Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  But the survivors got used to it, learned to run as if balancing books on their heads. One almost never saw a GI beyond his first combat with chinstraps buckled. Harry was growing wiser by the minute. “Running along I almost stepped on a German sniper. Fortunately for me he was dead. I would like to have had the scope sight on his rifle but was afraid the body was booby-trapped. That’s where the expression comes from: Any booby can be trapped. The Germans were tricky and would go to great lengths to kill us. Not me. I’m going to ski the Alps this spring.”

  The shells rained down all around. Harry wrote in his memoir:

  My boys all struggled along as best they could under the big loads. Occasionally I went back to help one, then another and another. . . . At the end of the column came the medic. We ran along together for a few yards. A shell landed between us and bounced away singing—a dud. I heard the breathless words, “I wish I . . . could . . . get out of this.” I heard another shell and dove into a shallow depression. It landed between us and he was up in the air turning over like a leaf in the wind, then on the ground—a shapeless form.”

  General Hays’s admonition passed in a nanosecond through Harry’s mind: “You must continue to move forward. Never stop. If your buddy is wounded, don’t stop to help him. Continue to move forward, always forward.” “I was up and gone in a flash.”

  What was it that made the soldiers plow forward, against their most basic survival instincts, through hails of lead and smoke, through what John Keegan, in The Face of Battle, calls “automatic and inhuman lethality”? It wasn’t the land itself; neither side fought for an Apennines home. And unlike in the animal kingdom, where fighting over territory is usually just ritualistic, on the battlefield, Keegan reminds us, “there is proprietorship which is fictive, and combat which is in earnest.”

  Why then, when the mind says no, does the body continue? Harry watched the walking wounded return down the path, almost always with relief on their faces. The men moving forward could be forgiven a bout of envy; the wounded had survived—not unscathed—but survived that which still threatened those advancing. And so the attack soldiered on, trusting in . . . what? Luck? Leadership? One’s own sheer determination? Some power greater than all this? Keegan writes that “individuals fight for personal survival which [the individual realizes] is bound up with group survival, and out of fear of incurring by cowardly conduct the group’s contempt.”

  Patriotism rarely played a role. Dan Kennerly wrote in his diary: “I don’t recall thinking of patriotism at any time during the day. My only thought of duty was to myself and my comrades.” On the first morning of the attack up Gorgolesco, Hugh Evans, a twenty-year-old staff sergeant with C Company, 85th Regiment, came upon his friend and platoon leader, Bob Fischer, lying face-up in the arms of another friend, Mac MacKenzie. Fischer’s chest was riddled with holes from a machine-gun burst.

  Seeing that he had a sucking wound, and not being able to think of anything but to put an air-tight bandage on the wound, I ripped the back out of Mac’s pile jacket and began to make such a bandage. Before I had finished, I looked at Bob’s eyes and saw that he had died. . . . Mac said he kept saying, “Oh god. Please not now. Please not now!” Bob was maybe a couple of months older than I . . . and the first person I had seen die.

  Evans’s eyes filled with tears of rage, and the young man whose tenor voice lent a sweet harmony to 10th singalongs became a Berserker—a Viking term for a warrior who fights outside of himself, with a controlled fury. Evans and a couple of other soldiers crawled to within a few yards of the offending machine-gun nest:

  [We hurled grenades] at the points where we thought the Jerries were. All of us were so angry we didn’t speak. Finally, I jumped over the last little rise and . . . landed on two dead Germans. For the next ten minutes I just kept moving, throwing grenades and firing my machine pistol.

  By himself he took out a second machine gun, killing six more “Jerries” and taking twenty prisoners. “The last Germans, who got up and yelled ‘Kamerad!’ I held with an empty gun.” As it happened, these were the last two enemy strong points before the summit of Gorgolesco.

  By the end of the first day (sundown on February 20), six battalions of the 10th Mountain Division (with three battalions in reserve) had control of nearly six miles of ridgeline from Riva on the west across the top of Belvedere to Gorgolesco on the east. The Americans occupied the high ground on Belvedere, but other Allied divisions had done so before. The trick now was to hold it against the inevitable counterattacks and the withering rain of artillery from guns miles away to the north. Those guns, indeed all of the German rear echelon, remained protected in the difficult, buckled hill country still separating the Allies from their ultimate objective, the Po River valley, twenty miles to the north. Belvedere was only the first step—a key one, but only one—in the drive to Bologna.

