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Camp Hale, 1943

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“Heaven and Hell”

Well, here I am at Camp Hale, and let me tell you it’s really something! . . . you either like it immensely or dislike it immensely. I belong to the former group.

— Private John Parker “Eagle” Compton to his parents, October 5, 1943

“Dearest Punkin,” eighteen-year-old private Martin L. Daneman wrote to his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Lois Miller on arrival at Camp Hale on April 29, 1943. He was assigned to Headquarters Company of what was to become the 3rd Battalion of the 86th Mountain Infantry Regiment, and had been in the army for a week. “Here I am at last a ski trooper who doesn’t yet know how to ski.”

Daneman had taken the overnight passenger express train known as the Rocky Mountain Rocket from Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station to Denver’s Union Station, which completed the thousand-mile run between the two cities in under twenty hours. On arrival at the Denver terminus in the morning, he transferred to a bus for the four-hour ride to Camp Hale and his new life with the ski troopers. The last stretch of the trip proved the hardest. It was another six months before regular bus service became available to ferry soldiers around the camp. In April, new arrivals could sometimes hitch a jeep ride into camp, but Daneman wasn’t in luck that day. Instead, from the Pando bus stop at Hale’s northern end, he had to drag his heavy barracks bag through the camp gates to a headquarters building a half mile away, becoming aware for the first time just how thin the air was going to seem at 9,200 feet, while at the same time coming to regret his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. After reporting in, he was directed to a two-story barracks building assigned to his company, another long, breathless hike away. There he found a vacant upper berth among the steel double-decker bunks. Finally he could write to his girlfriend, something he went on to do virtually every day he spent in the army until departing for Italy a year and a half later.

Lois, whom Daneman had met in high school in Chicago, had recently moved to San Francisco to live with her divorced mother. Marty, as everyone called him, a city boy who grew up in Brooklyn and Newark before his family settled in Chicago, had never been so far west or so high up before. Everything was new and marvelous: “This morning at 11 we caught a bus in here & came thru the most gorgeous plus country I’ve ever seen . . . We’re right in the heart of a valley, 10000 ft up in the Rockies.”

They came by the thousands to Camp Hale that year, some older but many of them boys just out of high school, like Daneman. Born after, or at least with no direct memory of, what was still being called the World War or the Great War, they had only a hazy notion of what their own war would be like, and where they might be called upon to fight and die. They were a post-Hemingway generation, and thus not inclined to romanticize war in chivalric or Victorian language, but still young and naïve enough to think of it as something of an adventure. There were many three-letter men in their ranks, arriving with the endorsement of the National Ski Patrol, but the proportion of experienced skiers and climbers was declining. Some, like Daneman, had no prior outdoors experience. (He cited his background as a high school runner and weightlifter as qualifications on his application to the mountain troops, by then sufficient to win approval from the NSPS.)

Albert N. Brockman was another eighteen-year-old ski trooper who had yet to learn how to ski when he passed through the gates of Camp Hale. He enlisted in Pennsylvania on February 1, 1943, and three weeks later reached the camp, initially assigned to A Company of the 86th Regiment. For those arriving that first winter, when the snow still lay deep on the ground, their basic and specialized training were jumbled together, as had been the case on Rainier a year earlier. Brockman wrote to his sister Betty on February 22: “Our skis will be issued soon and I will start training. Now we are having our basic and we drill for hours.” Two weeks into basic training, Brockman wrote Betty to let her know that his company had just gotten their skis and other outdoor gear: “We are going to start skiing as soon as we finish on the rifle range . . . Yesterday I used Dick’s camera and had one of the fellows take pictures of me in my camouflaged uniform with skis, rifle, pack and all. They will look pretty good if they turn out.” A letter to Betty later that month reported on Brockman’s first day on the slopes: “I have been skiing all day. We were practicing the stem turn today which is almost like the snow plow turn . . . During the morning I was on the tow with a dumb cluck who fell off and he pulled me off too. I got a slight charley horse in my leg from all the pulling and struggling trying to get back on.”

By the end of March, with freshly honed skiing skills, Brockman’s company was sent into the surrounding mountains for five days of maneuvers. On the final day, he reported to Betty, they climbed a thirteen-thousand-foot mountain on skis, attacking a “make believe enemy.” At day’s end, they were back in the snow caves they had dug for shelter when unexpected orders came to pack up and make the fourteen-mile ski back to camp, a four-hour slog without food or rest, arriving close to midnight. “I was one tired soldier,” he concluded.

