Bob Woody, crammed into a rather less luxurious troop hold, heard music one night. “Top side, a band was playing. I climbed up some pipes and lo, there were WACs—enlisted women—dancing with officers. Ahhhh, how those officers could bend the rules. I joined the dancing and was promptly escorted down the deck stairs by MPs with a warning not to return.” The often-informal, egalitarian relationship between officers and men that had characterized the division in the mountains (and would reassert itself in the stress of combat) had been at least temporarily revoked.
Fine weather brought calm seas for most of the voyage. Men lounged on deck, gambled in their bunks, smoked endlessly. (Cigarettes were only five cents a pack in the ship’s store.) Or else they leaned on a rail and stared into the waves: to the east beyond the bow toward what might be coming, or back west to what they’d left behind. Medic Nate Morell says, “The big topic was: Were you afraid to die? Or how you might die.”
The slower Argentina crossed the pond with an escort of destroyers and occasional sub-spotting aircraft. The West Point sped across alone, picking up a convoy only when she entered the Mediterranean Sea through the Straits of Gibraltar. It was just before Gibraltar that the veil of secrecy finally lifted, and the men learned their destination: Italy.
Italy, Winston Churchill’s “soft underbelly of Europe,” had in the sixteen months since the landing at Salerno, proved to be anything but soft. In part this was due to the Allies’ unwillingness to commit a truly overwhelming force there; the way to Germany and to Hitler’s ultimate destruction lay to the north—across France and the Low Countries—not up through the hundreds of miles of tortuously folded countryside that characterized the Italian peninsula. And secondly, General Kesselring’s defensive strategy used that convoluted terrain to brilliant advantage, stymieing the Allied advance most notably at the Gustav Line south of Rome.
At the center of that line stood Monte Cassino crowned by its hilltop, sixth-century Benedictine monastery. Three times over the winter of 1944 Allied forces—British, American, Polish, French, and New Zealand troops—tried and failed to dislodge the tenacious Germans occupying the heights. On January 22, in an attempt to bypass Cassino, Gen. Mark Clark put fifty thousand men and five thousand vehicles of his U.S. Fifth Army ashore at Anzio, just thirty-three miles from Rome. But Kesselring’s counterattack bottled up the Americans there. Meanwhile, Allied bombers flattened the ancient abbey on the hill, but the rubble turned out to provide even better cover for the defenders, and more difficult going for Allied tanks and foot soldiers. Finally, in May, British Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander shifted his Eighth Army over from the Adriatic to join Clark in a redoubled effort against Cassino. This time, the Gustav Line was breached and Monte Cassino itself fell to a Polish battalion. At the same time the Americans broke out of Anzio, joined the combined armies moving north, and marched, unopposed, into Rome on June 5, 1944.
But Kesselring was not routed, as expected. Instead he led an orderly retreat to yet another string of mountainside fortifications south of Florence, the Arno River Line, and after that to the Gothic Line in the Northern Apennine Mountains, the last range of hills before the Po River valley. The Po was Italy’s breadbasket, one of the last and most productive sources of food and munitions for a far-flung German army increasingly short of both. Berlin wanted desperately to hold the Allies south of the valley, and Kesselring had the advantage of the high ground—of superior observation and prepared positions.
Through the fall of 1944, the British on the east and the Americans on the west managed to shoulder the Gothic Line north but a few kilometers. There was no breakthrough anywhere along the front, which stretched from near Pisa on the Ligurian Sea to Ravenna on the Adriatic. The Allies might have made faster progress but for two rather major handicaps, attention and priority. First, the world’s attention shifted to Normandy; D-Day was June 6, the day after Rome’s liberation. And then in August, the Allies launched Operation Dragoon, to open a second front on France’s Mediterranean coast, which drained away several crack divisions from Clark’s Fifth Army. The fighting in Italy ceased being news. What with Mussolini’s overthrow, the negotiated surrender of Italian forces, and now the liberation of Rome, much of the world assumed the war in Italy was over. Alexander and Clark would just have to do the best they could with the limited resources they had. The first snows blanketed the Northern Apennines in November. Movement of men and machines became nearly impossible. As winter set in, the two sides hunkered down, wary and exhausted, across what Allied maps now called the Winter Line.
