Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  In early April, the 10th was sent back north into the line, replacing the 92d “Buffalo Division,” which had stepped in while the mountain troops rested. An all-black division with all-white officers, the 92d had fought gallantly in Italy since August 1944, but was still subject to Jim Crow–type discrimination. Bob Woody remembers “bellying up to the bar in some little mountain village next to a black soldier. Nice kid. Pleasant conversation. But the next day the order came down not to fraternize.”

  The line was mostly quiet; the enemy lobbed in shells now and then for harassment only. The weather continued fine, and the living was easy, if not so refined as a weekend in Florence. For a few packs of cigarettes or cans of C rations, the men could trade with villagers for fresh milk and eggs. One lucky outfit enjoyed surprise meat when a German artillery shell killed a couple of rabbits and threw them on the roof of a nearby building.

  There wasn’t much to do. G Company of the 85th spent many happy hours watching a buxom young girl named Rita go about her chores on a farm called Tora. After a while, though, the men noticed that before every German mortar barrage, Rita would disappear into Tora’s root cellar. Further investigation revealed that during the previous regime, Rita had taken a German lover. Now the theory was that Rita was sending him signals by hanging her wash out in a certain way.

  John Jennings’s squad spent a few happy days in a villa owned by a local Fascist leader and inhabited most recently by German officers. One side of the building was almost completely blown away, but the interior proved a fruitful maze. From Jennings’s pocket diary:

  In the cellar are great wine kegs (empty) and presses. Below this is another tunnel-like passageway, which came to play a big part in our otherwise humdrum existence. Led by a tip-off from a local Pisano (native on our side—at least they say so), a character named “Doc” Adams, a medic from White River Junction, Vermont, attacked the sub-cellar walls with a pick. Sure enough, before unbelieving eyes, he uncovered a hidden cache of wine bottles which glimmered enticingly in the shimmering candle light.

  Over two days the boys from F Company of the 87th pulled one thousand bottles of wine (Jennings counted) from the vault—“all excellent.”

  During the day, Army radio piped broadcasts into just about every GI position. The soldiers heard how the war was winding down. Vienna had fallen to the Russians on March 8, and now the Soviet army was within hailing distance of Berlin. On March 26, Gen. George Patton and his Third Army had crossed the Rhine at Mannheim and now, on orders from General Eisenhower, was beginning his dash to the southeast, toward the Danube and Austria. Rumor had it, Hitler planned a final defense of the Alps, within a so-called Final Redoubt. High in the glacial mountains, he and a corps of elite troops could hold out for months, maybe years. But surely, went other rumors, the Alpine Redoubt was nothing but a figment of propaganda chief Josef Goebbels’s imagination. Surely the crippled German armies, the ravaged and starving German cities, were within days of surrender. Maybe the war would end before the 10th would be called on to attack again. Maybe.

  What the troops couldn’t know was that secret negotiations for a surrender in Italy had been going on since December 1944. Without Hitler’s knowledge, his generals on the southern front, Kesselring, Wolff, and von Vietinghoff, had met in Zurich with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services, who was in direct contact with FDR. Roosevelt supported what came to be known as Operation Sunrise, but the Soviets, also in on the negotiations, attempted to scuttle the deal. They apparently believed that Communist Yugoslav forces had a better chance of capturing Trieste, a long-contested city in northeastern Italy, if the Brits and Americans remained tied up in the Apennines. With the end game near, the future cold warriors maneuvered for advantage in a postwar Europe. And so a bizarre, behind-the-scenes minuet for an early peace in Italy went nowhere while the dancers continued to meet and engage.

  Meanwhile, Hitler’s threat of pulling back to an Alpine Redoubt had to be taken seriously. Bob Parker, ever philosophical, chalked it up to the “uncertainty of war.”

  We could have sat there and waited for the war to end. It probably—certainly—would have saved a lot of lives. But General Hays had his orders. What if the negotiated peace fell apart? What if Hitler, instead of putting a bullet through his brain or whatever he did, had moved to his fortress in Bavaria and defended Germany from there? We couldn’t take the risk. General Hays’s orders were to deny the southern border to Fortress Europe. We had to press the attack.

