Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  Chuck Hampton notes in his memoir that an unusual number of 10th troopers (unusual for a regular Army division) “spent precious weekends skiing and climbing instead of or in addition to pursuing the more common military sports of pub crawling and chasing women.” Aspen appealed to the real skiers in the division; there was but one bar there, and a terrible paucity of young women.

  The MTG group, thirty-some men headed by then Capt. John Jay, hoped to make the trip overland. It was to be both a reconnaissance training and a “pleasure exertion,” as one soldier wrote in the Camp Hale Ski-Zette. Under heavy loads (they carried ten days’ food in case of bad weather, and the despised impermeable, four-man tents), they set out in fourteen inches of fresh snow. Breaking trail knee-deep required so much effort that they had to rotate leaders every ten to fifteen minutes. Hampton remembers that the ever-eager Bud Winter “seemed to actually enjoy the work.” “Aware of Bud’s propensity for trying to please everyone, we were more than happy to oblige, allowing him double shifts and even going so far as to compliment him on how rugged he was.”

  Bud wrote home: “I have acquired the name ‘rugged Winters’ from the trip. I guess I was in a little better condition and tired some of the other fellows out when I was trail breaking.”

  The mountaineers crossed three passes higher than 13,000 feet and enjoyed downhill runs of up to six miles “without stopping—in new powder!” Winter wrote. “It was beautiful.” The only problems seemed to be melting enough snow morning and evening to stay hydrated in the dry, high-elevation air, and breaking apart the infamous D ration chocolate bar, which had been specially formulated not to melt in the tropics. In Colorado in the winter, it was hard enough to break your teeth. Mostly, the dehydrated food worked out fine. The men boiled up stews of rice, dried meatloaf, tomato powder, cheese, and condiments. For breakfast they cooked a mixture of rolled oats, bits of fruit, raisins, dates, sugar, and powdered milk and drank cups of instant Nescafé.

  On the final climb before the descent to Aspen, Captain Jay and Sgt. Paul Petzoldt of the 10th Medics disagreed about the stability of a particular slope. Jay thought it would be fine to zigzag directly up the face. Petzoldt argued that the intense sun of the previous three days had created potentially dangerous avalanche conditions and announced finally that he would be skirting around the suspect slope. Six men joined him for the end-around, while “the rest of us,” Hampton wrote, “not choosing to spend the remaining years of our military careers on John Jay’s skunk list, meekly followed him.”

  There weren’t many men in the world who knew more about avalanches than Petzoldt, though the actual science of snow was in its infancy then. Even the experts relied heavily on experience and intuition, and Petzoldt, by the time he joined the 10th at age thirty-four, had had plenty of each. A polar opposite to the intellectual, self-deprecating David Brower (the other “famous” American climber in the division), Petzoldt was an expansive, bear-like man, with berry thickets for eyebrows. Fabulous stories—most of them true—were forever being attached to his legend. The first was that he had scaled the 13,770-foot Grand Teton in Wyoming, a serious rock climb even today, at age sixteen, in his cowboy boots. In 1938, he joined the first American expedition to K2, in the Karakoram Range on what is now the border of China and Pakistan. Petzoldt’s group didn’t succeed in reaching the top—an Italian group made the first ascent in 1954—but Paul did establish an American altitude mark of 26,700 feet and set a record for the longest stay above 20,000 feet. Legend has it the preternaturally fit Petzoldt could have summited, without supplemental oxygen, had the team planned a little better. He even brought back the world’s first color photographs from those altitudes.

  In the 10th, Petzoldt shared invaluable lessons on dressing for the cold. (Winter daytime temperatures in Jackson Hole, where he ran the nation’s first guiding and mountaineering school, rarely popped up above zero and often stayed down in the minus-20-degree range.) He told the ski troops: Keep a wool layer next to your skin—never cotton; cotton fiber absorbs water, but wool helps wick the moisture away from the skin—and keep a second pair of socks on your torso sandwiched between underwear and sweater, where body heat will help to dry them out. Cold feet were a greater threat to a maneuvering army (witness Attu) than was the enemy.

