One K Company lieutenant, Roger Eddy, scion of a prominent Connecticut skiing family, told author Hal Burton in The Ski Troops, “There was a lot of rifle fire. Every time a helmet poked up through the fog, everyone let go, and a lot of people simply fired because they thought they saw Japs in the murk. We were all scared stiff, we were green, and everybody expected to die.”
Eventually the fighting died down, and as dawn neared, scouts walked out on the ridges to assess the damage. Very soon the night’s awful truth came clear: There were no Japanese among the dead and wounded. Fear and fog had cost them seventeen of their own men. Three times that many had been wounded. “We felt as if we’d been on an all-night drunk,” said Eddy. “We were exhausted, disgusted, and ashamed. And we knew we’d done all the killing ourselves.”
And still, top brass insisted the island’s defenders must be there somewhere, holed up in caves or inside the crater of the volcano, waiting. To suggestions that the Japanese had somehow escaped the island without their knowing, the Navy reacted with incredulity. No one could have slipped through the American naval blockade in either direction, they said. Not without our knowing.
So, the anxiety remained, compounded now by the horror of friendly fire, and the men of the 87th, along with the infantry regiments that followed them ashore, began their second day on Kiska patrolling to the far corners of the island, and waiting.
Bob Parker’s I&R (Intelligence and Reconnaissance) platoon had been one of the first to scale the island backbone on the 15th. They saw and heard the shooting that night but, fortunately, had not been involved in the mistaken firefight. Next morning, half the platoon was ordered to stay on the ridge while the other half, eight men, were to work their way down to Kiska Harbor, to ascertain if there were any Japanese there. Down the soaking tundra they scrambled, as inconspicuously as they could, down and across intervening ridgebacks, four miles to the harbor.
Parker was, in some ways, Harry Poschman’s opposite. Raised the second of three sons at Parker Farms in central Massachusetts, young Robert had New England roots that predated the Revolutionary War. Five Parkers died at the Battle of Lexington. Relatives were Civil War heroes and founders of Howard University. Great Uncle Howard was the man to whom Cochise surrendered in 1872. He later became superintendent of West Point. Parker men, when called upon, became citizen soldiers. So, after one year at St. Lawrence University, where he ran track and raced on the ski team, Bob quit school and joined the newly formed 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment. He arrived at Fort Lewis just after the storied May climb of Mount Rainier.
Unlike Harry Poschman, Bob Parker didn’t regret missing out on Paradise. It wasn’t in his nature. With a keen intelligence and the self-confidence that comes from being a natural athlete—the kid who jumped thirty feet off canal bridges in upstate New York and had to be dragged off the local ski hill for supper hours after the light had gone—Parker loved every minute of training and volunteered for I&R school knowing that he would probably see the war from a forward observation post, way out on the point.
Now, approaching the edge of the Japanese encampment at the harbor, he felt “thrilled and terrified at the same time.” As he moved from one hiding place to another, however, the terror soon passed. The patrol found scores of bombed-out buildings; the Air Corps had done its job in spite of the fog. They found a harbor littered with sunken barges. They even found a camouflaged launch ramp and a small fleet of miniature submarines. But no Japanese soldiers. All of the subs had been scuttled on their cradles, gaping holes blown in their sides. It was clear no one had occupied the place for some time.
Mission accomplished—and much relieved—the squad set about, in true 87th tradition, to make the most of the situation. There may have been a war on, but there were always opportunities, especially in the wild. Sure enough, one of the men, a Scandinavian American, called out to the others, “At least we can have some salmon.” There on a gravel bar where one of Kiska’s ice-cold streams entered the harbor, hundreds of spawning salmon thrashed in the shallows. The Scandinavian had already jumped into the calf-deep water and was tossing fish, the firm ones, onto the beach. Someone grabbed a knife and started filleting. Someone else built a fire on the hard sand with boards from a bombed-out building. They nailed the fillets to planks stuck in the sand beside the fire, and when the fish were done, ate the roasted pink flesh with their hands—“plank salmon” they called it with mock culinary seriousness. After weeks of shipboard food and Army C rations, this was a feast of indescribable sweetness, not unlike the one they’d had when Tap Tapley shot that blue grouse on maneuvers in Colorado. When they had eaten all they could hold, they built up the bonfire, took off their wet boots, and leaned back against the long, northern evening.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the island, patrols explored the elaborate tunnel systems in which the occupying forces had lived and from which they had departed in a hurry. Meals were found half-eaten, and board games on tables abandoned mid-play. There were huge bunkers filled with rice and saki, and some rooms with colorful, silk kimonos. There was an underground hospital, a Shinto shrine, and even a Japanese victory garden with vegetables growing in the volcanic soil. The patrols found two mongrel dogs, the only living remnants of occupation, and one Japanese soldier, dead of natural causes apparently and left underground as the others fled.