  Without the benefit of hindsight—with no perspective at all save that from their warm, spring foxholes—the men of the 10th waited amid the rumors and the blooming of cherry trees and the steady build-up of materiel. Great stockpiles of shells, small-arms ammunition, K rations, and supplies of all kinds grew by the roadsides. Both sides continued to drop propaganda leaflets from overhead. David Brower remembered:

  They delivered the papers in some sort of propaganda rocket that moaned over and popped. Their stuff arrived a little tattered, but no less amusing. One of their cleverest bits of copy was a bunch of instructions for fooling the medics and simulating various ailments that would enable a man to sit out the war in a hospital. . . .

  In one issue of the Low Down [the name of the monthly propaganda sheet] they insisted, on page 1, that they were going to keep on fighting and fighting, while on page 2 they argued that we should take no unnecessary risks in the European war, which had already reached “five minutes to twelve.”

  Bud Winter, who had returned to his outfit, wounds healed, in late March, noted in a letter to his mother that at least some of the enemy doggerel was appreciated. “The Jerries shell us with leaflets with a picture of a beautiful girl on one side and a skull and cross bones on the other. One side says Life and the other Death. . . . Well, anyway, it seems to raise the morale of most of the fellows because they hang the side with the beautiful girl up for a pinup and say to hell with the other side.”

  The Allies shot their propaganda sheet, Frontpost, overhead in 105-mm shells timed to burst high in the air over German lines. Included were “PW passports,” which promised in several languages (the depleted German ranks included many east European and Russian “recruits”) to give safe conduct to the deserting bearer on his way through Allied lines. “More than one prisoner had his safe-conduct pass neatly tucked away in his billfold,” Brower recalled, “and produced it with a sheepish smile when he reached the interrogation point.” Ever the editor, Brower couldn’t resist adding, impishly, “Reaction to the Frontpost seemed very favorable; the PWs’ most frequent complaint was that the paper hadn’t been delivered regularly enough.”

  Reading time would end abruptly for the men of the 10th with the commencement of the long-awaited Spring Push, code-named Operation Craftsman. This would be the last offensive, it was hoped, into the Po Valley and beyond. No one knew the final objective, other than the unconditional surrender of the German army in Italy. And to that end, the offensive would involve nearly every Allied unit in northern Italy, all tactical aircraft, and some fifty thousand Italian partisans who were being counted on to wage guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines.

  Craftsman had three components. The first was a diversionary attack on the far left flank of the U.S. Fifth Army front near the Ligurian Sea. The 92d Division jumped off on April 5, augmented by the Japanese American 442d Regimental Combat Team. These soldiers effectively tied up some of von Vietinghoff’s reserves around the town of Massa, preventing them from moving east to defend the Fifth Army’s main point of attack.

  On the east end of the front, the British Eighth Army, including divisions from New Zealand, India, and Poland, charged off on April 9 through the rugged Argenta Gap. The Brits would hug the Adriatic coast, destination Venice and ultimately Trieste—to get there before the Communists. In the middle of the front, Clark’s Fifth Army was scheduled to jump off April 12 against the last stoutly defended hills, destination Bologna, and the 10th Mountain Division would spearhead the attack.
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br />   Once again 10th soldiers filled their ammo belts, checked their rifles, and steadied their minds for what the combat veterans knew would be a murderous opening day. But then came an unexpected reprieve: Fog over the airfields the morning of the 12th prevented the Air Corps from flying its dive-bombing missions. The attack was postponed a day. Then on the morning of the 13th, the troops learned of President Roosevelt’s death the day before, at age sixty-three, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at his Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. As Bob Woody noted, “An era had ended. We had been first graders when FDR was first elected.” The news and the fog and the fact that it was Friday the 13th added another twenty-four-hour postponement. John Jennings wrote in his diary:

  Each stay of 24 hours bringing great relief and jubilance . . . like a prisoner receiving a brief stay of execution. . . .

