When, in 1939, Minnie Dole started the National Ski Patrol System, Harry and a bunch of his ski-club mates took the required courses and set up a member patrol of their own. Harry always took his vacations in the winter so he could ride the Union Pacific train north to Sun Valley to ski with the famous expatriate Europeans, with Sigi Engl, Friedl Pfeifer, and Otto Lang.
By the time Pearl Harbor interrupted this idyll, Harry was twenty-nine. His body was lean and fit, but his broad forehead already sported a widow’s peak, and his eyebrows drooped with a kind of hound-dog resignation. Harry answered the draft call soon after the December 7 “day of infamy,” but bureaucracy and basic training as a machine gunner kept him from a timely meeting with what he called “the real mountain troops on Mount Rainier.” Letters from Washington “made it sound worth the effort . . . the big mountain up north where the snow lay deep covering the first stories of their luxurious barracks . . . Paradise, they called it.” Camp Hale, where he did join the troops a few months later, was not paradise, but it was good to Harry through the winter of 1942–43. With his stylish Arlberg turns and obvious experience, he was made a ski instructor, and he even had fourteen other instructors under his command. They lived in rustic one-story barracks right at the base of Cooper Hill, where the Army had erected what was then the world’s longest T-bar. Cooper was a pleasant three miles from Camp Hale proper, and so Harry managed to avoid much of the odious duty heaped on enlisted men, things like marching drill and KP. Instead, he and his fellow instructors taught skiing by day to the steady stream of new recruits and drank beer in the evenings, from a secret keg hidden in the rafters. It was good duty, but it was about to end.
On June 11, 1943, the 87th Regiment received orders to pack up and leave Camp Hale for Fort Ord, California, one of the biggest military staging areas on the West Coast. The newer 86th and 85th Regiments would stay behind. The average soldier was told nothing about the mission; all but a few top officers were kept in the dark. The men assumed that Fort Ord would be just a stopover, but they could only guess about their ultimate destination. With a mixture of excitement and apprehension, Cpl. Harry Poschman got his gear together and trundled aboard the waiting trains with everyone else.
Fort Ord teemed with soldiers when the 87th arrived two days later. The camp, on Monterey Bay just north of the old Spanish mission town, looked out over sand dunes to the blue Pacific. It was warm and sunny, not unlike San Diego, and Harry thought that if they couldn’t be skiing, this wasn’t a bad second choice. “Too bad there had to be a war going on out there somewhere.”
The first clue as to their planned deployment was the judo. In the Fort Ord gym after breakfast, instructors introduced the mountain men to the ancient Japanese martial art. Harry and a Greek-American friend named John Vasos drew a petite, blond instructor who said, “Soldier, rush up to me and throw a punch at my face.” Vasos demurred, “Aw, lady, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Do as I say, soldier.” Vasos charged, punched, and landed on his back with the sound of a small thunderclap.
“Next.” Poschman was next in line and “watched, amazed, as the ceiling went spinning by.” Each man took his punishment in turn, three times in three different maneuvers. The instructor explained that in a real hand-to-hand fight with a Japanese soldier, without a mat to cushion your fall, “you would go down and stay down.” A voice from the back of the room chirped, “If ever I get that close to a Jap, I’m not going to rassle him. I’m going to shoot him.” To the ski troops, it all seemed surreal. Big Vasos the Greek screwed his face up in contempt and predicted, “This outfit will never go into combat.”
Next came endless rounds of immunizations, for the Asian diseases of the Pacific combat area, Harry assumed. The day after the shots the men became stiff and sore, and their food would not stay down. So many men came down with fevers that there was talk of fifth-column treachery within the ranks.
But the fevers cooled, and soon enough the regiment found itself in a new kind of training, colder and wetter than the ski drills had been. First the men scrambled down rope nets from the Monterey pier into landing craft bobbing on a chilly ocean swell. Then they repeated the drill down the side of a big, gray ship anchored offshore. This time the packed landing craft surged ashore, and everyone got soaked charging imaginary defenders in the dunes. Amphibious landings? Judo? Surely the 87th was headed somewhere in the Pacific theater. Some men hurried to marry their sweethearts on weekend leave in San Francisco, and Harry thought blackly to himself, “Who would want to make widows out of such sweet young things?” Meanwhile, he pictured himself flying down a white-powder mountain and wondered if he’d ever have a chance to do that again. He realized how far out of his element he was here, and how much stranger things might still become. He marveled to Vasos, “I signed up to be a skier, not a fighter,” but Vasos the Greek just repeated his mantra: “This outfit will never go to war.”
