“Mountaineering,” Keegan surmised in The Face of Battle, “has become in our time a sort of military operation in which sport imitates war.” For evidence, he had but to paraphrase the literature on the Eiger’s many attempts, tales of climbers “crouching, shivering, day after day in tiny, filthy holes hacked with infinite labor, short of food, depressed by the death of comrades, expecting at any moment to be swept away by avalanche. . . .”
Dave Brower never lost his sense of harmony, his joy and wonder at the places climbing took him, but he nevertheless utilized the military terminology his sport had adopted. Writing in For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower, he discussed a failed attempt to scale British Columbia’s Mount Waddington in 1935. He talked of “assault teams” and “support teams” and of “pushing forward on two fronts.” He and his partners planned a “ten-day attack on the peak” but were repulsed ultimately by “barrages” of stones and ice from above: “Waddington had deployed [its] defensive weapons.”
So, the climbing instruction at Camp Hale, by the very nature of the sport, dovetailed with the military objectives. Where skiing (the other half of a mountaineer’s skill set) was essentially an individual sport, climbing was fundamentally cooperative. Share a rope with another man on a vertical cliff, and you will perforce develop “mutual dependence and comradeship.” That from the Austrian Heinrich Harrer, one of the pioneers on the Eiger Nordwand. A climber functions best, Harrer wrote in The White Spider, when there is a “sense of mutual reliance . . . subordinating his personal well-being to the common weal.” One would be hard pressed to find a better description of the Army’s formula for success: replacing the individual’s goals with an overarching loyalty to the squad, the platoon, the company, the battalion.
Not that all of the climbing at Hale was deadly serious. Even Dave Brower was not above a little fun. Twice a month, with his fellow instructors Dick Emerson and Leo Healy, he would put on a falling demonstration, or rather a demonstration of how to hold a piton fall:
Leo would climb up a thirty-five-foot cliff to a carabiner through which the rope ran back down to Dick. He would then gather in about twenty feet of slack and jump, relying upon Dick to stop his fall, pulleywise, from below. Mere stopping of the fall became so routine that I would place an X on the cliff and have Dick stop Leo so precisely that his feet would strike the mark—which was three feet off the ground. My part in the demonstration was to give the lecture—and to insist that the mark be at least three feet high.
Before the war, no one would have been crazy enough to try this falling stunt. That’s because the hemp ropes climbers used had very little stretch to them, very little give before the rope simply snapped. Climbers used their ropes for protection against a possible fall but rarely tested the ability of their cords to hold a fall. With the arrival of the war, traditional sources of hemp (Italy and the Philippines) went away. An alternative material had to be found, and not just for the mountain division but for the Navy and Air Corps as well.
The answer came in the form of a new petroleum-based fiber called Perlon. The original patent was, ironically, German. But the American company DuPont had a cross-licensing agreement and had already begun manufacturing what it called “nylon.” Before 10th Mountain climbers got hold of nylon rope, it was already in use by the Army Air Corps for parachute cords and glider towropes. Then 10th climbers were asked to test the new ropes, which could be formulated with varying degrees of stretchiness. When an early prototype arrived at the offices of the Quartermaster General, Bob Bates, a well-known climber who had been with Paul Petzoldt on K2 (the world’s second-highest peak) in 1938, tied one end to his desk and the other around his middle and proceeded to rappel out the window. The stretchy rope let him down farther than he had intended to go, and he ended with his legs dangling outside the window of the floor below. A secretary in that office screamed, certain that someone had hanged himself.
The Army eventually got the stretch right and shipped thousands of 120-foot, olive-drab, nylon climbing ropes to Camp Hale for the safe training—and amusement—of the mountain troops. Nylon not only reduced the sudden impact when stopping a fall, it turned out to be much stronger than hemp, more abrasion resistant and far more supple, easier to handle and coil. Though the 10th’s equipment wing, the Mountain and Winter Warfare Board, couldn’t exactly take credit for inventing it, the nylon rope did in fact presage a revolutionary new era for rock climbers.