  It was in those hours that one really noticed the beauty of the world around him. It was spring. The drabness was gone. The grass was a delicate light green. Some of the trees were in bloom. Nameless birds twittered. The sun shone warm and restful from a clear blue sky. Yes, you could see now that Italy was beautiful.

  And then the zero hour approached yet again and Jennings’s thoughts turned darker:

  The brass hats way back there in Corps or Army headquarters, the rear echelon men, and the people at home welcome a big offensive, for it brings the end of the war that much closer. However, infantry soldiers don’t see it that way; they are the ones that will have to do the killing and the dying, and nearly every one would be just as happy if it didn’t come about, if it could be won on some other front. Nevertheless, when the final order comes, the infantryman loads his rifle, grits his teeth and sets off into Hell. That’s how wars are won, I guess.

  The emotional seesaw finally ended with a clear dawn on April 14. The Brazilian Expeditionary Force took up the left flank with the 10th Mountain Division next to them. To the 10th’s right, the 1st Armored Division straddled Highway 64. The 6th South African Armoured Division was next to them, and then the U.S. 88th, 91st, and 34th Infantry Divisions still further right. The 85th Division stayed in reserve. Allied artillery began firing about 4:00 A.M., and Harry Poschman remembered thinking, “Nothing could live in that wall of lead and steel we threw across the valley to the north. Next came the planes. Their combined efforts churned the ground and clouded the sky. The Germans were not firing back at us. I thought for sure they must all be dead.”

  At 9:45 A.M.—on what would be the bloodiest single day of the war for the mountain division—the 10th pushed off down the forward slopes of Monte della Spe, all three infantry regiments in a line abreast.

  CHAPTER 12:

  Race to the Alps

  The Germans had had a month to prepare for an Allied push they knew would be coming. And they knew that this was probably their last real stand, their last line of defense against an Allied breakthrough. Lose this one and that was likely to mean the end to their long, fighting retreat up the spine of Italy. Hills always confer an advantage to defenders, but once in the big valley to the north, superior Allied numbers—mechanized units, tanks, and aircraft—would certainly tip the scales.

  In anticipation of the push, General von Senger’s 90th and 94th Panzer Divisions, along with elements of the 334th and 267th Divisions, fortified every defensible position across the complex, rolling, sometimes steep terrain north of Monte della Spe and west of the town of Vergato—a region of scattered farms and woods not unlike New York’s Catskills or Vermont’s Green Mountains. They buried countless thousands of mines. Some were glass-topped Topf (pot) mines, almost impossible for the American engineers and their magnetic mine detectors to find. They camouflaged hundreds of machine-gun nests in hedgerows and calibrated artillery in advance to blast the ridges and gullies the Americans would need to traverse. They made a fort of every stone barn and farmhouse still standing. They even rigged bins of chestnuts with wires and high explosives to booby-trap heedless GIs. Most importantly, they dug elaborate underground bunkers in which to wait out the inevitable Allied bombings.

  The shelling began in the early morning of the 14th. First came the waves of heavy carpet bombers, followed by more waves of P-47 dive-bombers, followed by the pounding of thousands of rounds of artillery shells. With the Luftwaffe effectively eliminated from Italy, there was no German air defense, nothing for the German infantry to do but sit and take the beating. The shelling was designed to demoralize as well as bury as many of the defenders as possible. But despite the sound and fury, despite the impression Harry Poschman and many others had that nothing could have survived such an onslaught, when the big guns stopped firing, the Germans dug themselves out of their shelters ready to rain fire down on the advancing Americans. In the first hours, especially, they had plenty of targets to shoot at. North of della Spe’s concealing knob, the landscape opened into a complex of small intersecting valleys, cut by country roads and nearly devoid of trees. The riflemen tried to run across, but with almost no natural cover they fell by the score before they even had a chance to climb the next set of hills.

  Just after the jump-off, Capt. David Brower mused on the heavy responsibility an officer bears in the planning of such an attack. He recorded his thoughts in Remount Blue. “There is no security against the gnawing feeling of responsibility you have for the men out there whose safety—what there is of it—depends too much on luck and very much on the proper support the battalion must give and coordinate. So you just get gnawed at until there are mostly calluses left. You can step out [in Brower’s case step out of the battalion command-post dugout on Monte della Spe], view the human devastation, and marvel only that there hasn’t been more.”