  He also worked to develop the 10th’s standard operating procedure for mountain rescues, along the way devising a rescue sled from existing body baskets set on skis. At Hale, he orchestrated scores of actual evacuations of frostbite and hypothermia cases and of one person with a burst appendix on maneuvers in below zero weather. Summers, Petzoldt designed a “zipline” procedure for getting lots of troops down a cliff in a hurry. Soldiers clipped onto a fixed line and jumped—like paratroopers jumping out of an airplane—sliding at high speed down the rope to the ground. Petzoldt was quite proud of the fact that among hundreds of “zipliners” there were “lots of bruises but not a single broken bone.”

  Captain Jay, an Easterner, had nonetheless spent many days in avalanche terrain, on Mount Rainier and in the course of his film work, and he doubtless felt secure in his decision to lead the troop directly up the steep snow slope. He probably didn’t tell his followers about the time he had led a detachment in the high country above Ashcroft for the express purpose of studying avalanches. On the way up, a corporal in the squad triggered a slide and rode it all the way to the valley floor. When the snow stopped moving, only the corporal’s head was showing above the surface. Jay had been so intent on capturing the slide on film that he failed to notice a sympathetic release, which swept his skis out from under him and left the camera staring at the sky. Both men were unhurt.

  Bud Winter might have heard that story about his CO. He certainly had several of his own to tell. The most dramatic probably was the time he joined another detached group trying to summit Mount Democrat, one of Colorado’s 54 “fourteeners,” in the Mosquito Range east of Camp Hale. The climbing party had to cross a number of very steep snow gullies to gain the summit ridge. Each couloir was filled with four to five feet of wind-blown snow and another ten inches of hard wind slab on top of that. The question was, Would the wind slab hold their weight? Staff Sgt. Bill Hackett kicked at the hard slab and decided it was safe to proceed. Two steps later the whole thing let go, and Hackett found himself prone on a moving block of snow.

  Sgt. Skip Finn later wrote in the 10th’s newspaper, the Blizzard:

  No one could have possibly thought faster than Bud Winter did. He was just behind Sgt. Hackett but was standing below a rock which prevented the snow around him from avalanching. With his left hand he grabbed the rock, threw himself on the snow and reached out with his right ski pole to Sgt. Hackett. “Grab the pole!” he yelled. Hackett did. He was just able to grasp the part below the snow ring and hold on to it while the snow went out from under him, tumbling 2,500 feet down the couloir.

  A lot of skiers had encounters with moving snow during the two winters at Hale, most of them rather less exciting than Hackett’s. And remarkably, no one was seriously hurt in a slide. Both parties on the way to Aspen made it safely to the saddle. Hampton figured the larger group with John Jay in the lead “had simply been lucky.” Petzoldt’s team, with farther to go, took a little longer to gain the ridge. “So respected was Petzoldt,” Hampton remembered, “that when he reached the top, knowing glances and shoulder shrugs were exchanged but nothing further was said about the dispute.”

  Typically upbeat, Bud Winter reported simply, “Paul Petzoldt was along. He was the man who climbed on the K2 expedition. He wants some of us to come on another expedition after the war.”

  That afternoon the troops skied right to the center of town over Aspen’s empty streets. Laurence Elisha, proprietor of the Hotel Jerome, the only working hotel during those “quiet years,” offered the tired crew showers and beds for the night. And he put two bottles of Seagram’s Seven Crown on the bar and said, “Help yourselves.” Chuck Hampton peered through the dim light at the furnishings: “The still e
legant and ornately carved woodwork, the carpets . . . [were] showing signs of their antiquity. The bar was some forty feet long, complete with a brass rail to rest your foot on.” High on the wall, a life-sized painting of a gossamer nude gazed languidly at no one and everyone, and over in one corner, a green cloth covered a card table. “The only thing missing was a bunch of trail worn cowboys or dirt-stained miners bellied up to the bar.”

  Laurence Elisha was a mountaineer too. He knew what the guys had achieved in skiing over from Pando. He appreciated their enthusiasm for skiing in general and for his mountains in particular. He enjoyed being around their vitality and their innocence. And he knew that sooner or later they would surely be asked to put themselves in harm’s way.