  After Belvedere and Gorgolesco were captured, the 85th Regiment’s 2d Battalion took off to the northeast toward the operation’s final objective, Monte della Torraccia, the last in this chain of hills lording over Highway 64. Lt. Col. John Stone’s men ran into hellish artillery fire in an exposed saddle on the way to the peak and were pinned down. The retreating Germans intended a bitter fight over della Torraccia and called in their most accurate artillery, the deadly 88s. Shells came down “like a New England hailstorm,” vaporizing soldiers in their holes. Stone heard the orders to move forward and knew the danger in staying put, but he couldn’t move. Every attempt to attack up the hill drew more devastating fire. His ranks were seriously depleted, his men low on ammunition, food, and water. The battalion remained in place and suffered dreadful losses. Two days later, the Third Battalion of the 86th moved through the 85th, and Stone was relieved of his command. Many of his men never accepted the justness of that verdict.

  There had been bravery, sometimes foolish bravery, in those days, and there had been cowardice. The fear simply ate some men up. Pfc. John Jennings, the Dartmouth undergrad whose quiet competence on ski patrols before Riva had earned him a role with Headquarters, F Company, 87th Regiment, saw it happen the very first night, in the quiet before the attack was discovered. His unit was out in front with the company commander, charged with relaying information back on routes, enemy resistance, whatever they found. “We were just starting our assault on Belvedere—a couple of communications people, a captain, and a first sergeant. He just dropped the radio and took off. It was one of those big goddamn Infantry 300 radios on a packboard. Weighed about forty pounds. I picked it up and carried it for the rest of the war. Where he was during the rest of the war, I don’t know. I never saw him again.”

  In the middle of the grisly battle for Gorgolesco, one of Harry Poschman’s machine gunners decided he could take no more and shot himself in the calf with his .45 pistol. “Blew the bone right out the front. He said he was holstering his gun, but the guys told me no, he did it on purpose.” Those who kept going understood the awful strain, and perhaps because of that understanding, voiced little condemnation.

  A close sibling to bravery and fear—and a much more powerful force than either, to hear the men talk—was luck. Not a man in battle in the Northern Apennines didn’t invoke luck’s fickle nature, both good and bad. Hours before his C Company (85th Regiment) was to jump off on Belvedere, Robert Woody was told he would have to remain behind. “My wretched cough—deep and wracking—could give us away. I protested—feebly: ‘I want to go.’ [Peter] Wick and [Frank] Miller were adamant. Inwardly, I was glad their insistence was so strong. I was too young and dumb to fear lead and shrapnel; I thought myself immortal.”

  From a farmhouse behind the line of departure, Woody and another man, who had pneumonia, listened. And that sense of immortality evaporated. From Woody’s memoir:

  Firing erupted in the darkness on the mountain and increased in crescendo. Their machine guns, rapid rate of fire. Ours, slower rate of fire. The silence had been broken, and we knew the shit had hit the fan.

  Some artillery came in on
us. It killed the battalion mail clerk, William Blaise. I had known him since junior high. The firing and explosions continued through the dawn and into the morning. But by mid-morning, the intensity of the rifle and machine-gun fire had ceased.

  Later in the afternoon, the sun was out warm and bright. Roy Bingham walked in worn and wan. He had chosen to accompany C Company up the mountain. He told of the terrible things that he had seen and that had been done to the platoon by the Germans and by the platoon to the Germans. He said Capt. [Charles] Smith had either stepped on or had been hit by a mine. Medic Kurzinger had been killed by a mine. Walker had been killed. Fischer had been killed. But his buddy Evans, in great anger, had taken out a machine-gun nest.

  His account went on. There had been killing of prisoners. We were not only red-blooded, but cold-blooded. Now the mules were coming down with bodies in the mattress bags tied over their backs like beef halves.

  The following day, Woody climbed Gorgolesco to rejoin his unit. “I felt craven. I asked Thornton if there were bad feelings. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘The guys understand.’ ” Woody gave all his water away; the men, now defending the ridge, were parched.