  The hills the 10th attacked this time were less grand than those they’d left behind. Most didn’t have names on the map; instead they were known by their elevations in meters above sea level. On the left, the 85th Regiment started up Hill 913, Hill 909, and Hill 915. The 87th Regiment, in the middle, tackled Hills 903 and 890 and the town of Torre Iussi at their foot. On the right flank, the 86th Regiment had as its objectives Hills 889 and 815, plus the very rocky and steep (and aptly named) Rocca (Fortress) Roffeno.

  These hills would be the last that hundreds of men from the 10th Mountain Division would ever climb. Five hundred fifty-three mountaineers were killed or wounded that day. (By contrast, the Riva Ridge operation counted “only” 68 casualties over seven days’ fighting. Nine hundred fourteen were lost over the twelve days it took to win and hold Monte Belvedere and della Torraccia.) The numbered hills were also witness to moments of great bravery amid the carnage. Hill 909 was where Pfc. John Magrath, a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old in G Company, 85th Regiment, earned the division’s only Medal of Honor. Soon after crossing the line of departure, Magrath’s company came under intense fire. His commander fallen and dead, radioman Magrath volunteered to accompany a small reconnaissance party forward, where he performed a series of astonishing solo feats, possessed, apparently, by the kind of inexplicable energy that had inhabited Hugh Evans on Gorgolesco. Running ahead of the group, with only his semiautomatic M-1 rifle, Magrath rounded the corner of a farmhouse and came face to face with a German machine-gun crew. He shot one man dead and forced the other to surrender. When five more enemy then sprung from their foxholes and began shooting at him, Magrath turned the German machine gun around and mowed down the lot, killing one and wounding the other four. Abandoning his M-1 in favor of the deadlier MG-34, he carried it across an exposed field, exchanging fire with yet another machine-gun position in the trees, killing two more and capturing that weapon as well. The rest of the company followed in amazement. Magrath’s heroics and luck ran out later in the day, however, when he volunteered to dash through heavy shelling to gather a casualty report. In the middle of an open field, sprinting hard, he was killed instantly by mortar shells that exploded practically at his feet.

  Sgt. Friedl Pfeifer, the Austrian skimeister with dreams of transforming Aspen from a backwoods ghost town into a thriving
ski destination, led his squad onto Hill 903, where shrapnel from mortar or artillery fire tore through his back and pierced a lung. Pfeifer survived but spent the rest of the war in the hospital.

  Perhaps the best-known victim on Hill 913 (at least in later decades), was a replacement soldier from Kansas named Robert J. Dole. Second lieutenant Dole, with I Company of the 85th, had never skied and had not been with the 10th at Camp Hale or in Texas. He was one of thousands of American Army replacements who were assigned to new companies to help bring them back up to strength after substantial losses in battle. (By the time the war ended, the 10th would include on its roster nearly seven thousand replacements in addition to the fourteen thousand men originally in the division.) That first night on Hill 913, Dole was leading a patrol when machine-gun fire killed two scouts and ripped into Dole’s neck and arm. He spent the next forty months in army hospitals.

  It was also on Hill 913, on the first night of the Spring Push, that soldiers of the 85th Regiment, 3d Battalion, dug in on their side of the hill and in a quiet respite began singing. When they sang “Lili Marlene,” German soldiers on the other side of the hill joined in. Then the Germans started a new song, and the Americans did their best to sing along. In the morning, both sides got up and resumed killing each other.

  The 10th did not demonize its enemy across the line. Rather, 10th men recognized a certain shared heritage with these men, and common passions. “We had a grudging respect for the German mountain troops,” recalls Bob Parker. “We knew they weren’t Nazis, by and large, and at home were mountain guides, ski instructors. We knew that had they been home, Friedl Pfeifer and Sigi Engl would have been drafted into their mountain troops and might have faced us across the line. The fact of war convinces one that the sooner it is over, the better, for everyone.”