Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  Sadly, April 14 brought the end of the war for Bud Winter, one of the most beloved of the original Mountain Training Group. Winter was with M Company, 85th Regiment, on bloody Hill 913 that day. A forward mortar observer for a heavy weapons company, he was killed when a German mortar barrage fell in on top of him. Bud’s last letter home was dated April 12: “Dear Mother, I went to a memorial service for the Belvedere dead. I was glad to be there as I knew many of the boys. Some were quite close friends, but I guess that comes with war.” Not even the recent death of friends or the uncertain prospects ahead had dimmed Bud’s love of fly-fishing, however. He ended the letter, “Please send the fishing tackle if you get a chance. Love to all, Bud.”

  By April 16, the hills were littered with bodies, machinery, and the bloated carcasses of little Italian mules both sides had used to carry supplies on the one-lane tracks that passed, in the convoluted terrain, for roads. The 10th had suffered mightily, but the German divisions facing them had been practically destroyed. The attack had severed the connection between the German 41st Mountain Division and General von Senger’s 14th Panzer Division. The 90th and 94th Panzer Divisions had been routed; their foot soldiers surrendered by the hundreds or else fled in disarray. The speed of the 10th’s advance had caught many a German unit off-guard. On the morning of the 16th, when the 87th Regiment arrived in the town of Tole—six miles north of della Spe and one of the last strategic road junctions leading to the open country of the Po Valley—they found that the commanding general of the 90th Panzers had abandoned his headquarters in such haste he’d left on the table a fresh piece of bread and jam, with one bite missing.

  The 10th left the hills behind on April 20 and poured out onto the long downslope to the Po. In seven days of relentless forward movement, the division had lost 1,800 men—370 of them killed in action, the others wounded. But now that they had breached the German defenses, there was little resistance as they raced north miles ahead of the rest of the U.S. Fifth Army. Commanding Gen. Mark Clark sent a message forward to General Hays commending his “rapid progress and brilliant execution.” Clark also said that he wanted Hays to stop there, at the edge of the valley, to let the 85th and 88th Divisions catch up and move through. The 10th had done its job, he said; now flatland infantry would continue the attack. Hays was livid. Bob Parker recounts Hays turning to his chief of staff with Clark’s message in hand. “ ‘Did you see this message?’ [Silence.] Then he asked the radio operator, ‘Sergeant, did you see this message?’ [Silence.] And he took the paper and crumpled it up and threw it in the trash bin.” The 10th had spearheaded the push, survived all the numbered hills and all the ones with names, and broken the back of the German defense, and now Mark Clark wanted him to stop.

  Hays had been the one to see, before General Clark had, the wisdom in taking Riva Ridge prior to an attack on Monte Belvedere. Now that same instinct told Hays that this was not the time to stop and reorganize. Hays sensed the importance of pressing forward with all possible speed, sensed the chaos among the retreating Germans. To hell with reorganizing. To hell with Bologna; the big city on the 10th’s right would soon be in the hands of other Allied divisions. Hays wanted to get to the Po River, another seventy miles to the north, before retreating Germans had a chance to blow the bridges across the water. General Clark may have wanted the 10th to slow up, regroup, consolidate, but Hays refused, shrugging, “They’ll have to catch us first.”

  With the roads through the Apennines now in Allied hands, the 10th had at last become a mechanized division. The men rode on anything that promised to get them off their feet. They piled on jeeps and tanks, hitched rides with self-propelled artillery and six-by-six trucks. They drove captured German officers’ cars, rode ambulances and horses and bicycles. And when they couldn’t ride, they walked in long, dusty lines, finally free of the hills, down the gently sloping plain. Into the valley David Brower later said reminded him of home—his native California Central Valley. Two-thirds of Italy’s farmland lay in the Po’s 250-mile-long alluvial bowl. The land was a great patchwork of cultivated fields and orchards—wheat, corn, sugar beets, vegetables, peaches, plums, pears, apples, grapes, nut trees—every square separated from its neighbors by a canal, a well-worn path, or a line of poplars. Nearly every river in northern Italy, from the south side of the Alps to the north side of the Apennines, flowed into the Po, which meandered east to the Adriatic Sea south of Venice. In addition to farming, the Po also supported Italy’s industry, with its most prosperous, modern cities: Milan, Turin, Bologna. The Germans had been right to throw everything they had into defending this river and its valley. But now they were running for their lives.

