CHAPTER 7:
Not Too Swift
The fact was, the Army had no mission for the mountain troops. Observers from Army Ground Forces noted in their April 1944 report that the D-Series maneuvers had gone well, that the light division had proved its ability to operate at extremes of altitude and weather. But the writers remained skeptical of the 10th’s organization and specialized equipment, its lack of motorized transport, and its relatively light firepower. Of course, these things were precisely the point of a light division, that it could move swiftly—lightly encumbered—in remote, possibly snowy, roadless places.
But that wasn’t what the Army believed it needed in the spring of 1944. When Chief of Staff George Marshall offered the 10th to various theater commanders, they all declined, citing the division’s comparatively small size, its specialized training and its light armament. General Eisenhower, by then the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, passed the question on to his chief of staff, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, who reportedly took one look at the 10th’s table of organization and said, “All those mules? Hell no!”
In late April, Minnie Dole went to see General Marshall to plead for a combat-zone assignment for the ski troops. Marshall hedged, saying only that because there was just one light infantry division (the only other light divisions, by definition, were the airborne 82d and 101st) and because transportation had become so scarce, it didn’t make sense to send the 10th to one theater of war if the need might subsequently prove greater in some other theater of war. The 10th would just have to wait in reserve until the right opportunity presented itself.
The stated reason for the move to Texas was to acclimate the 10th to hot weather and low elevation so that it could participate in large-scale maneuvers in Louisiana in September, maneuvers that never took place because so few Army divisions remained stateside. The real purpose of the relocation was to beef up the 10th so that it could fight alongside regular heavy infantry divisions wherever they might be in action. General Marshall wasn’t ready to give up on the mountain troops; their special skills might yet prove useful. But he did want to bring their manpower and firepower up to the levels of a full division. And that meant reorganization.
To the dismay of the 10th’s senior mountaineers, the Mountain Training Group was disbanded and its men distributed among the various companies, about five instructors to each company. At least two thousand additional officers and men were added to the infantry regiments, and heavy weapons companies were added to all battalions. These included the much more powerful .50-caliber machine guns (the 10th had trained with .30-caliber) and mortar platoons using larger, 81-mm ammunition. The outfit’s mule-borne 75-mm howitzers were augmented with motorized 105-mm and 155-mm artillery. New men—transfers mostly—expanded the ranks of the 10th’s medical, engineer, and signal (communications) battalions. In the heat and the flat terrain of southeast Texas, the 87th’s regimental motto—Vires montesque vincimus (We conquer men and mountains)—seemed like a cruel joke. Many of the Camp Hale veterans felt betrayed.
Of the experience at Camp Swift, Harry Poschman wrote in his memoir, “If it can be said the 10th Mountain died, this is where it started. . . . Whole new companies were formed consisting of men not familiar with the ski troops and their special training.” With the dissolution of the MTG—there being nothing for the elite mountaineers to teach—Harry was reassigned first to a standard rifle company, then to a heavy weapons company in the 85th Regiment. Morale hit rock bottom. Many of the original Hale guys scrambled to transfer out, and some of them succeeded. When a call went out in July to replace the paratroopers depleted at Normandy, so many men volunteered from the 10th that division commanders were forced to bar further transfers.
Nineteen-year-old Robert Woody had only been at Hale a couple of months before the move to Swift, but he had developed a real connection to the place, to the mountains and the skiing, to the idea of being mountain troops. He slept “good and heavy” on pine bough beds, learned from the grizzled Paul Petzoldt how to evacuate wounded down a rock face, and even turned down a chance to “escort a college girl to a couple of dances at the service club . . . in order to go skiing with the boys.”
Woody hated Swift, the comedown it represented—the insult even—and the reality of its stultifying summer days. Letter home, June 27:
The day before yesterday we fired the carbine. During the afternoon I was in the pits; on a given whistle signal I’d hold up my target. . . . There was no air circulating and the rays of the sun made the small six-by-three hole just like a bread oven. I could write notes on the wall with my sweaty finger. The floor was a graveyard of horrid bugs dead and living. . . . The bullets would sing over your head and kick dirt onto your sweaty back. . . . Flies, gnats, mosquitoes made a meal out of you. Believe me I don’t wanta know nothing about holding targets again.