Unlike Brockman, who completed elementary ski training and spent nearly a week at high altitude on ski maneuvers within a month of his initial arrival at Camp Hale, Daneman, arriving at the end of April, when the snow had melted in the camp and the lower slopes surrounding it, would not don a pair of skis until the following October.

The variations in Brockman’s and Daneman’s experience, in the lack of any fixed, defining pattern of training, illustrate one of the many ways in which Camp Hale in 1943 differed from tried-and-true army practices. At flatland camps, large groups of recruits, all equally green, arrived at the same time and went through a lockstep instructional process as set down by Army Ground Forces directives; at Hale, in contrast, the Mountain Training Center instructors were constantly improvising, depending on the season and the supply of qualified volunteers, which ebbed and flowed. Some days three new recruits might show up at the camp, on other days a hundred, with previous time in service ranging from a week to years. As the official history of the MTC recounted: “Time after time General Rolfe begged Army Ground Forces not to send him raw recruits, but there was no satisfactory way to stop them, and the men kept coming direct from induction centers. This meant postponing their mountain training three months or else combining it with their basic training, neither of which was a good solution. Furthermore, the basic training had to be conducted in echelons, as the men trickled in.”

Because Daneman arrived in warm weather, his time in basic bore a greater resemblance to the traditional version. He described the training with amused detachment some decades later; it had, he recalled, consisted largely of the systematic destruction “by means of tyrannical discipline of any remaining sense of individuality we had. Our total subjugation to the whims of authority was made crystal clear.” A speck of dust found on a rifle during inspection on a dusty field (there hadn’t been time to sow grass seed when the camp was constructed the year before) earned a demerit, which could mean the difference between receiving or being denied a weekend pass. Once, in the absence of visible dust on his rifle, having taken extra care preparing for inspection, Daneman still wound up receiving a demerit from the inspecting officer—for the dust on the bottom of his boots.

In letters to Lois, he chose to emphasize the positive side of the experience: “At last we’ve started basic & now I’m beginning to feel that I’m learning something.” This was May 10, a dozen days after his arrival at camp. Newly arrived recruits were usually, although not always, assigned a week or two of light duty to help them adjust to the altitude. “We had some exercises to start off with & then an hour of drill,” Daneman continued. “Back to class for more lectures, this time about guard duty. Then came chow & mail call.”

Robert B. Ellis, also eighteen when he made his way to Camp Hale in the spring of 1943, came from a very different background than Daneman and Brockman. His parents had been American medical missionaries in Iran, where he was born in 1924, and he did not live in the United States until he was a teenager, his time abroad including a year in school in Switzerland. In the spring of 1943 he volunteered for the mountain troops, arriving at Camp Hale in mid-April, assigned to L Company of the 86th Regiment. His cohort of recruits for some reason had the ill luck to begin basic training at once, without the usual acclimatization. On his second or third day in camp, after drilling for four hours in wet driving snow, he wrote to his mother: “It certainly is going to be a tough three months of training I must say. The altitude is about 10,000 ft, and you certainly feel it. My nose bled today and everyone here has a cough, some sore throats, etc. The sergeant says you’ll probably have a sore throat the whole time you’re here.” Their training days began with reveille at 5:30 a.m., and sometimes they did not get to bed until 11 at night. He liked the men in his platoon, almost all of whom he described as “college men,” very competitive, and “certainly the hardest and toughest I have ever seen.” Hard and tough they may have been. Still, as Ellis noted in a postscript to the letter, the day before “10 out of 50 men collapsed because of the altitude and exhaustion.”

Around the time Private Ellis began basic, the newsprint edition of the official camp newspaper, the Camp Hale Ski-Zette, appeared for the first time. (It had a previous life as a mimeographed sheet.) Four pages long, published weekly for the next fourteen months, it offered a summary of war news, plus local reporting on the doings of what amounted to a small city—sports, entertainment, even wedding announcements. The tone was relentlessly upbeat and, given the mountain troopers’ fondness for bawdy drinking songs, surprisingly wholesome. The Ski-Zette, for example, ran “pin-up” pictures of mountains instead of the usual girlie photos. In an aside in the first issue, the Ski-Zette noted that the camp commander, Colonel L. D. Brogan, was fond of calling Hale the “camp nearest Heaven.”

There was disagreement among the men at Hale as to how accurately that described the camp’s immediate neighborhood. Earlier that year, someone forwarded Minnie Dole a letter from an anonymous trooper in the 87th about the defining feature of life at Camp Hale: “The fellows are beginning to dub it Camp Hell . . . for the simple reason that almost every one of us was in excellent physical condition when we arrived from California,” where the regiment had been on maneuvers in the fall of 1942, “and in almost no time at all we began to develop this ‘Pando Hack’ or ‘Pando Plague.’”