  For two days the 10th streaked north toward San Benedetto Po, covering thirty-five miles a day, battalions leapfrogging, stopping only rarely to deal with streams of prisoners, or to catch a fleeting rest. Men slept wherever they plopped down: They slept in ditches, they slept in jeeps, they slept on the backs of clanking tanks. They even, as David Brower had predicted back at Camp Swift, slept while they walked. Bill Mauldin understood the phenomenon. In one cartoon, his Willie and Joe march along in a dogged, disheveled column, and Willie says, “Maybe Joe needs a rest. He’s talking in his sleep.”

  The nonstop 10th outran its artillery support, outran its supply vehicles. The men ran right off the maps they carried with them. Occasionally they had to fight through pockets of German resistance. Often, these were units who were unaware that the American advance had actually passed by them. The Germans were shocked to find they were behind enemy lines.

  Through their exhaustion, the men of the 10th felt something they hadn’t felt before, a sense of exhilaration, a hint that the fighting might soon be finished. It was as if they were sliding downhill again—not on skis now, but as though riding something inevitable, like gravity. They’d been through their baptism of fire, gone from innocence and optimism and a false sense of invincibility, through the nighttime terror of the Belvedere climb; through the grinding, waiting, random death on della Spe and all the subsequent hills; through the unseen mines and the implacable, spitting machine guns; through all the running, the digging in, the struggling up to run again. They’d long since been robbed of any illusion about war’s nobility or their own special place in it. But now, despite the familiar, interminable weariness and aching feet, there was the hint of something different, some kind of momentum (partly of their own making) heading irresistibly toward conclusion.

  In many villages that the 10th passed through, women and old men appeared along the roadside with wine or eggs or bread. Seeing the Americans coming, they would run to the garden to dig up bottles of wine they’d hidden from the Germans. Little girls put flowers in GI’s helmets. People cheered: “Bravo! Viva! Libaratore!” Without breaking stride, a trooper would take a glass of wine, down it, then hand the glass to the nearest child running alongside, who returned it for a refill, and the cycle began again. Bob Parker received a handful of eggs. Thinking fast, he stopped and built a quick fire under his helmet, added water, and hard-boiled the fragile gifts. Now he could carry them safely in a jacket pocket.

  There actually was enough wine to cause a problem for some of the soldiers, but even if there had been none, the events around them would probably still have seemed hallucinatory. John Jennings recalled an encounter when they were speeding through the Po’s villages: “A German tank roared out of a side road, fell in with one of our mechanized columns, finally recognized that we weren’t retreating German forces, fired off a couple of rounds, and sped off.”

  Bob Parker ran head on into the chaos as he passed through another village. He was riding in a jeep, absent-mindedly manning the machine gun mounted on the back. “People came running out wanting to give us something. One woman threw a crusty, hard bread loaf at us as we went by, and I wasn’t paying enough attention because it hit me right on the forehead.” A minute later Parker’s column stumbled into a firefight with some stubbornly resistant Germans; the bread was instantly forgo
tten.

  That night at chow a medic sits down next to me and says, “Let me fix up that wound, soldier.” I said, “What wound?” I had blood all over my face from a cut on my forehead. He bandaged me up and then handed me the form you filled out to receive a Purple Heart. I said, “No, I got hit by a flying loaf of bread.” He said, “Go ahead, fill it out. Wounded in the line of duty.” But I couldn’t do it, not for failing to catch a loaf of bread.

  So many Germans were surrendering, the 10th had a hard time dealing with them all. Hays didn’t want to give up any of his men to escort prisoners to the rear, so scores of POWs were searched, tagged, and simply told to walk south on their own. In their mad dash north, Dave Brower’s platoon spun some of those southbound prisoners around and had them carry packs for the tired Americans. At times, it was not easy to tell the captors from the captives. Some ski troopers wore souvenir German mountain caps or German sweaters. Others sported feathered Alpini hats. Everyone wore the same thick coat of road dust. Through confusion and irony, the motley parade surged northward.