  Bud Winter, with M Company, 85th Regiment, on Belvedere, wrote to his brother about another kind of luck, the kind that ignores a man’s health, his courage, and his skill:

  Dear Fred.

  I guess you have heard already that I did not duck soon enough. I got hit at three o-clock in the morning [February 20] by some shrapnel from a German 81mm mortar [two fragments in his chest]. . . . I am in bed, without a worry in the world. The only thing[s] I do not like are the penicillin shots in my behind. . . . A Red Cross lady mailed my Purple Heart home for me. Please have “Lt. Burdell S. Winter” engraved on it with the year, 1945.

  On March 3, he wrote again to say that he expected to be back with his mortar platoon the next day. “My wound isn’t bothering me.” And with typical Winter enthusiasm he added, “Found a couple of articles in Yank magazine which makes it look as if I won’t have to worry about education expense. You don’t have to worry about me studying when I get there. Since being over here, I realize how important an education is! You can be sure of one thing, though. I’m going to a co-ed college, and I’m going to make a name for myself in skiing.”

  Safe to say skiing intruded on very few reveries among the exhausted soldiers who made it through those first days. “It seemed a lifetime since we had any sleep,” Harry Poschman wrote. “Actually, it was only three days.” The 3d Battalion of the 86th finally took della Torraccia on February 24 and then held it despite numerous well-organized counterattacks. Dave Brower and his fellow 3d Battalion troopers came to think of “della Torraccia” only as the official, geographical name for the mountain on which so many of their friends had died. Among themselves they knew the mountain’s facets by the events they’d witnessed there: “Purple Heart Ridge,” “Honeycomb Hill,” and “Dead Man’s Gulch.”

  And then, except for scattered shelling from the other side, the front was again quiet. Harry Poschman recalled, only slightly sarcastically, that “the boys made themselves comfortable in luxurious, deep gun pits and foxholes, improvised cooking facilities, and ordered better food. The better food didn’t come.”

  Prisoners streamed by toward the Allied rear, hands on their heads, number tags looped through buttonholes in their wool greatcoats. The 10th had taken more than four hundred prisoners in four days. Bob Parker watched one group of POWs march by his position and admired the footgear they wore. “In Italy we were never issued the mountain boots we’d had at Camp Hale. So I picked out this guy about my size. Poor guy, he’d been told that we indiscriminately shot prisoners. He was terrified. I told him, ‘Sitzen sich! Schuhe heraus!’ in my limited German.

  “Now he was barefoot, and he knew he was going to be shot. I gave him my GI shoepacs and sent him on his way. His were beautiful leather—and a perfect fit! For the rest of the war I had a German sweater and German mountain boots.”

  Harry Poschman also scored a pair of superior German boots, but in the end he couldn’t keep them:

  One day the boys got restless and went ahead of our line to explore. They found an abandoned bunker containing food, boots, and a body. I got the boots because they fit. . . . Those boots were the best footwear I ever owned. The edge nails—real tricounis—gave fine traction on any ground, just the opposite of our boots. They were waterproof and warm in the snow. That’s what led to my undoing.

  Occasionally I had to get out and check gun duty and other things. I left tracks. One morning a rifleman came running to our platoon command post to say he had tracked a German right to our door. That ended my luxury footwear.

  The unusually fine winter weather continued, and during the day the men of the 10th could bask in the sun without their clothes on. One balmy afternoon, battalion headquarters phoned to say a Red Cross doughnut girl was on her way up to the front lines with doughnuts and coffee. The girl turned out to be Debbie Bankart, the perky New Hampshire ski instructor who had taken John Jay’s movies on the recruitment trail. Already in Italy when the 10th shipped over, she had asked to be transferred to the Northern Apennines. The men clutched whatever garments they could grab to cover their nakedness, helped themselves to pastries from Bankart’s basket, and stood in wonderment at the beauty and absurdity of it all.