Camp Hale was probably the most scenic military establishment in the continental United States, surrounded as it was by high and pristine mountaintops, but aesthetics aside, its construction in the Eagle Valley proved a colossal blunder. The valley walls helped to shelter the camp’s inhabitants from the winter winds—but in the absence of cleansing breezes, the smoke produced by coal-burning locomotives (three to a train to get them up and over the steep grade leading to camp), plus that added by hundreds of coal-burning stoves in barracks and other buildings, pooled overhead in a dense brown cloud. It turned the accumulated snow below a sooty black and wreaked havoc on the respiratory system of camp inhabitants. The naturally dry alpine air only made things worse. Robert Ellis’s lips split soon after he arrived and would not heal for weeks. At night it became standard practice to dump a bucket of water on the barracks floors to try to keep a little humidity in the air as the men slept. It didn’t seem to help.

Within a day or so of arrival in camp, newcomers began to experience the symptoms of the infamous “Pando Hack” (also known as “Pando-monia”): first, a dry feeling in the nose and throat, followed by a slight cough, and two or three days later a painful sore throat and a brutal cough. Some men were so ill they could eat nothing solid; some could speak only in whispers. Sick call lists along with lines and wait times in the infirmary expanded, but medics had nothing to prescribe but aspirin and gargling, neither of which had much effect. The only cure was to get out of the smoggy valley, and some troopers began to look forward to maneuvers in the surrounding mountains for just that reason. Nineteen-year-old John Parker Compton, nicknamed “Eagle,” arrived at Hale in September 1943 and was assigned to G Company, 86th Regiment. He had grown up in Westchester, New York, and was the grandson of the chairman of the board of the Ralston Purina Company, learning to ski on family vacations in the Canadian Laurentians, and at boarding school in Switzerland. (In an early letter to his grandparents he wrote that Camp Hale “sort of reminds me of when I was in Switzerland.”) Notwithstanding this privileged background, at least to judge from Compton’s letters home, the life of an army private was a source of genuine satisfaction to him. None of which made him immune to the common ailments of the camp. “My Pando Hack got better on bivouac—of all places,” he wrote his parents some time later. “It’s funny, I never get a sore throat, just a tickle as soon as I do any climbing.” And Compton counted himself one of Camp Hale’s fans.

Health problems were exacerbated by the difference between “mile-high” Denver and nearly two-mile-high Pando, separated by only a few hours’ travel but by four thousand feet in elevation. Camp Hale’s altitude was only a few hundred feet lower than that at which military pilots were required to strap on their oxygen masks. Charlie Houston, a noted Himalayan mountaineer (leader of the 1938 K2 expedition), was a navy physician during the war who studied the effects of high altitude on pilots. In a postwar study, he described the effects of “Acute Mountain Sickness,” which occurs at an altitude above seven thousand to eight thousand feet after rapid ascent (which he defined as “a day or less”), including debilitating if usually temporary symptoms of “headache, nausea sometimes with vomiting, shortness of breath, disturbed sleep, difficulty with thinking.”

Altitude sickness was only poorly understood in the 1940s even by experienced mountaineers, and certainly was an unfamiliar ailment to the average army doctor or medic. Many recruits began their time as mountain troopers feeling miserable from the effects of altitude, even before their Pando Hack developed; some wound up hospitalized for weeks at a stretch (and it didn’t seem to occur to medical staff that a simple cure would be to move patients to a lower elevation). Training standards had to be modified so that for every thousand feet in elevation gain, an hour was added to expected marching time. By the fall of 1943, an Altitude Board at Camp Hale composed of medical officers met periodically to review cases of soldiers who could not acclimatize. “A large percentage of men can’t take it up at this elevation,” Private Harris Dusenbery, assigned to C Company of the 86th Regiment, wrote to his wife, Evelyn, in Portland, Oregon, in October 1943, shortly after his arrival, “but the only way to find out is to try the men out and to transfer to other camps those who can’t staff the gaff. I am told that sixty men have transferred from our company to other camps in the last few months.”

