Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  On two of the routes, 10th mountaineers attached fixed ropes to the rock so that troops burdened with rifles and ammunition could haul themselves up the steeper ledges. The ropes—of the new olive-drab nylon—could not be seen from above. To secure them, climbers looped sections around trees and roots or, when there were none, used piton hammers to drive anchors into the rock. The sound of steel on steel would surely have sent a signal to the Germans, so the mountaineers wrapped their hammers in thick cloth to deaden the sound. The anchors were then fitted with snap rings (now called carabiners) and the rope passed through, as one would do on an assault of Half Dome in Yosemite (there was that overlap of military and mountaineering language) or an attempt on the Matterhorn. The sport Dave Brower and others had taught so enthusiastically in training was now being employed with deadly intent.

  While a handful of top climbers fixed the routes, most of the 1st Battalion, 86th Regiment, was sent back behind the lines for intensive rock-climbing and marksmanship training in a quarry near the town of Lucca. Although 70 percent of these men had been with the regiment at Hale, General Hays wanted to make sure all of the soldiers were fit to climb, that they all felt a mountaineer’s esprit. Battalion commander Lt. Col. Henry Hampton wrote later: “The 30 percent not trained at Camp Hale were fairly good in movement over rough terrain as they were young and desired to be as good as the rest of the mountaineers. Of course, if we had to use skis and snowshoes, it would have been a different story. Skiers and snowshoers are not trained in two weeks.” The 1st Battalion men would have to be comfortable with the rock and rope, and with each other, because they were going to make the climb at night.

  That was the plan. Hays figured the Germans would never anticipate an assault up Riva’s “unclimbable” east face, at night, by inexperienced troops, and he was counting heavily on the element of surprise. The plan called for the 1st Battalion (Companies A, B, C, and D) plus F Company from the 2d Battalion—about eight hundred men—to scale Riva on the night of February 18 in preparation for a dawn attack. The rest of the division—the 85th and 87th Regiments and the 3d Battalion of the 86th (upwards of twelve thousand men, including reserves)—would attack Monte Belvedere on the night of the 19th.

  Then on Friday, February 16, two days before the attack, the general did something unusual. He sat down with the men of his division, not just the officers but the dogfaces too, and told them exactly what to expect. “He said,” Dan Kennerly wrote in his diary (excerpted in Good Times and Bad Times): “ ‘I have never before talked to men of your level about the details of a coming campaign. But I’m trusting you to carry this off.’ ” He said there would be no artillery or aerial bombardment prior to jump-off because it would ruin the element of surprise. Companies would move up the mountain in silence with fixed bayonets and no ammunition in their rifles. Again, to enhance the surprise. The general didn’t want any premature firing, and he didn’t want companies (echoes of Kiska) mistakenly shooting each other in the dark. Load weapons only at daybreak, he told the anxious faces around him. “You must move forward,” Kennerly remembers him saying. “Never get pinned down. Move forward. There will be no order to turn back. Any order to turn back will be a false order. Shoot the enemy. Bayonet him. Brain him with your rifle. To the victor will go the spoils. Take trophies—anything: pistols, cameras, watches. Send them home for the grandchildren to see. You’re going to go there, and you’re going to do damn well. Good luck.”

  At least one GI reported later that in spite of their inevitable nerves, “the feeling of affection for Hays ran so high, we would have followed him to hell.”

  CHAPTER 9:

  Riva Ridge

  Through the night of February 17, the men who would climb Riva Ridge hiked the fourteen miles from their training area in Lucca to one of five tiny villages at the base of Riva’s east wall. Each village housed an assault company, one company for each of the designated climbing routes. From north to south along the Dardagna River, now bellowing with snowmelt, eight hundred 10th Mountain Division soldiers piled into farmhouses and out-buildings in Pianacci, Ca di Julio, Farne (the battalion command post), Migliante, and Poggioforato. On their way through Regimental Headquarters at La Ca, the riflemen received double the normal issue of ammunition—ninety-six rounds—and extra K rations. It had been decided they would go without blankets or extra clothing to make room for the added firepower.