  Two days after General Hays’s refusal to stop, the 87th Regiment reached the sandy dikes of the Po River, near the town of San Benedetto Po. Word of the 10th’s approach had preceeded them, and as Hays had feared, the bridge lay in twisted wreckage sagging into the flow. The 10th would have to find another way to cross. The scuttled bridge would slow the mountain troops’ advance, but it had other, unintended consequences as well: German troops fleeing north were also caught on the south bank. The men of the 87th watched from a distance as hundreds of Germans, including a general and his staff, swam the muddy current. More than a few drowned trying to reach the safety of the far shore.

  The river here was about two hundred yards wide, not yet in full spring flood, moving languidly but powerfully, at about six miles an hour. Hays had no equipment for laying down a pontoon bridge; that had been assigned to II Corps, miles away to the east. Nor did he have assault boats; they were on their way to the 85th Division, also miles downriver, to the units Mark Clark had intended and expected to lead the crossing. Not only did Hays have no way to cross, he didn’t know what lay on the other side. He didn’t know if the enemy had reinforcements prepared to resist an American crossing. He didn’t know if he’d have the support of Allied air power (still moving up from their Tuscan airfields) or artillery. Communication among American units was scanty, and new maps were still in the process of being prepared. What Hays did know was that he was the first to reach the river and should get across as quickly as possible, to establish a beachhead in case there was a fight. So, while the 87th settled in for the night on the south shore and the other two regiments moved up in the darkness to join them, the general called his engineers and told them, in no uncertain terms, to find him some boats.

  The 126th Engineers were the resourceful bunch who had built the aerial tram up Riva Ridge. A couple of engineers—one of them Lt. Fritz Benedict, an architect who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright before the war—and a supply warrant officer took off in a jeep. Somehow in the night they ran into a convoy of five flatbed trucks, each one loaded with ten plywood assault boats, bound for the 85th Division. Perhaps it was the patch the warrant officer wore—signifying 85th Regiment, not 85th Division—or perhaps the 10th men were just that convincing. At any rate, they persuaded the convoy commander to follow them; they’d lead him right where he wanted to go, they said. Instead of his scheduled destination, though, they took him to the 10th Mountain position at San Benedetto. They arrived at the river about midnight, hastily unloaded the boats, and sent the convoy on its way, none the wiser.

  By noon the next day, April 23, companies of the 87th Regiment—in an unlikely reprisal of their landing on Kiska—made the first Allied amphibious crossing of the Po River. The boats came equipped with paddles—no motors. So the engineers paddled the ungainly craft, each one loaded to the gunwales with ten to twelve infantrymen. The first wave of boats triggered considerable artillery and mortar fire from beyond the far bank, and high-trajectory, antiaircraft flak burst in black rosettes above the water, but the fire seemed undirected, and the boats moved across with relatively few casualties en route. The first man ashore was Tech. Sgt. George Hurt of A Company. Hurt had been one of the members of the original 87th glee club back at Paradise in the earliest days of the ski troops.

  Once on the far bank, the men splashed out and threw themselves against the sand dike expecting a shower of lead. But they encountered negligible resistance. They hopped over the top and discovered dozens of enemy dugouts but very few Germans manning them. Fritz Benedict was one of the first engineers across to the north side. He and a buddy captured a German inside one of the dugouts and took shelter there for a while against the sporadic shelling. The man talked to them in animated, insistent tones. Fritz spoke a little German and asked him to slow down. Finally, he understood. The prisoner was predicting the future. He was saying, “I don’t know why you aren’t fighting with us against the Russians. The Russians will be your enemies very soon.”

  Back and forth the engineers paddled. Once the 87th was safely across, they began ferrying the 86th and the 85th. Eventually, amphibious trucks called DUKWs (pronounced “ducks”) arrived to take on some of the burden. The next day bridging equipment from II Corps arrived as well, and other engineers quickly spanned the flow with a floating pontoon bridge. Now the six-by-six trucks and tanks and artillery could move across and continue the drive north. At long last, General Clark caught up to the 10th. Once again he congratulated General Hays—the insubordinate cavalry charge out of the hills apparently forgiven. Clark pumped Hays’s hand and, grinning, called him “the conqueror of the Po.”

