Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  All in 114 days. The 10th was the last U.S. division to enter the war in Europe, but it had been given one of the most daunting assignments in Italy and consequently suffered the highest casualty rate, per combat day, of any division in the southern theater. Nine hundred seventy-five 10th Division men were killed in four months; 3,849 were wounded. Ten other U.S. infantry divisions fought in Italy. Of these the 34th suffered the highest total casualties—16,401 over twenty months, for a casualty rate of 820 a month. The 88th Division incurred 13,111 casualties over fourteen months—937 a month. The 10th’s casualty rate figured out to 1,209 per month. General Hays’s high praise had come at a high cost.

  The thrill of victory in Italy lasted only a few days. VE Day (May 8) came and went “with little excitement,” according to Harris Dusenbery in The North Apennines, in part perhaps because the Army had just released photographs of the atrocities in the concentration camps: Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz. Reality set back in. The United States was still at war in the Pacific. Even though Japan faced a hopeless situation, similar to Germany’s in the last weeks, official Japanese propaganda promised that her people would fight to the death. Experience on Okinawa proved this. What would it be like for American servicemen charged with invading the Japanese homeland? Tenth men didn’t want to think about it, but rumor swirled, as always: The invasion was planned for the rocky coast north of Tokyo, where mountain troops would be called on to scale the sheer sea cliffs, no doubt defended by desperate fanatics . . . and so on. The dogfaces wouldn’t hear about it, but on May 25 General MacArthur was ordered to plan Operation Olympic, the invasion of the southern island of Kyushu, to commence November 1. The War Department estimated hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties and as many as two million Japanese dead. And the 10th was slated to lead the attack.

  Two weeks after von Senger’s surrender, the 10th’s disparate units, spread around the high country north of Lake Garda, were ordered back down into the Po Valley. This was a blow to the mountain men, most of whom were savoring their first taste of the Alps. These summits were no higher, most of them, than the peaks around Camp Hale, but the valleys cut much, much deeper. Average elevations for the glacier-carved valley floors were between 1,000 and 3,000 feet above sea level, versus 7,000 to 9,000 feet in Colorado. Peak-to-valley elevations might span 10,000 vertical feet, double the relief of most climbs in North America outside Alaska. Multiplying the feeling of immensity, timberline in the Alps is much lower—a good 5,000 feet lower—than it is in Colorado. So, the vast majority of this high country qualifies as alpine: naked rock, tundra, snow, and ice. This unobstructed distance, and the huge vertical relief, are what led Shelley to write: “I never knew what mountains were until I saw the Alps.” Many in the 10th had the same epiphany. They were transported by the beauty, and not at all eager to leave.

  Having to come down was particularly hard on John Jennings, whose unit had settled into the idyllic little town of Folgaria, in the Dolomite Range. With time on their hands, they had set up an impromptu rock-climbing school; they relaxed with the local people and climbed frequently on days off.

  I arrived on a peak from which I had one of the most breathtaking views I ever hope to behold. I could see for miles and miles in all directions across the Alps. I’m pretty sure that was Switzerland in the hazy distance. . . . There were numerous old emplacements, caved-in dugouts, trenches and caves on the peak I climbed and on some of the surrounding promontories and ridges. These were used in the last war, which was rather intense in this area. The Austrians and the Italians battled back and forth for some time through this unbelievable country.

  (Mountaineers who did any rambling at all saw the old fortifications, defensive bulwarks that gave David Brower a subjunctive chill: “Had we not beaten the retreating Germans to them . . .”)

  For Jennings, the hardest part of leaving was saying goodbye to the Rizzardi family, “consisting namely of the signorinas Sandra, Maria, and Piera, whose mountainside home we visited quite frequently. My particular favorite was Maria, a girl of about my own age. Here there was a little social life for a change, and even a couple of dances.”

  That all ended with relocation to the dusty, flat Po, now overlain with the heat of early summer. Bob Woody groused, only half facetiously: “Shaves, close-order drills, and all the chicken shit was to be re-imposed. Incredible. We had just won a war! We were heroes.” Some of the heroes had enough points to go home. You accumulated points for months of duty and months in combat. You got five points for each battle star—Northern Apennines, Po Valley, etc.—and five for any medals you earned: Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Silver Star, and so on. (Woody’s nascent writing career got a boost when certain noncoms, who “knew of my way with words,” asked him to help with their commendations for a Bronze Star. “Sure, I said, creating in my mind or embellishing events in the officialese of the citations: ‘In spite of wounds to an embarrassing part of his anatomy, Sgt. So and So refused evacuation and stayed with his squad. . . .’ ”) Anyone with enough points could, at any time, leave for home. A few in the 10th did just that.