Bud Winter, young as he was, turned out to be very adept with the ropes. He got so excited when he passed his climbing instructor’s test, he wrote home immediately: “Dad, passed my test with the fifth highest mark in the troop. Friedl and I had the same mark: 44 out of a possible 50!”
Everything about the 10th thrilled Bud: “The camp and the trip to the camp are the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life. We traveled up the Arkansas River between 1,000-foot cliffs and saw the world’s highest suspension bridge [at Royal Gorge], 1,300 feet high! . . Dad, Toni Matt and Herb Schneider (Hannes Schneider’s son) have just joined our troop. What a ski team!”
He wrote home with observations on everything from the wild-flowers to the famous skiers in the MTG:
Guess I have been boring you talking [about] how swell our troop is. Found out yesterday that 15 out of 40 men in my barracks have won United States winter sports records, and eight of them hold world records. . . .
Hiked twenty miles to Tennessee Pass and over Chicago Ridge, over 13,000 feet. From the top we could see the second and third highest peaks in the U.S.: Mt. Elbert (14,431) [actually 14,433 feet] and Mt. Massive (14,415) [actually 14, 421 feet]. . . . There are more wild flowers above timberline in these mountains than you have ever seen before. The columbine are deep purple and white. They look just like orchids. . . .
This morning we gave a demonstration of an assault on a cliff. I was one of the enemy and had to light and throw sticks of dynamite while they shot over my head with machine gun tracers. I’m not kidding: I was scared.
Chuck Hampton remembered Bud as having “a personality just like a puppy. He was friendly with all his fellow soldiers, relentlessly cheerful and optimistic, trusting of everyone and everything and . . . without a mean bone in his body. . . . He had two obsessions in life. One of these was skiing, the other was fly-fishing . . . As far as we know, he was the only man in the entire division who had brought his fly-fishing outfit to the war.”
“I’ve had some excellent trout fishing,” Bud wrote home. “Sure love it out here!”
When he could, Bud liked to fish for native cutthroats in the ice-blue lakes at timberline. And when he couldn’t go high, he took his fly rod a couple of blocks to the Eagle River where it ran through camp, still chock full of brookies in spite of its ruler-straight course.
To read Winter’s letters is to hear only his congenitally upbeat Field & Stream version of the ski army. Most men of the 10th were also well aware of the wider war that summer and fall of 1943.
In the Pacific, in accordance with the U.S. strategy of moving up deliberately from the south, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s armies took the Solomon Islands one by one, attacked the crucial Japanese naval base at Rabaul, and, with Australian units, advanced up the coast of New Guinea toward Japanese-held positions there.
In Europe, following the Allied victory in North Africa, only one front remained active, that on the east. Stalin pleaded with Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second, western front to relieve some of the pressure on his people, but the long-planned-for invasion of western Europe still was not ready.
The great strategic disadvantage Hitler faced in 1943 was the immense breadth of his conquests. German armies were spread out over thousands of miles, from Moscow to Stalingrad, from Athens to Paris. Occupying forces battled resistance movements in Greece, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Poland. Additional resources were tied up carrying out the Reich’s genocidal policies against the Gypsies, Jews, and Slavs within the conquered lands. Hitler kne
w the Allies would attempt an invasion in the west, but he didn’t know when or where. Defense of the vast empire turned out to be much more problematic than the initial expansion.
Meanwhile, the buildup for the cross-channel Normandy invasion continued as men and materiel poured into southern England. In the interim, at Churchill’s insistence, the Allies instigated “more modest operations” against Europe’s “soft underbelly,” moving into Sicily on July 10, 1943, and then, in early September, onto the Italian mainland. German General Field Marshall Albert Kesselring had only eight weak divisions with which to defend southern Italy. In theory, he also had the Italian army in reserve, but the Germans felt the Italians had proven to be ineffectual fighters, and the Italian surrender (negotiated in secret by Marshal Badoglio and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower) on September 8 took them out of the fight. (As per the deal with Eisenhower, Badoglio would complete the official about-face and declare war on Germany on October 3.)