U.S. military planners decided early in 1943 that the Aleutian Islands that had been invaded, Attu and Kiska, had to be reclaimed, for American morale as much as for the islands’ strategic value. In fact, they were of little strategic importance. The main Japanese forces were engaged elsewhere; the islands were an unlikely staging ground for an attack on the North American continent. And besides, the U.S. Navy had committed a number of destroyers and other ships to a blockade of the islands, to prevent any resupply or reinforcement from Japan. It was nevertheless decided to send troops to roust the invaders. This proved to be an expensive choice.
The recapture started with Attu, the farther out and less heavily defended of the two, in May 1943. Planners thought it would take between three and five days to clear out the twenty-six hundred dug-in Japanese. After preparatory shelling by air and sea, twelve hundred troops of the 7th Infantry Division landed unopposed on Attu’s still-snowy shore. The 7th had been training for duty in North Africa. The marshy Aleutian tundra quickly soaked through the men’s desert boots, as it all but swallowed up the division’s vehicles. Rain and wind penetrated their khaki jackets. Men couldn’t keep their feet warm; there were thousands of cases of frostbite and what in World War I was known as “trench foot” from prolonged cold and wet.
The Japanese, it turned out, had retreated to the high ridges, where they waited for the Americans to come to them. Two and a half weeks later, the last eight hundred Japanese troops charged down Engineer Hill in a final desperate counterattack. They very nearly succeeded in reaching U.S. artillery positions (and turning the guns around on the Americans) before they were stopped. Unwilling to surrender, the remaining five hundred enemy soldiers blew themselves up with hand grenades held to their chests.
All 2,600 Japanese soldiers died, along with 549 Americans. In addition, 1,148 Americans were wounded, and 2,100 were taken out of action by the severe weather. Bitter lessons not to be repeated on Kiska. For that campaign, the Army would marshal an even more formidable force—spearheaded by its newly created mountain troops.
On July 27, three thousand men of the 87th boarded a rusting, thirty-six-year-old, German-built troop ship in San Francisco harbor and steamed north. Destination—for the dogfaces anyway—still unknown. Life aboard the renamed USS Grant consisted of “a little sleep, a little swearing at the squawk box, a big craps game, and a big rush for the seasick tube,” according to Harry Poschman. Conditions were so cramped belowdecks, one soldier bet Harry he could touch twenty bunks with a six-foot pole. Harry took the bet, guessing he could do better than that. Standing in the middle of the cabin and using his rifle as an extension of his arm, Harry tapped the metal frames of forty-two bunks, sardined from floor to ceiling, without moving his feet.
The squawk box roared to life at any hour of the day or night: “Now hear this! Now hear this! . . .” The men came to see it as an instrument of torture, and after a time, a version of the boy crying wolf. One black night Harry and a fellow machine gunner stood watch on deck when the squawk box shattered the peace. “Now hear this! Now hear this! Torpedo
wake off the port bow.”
“We strained our eyes and ears, and nervously thumbed the trigger bar on the old 20-mm antiaircraft guns.”
“Now hear this! Torpedo wake off the stern.” The voice both droned and cackled. The night was so impenetrably dark, Harry couldn’t even see the Grant’s wake. “Pierpont and I discussed the situation and concluded the guy was a damned liar, just trying to keep us awake. We went back to sleep.” And the ship forged ahead into the ever-colder sea with its cargo of guns and equipment and thousands of scared young men.
The USS Grant was not alone out there. The Pacific Command had assembled a formidable armada, Aleutian Task Force 9. One hundred ships carried 35,000 men toward the certain dislodging of 6,000 Japanese from Kiska. American soil (even though few Americans had heard of it, way out in the Bering Sea, four thousand miles west-northwest of Seattle—only five hundred miles from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula). It would be the largest amphibious landing in the Pacific theater to that point in the war. Besides the 87th Regiment, the force included the U.S. 7th Division; the 17th Infantry Regiment; 5,000 men from the Royal Canadian Army’s Pacific Command; another 5,000 from the 53rd Combat Team of the Alaska Defense Command; 2,500 men of the 1st Special Service Force (a combined U.S.-Canadian force known as “The Devil’s Brigade”); and various artillery, engineer, and other support units.