Sometime in June the Japanese high command had decided to pull out of Kiska. Their war now was in defending their gains in the South Pacific. The first six hundred men had been evacuated over the course of a month by the miniature submarines. Then on July 28 the Tokyo Express had arrived. A force of light cruisers and destroyers slipped through the fog, and the blockade of American destroyers, into Kiska Harbor. In something less than an hour the remaining fifty-two hundred men of the garrison were hustled aboard. Then the whole force disappeared back out into the North Pacific. It was a stunning feat of organization and stealth, not on the order of the rescue at Dunkirk perhaps, but stunning nonetheless, and profoundly embarrassing to the U.S. Navy.
Perhaps out of embarrassment, or a desperation for certitude, Allied commanders on Kiska waited eight days to declare that there were definitely no Japanese fighters on the island. By this time, the men of H Company had already figured out how to make their own rice wine and how to build walls of boulders to keep their tents from blowing away in the williwaws.
When the official word finally came, John Vasos nodded his head in satisfaction and said, sighing dramatically, “This outfit will never go into combat.”
Leaving Kiska would be no easy task, though. First the Army had to bring in a replacement force to hold the island against any future threat. But more difficult than that was the matter of finding transport back to the mainland. The summer of 1943 had seen a dramatic buildup of U.S. forces around the world, and now there simply weren’t enough spare seaworthy ships. U.S. war planners had decided to attack Japan from the south and southeast (and not by way of the Aleutian chain or from mainland Asia), and so there had been a tremendous massing of resources in the South Pacific. Then there was the ongoing sea traffic to and from England in preparation for the Normandy landings the following spring.
In May 1943 the British Eighth and U.S. First Armies finally defeated the wily “Desert Fox,” General Rommel, in Tunisia and accepted the surrender of Germany’s Afrika Korps. In July, the Allies invaded Sicily, and by September the British Eighth Army had hopped across to the boot toe of Italy. Mussolini’s Fascist regime was toppled from within, and the new government of Pietro Badoglio began secret surrender negotiations with the Allies. On September 9, the U.S. Fifth Army, under General Mark Clark, landed at Salerno, south of Naples, and began the slow, bloody drive north, from one defensive line to another, against German soldiers who fought desperately and well, despite the loss of their Italian allies. In fact, Hitler had ordered all his armies to stand their ground, never surrender, even in tactically hopeless situations. “Germany shall either be a world power,” he proclaimed apoca
lyptically, his dream of European dominion shrinking with each passing month, “or be not at all.”
In short, the Navy and the merchant marine were busy, and the retreat from Kiska became a relatively low priority, leaving some men waiting there for months. Harry Poschman was lucky. He and members of the 2nd Battalion landed one of the first rides off the island on the freighter John B. Floyd. “The fun started immediately,” Harry remembered of the shipboard celebrations. “Out came Peter [Wick’s] accordion and Steve [Knowlton’s] bass fiddle. The party was on.”
Out came the war souvenirs too—the Japanese machine guns, grenades, shells, pistols, and bullets. The good ship John B. Floyd was, according to Harry, “in mortal danger of going to the bottom as the result of an internal explosion.” Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and “the guys laughed and sang and gambled” all the way to Seattle.
The first stop en route was at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where the men of the 87th “were treated like heroes,” Harry wrote, “for we had chased the Japs from the Western Hemisphere. The lights came on and the people were no longer afraid. Show girls welcomed us. Gorgeous dolls they were, too. We must have looked like a ragtag army to them, dirty and smelly, straight from the land of mud and mildew. A few of the lucky guys got kissed.”