  But General Clark’s message was not all adulatory; he had a new assignment for the mountain division. While the speed of the Fifth Army advance had left von Vietinghoff’s forces in a shambles, many thousands of them still had their heavy weapons and remained capable of a fighting retreat into the Alps, into Hitler’s Final Redoubt. Of course, there was skepticism about the existence of such a Götterdämmerung plan, but Clark and the Allied commanders couldn’t afford to take the chance that it didn’t exist. Clark’s solution was to send the 10th to cut them off at the pass. Literally. If the 10th, with its speed and stamina, could beat the Germans to the Brenner Pass, on the Austrian border, and cut off this primary escape route, then surely the fighting on the southern front would be over.

  And so the 10th took off again, as soon as its armor—jeeps and tanks and artillery—got across the Po. The troops skirted around Mantua and drove up Highway 62 toward Verona, stopping only briefly to wolf down K rations and maybe catch a few minutes of sleep. From Verona, they would begin climbing into the Alps, up along the Adige River into the Sud Tyrol, following the ancient route to Brenner Pass.

  Slogging toward Verona with his D Company, 85th Regiment, Harry Poschman could at last see the snow-topped Alps, the inspiration for the ski troops in the first place. Harry felt his spirits lift. The resistance north of the Po had so far been light; soon, maybe, this would be over. He smiled to himself. “I will ski soon.”

  CHAPTER 13:

  Tunnel of the Dead

  As the 10th sprinted for the Alps, the American public focused on events in Germany and Okinawa. By April of 1945, doubts about Hitler’s sanity were aired frequently, if not openly, within the highest levels of Nazi command. Hitler had proclaimed on the eve of the American armies’ crossing the Rhine that “the [final] battle should be conducted without consideration for our own population.” He ordered the destruction of Germany’s critical infrastructure: the electrical plants, the waterworks, gas works . . . “all food and clothing stores” in order to create “a desert” in the Allies’ path. He told his minister of war production, Albert Speer: “If the war is lost, the German nation will also perish. So there is no need to consider what the people require for continued existence.” Even Speer, who had run Germany’s slave-labor industry, was appalled at this callousness, and went behi
nd the Führer’s back to convince regional authorities to ignore the order.

  By April 11, U.S. and British forces had reached the Elbe River, sixty miles west of Berlin, and stopped there, in fulfillment of the agreement between Eisenhower and Stalin. Two weeks later, Soviet divisions completely surrounded Berlin and linked up with the Americans on the Elbe. Also mid-month, U.S. and British forces liberated the concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, revealing for the first time the full horror of Hitler’s plan for the extermination of Europe’s Jews, his “Final Solution.”

  In the Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was making good his promise to return to the Philippines, rooting out the last Japanese resistance on the big island of Luzon. The British also made good progress southward through Burma toward Rangoon, while one of the major battles of the war raged on the island of Okinawa, south of the Japanese main islands. The drama on Okinawa, and on the surrounding waters of the East China Sea, riveted the nation from April 1—when U.S. Marines first landed. There was the failed suicide mission of the Yamoto, the greatest battleship in the world, sent south to Okinawa with only enough fuel for a one-way trip, in a desperate attempt to finish off the U.S. Fleet. And there was the horrific struggle for Okinawa itself, which resulted in forty-eight thousand American dead and wounded and in excess of one hundred thousand Japanese killed. The main islands of Japan were now within striking distance, but the willingness of Japanese soldiers to fight to the last man, and the intransigence of the Japanese leadership, complicated any hopes for imminent victory.

  In northern Italy, with the end of the war in sight, danger and risk took on new meaning. There was the story, for instance, of what happened to John Jennings’s company commander just north of the Po River. Jennings’s F Company, 87th Regiment, had crossed the river without casualties and then moved inland to occupy a small town on the left bank. All seemed peaceful in the hamlet, and the men settled into defensive positions while the pontoon bridge was being built, waiting for the armor to cross. It was the first real rest any of them had had since the jump-off April 14. Capt. James Kennett found an abandoned bicycle and, entranced perhaps by the sweet spring air and the near-certainty that his war would soon be over, rode up and down the streets of the village. A lone sniper, left behind in a second-story window, fired once. The bike clattered to the cobblestones along with the mortally wounded captain. Jennings was nonplussed. “All through the fighting, as a radioman, I was up with the captain in the front of the company. . . . He came through the worst of it right out in front—unscathed—only to be killed when things were beginning to look easier.”