  The rest were saved from the heat and boredom of duty in the valley—guarding prisoners, cleaning weapons, and the incessant marching—by another potential conflict, a phantom conflict happily, on Italy’s border with Yugoslavia. On May 20, the division was ordered to Udine. Tensions between Tito’s ragtag Yugoslav forces, Italian partisans, and Italian Communists ran hot for a time. The U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies were to quell the isolated skirmishes and secure the border. The great benefit for the 10th was that they were in the mountains again, and relatively free to pursue their passions.

  On June 3, a collection of former MTG men reunited on Mount Mangart, in the Carnic Alps, for a long-imagined ski race. Using gear appropriated from Axis warehouses, they climbed Mangart’s 8,927-foot height and set a course in the vestigial spring snow. At last, Harry Poschman could lean into his elegant Arlberg turns. Everyone admitted that the skiing muscles had suffered from long neglect, and there were some humorous “rubber-leg” scenes at the finish line, but the day was a grand one. They all agreed it was only right that the fastest skier of the day should be Sgt. Walter Prager, the former Dartmouth coach and 87th Regiment instructor on Mount Rainier.

  With time and a jeep at their disposal, Bob Parker and Sigi Engl took off across Austria—to Innsbruck and Kitzbühel—to see if they could find Sigi’s uncle. John Jennings made the short hop over the border into the Austrian state of Carinthia for some sailing on the Wörther See. David Brower and a number of his Sierra Club mates took advantage of the fine summer weather to climb some of the classic routes in the Alps.

  Raffi Bedayan attempted the Matterhorn (Monte Cervino) from the Italian side but was chased down by bad weather. He did succeed in climbing Austria’s highest summit, the 12,470-foot Grossglockner, as well as the massive snow dome of Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in central Europe at 15,771 feet. Astride the border of France and Italy, rising nearly 13,000 feet above Chamonix on one side and 12,000 feet above Courmayeur on the other, Mont Blanc resonated with a special significance. It is the literal birthplace of mountaineering (beginning with its first ascent in 1786) and a physical and spiritual mecca for climbers ever since.

  The writer and climber James Ramsey Ullman stated the fact in no uncertain terms in his classic, High Conquest: The Story of Mountaineering: “The Alps were the first place where it ever occurred to men to climb mountains—where not merely a sport was born, but an idea.” David Brower, very much an idea man as well as climber, found himself in a kind of heaven for the two months the 10th occupied northern Italy. Here was the myth and lore of climbing, the stuff he’d read about since his youth. Brower helped to establish division climbing and ski schools at Trafoi in the Dolomites, at Passo del Predil in the eastern Julian Alps, and on the tremendous glaciers of the Grossglockner. With fellow 86th trooper Leo Healy, he got to within 800 feet of the Matterhorn’s summit of 14,691 feet, where Healy was stricken
suddenly with headache and nausea—acute mountain sickness. They were forced to retreat, but Brower remained thrilled with the attempt. “It is a big mountain. You climb for hours, and it still rises more hours above you. The exposure—the thousands of feet of precipice plunging to the glaciers below—is, and I can think of no better word, classical.”

  Most of Brower’s time was spent in the Dolomites, the Italian range that is home to a particular gray-and-pink limestone rock, and bolts vertically out of lush, green pasture. It was here that some of the highest-standard rock climbing was practiced. After working their way through barbed wire left over from a World War I machine-gun position, Brower and his 3d Battalion buddies climbed Piccola Cima, one of the three famous spires in the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. Then it was off to France for a successful two-day ascent of the Grepon, one of the famous Chamonix rock needles.