In Seattle, it was the same thing, a hero’s welcome. The blackout had been lifted; the soldiers got fresh-water showers, new clothes, and new shoes; pretty girls flocked to the dock. But it all came with a hollow echo, for the soldiers knew they hadn’t done anything, really. Worse, nearly a hundred of their comrades had died “liberating” Kiska. Twenty-three men of the 87th were killed—seventeen by friendly fire on the first awful night and six more in booby-trapped tunnels or by exploding mines. Fifty-five ski troopers were injured.
Bob Parker’s unit didn’t start back until December. Resourceful and self-reliant as they were, after three months even they began to feel tortured, by boredom and by the knowledge that both the war, out there, and winter skiing at home, were going on without them. They were finally picked up by a wooden, side-wheeler paddleboat, The Denali, a craft designed for the calm waters of the Inland Passage. “We bobbed like a cockle shell” on forty-foot seas in the Gulf of Alaska, Parker remembers. Two Liberty ships broke in half during that storm, but The Denali made land at last in one piece.
And Kiska was left to the blue foxes and the puffins and the sea lions. Almost. One group of 87th men never did sail for home; they stayed in the Aleutians for the duration of the war as part of the North Pacific Combat School, or NPCS, which taught “muskeg” combat techniques on the off chance that American troops would invade Japanese outposts in the Kuril Islands. The Austrian downhiller Toni Matt was one of the NPCS guys. As was Horace Quick, a former National Park Service ranger and survival expert who had been the model for the famous Saturday Evening Post cover. Most notorious perhaps was Ernest “Tap” Tapley, who was part Passamaquoddy Indian and who grew up trapping, foraging, and skiing in western Massachusetts. On Unalaska Island, where the NPCS was based, Tapley was out messing around with bow-and-arrow one day when an American P-38 fighter plane crashed close by. The plane’s pilot, who had parachuted safely to the ground, joked that Tapley had brought his aircraft down with an arrow. Tapley claimed he was just hunting rabbits. Tapley’s friends in the mountain troops, some of whom had seen him bring down a full-grown cow elk with a perfectly thrown knife, weren’t so sure.
CHAPTER 6:
Sport Imitates War
While the 87th Regiment battled what one of the men called “optical Aleutians” on Kiska, nineteen-year-old Pvt. Bur-dell S. “Bud” Winter was ducking live machine-gun fire outside Camp Hale, Colorado.
The newly designated 10th Light (Alpine) Division refocused training that summer of 1943 from snow to rock. As always in the high Rockies, snow lingered in shady couloirs throughout the summer, but down in camp, the ground was dry and a bright sun warmed the B and C Street rocks just east of the barracks. Climbing classes ran every weekday there and on a granite outcropping at the confluence of the Eagle River and Homestake Creek. Early on, camp commanders decided that the instructors’ group should stage a demonstration. Not just a demonstration of movement and rope-handling skills, but a full-on, dramatic exhibition simulating combat conditions. A scenario was devised to inspire as well as instruct new recruits. There would be good guys and bad guys. A squad of armed climbers—the good guys—supported by machine-gun fire would attack a fortified “enemy” position at the top of a cliff.
The attack group was to be led by Tacoma, Washington, climber Chuck Hampton (who wrote about the episode in a privately published memoir), and the defenders by the irrepressible, jug-eared Winter, an Eagle Scout and a high school skiing and pole-vaulting star from Schenectady, New York. The attackers would be climbing unroped, so the route had to be just right: difficult enough to look dramatic but easy enough so the climbers wouldn’t be likely to fall. Once the perfect site was located, the climbers spent half a day cleaning the route of loose rock and practicing their moves until they’d memorized every hand and foot hold.
The defenders dug a trench along the top of the cliff to protect themselves from the live fire. There they would lie, detonating quarter sticks of dynamite to simulate grenade explosions until the attackers surged over the top. Also in the trench with them would be a life-sized dummy—an old uniform stuffed with rags—that could be tossed off the cliff during the ensuing hand-to-hand fighting.
They recruited a machine-gun crew from a heavy weapons company and ran through the scene a couple of times for practice. Hampton and his squad got to know the crag so well, they fairly flew up the route. At that point, their platoon leader, David Brower, warned, “Listen, you guys. Don’t make it look too easy. You can fall off there, you know.”