The humid plains around Bastrop swarmed with insects and just about every poisonous snake native to North America. A man in Bob Parker’s platoon woke up one morning “with a copperhead curled up in the warmth of the guy’s stomach, inside his sleeping bag.”
Paul Petzoldt, so unflappable at high elevation, on vertical rock and snow, had a deathly fear of snakes. The night he arrived at Swift his new unit was assigned a nighttime field problem. The men were told to dig foxholes and wait for a mock attack. “Don’t move until I give the command,” said their officer. Petzoldt lay in his hole listening to noises in the oak trees and seeing what he thought were eyes glinting in the branches above him. He tried to sleep and might have dozed off briefly when something soft and wiggling fell onto his lap.
At that moment, the attack began. “Enemy” soldiers ran at them banging on pots and yelling “Yankee, you die!” Petzoldt bolted upright swiping desperately at the squirming thing on his uniform front. The officer yelled, “Get down! Not yet! Not yet!” But Petzoldt had had enough. He stalked off and the next day pulled some strings with division command and had himself transferred to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he remained as an instructor for the duration of the war.
Not everyone wanted to get out. Bud Winter did, in fact, leave for three months to OCS, but he returned to Texas a second lieutenant in November. And Winter’s sunny disposition continued in spite of the gloom that infected many of his comrades. “Dear Fred,” he wrote to his brother from Camp Swift. “Last week I had one day off to go to town and I really had a wonderful time. I got a date with a nice little co-ed from Texas University. She was really a swell kid. Austin is really a nice town to go to.”
Bob Parker never seriously entertained the idea of transferring, not even after an incident that could have killed him. He and his I&R mates had figured out a way to sleep up off the ground away from Swift’s various crawling things. One of the guys in the platoon had been a fisherman before the war, and he taught them how to weave fishnet hammocks out of laundry cord. Parker felt pretty smug and secure one morning at reveille as he climbed down from his suspended bed to dress for chow. Most of his clothes had spent the night in the hammock with him, safely above the forest floor. Only a few items—his helmet and helmet liner, for instance—had to be left on the ground. (Because of the heat, the men were not always required to wear their steel helmets, but they did have to wear the lighter helmet liner into the mess hall.) Parker donned the liner, felt a searing pain at his temple, and immediately blacked out.
Shocked, his buddies stood staring at the scorpion and at Parker lying on the ground. They finally recovered their wits enough to carry him to the base hospital. The scorpion had stung Parker right on the temporal artery. He remained unconscious for about twelve minutes but eventually came to, apparently fine, but with “the worst headache” he’d ever had. “It lasted two days.”
Midway through the summer of 1944 Bob Woody contracted poison oak on his legs and face, a debilitating case, but it meant he got to spend what he described as “five delicious weeks” in the camp infirmary. “With Epsom salt baths [and] Texas University
girls coming to the hospital to teach us archery,” it certainly beat bedding with the snakes and enduring forced marches in the heat.
As Woody wrote in Charlie Red One, Over and Out, his self-published memoir of the war years, the hospital also exposed him to a different world. The food servers at the hospital mess were actually prisoners from the defeated German Afrika Korps.
They were prisoners in body [only]. Their souls were still with the Korps and German supremacy. They did not look at you. They looked through you. They slapped servings in your tray with clear disdain. Fuck ’em, I thought. Then one day as I left the mess I just happened to be singing in Latin: Adeste, fideles, / Laeti triumphates, / Venite, venite in Bethlehem. One of the prisoners came over to me. “I know that song,” he said. “We sang it at home.” There was no disdain in his voice or eyes.
The next ward over from Woody’s was the VD ward. “A lot of those guys were in bad shape, hunched and shaking. . . . Made a believer out of you.” Everyone in the division was made to sit through what they called the “Mickey Mouse” movies over and over. “It began with the War Department musical fanfare,” Woody recalled.