Kesselring chose not to confront the British Eighth Army landings on the toe and heel of the Italian “boot.” But he did contest, effectively if temporarily, Gen. Mark Clark’s U.S. Fifth Army landings at Salerno just south of Naples. Then he pulled back to a defensive line (this one was called the Gustav Line), from coast to coast across the mountainous spine of the country, in the first of a series of protective moves, designed not to win the war, but simply to hold on to as much territory as possible for as long as possible. Hitler had apparently resolved to preside over the downfall of the German nation, and Kesselring, a good soldier to the end, would use his limited resources and the rugged Italian geography brilliantly to slow the Allied advance, to delay the inevitable, for nearly two more years.
As the 10th began its second winter at Hale, the winter of 1943–44, Bob Parker returned from Kiska and rejoined his I&R platoon. They studied map reading, radio operation, and uniform and aircraft identification. Before Kiska, ironically, they had learned to identify only German uniforms and aircraft. After Kiska, they studied both German and Japanese livery.
Harry Poschman came back to his first love, teaching skiing with the MTG up on Tennessee Pass. The Cooper Hill T-bar dragged skiers a mile and a half up the Continental Divide to 11,700 feet. The terrain wasn’t very steep on Cooper’s rounded shoulder, but the snow stayed good and cold up so high. And Harry could practice his elegant Arlberg turns, of which he was so proud. “It was nothing but a damn ski club,” he says, with much fondness.
Every day, soldiers from the newer regiments trucked up from camp with their white-painted skis, their square-toed, leather mountain boots with the white spats-like gaiters to keep the snow out, their bamboo ski poles (manufactured for the war effort by the Orvis fly rod company) with baskets as big as phonograph records, and they lined up and got their lessons. Harry taught the classic Arlberg progression: walking, sidestepping, kick turn, snowplow, snowplow turn, sideslipping, traversing, and finally the stem turn and skidded stem christie. At the end of six weeks each set of skiers took a proficiency test. Most passed; many caught the bug, became experts, and bonded in spirit, and in song, with the early 87th skiers.
When you were in, you got to sing the 87th Glee Club songs, like “Oola and Sven.”
Oola had a cousin from the wild and wooly West.
While Oola liked the skiing, Sven liked snowshoeing the best.
They got into the mountain troops and put it to a test.
And everywhere they went they gave their war whoop.
Chorus:
Oh, give me skis and some poles and klister.
And let me ski way up on Alta Vista.
You can take your snowshoes and burn ’em, sister.
And everywhere I go I’ll give my war whoop.
Everyone was keen to see how it would all turn out.
The Winter Warfare Board was standing anxiously about.
And even Axis agents had been sent up there to scout.
And everyone was waiting for the war whoop.
(Chorus)
The colonel pulled the trigger and they started out to race.
Sven got an early start and set a most terrific pace.
But Oola whipped right by him with a sneer upon his face.
And when he reached the top he gave his war whoop.
(Chorus)
Two seconds later Oola finished in a mighty schuss.
A-passing on the way poor Sven a-lying on his puss.
The moral of this story is that snowshoes have no use.
And poor old Sven no longer gives his war whoop.
(Chorus)
The Eighty-Seventh had a heavy weapons company.
They spent six weeks at Paradise and never learned to ski.
The reason for this tragedy as you can plainly see
Is everywhere they went they wore their snowshoes.
Oh, give them skis and some poles and klister.
And let them ski way up on Alta Vista.
They can take their snowshoes and burn ’em, sister.
And everywhere they go they’ll give their war whoop.
While most of the MTG was busy in Colorado that winter of 1943–44, some members of the elite training outfit were detached elsewhere, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for example, to teach courses in winter survival to regular infantry divisions. And the Army sent MTG stalwarts, including David Brower and Peter Gabriel, to establish a climbing school across the country at Seneca Rocks, West Virginia, where upwards of ten thousand flatland infantry from five different divisions got at least a basic introduction—a week’s worth—of rock work with the experts.