All of this might have been justified if the acclimatization the mountain regiments gained during training could have been expected to provide an edge in the coming fight. No one knew in 1943 where they would eventually be shipped overseas, although Norway, Italy, and Burma were the possibilities most often raised in barracks conversations. There was no battlefield where they might plausibly be deployed that would require them to fight at altitudes of nine thousand feet (where they presently lived), let alone thirteen thousand feet (where they climbed for maneuvers). Even if they were sent to the Alps, it wasn’t summits but passes that would be their objective, and those were thousands of feet lower. (The Brenner Pass, the principal route through the Alps from Italy to Austria, was only 4,495 feet, lower than the Paradise Valley buildings that housed the 87th on Mount Rainier.) And in any case, whatever level of acclimatization the mountain troops acquired to altitude while training would have worn off long before they could travel by train across the continent and by troopship over the ocean to reach their ultimate frontline destination. Overall, the advantages Camp Hale offered in terms of proximity to snow slopes and other mountain training grounds were outweighed by its toll on the health and morale of the mountain troopers.

The camp’s deficiencies were compounded by deficiencies in the mountain regiments’ leadership, displayed early in 1943 during maneuvers on Homestake Peak. The 13,209-foot mountain is located on the northern end of the Colorado Rockies’ Sawatch Range, part of the Continental Divide, about twelve miles to the southwest of the camp. Army Ground Forces had decided it was time for the mountain troops to put a sizeable force into the field to test the effectiveness of their training. A battalion of infantry from the 87th Regiment, along with the 99th Field Artillery battalion, received orders to set out from Tennessee Pass to Homestake Peak on February 4 for eight days of maneuvers. Their assignment was to establish a defensive line just below the summit of the mountain, repelling raids by designated “enemy” units. The ski troopers’ main camp was located at about two thousand feet below the summit, on the shores of Homestake Lake.

Civilians Minnie Dole and John Morgan of the National Ski Patrol were invited by the War Department not only to observe but also to join the maneuvers. They flew to Denver with Major Walter Wood, an experienced mountaineer who, as a civilian adviser in 1941, had helped test cold weather gear for the army in Alaska and the Yukon, currently assigned to G4 (Logistics), and Captain Jack Tappin, a champion skier in civilian life, commissioned in 1942 and serving with G3 (Operations and Training) at Army Ground Forces headquarters. From Denver, they drove to Camp Hale via Tennessee Pass. The last time Dole had visited the mountain troops had been on Mount Rainier, about as glorious and pristine a setting imaginable. Whatever he was expecting this time, Dole’s first view of the new camp brought up images of dark satanic mills, not some idyllic ski resort. It reminded him “of a large industrial development. It had a huge pall of smoke hanging over it.” That night, reunited with old friends John Jay and Paul Townsend, Dole listened to their “succession of gripes” about everything from the Pando Hack to the lack of weekend leave. Major Wood reminded the ski troopers that, after all, there was a war on, and they should be happy not to be training in some godforsaken Louisiana swamp. But Jay and Townsend made clear to Dole in language “that blistered the walls” that Hale was no paradise (or Paradise Valley).

On the second day of maneuvers, Dole, Morgan, and others on the inspection team set off on skis from Tennessee Pass up Homestake Peak, burdened with heavy packs, but grateful that, unlike the soldiers they accompanied, they weren’t carrying M1 rifles (an extra nine and a half pounds), and that a path through the deep powder snow had been broken by the men who went before. As they were soon to learn, from the first moments of the exercise, inexperienced officers bungled the operation. They had required the soldiers to stand around for two hours before beginning to climb, during which the men were thoroughly chilled, and then set out at an unreasonable pace in light of the burdens they carried. Some men hadn’t been properly instructed in how to wax their skis for ascending slopes, and exhausted themselves as they floundered upward. The mules in the accompanying pack trains also balked when the snow came up to their bellies. Supplies had to be reloaded onto sleds and hauled up by soldiers acting as beasts of burden, attached to the loads by harnesses. Some soldiers got lost; others gave up and fell out of line; a few actually deserted. Fully half the soldiers on the maneuvers had never been snow camping before. On the way up the mountain, Dole and his companions encountered an exhausted, ice-encrusted soldier who confessed in a southern accent that he was heading back to camp without permission, explaining, “I just cain’t take this stuff.” Before turning in that night at the Homestake Lake encampment, as the temperature dropped to thirty degrees below zero, Dole took a walk with a sergeant around the tents. They were astounded to come upon two soldiers standing barefoot in the snow. Dole recorded the ensuing exchange:

“What do you guys think you’re doing?” the sergeant exploded.

“We figured that if we froze them up a bit, we’d get evacuated out of this hellhole.”

The sergeant must have been hanging around the mule skinners because what he said next would have blistered even a mule’s ear.