  Throughout the next day, the men stayed in their hiding places at the foot of the cliff, marking time, breaking down and cleaning their weapons. They talked, they argued, they grew understandably restless. Some tried to sleep. Some withdrew into silence, while others became more voluble in their anxiety. This was it: They were about to confront an enemy demonized for years in the media as ruthless killing machines—some had even called them Supermen. The mountaineers knew themselves to be all-too human. Just kids, most of them. Still innocent of killing, of the real stuff of war. Would they perform bravely? Or wither in fear? Would it hurt awfully to be shot? Would there be time to feel anything? They were about to find out.

  Jump-off time was set for 7:30 P.M. the night of the 18th. Sgt. Jacques Parker, who was with the advance party that would lead C Company up Route 3 to Monte Serrasiccia, remembers a moment just before the order came to move out. “Our group was in the attic of one of these homes, and we all knelt together. We had people of various faiths, including this big Austrian who lost part of his family to the Nazis. We all just knelt up there. Nothing was said. . . . Even though we all thought we were so tough, we knew it was going to be rough on the mountain.”

  Harry Poschman, who was lying in the dark a few miles away at the base of Monte Belvedere, wrote of the feeling: “Nothing to do but wait, and write letters home, or where? Some of these boys are scared. It’s the night before, and I don’t mean Christmas. I can’t imagine a man saying, ‘I’m going to get killed tomorrow,’ but some did. Not knowing what to expect I don’t expect anything; just sort of blank.”

  The Riva columns moved out on time into an artificial moon-glow created by banks of searchlights aimed up into the clouds from miles behind the lines. The lights had a dual purpose—in theory—to blind the enemy high on the ridgelines and, second, to provide just enough light so that Allied forces could maneuver in visibility approximating that from a partial moon. The lights had been standard operating procedure for weeks, but this night some in the columns making their way up the rock worried that the light could betray their advance. The climbers were extraordinarily exposed and vulnerable, veritable ducks in a shooting gallery. A single enemy machine gun from on high could wipe out a column of men working single file up any one of the narrow trails. Maj. John Hay, a commander with the 3d Battalion, which huddled in reserve at the bottom of the ridge that night, said of the German advantage, “A dozen men, each with a handful of rocks, could have defended those positions.”

  But then a dense fog rolled in during the night, blanketing the top of the ridge and obscuring the climbers from above. It also blocked the light from the searchlights, and at least one column lost touch with its lead group. But actually nothing could have been better for the element of surprise.

  The night was cold, not bitter, but below freezing. Meltwater on the rock turned to glaze ice. Only the lead climbers had been issued the fine, stiff-soled mountain boots developed at Camp Hale. The rest struggled with the standard-issue, Army pac shoe, which had a soft leather upper and a rubber sole that deformed and gripped poorly. But thanks to the support from fixed ropes, and perhaps the comforting cloak provided by the fog, the columns progressed deliberately, if haltingly, upward. The line stopped, as highway traffic does, when its lead elements slowed to negotiate a tricky patch of water ice, for example, or to make a move up a particularly steep section. For the most part, this wasn’t technical climbing; the trails angled through steep, but not vertical, rock and brush. (One route was mellow enough for mules to navigate.) The trick was not to stumble, to use the many exposed roots and saplings for h
andholds, to stay focused and patient. The fog demanded special care. At times the climbers could see only five or six feet ahead. When the line moved forward again, each man turned and tapped the man behind. In the gauzy quiet, the distances, the void both above and below, seemed endless.

  One by one, still in darkness and pretty much on schedule, the companies crested the ridge. Much of the terrain on top was barren of snow, rocky and wind-scoured with only a few saplings for cover. In some places remnant snow cornices allowed the climbers to dig in. With one exception, there was no resistance, no German defenders to be seen or heard in the mist. That exception came at the far north end of Riva (Route 1), where a detached platoon from A Company under the command of Lt. James Loose apparently woke the crew of a German observation post. Loose’s men had no choice but to scramble up a scree field to their objective, and the clatter of rolling rock invoked a hail of grenades from the other side of the ridge. “Fortunately,” Loose told Flint Whitlock in Soldiers on Skis, “they thought we were further down than we were,” and the grenades exploded harmlessly below. Once on top, Loose organized his men into a tight defensive perimeter and waited. “The Germans backed off and let us alone for a while. We found out later that they thought we were a lost patrol so they were just going to let us sit there and chop us up when they were ready. Which was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made.”