  The Grossglockner eventually became the site of several regimental “refresher” schools, where former MTG instructors led classes for both neophyte and experienced mountaineers. Grossglockner means “big bell” in German, and the massive, bell-shaped mountain, draped on all sides with glaciers, offered plenty of summer ice and snow routes. The 86th set up its school in the Glocknerhaus, an inn owned by the Austrian Mountain Club. The 85th took over the Pasterzenhaus nearby. Equipment had to be scrounged from all over northern Italy and southern Austria. “Our American equipment would have suited us better,” wrote David Brower, “but it was still in Naples and no transportation was available to get it to Austria.” Soon, however, “ropes, pitons, axes, crampons, carabiners, boots, parkas, skis, pants, rucksacks, and various minor items of mountaineering equipment were pouring in.”

  Harry Poschman remembers:

  [I] couldn’t take my eyes off the huge mountain, the constant rumbling slides and big snow fields. The ice field at the head of the Pasterzen glacier loomed big and bright even at night, and several of us decided we would go up there at the first opportunity. It was early July. I didn’t care if I never went home, what with skiing, the great Austrian beer, climbing, beer, pleasant people, free food, and let’s not forget beer at $1.50 a barrel.

  Fifty school graduates made the difficult ascent to the peak itself, up the glacier, across great crevasses and through a jumbled mass of ice seracs, overnight at the Oberwalderhütte and on to the summit. There were more ski races on the lower slopes. Harry and his crew eventually made the long hike to the Oberwalderhütte “in anticipation of a beautiful run down the next morning.” The hut was filled with pleasant people and conversation. Germans and Austrians, former enemies, reflected on the war with their American counterparts. The morning dawned clear and cold; the skiers would wait until the sun warmed the snow to perfect corn [the skiers’ term for “melting crust”] before skiing down.

  We watched the sun gradually creep across that vast expanse of snow till it lit up a tiny figure far away. The figure was approaching. Byron Johnson arrived long before the snowfield was soft enough for our descent. He was a messenger. The message was “Go.” Immediately—not when the snow was soft enough to enjoy the run, but right now. (The run down was terrible—more like ice skating.) The 10th had left the mountains and gone back to Florence. We would get the bad news on our arrival there.

  Bob Woody was in the Franz Joseph Hut on another shoulder of the Grossglockner when a different messenger brought the exact same message. “We were being summoned to Florence. The whole division was to be shipped to the United States for amphibious training and the assault on Japan.”

  That assessment seemed confirmed when the 10th was replaced in Udine by the 34th Infantry Division, the division with the longest service in the European theater of operations; they’d been overseas since November 1942. It wouldn’t have been right to send those long-suffering dogfaces to Japan. Let them stay in peaceful Italy and send instead the division with the fewest days in combat. It made sense, but it didn’t make the mountaineers happy. In Florence, the orders became more specific: Once home, the 10th was to reassemble after a thirty-day leave for a planned November 2 attack on Kyushu.

  In late July, in balmy weather, the 10th’s three regiments boarded three different ships and steamed for home. Despite smooth seas, tension lurked just below the surface. Woody thought, “What would the Japanese soldier be like? We had survived one war. Not likely the next one. I had once considered myself immortal. No longer. I was certain I would get it in Japan.”

  Then on August 6, word came that would change everything. A new kind of bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. “We had no idea what an atomic device was,” Woody recalled in his memoir:

  Hiroshima in my mind was some Japanese military camp on a palm-lined island in the South Pacific. All humans had simply vanished in atomic disintegration leaving barracks and palms intact. Geelan [Pfc. Thomas] talked about atomic theory. He was always a bit more erudite than the rest of us.

  And then [on August 11] we were passing the Statue of Liberty as a flotilla of tugboats and fireboats steamed toward us and presented us with a victory fountain from their hoses. There were pretty girls on those fireboats, too. We crowded en masse to the side. The Marine Fox began to list dangerously under our collective weight. The ship’s loudspeaker warned us to move back from the railing.

  Japan surrendered four days later.

  CHAPTER 15:

  “We Could Do Almost Anything”

  Sgt. Friedl Pfeifer would make good on his promise to return to Aspen after all. Landing back in the States, Pfeifer was sent to Camp Carson, in Colorado Springs, to recover from the grizzly wounds he’d suffered at Torre Iussi. By mid-September, missing half a lung but well enough to drive, he made his first trip up to the old silver town and immediately felt “the same incredible sense of coming home that had hit me two years before when I’d marched into Aspen with Company A, 87th Regiment.”