Official strategy in Italy now was simply to occupy as many German divisions as possible, in order to keep them from being reassigned to the fight in France or to the rapidly deteriorating eastern front. But Mark Clark didn’t like the idea of his soldiers sitting pat; he wanted to force the issue as soon as better weather allowed. His goal was to capture the industrial and railroad center of Bologna, at the edge of the Po River valley, and he was hoping the fresh troops of the 10th Mountain Division would help him get there. He had a particular assignment in mind for the 10th—the last U.S. division to enter the war in Europe—one that had frustrated several earlier attempts.
Three times in November 1944, Fifth Army battalions, including soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the U.S. 92d Division (one of two “all-Negro” divisions), had tried and failed to take Monte Belvedere near the center of the Winter Line. Belvedere was not a particularly imposing peak; taller and craggier summits, up to 7,000 feet high and crusted with early snow, could be seen to the northwest. Belvedere stood only 3,800 feet high, a three-mile-long humpback of a mountain with a patchwork of fields and orchards, stone barns, and chestnut woods nearly to its summit. It looked unremarkable, even benign. But Belvedere was the military key to Highway 64, one of only two roads from Florence over the mountains to Bologna, and thus crucial to Clark’s plans. From Belvedere’s ridgeline, artillery observers with the German LI Mountain Corps could direct fire onto any movement approaching the highway. Further progress to the north required that the Allies take and hold Monte Belvedere. The hope was that the 10th, with its mountain training, its esprit, and its very high level of fitness, could do what no one else had yet managed: to dislodge Belvedere’s defenders.
On board ship, the ski troops got their first glimpse of Italy as the island of Capri slid by to starboard. Then, growing on the horizon, came the broad cone of Mount Vesuvius, still smoking following its March 1944 eruption. That blast—from the same volcano that had buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum several feet deep in ash and debris in A.D. 79—had raised the overall height of the mountain 500 feet to just about 4,000 feet above the wide crescent of the Bay of Naples. The water in the harbor was green and clear, and staring down into it one could conjure thoughts of romance and holiday. But a broader glance revealed a naval graveyard. Ships of all descriptions lay twisted half in and half out of the water. The waterfront had been blasted to rubble by both Allied and Luftwaffe bombers, and the ancient city of Naples stood in tatters, its human inhabitants dressed in rags, scrounging scraps from GI food lines. Suddenly, to the men of the 10th, the war was very real.
On disembarking, the soldiers were immediately accosted by prostitutes. “They were hungry,” Bob Woody remembered. “Little boys would come up to you with their filthy faces and say, ‘Fichi, fichi. Wanna fuck my sister?’ One girl kissed my shirt collar—big red lipstick marks. Newc [Eldredge] and I said, ‘We’re too tired.’ Meaning, we’re scared. A lot of guys had no compunctions. No money changed hands; these people had nothing to buy. The standard medium of exchange was a pack of cigarettes.”
Dave Brower, a smoker like most of the men, noticed that a cigarette butt would no sooner hit the ground than a flurry of barefoot beggars, like pigeons in more prosperous times, would flutter in to claim it. “For the first time, for most of us,” he wrote, “we were now foreigners.”
The ebullient Bud Winter, while not oblivious to the squalor an
d sadness of Italy, focused instead on his fly-fishing. He’d brought along his rod and reel, and now he wrote home to his mother, asking her to send, at her earliest convenience, “some trout hooks and line.”
The 10th’s three regiments stayed only briefly in Naples before shipping out again, either by coastal boat or by train, to Livorno and then Pisa just south of the Winter Line. Woody and a few others climbed the famous Leaning Tower and rang the bells. Afterward, Woody found the bell ringing “irreverent and disturbing.” It was about this time that a company of 86th men walked into a minefield near the regimental staging area at Quercianella. One man was wounded when he stepped on a “bouncing betty,” an antipersonnel mine that jumps up to waist height when detonated and sprays shrapnel in all directions. Heeding the cries for help, several medics left the safety of nearby railroad tracks and were themselves killed trying to reach the wounded man. Adding to the melee, a chaplain rushed too hurriedly to help and was also killed by the buried mines. The 10th Mountain had been bloodied for the first time since Kiska.