  Jacques Parker and his lead climbers on Serrasiccia (Route 3) crept over the top about midnight, moving as quietly as they could, and found—nobody. They did come upon a small hut just back from the edge, hastily built of wood with a stovepipe sticking out of the roof. “We didn’t know if anybody was in there or not, so we dropped a grenade down the chimney. It blew the door off, and we crept up and peered in. Nobody there. Just a couple of girly magazines and some benches for the guys to sit and rest.”

  Here and everywhere else along the ridge, the enemy had apparently withdrawn for the night, secure in the assumption that no significant force could or would climb Riva’s sharp side. The German observers had a network of fortified dugouts down the relatively gentle hillside to the west, and the defenders had all—all but the crew James Loose encountered—retired in complacency. The dogs, too, had retired. Later, when it was all over, General Hays joked about the 10th’s luck: “They must have sent the dogs back to Bavaria on furlough.” With the coast clear, Jacques Parker turned around and descended his climbing route to fetch the rest of C Company.

  As dawn neared, the Americans dug in, each company on its particular section of ridge. Now they were the defenders. Perimeters were established. Weapons squads set up their machine guns on the flanks; mortar men deployed to the rear. Wherever possible, companies sent patrols out along the scarp to establish contact with one another. Signal Corps men strung communication wire on the ground between the various positions and back down to Battalion HQ. Everyone preferred phone communication to the radios, which functioned erratically, although the phone wire was vulnerable to sabotage and to random artillery hits. All the while, the obfuscating fog concealed the 86th’s movements from the enemy. “It was sort of supernatural,” remembers Lt. Howard Koch of C Company. “Somebody was watching over us, we all felt.” But sooner or later the Germans would have to discover the intruders.

  About 11:00 A.M. on the 19th, a wind came up, and the fog lifted. At noon, A Company on Monte Mancinello (Route 4) engaged an enemy patrol of about a dozen men, killing six and taking the rest prisoner. An hour later on Serrasiccia, C Company watched as a patrol of forty Germans approached from the west, from the garrison town of Fanano. Some of the Germans spotted figures moving around on the ridge and, assuming them to be their own troops, waved in greeting. The Americans waved back and waited for the Germans to get closer. Howard Koch recalled, “If we had been more combat wise, we would have let them get in really close. We pulled the trigger a little too early.” The enemy platoon melted back into the woods.

  Now the battle for Riva Ridge was truly on. The Germans finally realized what had happened and organized counterattacks on Riva’s most critical high points, the ones nearest to Belvedere (Routes 1, 2, and 3). During the night of the 19th, German patrols sneaked up to the ridge in the gaps between American positions. (Distances along the ridge were too great for one battalion to fill.) The Germans infiltrated in two places—between James Loose’s detached platoon on Pizzo di Campiano and his distant B Company neighbors on Capel Buso, and again between B Company and C Company on Serrasiccia. They cut the communications wire the signal teams had laid, and killed and wounded several men on C Company’s far right perimeter, before digging in themselves just off the summit.

  By this time automatic-weapons fire no longer surprised the men of the 86th. Occasional firefights erupted all along Riva’s crest, and more firing echoed from across the river on Monte Belvedere, where the principal attack had just begun. C Company’s Lt. John McCown heard the gunshots on his right flank but couldn’t send anyone out to investigate until morning. At daybreak he and a squad of nine, including Jacques Parker, went to see what had happened. McCown was one of the division’s best climbers, a member of the American Alpine Club and, with Dave Brower, a lead instructor at the Assault Climbing School in West Virginia. He and Jacques Parker together had done much of the reconnaissance for Route 3. He was also a bit of an anachronism, a gentleman soldier who wore his father’s World War I pearl-handled officer’s revolver on his hip.