  The respite—what Harry Poschman referred to as “the good life there on Gorgolesco”—turned out to be short-lived. The fall of Monte Belvedere—indeed the capture of all the hills from Riva on the left to della Torraccia on the right—had surprised not only the Germans but the Allied command as well. The untested 10th had exceeded even General Hays’s expectations, and a critical salient, or wedge, had been driven into the Nazi defenses. Some in Allied command thought that the U.S. Fifth Army should exploit the 10th’s gains before the Germans had a chance to reorganize, that the Fifth should push through immediately to the Po. But instead, the order came down for the 10th to attack again, in another “limited offensive” to extend by three or four miles Allied control of the hills overlooking the prized Highway 64. The offensive was expected to last just a couple of days. The all-out effort to reach Bologna and the Po, the so-called Spring Push, involving the entire U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies, remained stubbornly on-schedule for mid-April.

  After a week of relative quiet, the “limited offensive” was set to begin March 3. All of the 10th’s battalions had been returned to full strength using replacement soldiers, none of whom—with the exception of returning wounded like Bud Winter—had been with the mountain troops before. Jump-off was set for 6:30 A.M. The 86th Regiment, on the left side of the advance, circled around the base of della Torraccia and headed for Monte Terminale and a succession of smaller hills beyond it. In the center of the line, the 87th Regiment had as its objective the crossroads town of Castel d’Aiano, a medieval stone village utterly smashed to rubble by the competing big guns. The 85th would follow the 87th up to Castel d’Aiano and then veer right and secure the division’s right flank from atop Monte della Spe.

  Army histories say that all objectives were achieved by March 6, within the anticipated time frame. But this says nothing of the hard fighting during those four days, or of the losses suffered during the ensuing German artillery bombardment—some of the most incessant of the war in Italy—shelling that pounded ski troops for nearly two weeks after the ground had been “taken.” Right off the bat, on the first morning, the 10th lost an icon.

  On the left, A Company of the 86th ran into unexpectedly stiff resistance around the village of Iola at the base of Monte Terminale. A German machine gun on a forested ridge had three squads pinned down. Tech. Sgt. Torger Tokle, the man who had set world ski-jumping records (and had charmed his fellow trainees at Hale by leaping over supply counters in a single bound) volunteered to take his platoon bazooka man forward and rub out the offending gun. No sooner had the two men started out than an artillery shell landed directly on Art Tokola, the bazooka man.
He had five bazooka rounds on him, which detonated in a fearsome blast, obliterating Tokola and riddling Tokle’s body with shrapnel.

  News of Tokle’s death spread rapidly through the division and beyond. Newspaper accounts back home reported his death by name—such was his fame. The ski troops felt his loss viscerally. He had been the indomitable world champion, the confident Norwegian patriot with the troll cheeks and unfailing grin. If death could come for Torger, it could come for anyone.

  That was the trouble with artillery; it was so lethal, so indefensible, so random. One afternoon about a week into the “limited offensive,” Bob Parker and his 87th reconnaissance platoon arrived at a place the soldiers had named Punchboard Hill for the terrific shelling it had received. A chestnut forest that had once blanketed the slopes had been blown to splinters. Not a single tree stood against the winter sky; the ground was a tangle of tree limbs and craters. Hardly a square yard of earth had been spared. (In fact, Fifth Army statisticians, who followed along behind the lines charting everything from casualties to tank kills, verified that Punch-board Hill, rising above the crucial road and bridge at Malandrone Pass, had received the most concentrated bombardment since Anzio.)

  Parker and his boys were to set up an observation post on top of the hill. Company A’s lieutenant suggested they wait until dark to set up the observation post. “Meanwhile,” he said, “you guys better dig in—the Krauts always shell at supper time.” Decades later, when he could finally write about the incident, Parker recalled:

  Our rocky clearing was a lousy place for foxholes—mostly shallow soil, shale, and hardpan. But I found a little bench where water had collected and soft soil built up. I began to dig.

  One thing we had learned in combat was the trajectories of German artillery. The 88s and 40mm ack-acks had flat trajectories. The rockets, and the shells of 105s and mortars—better suited to mountain warfare—arced high over a mountain then fell in a slanting dive, hitting the first projection they came to on the other side—a tree, a house, a man. As I dug my foxhole, I began to realize my little bench could be a perfect target for a high-angle 105.