  Elisha had a standing deal with the ski troops: A dollar a day got you a bed at the Jerome and a steak dinner. Scores of soldiers took him up on the offer whenever they could wrangle a weekend pass from Hale. There wasn’t much else to do, frankly. Leadville was still off-limits. You could go to Denver (a four-and-a-half hour drive in good weather), and many did for the parties and the warm hospitality of local families (and bartenders) who felt duty-bound to keep the troopers’ spirits high. The big event on Denver weekends—besides mixing punch in the bathtub at the Brown Palace Hotel—was the subsequent, impromptu rope demonstration; lightheaded troopers couldn’t resist rappelling down the hotel’s atrium walls.

  On Aspen weekends, they’d pile into somebody’s car on Friday, at 5:00 P.M. sharp, drive three or four hours to the Jerome, bounce up early for skiing both Saturday and Sunday, and straggle back to camp in time for reveille Monday morning. In Aspen they had to get up early in order to catch the truck to the Midnight Mine. Bob Parker remembers greeting the driver and another miner in the semi-dark. The skiers would throw their skis and packs in the back “among the cables and shovels and other mine equipment” and then clamber in on top of the mess for the cold ride up Castle Creek.

  The Midnight was on the back side of Aspen Mountain, one of the few silver mines still in operation. A ride with the mine crew gained you 2,000 vertical feet on the way to the top of Roch Run. The final thousand-foot climb with skins on “revived our circulation and our spirits.” On the ridge they removed their skins and “glided north taking in the glorious scenery across the Roaring Fork Valley.” “This was why each one of us had joined the ski troops,” remembers Parker, “fresh powder snow, and the mountain world all to ourselves.”

  They’d stop for lunch—sandwiches provided by Mrs. Elisha, Laurence’s wife, Svea—someplace where they could see the naked, timberline cirques of the Elk Range—Highland, Castle, Mount Hayden—the ones that had so charmed André Roch. Then it was down the vertiginous Roch Run to town. “Some of us New Englanders,” Parker remembered, “never having skied a mountain this imposing, experienced the same gut-tightening feeling we had felt before our first ride on a big roller coaster.” The empty streets of Aspen looked like a checkerboard below them. Only the Jerome, the Wheeler Opera House, and a few pioneer buildings stood out against the white.

  At the bottom, “feeling like heroes,” the men took a couple of runs on the boat tow before sliding back to the Jerome and one (or two) Aspen Cruds, Laurence Elisha’s infamous whiskey-spiked milkshakes.

  Aspen unfurled like a dream, and no one was smitten harder than the Austrian champion Friedl Pfeifer was. In his autobiography Nice Goin’: My Life On Skis, he wrote about first glimpsing Aspen: “I was filled more with the beauty than I was proud of our accomplishment [in hiking over]. The mountain peaks looming over the town made me feel like I was returning to St. Anton.” Pfeifer imagined Aspen resurrected after the war as a “skiing community,” much as his bucolic hometown had revived, thanks to ski sport, in the 1920s and 1930s. On one visit, Friedl dropped in on a meeting of the Aspen town council and promised that if he survived the war, he’d be back to help with the transformation. The city fathers, most of whom still hoped that mining would stage a comeback, weren’t sure what to make of this wiry foreigner with the slicked-back hair and visionary glint in his eye.

  By the spring of 1944 the three regiments of the 10th were filled. Camp Hale bustled with nine thousand infantry soldiers, thousands more in artillery and supply, and at least five thousand Missouri mules to haul the material of war. In the end, Minnie Dole and the NSPS had been able to supply at most seven thousand volunteers to the division. The rest had come through the draft. The men in the early battalions had been training for two and a half years—sometimes, as John Woodward recalled, “feeling guilty for doin’ the things we loved.” Everyone was fit and hard from the training, and it was time to erase the “debacle” of Homestake, to test the troops in division-wide maneuvers—D-Series.