  After organizing evacuation of the casualties, McCown and his squad moved down a grassy knoll to the west in search of the German infiltrators. Quite unexpectedly, several enemy soldiers rose from their hiding places and raised their hands as if to surrender. McCown continued forward, when suddenly the “surrendering” Germans dropped to the ground and a hail of bullets erupted from unseen gun placements. The squad was cut down where it stood. McCown and two other soldiers were killed. Six Americans fell to the snow wounded by the treachery. The wounded didn’t dare move for fear of being shot again, and the Germans opened fire every time U.S. medics tried to scramble down to tend to them.

  In retaliation, the company commander, Capt. Worth McClure, ordered artillery fire on the Nazi position and readied two platoons from C Company to storm down and retake the ground lost. A short time later, shells screamed in over the ridge from the battery near Vidiciatico. The ground around the Germans erupted in geysers of mud and steel. The barrage lasted only a few minutes—long enough to scatter what was left of the enemy patrol. At last the C Company wounded could be treated and the dead removed. One of the men made sure to save McCown’s revolver so that it could be returned to his father.

  Six Germans were captured in the retaliatory attack. One of them, Jacques Parker remembers, “was a real diehard,” an SS lieutenant, shot in the gut. Some prisoners, their war over at last, tried to make friends with the Americans, or at least behaved submissively. But this guy remained obdurate, “even tried to cut [the] communication wire with the heel of his boot.” What to do with the man? Sending him down to La Ca via the trail would take hours and require an escort of at least two men, and Captain McClure needed all the soldiers he could muster up on the ridge. Besides, when asked, regimental HQ said they didn’t particularly want to interview the SS lieutenant.

  One of the men said, “I’ll take him down.” Parker and the rest understood what was about to happen, and they accepted the harsh expediency of it. It wasn’t by the rules, but emotions were running high—good men had been grievously tricked and gunned down—and Riva was far from secure. From a short way down the trail, they heard a single rifle shot. Apparently, the soldier had ordered his prisoner to march over an outcrop, and when the man hesitated, shot him for disobeying an order. If C Company men dwelt on the moral ambiguities involved, they kept it to themselves. A decision had been made that placed the welfare of the group ahead of ethical niceties. It was a harsh lesson, delivered for the first time on Riva’s knife edge. There would be others, they knew, before their war was over. And none of them would
be immune.

  The episode with the prisoner only underscored what the men of the 86th already knew—that their “impossible” climb up Riva had put an enormous distance between them and their support in the valley below. From the planning stages, it was recognized that two of the toughest challenges on Riva would be figuring out methods both to resupply the troops up top and to evacuate the wounded. The easiest of the five climbing routes, Route 2 to Cappel Buso, soon teemed with mule trains, though not with the 10th’s big Missouri mules. They hadn’t made the crossing to Italy; they’d been sent to Burma instead. But General Hays did secure the services of hundreds of smaller Italian mules capably driven by loyal Alpini. And the mules did yeoman’s duty, hauling ammunition, food, and water up Route 2. On all the other climbing routes, though, as the Germans counterattacked and supplies ran low, exhausted human porters struggled over rock and ice—often two and three times a day—with sixty-pound loads.

  The problem of evacuation remained, however. Stretcher-bearers took six to twelve hours to haul a man safely down the 1,500 vertical feet to aid stations at the base of the cliff. In some cases, sadly, that wasn’t fast enough. The alternative was to erect an aerial tramway, which, fortunately, the 10th’s engineers came prepared to do. Back at Camp Hale, the Army had decided to develop a portable tram for use in mountainous terrain. The people most familiar with aerial systems at that time were mining engineers. Mines throughout the Rockies and Sierras had long used cable trams to haul machinery up and bring ore down to the mills. Could the engineers build a tramway that could be broken down and transported in crates weighing no more than 250 pounds each? And then be reassembled again in a hurry?

  A young mine engineer named Robert Heron, who would go on to design and build some of the first chairlifts at Colorado ski resorts, came up with an ingenious, modular design, powered by a Piper Cub aircraft engine. It was a jig-back tram: One car went up while the opposite car came down. The same concept—much less refined—ran the Boat Tow on Aspen Mountain. When they got to Camp Swift, members of the 126th Engineer Battalion practiced taking the whole thing apart and putting it back together two or three times until they shaved their record down to just a couple of hours.