  Discharged from the Army on October 16, he moved straightaway into a little frame house on Third Street, just a few blocks from where the formal Victorian grid met the north face of the mountain. Pfeifer’s vision of an Aspen to rival his hometown of St. Anton was no small feat of imagination, for Aspen in 1945 still languished in its silver-bust doldrums of nearly fifty years. Most of the buildings had either burned or fallen down, or were boarded up against the town’s roving bands of semi-wild dogs. Most of the population of six hundred souls—down from a turn-of-the-century high of twelve thousand—either believed against all logic in the return of silver or else had become resigned to a life of inexorable, if not altogether unpleasant, decline. This was Aspen in what the locals called “the quiet years.” And but for a handful of risk takers like Laurence Elisha and the lumber merchant Tom Sardy, Friedl might not have got his dream off the ground.

  Pfeifer’s furrowed-brow intensity rubbed off on Elisha, proprietor of the only hotel and president of the fledgling Aspen Ski Club. Together, they tackled Pfeifer’s to-do list, which included widening the only ski trail on the mountain, the serpentine Roch Run, and cutting a new trail off the summit into Spar Gulch, one that would be less intimidating to intermediate skiers. Pfeifer also wanted to renovate the infamous Boat Tow toboggans, and build a rope tow for beginners’ lessons. These he accomplished with astonishing speed, utilizing crews of ski club volunteers who cut timber some nights long after dark by the lights of their miner’s helmets. Sardy extended a generous line of credit.

  A ski area needs a ski school, and Friedl staffed his with two friends who had worked with him at Sun Valley before the war, John Litchfield and Percy Rideout. Both also were 10th veterans and Dartmouth alumni. Litchfield had been with division headquarters, and Rideout (F Company, 86th Regiment), a former ski team captain, had been on the Riva climb.

  Army doctors had told Pfeifer that he probably would never ski again. But every day throughout the fall, Friedl hiked the mountain, learning its every curve and gaining back his strength. When the first real snow arrived in early November, he skinned to the summit and skied back to town, tears of joy streaming down his
cheeks. With the arrival of the second big storm just before Thanksgiving, the ski school and the lifts were ready for their first customers. Tickets were to be sold out of Mike Magnifico’s shoe-repair shop downtown. Pfeifer, Litchfield, and Rideout stood by the ski school sign and waited. Nobody came.

  Then, at last a Mrs. Nichol appeared. Pfeifer wrote in Nice Goin’: My Life on Skis, “She was a 70-year-old lady who had skied in Europe a little bit and was staying with friends in town. She was out there every morning for at least an hour or so, usually getting half way up the [rope tow] before her hands lost their grip. Percy, Litch and I tossed a coin every day for the privilege of teaching Mrs. Nichol and getting paid.”

  Pfeifer knew that a handful of skiers, a ski school, and a simple lift do not a world-class ski resort make. He had much bigger plans—for more trails and more and better lodgings in town, for a restaurant on the mountaintop, and, most important, for chairlifts to the summit, like the ones that had vaulted Sun Valley to instant acclaim in the late 1930s. Friedl figured, no doubt accurately, that “few people would be willing to drive 250 miles [then about eight hours] from Denver to ski a hill with a small lift.”

  But all of this development would cost money, a lot of money. Pfeifer estimated he’d need $250,000 to pay for it all, a sum that “might as well have been $10 million” for the impoverished, idealistic skiers involved. The answer came in the unlikely form of Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke. Unlikely, because Paepcke was not a physically adventurous person himself, not a skier. But his wife was, and Elizabeth Paepcke finally convinced her husband to visit moribund Aspen in the summer of 1945, a few months before Friedl Pfeifer’s return. Paepcke’s Container Corporation of America, which produced innovative cardboard packaging, had made him a rich man, and that allowed him to indulge his passions for philosophy, modern art, and a nearly evangelical zeal to reform American intellectual life. Paepcke believed in the Greek ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body. He thought that mid-century industrial America was lacking on both counts and that a conscious recombining of art and work, of humanistic study and physical activity, could right the cultural ship. He had long imagined creating a “summer university” for corporate executives in a pristine setting far from urban distractions. In Aspen, he believed, he’d found that place, and he proceeded to buy up whole blocks downtown, along with several of the best-preserved Victorian houses. He took out leases on the Jerome Hotel and the shuttered Wheeler Opera House and commenced plans for their renovation. “Here,” a friend wrote, “was to be another Renaissance, with Paepcke as Medici in chief.”