  Almost the entire division participated, for three sometimes hellish weeks in March and April 1944. Bob Parker missed all but the first days. His I&R platoon was once again sent up to Homes-take Peak. “Some of us couldn’t get enough. We were practicing our slalom right up until dark. I caught a tip between two little spruce trees and broke my ankle.” He spent the night in a sleeping bag on a bed of fir boughs “without so much as an aspirin.” Next day a team of medics tobogganed him three miles down to the nearest Weasel, which carried him the rest of the way back to camp. “So I missed the second part of D-Series, the storm part.”

  A massive late-winter storm blew into the central Rockies on Easter Sunday. It was accompanied by high winds and followed by unseasonably cold temperatures. Still, the various companies continued to patrol, dig in, move, dig in again. They’d crawl, fully clothed, into their sleeping bags only to be rousted scant minutes or hours later to saddle up and move again. Since the maneuvers were tactical, no fires were allowed, and at night no smoking lest the glow of a single cigarette give away an outfit’s location. “Enemy” forces waited in ambush to capture unwary platoons, which maneuvered, in turn, to outflank and capture them.

  Everything was done to make this mock combat as real as possible, right down to the gruff interrogation of prisoners. Pvt. Harris Dusenbery was captured in one exercise and pinned to the ground by a ski pole to the chest. In his book, Ski the High Trail, he recalls that for the first time the Army seemed to be “preparing the individual soldier for death.” There was a very real aura of desperation around the games, a code of “kill or be killed” that had not been present in training.

  Dusenbery brought age and a philosophical bent to his observations. He could have stayed out of the military. He was twenty-nine and a self-described pacifist, with a wife and child in Portland, Oregon, when he enlisted in 1943. “To my mind the war was a conflict between tyranny and democracy, between discipline and freedom. My desire for freedom was stronger than my desire for peace, and so, temperamentally unfit as I was, I went to war.”

  He also thought that joining with the mountain troops would be safer than combat with flatland infantry. “It was my theory that I would be fighting the altitude and the snow and so would be fighting my human enemies to a lesser extent. . . . Alpine terrain is familiar and comforting. I feel at home there.” Better to be swept away by an avalanche, he thought, or gently freeze to death on a mountainside than to be raked by machine-gun fire or blown away in an artillery barrage. “I can accept nature on her own terms. . . . It is the wrath of man I fear.”

  No doubt many in the 10th felt the same way. If this was a war that had to be fought and won, then why not discharge that duty in one’s beloved mountains? D-Series planners did their best to quash that love, or at least to take the element of play completely out of it. And by all accounts they succeeded in pushing Minnie’s ski troops to their limit. What that did was give this disparate bunch a common bond; it made them brothers, not just in song or in the shared adventures of mountaineering, but now brothers in misery too. And out of that misery, Dusenbery thinks, “We gained something that the Army calls morale. . . . We who went through the experience had an elan that could have been acquired in no other way.”

  After three weeks of scra
mbling the ridgelines at 12,000 and 13,000 feet, of eyelashes frozen shut, of numb fingers and toes and nights buried in the snow like ptarmigan, the 10th was officially deemed fit and tough and ready for war. But, would there be a war left for the 10th to fight? In April and May 1944 Soviet armies made steady gains on the eastern front. The British finally turned the tide against the Japanese in Burma, and American bombers in the Pacific hit the Japanese home islands for the first time. On June 5, elements of the American Fifth and the British Eighth Armies entered Rome on their slow and costly advance up the boot of Italy. The British Home Fleet had been conducting operations off the Norwegian coast for a month—part of a series of deceptions leading finally to the Normandy landings on June 6. That day Operation Overlord put 156,000 American, British, and Canadian troops on the French beaches. The long-awaited invasion of Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” had begun.

  As for the 10th, their orders came through on June 7, 1944. Without explanation, they were to pack up en masse and relocate to Camp Swift, Texas. Bastrop, Texas, thirty miles east of Austin. Elevation: 300 feet. Terrain: flat as a pancake. Temperature in the shade: 90 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Morale in the alpine division plummeted. And Harry Poschman’s friend, Vasos the Greek, now wearing the mantle of soothsayer, pronounced again: “This outfit will never go to war.”