Brower did know. This was the same David Brower who had edited the Sierra Club’s Manual of Ski Mountaineering and was in the process of writing the Army’s new field manual for mountain operations. A passable skier, Brower’s real expertise was on rock, where his skills were world class. The shy, beanpole, piano-playing drop-out from Berkeley was a stalwart, along with Hampton and Winter, of the Mountain Training Group, most of whom were already adept skiers and climbers when they joined the Army. The super competent John Woodward served as the MTG’s first commanding officer; the second CO was the ubiquitous renaissance man John Jay. There were never more than 150 of them in the teaching group, each man hand-picked, including obvious choices Friedl Pfeifer and Walter Prager, Rainier guide Peter Gabriel, as well as young hotshots like Bud Winter, and, when they got back to Colorado from Kiska, the likes of Bob Parker and Harry Poschman.
The day of the demo came. Bud Winter and his defenders slid into their trench. Chuck Hampton and the attackers hid in the bushes at the base. The audience, a battalion of infantrymen, spread out on the ground well back of the machine gun.
With a burst of machine-gun fire ricocheting off the cliff, the performance was on. The attackers scrambled across the talus slope at the foot of the wall and then swarmed up the rock, the machine gunner adjusting his fire so that bullets struck the hill behind Winter’s dugout. Just below the cliff top, Hampton writes, “I threw a stick of wood over and waited until one of Bud’s quarter sticks of dynamite exploded loudly.”
With that, the machine gun stopped firing; we charged up and over to engage in a bit of friendly wrestling with Bud and his defenders. Andy Black, one of our attackers, took on Nate Morrell in hand-to-hand combat that culminated in a bayonet thrust and a blood-curdling shriek as the dummy was hurled from the cliff. It was all very realistic. So realistic that John Woodward told me later some senior officers had been alarmed when the dummy was finally thrown from the cliff top. He told them it was what happened to soldiers who didn’t follow orders.
The exhibition lasted four or five shows, most or them performed on warm summer evenings. The audiences loved it—they regarded the show as shirtsleeve burlesque. Each time at the conclusion, as Hampton reme
mbered, “the demonstration team stood at the top and acknowledged the accolades with formal bows.” During what turned out to be the final demo climb, phosphorus-filled tracer bullets from the machine gun ignited dry grass on the hill behind the defenders’ trench and started a wildfire that swept instantly, it seemed, into summer-dry brush and aspen trees. While the fire raced uphill, the performers, including the dummy, retreated back down the rocks. There was nothing to do but let the fire burn, which it did until winter’s first snow finally doused the smoldering. For weeks during the fall, smoke from the fire settled over Camp Hale and mixed with the ever-present coal haze to exacerbate the Pando hack.
These men trying to create a mountain division were improvising as they went; there was no blueprint to follow. David Brower felt the live-fire exhibition was of dubious value compared to the MTG’s hands-on daytime instruction in the tying of knots, the proper placement of pitons in the rock for protection, and the crucial protocols involved in belaying a man, or in this case whole squads of men, safely up or down a vertical face.
Brower’s pragmatism was rooted in the mountaineer’s need to return alive to climb another day: Getting to the top is optional; coming home is not. But climbing was also his obsession, his “moral equivalent of war,” to use the philosopher William James’s phrase, and some of that passion found its way into the 10th’s training. The years leading up to World War II had seen a radical shift in alpinism, as equipment improved and the list of the world’s great unclimbed peaks shrank. Climbers tackled harder and harder routes. Bestor Robinson hammered iron pitons into cracks in the rock and introduced aid climbing to Yosemite’s granite walls in 1934. Brower himself used “extreme” climbing techniques in his first ascent of New Mexico’s Shiprock Peak with Robinson and two others in 1939. Europe’s last unclimbed walls were being knocked off one by one, until the last great “problem” in the Alps, the north face of the Eiger, was finally conquered in 1938. The traditional “romanticist philosophy of mountaineering,” wrote the historian John Keegan, “which laid stress on its spiritual value to man through the harmony it engendered between him and nature” had been largely replaced by a desire to “push to the limits of what is physically and psychologically possible.”
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