There was no time to stop to mourn the dead. The regiments were quickly off to the Apennine foothills, to little towns called Pieve and Bagni di Lucca and Vidiciatico. They traveled by night in lumbering six-by-six trucks or on foot over rutted dirt roads and ancient stone tracks too narrow even for the versatile army jeep. The men stopped under cover during the day and moved out again in the dark. The arrival of a mountain division to the front was supposed to be a secret; the troops had even been ordered to cut off their division patches in order not to tip off the Germans. But despite the stealth tactics, the Germans seemed to know as much about the 10th’s identity and whereabouts as did the average dogface. David Brower remembered that when his battalion stole into the town of Vidiciatico, a German loudspeaker on Riva Ridge bellowed, in English: “Welcome, men of the 10th Mountain Division.” Later, when the 85th Regiment settled in discreetly near the base of Monte Belvedere, German artillery rained down on the Americans propaganda leaflets that read: “Welcome, men of the 10th Mountain Division. It’s a long way from Camp Hale to Mount Belvedere . . .” How did they know? And what did it bode that the enemy apparently knew so much about its untested adversaries?
The mountains here reminded no one of Rainier’s lofty, glacier-draped cone or of the strings of alpine ridgelines surrounding Camp Hale. These mountains looked more like New England’s Appalachians—rounded by eons of erosion and heavily wooded except where generations of Italians had carved out field and orchard. The villages’ ancient stone buildings huddled on rocky outcrops, as if to take the least possible space from the fields below. Some had been fortresses from medieval times, and some were de facto fortresses now, first for retreating German soldiers, then for the Americans. Walls that had stood for centuries sported gaping, dark holes. Terracotta roof tiles and pale, limestone wall blocks spilled unnaturally into the narrow streets thanks to shelling by both sides.
The luckier men of the 10th got to sleep in barns or schools with hay for bedding and a roof, or at least part of a roof, over their heads. The really lucky guys, like Bob Woody, befriended locals and spent time in their homes. In a letter to his brother, Woody described the village of Pieve:
Remember those books on fairyland? This is fairyland. . . . At the village fountain, I met Dora Pellegrini, a 36-year-old mother of two. . . . She invited me to her home where I met her husband Giuseppe, a handsome dark-haired man with mustache. Giuseppe was in the Italian Alpini but when “Mussolini finiti” he took off for home, to his wife and two babies. . . .They gave me hot soup—and grappa. The grappa burned a ring down my throat. Giuseppe threw some into the fire and laughed as it exploded. . . . I gave them some of my rations, chocolate and cigarettes.
By January 20, 1945, all three 10th Mountain regiments were in place and sending patrols into the line. Both sides ran patrols, mostly at night. The two armies were sizing each other up, like heavyweights in the ring, circling and jabbing through the early rounds of what promised to be a long fight. Many times patrols never even saw the opposition. Bob Parker remembered one night when his reconnaissance team crept up to spy on the fortified town of Corona on Belvedere’s western flank. They worked their way through the woods to within a few feet of the old town’s stone walls, so close that Parker could hear the German guards talking quietly and smell the smoke from their cigarettes.
Most patrols hiked on foot through the crusty thin snow—probing, listening, cutting the enemy’s communications wire wherever they came across it, hoping to bring back a prisoner or two for questioning. Where deeper snow and more distant objectives required it, patrols went out on skis. But these were rare. John Jennings figured he participated in six night ski patrols for his 87th company through January. The last one, to the farm on the ridge-line, provided their biggest scare by far. The vast majority of 10th men never saw a ski in Italy.