North and west the task force steamed along the string of islands that reached, like a frigid necklace, across the Bering Sea. Most days fog restricted visibility to a few hundred yards, but one morning Harry awoke, as he wrote in his memoir, to “the most marvelous sight.” “Islands, beautiful and green rising up to great heights, looking like the fiords of Norway, were on the horizon.” Unimak. Unalaska. Umnak. Adak. After a brief stop in Adak Harbor, during which the 87th experienced its first walk on the tundra (“more like a stumble on a mattress”), the task force headed for Kiska and an invasion scheduled for August 15.
Chief of Staff General Marshall, who authorized the Aleutian campaign, told Minnie Dole after the Attu debacle, “I should have sent alpine troops to Attu.” The Aleutians were hardly the Alps, but they were alpine: treeless, snowy (even in summer), and devoid of flat ground. Weather was the enemy here as much as the Japanese. Just the kind of place for which the mountain division was being trained and equipped. Like Attu, Kiska bolted steeply out of the wind-swept ocean, a fifteen-mile-long fist of an island with the snow-capped Kiska volcano rising to 4,000 feet at the north end. The only good harbor tucked into a notch on the southeast shore. Task Force 9 would storm the opposite coast on the assumption that it was less heavily defended. The brass wanted the 87th to spearhead the landing, to climb the hillsides inland from the rocky beach and clear out local opposition so that the main force could then come ashore. What they didn’t tell the men—for obvious reasons—was that they expected 80 percent casualties among all units on Kiska, worse for the first companies to land.
American planes from the airfield on Adak, 250 miles to the east, had pounded the island for nearly a year, but they were not in the air on August 15 because of the fog. American warships, including the battleships Pennsylvania and Tennessee, did blast the island’s ridgelines, however, as the armada approached Kiska’s western shore. The night of the 14th, the men went to bed at 7:00 P.M., and were roused at midnight for sandwiches and coffee. Personal items were left behind in order to carry more ammunition. “We were limited to three days’ food and no blankets,” Harry Poschman remembered. “If we did not take the island in three days, we would all be dead.” Then it was over the side in the dark, down the rope nets into the landing barges, secure your pack, and wait.
The shivering set in almost immediately. Whether from the cold or nerves, the men couldn’t tell. No amount of training could have prepared them for this, their first battle test. They had been briefed again and again onboard ship about how important Kiska was and how tricky and dangerous—how skilled in the arts of murder—the defending Japanese were likely to be, every one of them ready to die for the emperor. Rumor pegged the number of enemy soldiers thought still to be on the island at anywhere from 4,500 to 30,000. Imaginations ran wild. Would they defend the beaches or wait, as they had done on Attu, to fight on the high ground? Everyone was afraid. Some reacted with an agitated desire to move, to get going. Others sat numbly in the boats.
There had been other bits of news, just as troubling as the casualty estimates, that the brass had chosen not to tell them. For nearly two weeks Japanese Radio Kiska had been silent. There had been no return fire when, in good visibility, American planes bombed and strafed the island. Similarly, there had been no fire on the U.S. warships from coastal batteries. A photo mission on August 2 showed Japanese trucks bunched together at Kiska Harbor rather than being dispersed, as they should have been for protection. Still, spotters for one air strike reported light flak. Some fliers said they had seen tracer bullets, and one pilot insisted he had strafed a fleeing Japanese soldier, who fell flat. Conflicting evidence notwithstanding, the high command decided that the enemy were simply hiding, as they had been on Attu, in caves and bunkers along the high ground, waiting to annihilate the Americans when they set foot on shore.
Also kept from the landing forces that morning was the fact that a company of Rangers had gone ashore during the night to spy out Japanese positions. They’d been ordered to radio back on what they found, but in the fog and diffuse moonlight they saw nothing, continuing across the island all the way to the eastern shore without sending a single message. When at dawn the first elements of the 87th hit the rocky landing zones, it was assumed the Rangers hadn’t reported because they were locked in battle somewhere over the ridge.