One of the strangest and most fondly remembered of the detached assignments sent 10th men up to the Canadian Rockies for two months, July and August 1942, on the Columbia Icefields. This was a secret mission to test new over-the-snow vehicles. The Studebaker Corporation had a contract with the Army to build such a vehicle, and the mountain troops’ job was to build the camps, keep the engineers and their prototypes from falling into crevasses on the glacier, and ski as much as possible on their days off.
The engineers tested ten to fifteen different designs, settling finally on a small, tracked, mini-tank-like thing that became known as the Weasel. Weasels saw limited action on Kiska, where tracked machines proved better than trucks with wheels in the deep mud. At Camp Hale, where the brass hoped the Weasel would serve as a kind of go-anywhere snow jeep, reviews were mixed. They went well enough on the snow-packed roads, but in deep, unconsolidated powder, they bogged down and dug themselves into ever-deeper holes. They also had a tendency to throw off their tracks, as a mule occasionally throws a shoe. Bob Parker complained that one of the prime skills his I&R team had to learn was how to muscle the track back onto a derailed Weasel. Weasels were popular with their drivers during winter’s coldest snaps, though: Without removing a glove or lighting a match, these men could heat their C rations on the engine manifold.
Things were much more low-tech for infantry learning the basics in Michigan. There an MTG detachment trained elements of the 76th Division in snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, and winter survival. They slept in lean-tos on frozen lakes and tromped around for weeks at a time through logged-over forests in sub-zero weather. The land was almost dead flat, so there was no downhill skiing. For fun, the instructors went skijoring. They strapped on skis, wrapped a length of telephone cable around a car bumper, held on to the cable, and toured the countryside around the iron-ore town of Watersmeet. You could skijor behind the car of a willing friend, or you could hitch a ride behind an unsuspecting driver. The roads were all snow covered, except for the bridges. When they saw a bridge coming, the skiers just leaned back on their heels and tore across. They’d get new skis when they returned to Colorado.
If you were lucky, you went skijoring with Albert Gronberg, a large and often angry Finn who had fought in the Russo-Finnish war. When the Russians finally won that mismatch, Gronberg escaped to Norway, then shipped out to the United States. On the way across, a Nazi U-boat sank his ship,
and he floated for twenty-four hours in the North Atlantic before being picked up by an Allied freighter. Soon after landing in New York, he was drafted and eventually found his way to the MTG.
There were a lot of Finnish immigrants in and around Watersmeet. You could tell their houses by the saunas in the backyard. When it was lunchtime on a skijoring adventure, Gronberg would let go of the tow cable at the nearest Finnish home and walk right in, inevitably to a warm welcome. There was little news coming out of Finland at the time, and Gronberg, as one of the last people to leave the country, was like a walking newspaper. After sharing what stories he could, Gronberg (and any mates that happened to be along) invariably tucked into a generous, home-cooked meal.
Soon after this detachment’s return to Camp Hale, in February 1944, a group of the MTG’s more ambitious skiers decided to ski over the Continental Divide to Aspen. As the crow flies, it wasn’t that far, maybe thirty miles, but the actual distance over the snow would be twice that and require a snow camping trek of at least four days and three nights.
Camp Hale soldiers had been making the four-hour drive the long way around to Aspen—down the Eagle River to Dotsero, down the Colorado River to Glenwood Springs, then up the Roaring Fork River to the ruined silver town—with some regularity on their weekends off. The old place was just one step above ghost-town status, but there was skiing there. In the mid-1930s, a group of eastern investors had seen the potential for European-style skiing in the high country nearby. Their grand plans were permanently interrupted by the war, but their Swiss advisor, André Roch, convinced townspeople to cut a trail down the face of Aspen Mountain into the heart of town. The resulting Roch Run hosted the national championships downhill in 1941, and it provided a world-class descent of nearly 3,000 vertical feet to those soldiers willing to hike for it. The only lift in Aspen in those days was the dime-a-ride “boat tow,” a tippy, twelve-person sled hauled up a short beginner slope by an old mine cable.
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