By the end of January, beginning of February, the weather eliminated any need for the 10th’s skis. Continuing warm and dry conditions quickly melted the snow on all but the true north exposures, and those were typically held by the defending Germans. Roads turned to mud, and the soldiers not fortunate enough to have billeting inside a building of some kind found themselves camped in deep muck. Nighttime temperatures still dropped below freezing, but during the day, a blazing sun warmed the air into the forties and fifties. In these conditions, the standard-issue olive-drab uniform—equipment initially resented by the mountain troops—was definitely superior to the whites they had hoped to be wearing. It looked as if Italy might be experiencing a very early spring.
While patrols continued to probe at night—and the rest of the division tried simply to give away as little as possible during the day—the generals were plotting the new Allied offensive, code-named Operation Encore. General Hays studied the terrain with new eyes and saw something that had escaped previous planners. Not only was Belvedere itself well defended, but the existence of a tall, unusually steep, perpendicular ridge to the west made it all but impregnable. Hays figured that the Germans atop what came to be known as Riva Ridge had been the real culprits in the previous failures on Belvedere. They not only had a perfect stadium-like view of Allied comings and goings, they could direct devastating fire in behind any approach to Belvedere’s south slope. Reconnaissance flights proved the existence of observation posts on the ridge and of elements of the 4th (Edelweiss) Mountain Battalion and a battalion of the German 232d Infantry Division garrisoned nearby. Hays determined that the 10th needed to neutralize Riva Ridge before a fourth attempt on Belvedere could succeed.
Riva looked, at first, like an insurmountable wall. Striated like a many-layered cake by horizontal rock bands, the cliff was actually a series of connected high points, three and a half miles long, from Monte Mancinello (4,770 feet) on the south, across Monte Serrasiccia and Monte Capel Buso, to Pizzo di Campiano (3,175 feet) at the north end. (For simplicity’s sake, the Army shortened the so-called Mancinello-Campiano Ridge to Riva Ridge.) Riva’s east face bolted 1,500 feet seemingly straight up from the Dardagna River at its base. But the pitch was not uniformly steep. The metamorphic rock had shattered and eroded into a series of gullies and ramps. There were routes that an experienced hiker could negotiate with relative ease. But there were also slabs of vertical rock and deep ravines hidden from the sun where ice and snow remained. The warmup in the weather meant that water from melting snow poured down the face during the day and froze in a thin glaze overnight. The backside of the escarpment, the German side, sloped gradually to the northwest, over still-snowy benches toward the town of Fanano. Several companies of seasoned German mountain troops were garrisoned there, but only a handful of defenders, forty to fifty men, occupied the spine of the ridge at any one time. The German command evidently felt that the eastern precipice was simply too much for the Americans to attempt.
General Hays asked Lt. Colonel Clarence E. “Tommy” Tomlinson, commander of the 86th Regiment, if his men could climb Riva. Tomlinson, who had served mos
t recently in the South Pacific and was no mountaineer himself, scanned the serrated ridge with binoculars and reported back with skepticism: “It looks pretty steep, sir.” Hays replied, “Nonsense. You’re supposed to be elite mountain troops. I don’t take that. You get out there and find a way.”
Still doubtful, Tomlinson sent patrols across the Dardagna torrent with orders to scout routes up Riva. The first week, patrols on skis probed unsuccessfully for a way up the cliff; the snow was going fast. Then a squad from B Company, 86th, climbed, without skis, to the northernmost section of the ridge, to Pizzo di Campiano. Nearing the crest at daybreak, the B Company men dropped into a crawl and peered over the top. A vicious burst of barking took their breath away; they’d been discovered by a guard dog. When three German soldiers popped up out of a dugout to investigate, the American staff sergeant in charge told them in English, “Hands up!” One of the soldiers went for his weapon instead, and the patrol shot him dead. At that point a hidden machine gun opened up on the interlopers, who turned tail and dashed back down the mountain with bullets zinging off the rocks around them. They made it safely down and were congratulated on achieving their mission. The trail they found was designated Route 1.
Over the next weeks, patrols established four more routes up Riva. The climbers did not go unobserved and had to duck occasional pot shots from above. But the Germans on top appeared to regard the few Americans scrambling on the face as relatively harmless; their conviction that no large-scale force would attempt the climb remained intact.
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