Then a familiar, gray-haired Hollywood actor, who always played chairman-of-the-board types, comes on in the uniform of a medical officer. “As an officer of the Medical Corps of the United States Army, it is my duty to inform you of certain pertinent facts regarding your body. Most men know less about their bodies than they do their own cars.” He’d pull down a chart and with a pointer begin: “This is the chest, the abdomen and the testicles—commonly known as the balls. . . .”
Woody was a buzz-cut, 137-pound, fresh-out-of-high-school virgin. His mates in C Company, 85th Regiment had given him the nickname “Cherry.” But he laughed along with everyone else at the movie’s misplaced sincerity. And like everyone else, he accepted the condoms and the prophylactic kits the first sergeant handed out with each weekend pass, “whether [the men] had grizzled faces or fuzz faces.”
Week after blazing week crawled by. The soldiers suffered through longer and longer conditioning hikes. David Brower, newly arrived from the dismantled Seneca Rocks climbing school, and out of shape after an eleven-day furlough to visit his pregnant wife in Berkeley, actually fell asleep while leading a platoon on a twenty-four-hour march—“fell asleep while walking.” “I think I usually avoid hallucinations,” he wrote in For Earth’s Sake, “That night I had enough for all time.”
New men arrived daily until the 10th reached its full compliment of over fourteen thousand soldiers. Heat exhaustion, which had crippled up to two-thirds of the ski troops when they first arrived from Camp Hale, became less and less common. Their bodies were adapting. Now they trained with air cover, something they hadn’t done at Hale. They trained with the heavier weapons. This was different work, a different life. Even their spare time was altered to the new environment. Where once they might have skied into an old silver mining town, now when they had a night off, they went to Austin, where the girls’ wide taffeta dresses swished against their pressed A uniforms on the dance floor. Still, to remind themselves of their mountain heritage, they sometimes brought climbing ropes downtown and practiced rappelling off Austin’s tallest building, a six-story hotel.
Then, in early November 1944, the Army declared the alpine division officially reorganized and gave it a new name, the 10th Mountain Division. Each man was issued a cloth tab with the word MOUNTAIN embroidered on it. These were to be sewn above the shoulder patch they already wore—a blue powderkeg with crossed red bayonets on it, signifying the Roman numeral ten. The MOUNTAIN tab put the 10th in the same league with other elite outfits, the ones who wore RANGER or AIRBORNE above their division patches.
This was definitely a morale booster. But the 10th still didn’t know for what it was being readied. The most persistent rumor whispered Burma. Up near Bob Woody’s company headquarters stood an obvious clue: a big relief map of Burma, which showed how mountainous the Burmese terrain really was. Woody figured it made sense: “We still had the mule pack. Mules were being used in Burma. Yup, we would be fighting under the famed General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell in what was called the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations.” But he also understood that the map might be a decoy planted by his leaders. “If there were leaks to the enemy,” he figured, “let the leaks say the 10th was going to southeast Asia.”
There was still no word when, after Thanksgiving, the division got a new commander, a genuine war hero and old friend of Chief of Staff Marshall’s, one Brig. Gen. George Price Hays. (Hays replaced Gen. Lloyd Jones, who had fallen seriously ill.) He was a man of spare frame, born in China to Presbyterian missionary parents, wiry and weather beaten, with the direct gaze and relaxed stance—one Westerner in the division thought—of a cowhand. Permanent smile lines around his eyes and mouth balanced a deep worry crease between his dark brows. The headline in the Blizzard announcing his arrival read: “Gen. Hays, Hero of Two Wars, Wins Battles—and Keeps Casualty List Short.” The officers and men liked him right away.
Hays had won the congressional Medal of Honor as an artillery forward observer during the second battle of the Marne. (The medal citation states matter-of-factly that “seven times he had horses shot from under him” as he raced from the front lines to his own artillery positions again and again to keep the lines of communication open.) He owned two Silver Stars for gallantry, the French Croix de Guerre, the Legion of Honor, and a Purple Heart. He had just returned to the States after commanding the artillery for the U.S. 2d Division at Normandy. Fresh from combat, he gathered the 10th’s senior officers and noncoms (noncommissioned officers—sergeants, for example) together at Swift and delivered a surprising talk. Lt. Col. Robert Works recalled in Soldiers on Skis, “He gave a picture of war which most people hadn’t heard—that war was an exciting thing. He said we would look back on it as one of the greatest things that ever happened to us.”