In the gray light, Harry drew the “lucky” first position—first out of his barge as the ramp went down. Fortunately, the sea was glassy, the swell almost nonexistent. Harry timed his leap, painfully conscious that the load he was carrying would take him straight to the bottom if he jumped too soon. In addition to his own gear, Harry lugged an extra forty pounds of mortar shells ashore, which he dumped at the high-tide line. On his packboard he’d strapped a poncho, food, ammunition, a rain suit, a belt with a canteen, a bayonet, a shovel, and other small items. His machine-gun squad split the weight of their shared gear, including the gun itself, the range finder, and the aiming circle, and each man topped off his load with the nine-pound Springfield rifle, binoculars, and map case. No one actually weighed the burden, but the total probably approached the infamous ninety-pound rucksacks of song.
In spite of the weight, the first companies of the 87th made good progress up the spongy, tangled, boot-sucking tundra. Much to their relief, the climbers received no fire from above, though one overeager American soldier behind them did squeeze off a long burst of tracers up one of the ravines. By mid-morning, H Company had reached the island’s spine, 1,800 vertical feet above the beach, and dug in. Through breaks in the fog, Harry caught glimpses of the volcano still higher to the north. From the ridge, he could see both coasts of the narrow island, a deeply wrinkled carpet of green flung over its rocky bones. Japan was out there somewhere, only about eight hundred miles to the southwest. Closer in, “little boats continued to skitter back and forth from land to ship looking like water bugs on a still pond, and huge battlewagons appeared and disappeared in the fog.” The place did have a kind of austere beauty. Not the towering, icy presence of a Mount Rainier. Or the fine, crisp air of Colorado. But it was beautiful just the same. And at this moment, eerily quiet. Hard to imagine that the sharp folds in the landscape before him concealed other soldiers whose job it was to kill or be killed. Harry decided it was “too beautiful a place to die.”
Then the williwaws hit. Sudden horizontal rain blew in from the Bering Sea. The wind shrieked so a man couldn’t hear shouting from the next foxhole. The ponchos and rain suits they’d been issued worked for only a few minutes; then the water, like needles, pierced every seam until the men were soaked through. They’d never experienced anything like
this in training, not even at 14,000 feet on Rainier. Then, just as swiftly as it had arrived, the wind stopped. Beginning in mid-afternoon, the williwaws came and went every couple of hours, replaced between times by swirling fog and mist.
As dark approached, I and K Companies sent patrols out along the meandering, intersecting ridgelines—standard procedure to scout for opposing patrols and to create a buffer zone out ahead of the line. Men in the line took turns peering into the fog and trying to sleep. When they were aboard ship, a system of passwords had been instituted to prevent enemy soldiers from infiltrating Allied positions. Soldiers approaching the line knew to call out “That thing,” to which the countersign was “Long limb.” In theory no enemy combatant, including possible German advisors, could correctly pronounce “That thing.” And at the same time, no Japanese infiltrator, trying to impersonate a friendly guard, could convincingly pronounce “Long limb.”
Occasionally, someone would hear something over the scream of the williwaw. Harry’s partner got spooked by a sound and banged on Harry’s tin hat with a rock. “Japs in the vicinity!” he rasped. “The trouble was,” Harry remembers, “as I saw it, the noise was coming from behind us instead of down where the Japs should have been.” Then it got worse. “A hysterical voice cried out, ‘Give the password or I will fire.’ If there was a password, the wind blew it away. The man with the hysterical voice fired. The pretty tracers streaked through the fog making blue and red pyrotechnics just like the Fourth of July.”
A nightmare Fourth of July. In the fog and tricky terrain, patrols bumped into one another or else circled back unwittingly to their own lines. Unable to see or hear above the roar of the wind, these inexperienced soldiers became truly blind with a fear that rose up in their throats and choked off reason. Someone opened fire, and then—of course—someone fired back. Tracers lit shadowy figures on the next ridge. More firing. And now the sounds seemed to be coming from all directions, from down in the gully behind, from up ahead, from all around. Panicky fingers pulled back hard on the triggers of their M-1s so that whole clips of bullets fired off in seconds. Smoke and mist, shouts of anger and of pain—were the wounded calling out in English or Japanese?—only added to the chaos.
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