Hays told the group—and his words quickly filtered down to the men in the line companies: “We are going to have good times and bad times in our combat overseas, and as far as possible it will be my policy to . . . have as good a time as possible as long as we accomplish our mission.”
The general didn’t know a lot about the mountain troops and what they were trained to do. But he could tell right away that they were a special group suffering a crisis of identity and purpose. Minnie Dole, still the division’s mother hen, wrote Hays in an introductory letter from Connecticut: “Many men have spent three, and some four, years with the outfit with no apparent prospect of combat. The result is that they have felt they are the forgotten division and the Army’s bastard child.” (Burton, The Ski Troops.)
Hays’s solution was to push the troops harder. Always fair and considerate of the men, he nevertheless sensed that to come together as a unit, they needed more discipline, more rigor. Hays became the shot in the arm the division sorely needed. One sergeant wrote home with enthusiasm typical of the infantrymen’s feelings about their new leader:
Mother, he is the answer to the prayers of us all. . . . Yesterday he actually came right out onto the field with us, and secretly every damn one of us cocked our helmets a little to the same angle he had his. He talked to us and told us to have fun at the front and keep a smile on our faces and give the enemy ten bullets for every one he fires at us. This guy doesn’t know what he has done for this outfit, but we will do our damndest to show him when the hot stuff comes. (Whitlock, Soldiers on Skis.)
The general knew, of course, where his division was headed. But he was not at liberty to share that knowledge. In late November 1944 orders came for the 86th Regiment to move out by train to Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, hard by the military port at Hampton Roads on Chesapeake Bay. The 85th and 87th Regiments left Swift for the same destination just before Christmas, and the division artillery battalions followed days later.
When the order came to board ship at last (December 11 for the 86th, January 4, 1945, for the other regiments), the mountain troops l
eft port without their mountain equipment—their skis and mountain boots, their white anoraks and down sleeping bags. They had instead been issued standard infantry khaki and rubber shoepacs. A concerned senior officer wrote to Minnie Dole, and Dole fired off a letter of complaint to General Marshall’s office. To Dole’s surprise, the answer came not from official Washington but from General Hays himself. Hays explained in no uncertain terms that he was now commander of the division and responsible for its welfare, and he concluded, “I shall brook no interference whatsoever.”
In one swift stroke, Hays ended Minnie Dole’s informal, but very real, influence over decisions affecting the 10th Mountain Division. It had to have been a blow; Minnie had worked so hard, become so immersed in “his” ski troops. He would have gone overseas with them had the Army let him. But in the end, he took the rebuff well. “After all,” he philosophized, “Hays is the commander. He’s the one that will take them into battle, not me.”
CHAPTER 8:
The Winter Line
The 86th Regiment sailed first, on the USS Argentina. The 85th and 87th followed three weeks later aboard the USS West Point, a converted luxury liner known before the war as the America. Built for the North Atlantic passenger trade, the West Point was the biggest and fastest troop ship in the fleet—faster, it was said, than any German U-boat. Inevitably though, rumors flew about what might be stalking her below the surface. One of Harry Poschman’s shipmates, seasick and miserable belowdecks, complained to one of the West Point’s merchant seamen. “It’s okay, soldier,” came the laconic reply, “you’ll be off this ship in a week. Less than that if we get torpedoed.”
Poschman’s platoon was assigned to a “good stateroom, way up high in first class.” This was definitely an improvement over the old USS Grant on the way up to Kiska. “The only trouble,” he wrote, “was that twenty of us were packed into what was once a deluxe cabin for two. Somebody with authority dropped in to say we were given this fine room because it was near the mess hall and we would have the privilege of KP for the entire voyage.” The worst part was that the guys on KP didn’t get to see any of the USO shows with their look-but-don’t-touch female entertainers.
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