In what was likely the highest casualty rate in the history of army maneuvers until then, some 260 soldiers, roughly a quarter of a battalion, developed frostbite or other ailments in the first twenty-four hours of the exercise, perhaps self-induced in a few cases, but mostly involuntarily. In actual combat, a 25 percent casualty rate in a single day would have been considered catastrophic. It could have been worse; there were no deaths, although that was partly through sheer luck. Major Wood intervened when a group of soldiers were ordered to retrieve airdropped supplies off an avalanche-prone hillside on the east face of Homestake Peak. Two days later, Colonel David Ruffner, commanding the pack artillery, a Virginia Military Institute graduate and veteran of the First World War regarded as highly competent but lacking in mountain experience, had several artillery rounds fired on Homestake’s east face from the 75 mm howitzers the mules and men under his command had hauled up from Tennessee Pass. He wanted to see if his guns could trigger an avalanche—a technique that, hypothetically, might be used in combat to sweep aside an oncoming enemy force. It worked, all right, and tons of snow and ice cascaded spectacularly down the mountainside. But Ruffner miscalculated just how far the avalanche would travel, and it reached all the way to Homestake Lake, threatening though thankfully not engulfing soldiers camping on the far shore.

In the midst of this accumulation of mishaps, the planned tactical exercise was canceled. The troopers remained on the mountain practicing high-altitude and deep snow travel and survival skills. As a stream of injured and demoralized men were evacuated from Homestake over successive days, those who knew their winter warfare history began to call the whole misadventure “the retreat from Moscow.”

In his postwar memoir, Dole wrote that he came away from his visit to Hale “enthralled that the camp was in existence and in capable hands.” But he didn’t sound so enthralled at the time. The Homestake maneuvers, he wrote in a report for the War Department, were yet another example of the army ignoring the advice of the real experts, the men he and the NSPS had recruited to the mountain troops, few of whom had yet risen to officer rank. The solution to the mountain troops’ problems was for the army to stop being so “rank happy, with rank at the top and brains at the bottom.” Major Wood and other observers filed their own critical reports.

Back in New York two months later, Dole received a letter from another recent visitor to Camp Hale, Frank Howard of the California Ski Association, offering additional insight into the mountain troopers’ winter of discontent. On the basis of conversations with men he knew well from civilian life, Howard wrote, “I think that the main thing the boys feel is that they are not getting competent leadership . . . The statement I heard over and over from everyone from the junior officers who ski to the privates was ‘If this outfit should go into combat we’d be slaughtered.’ Whether this statement is true or not the feeling that it is has a serious effect on the men’s morale. There was dissatisfaction, too, with the borrowed officers from ‘HQ only knows where,’ the officers who get lost where a boy scout could find his way home.”

It might seem unlikely that Dole or any other civilian could persuade the army that the wisdom of enlisted men should count more than the authority of rank. But surprisingly, Army Ground Forces chief General Leslie James McNair, who had opposed the creation of the ski troops back in 1941, and who was never entirely convinced that they were a good idea, nonetheless found Dole’s argument in this case persuasive. In a critical letter to General Rolfe (which amounted to a reprimand in all but name), McNair pointed out the failures in leadership revealed by the Homestake maneuvers and declared: “The large proportion of experienced woodsmen, mountaineers, guides and trappers in the enlisted and lower commissioned grades provides an excellent source of technical knowledge. This source should be used to the utmost in the development of instructional training technique which is founded on time-tested mountain and winter procedures.”

Two things happened in response to McNair’s letter. One is that Rolfe saw to it that nearly two hundred enlisted men and NCOs from the mountain regiments were dispatched to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, with the promise that upon being commissioned second lieutenants, they would return to serve with one of the mountain regiments. And in midsummer, Rolfe himself was sacked as commander of the mountain troops, replaced by Major General Lloyd Jones. The Missouri-born Jones, fifty-four years old with no previous skiing or mountaineering experience, and suffering from a chronic case of bronchitis, was not an obvious choice as Rolfe’s successor. But he was reputed to know something about cold weather fighting, having commanded the force of soldiers and sailors that occupied Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands in January 1943 in preparation for a future assault on Japanese-occupied islands in the chain. As for Pinkie Rolfe, he was reassigned to the post of deputy commander of the 71st Infantry Division and subsequently took part in the invasion of Germany in 1945.

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At the same time as the shift in command, the mountain infantry regiments finally acquired divisional status in July 1943. Although the original 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment had by this time been dispatched for duty elsewhere, there were now three infantry regiments at Hale: the 86th Regiment, activated on December 12, 1942; the 85th Regiment, activated on July 15, 1943; and, on what turned out to be temporary assignment, the 90th Regiment, also activated in mid-July, and drawing heavily on men who had previously trained with the 86th. The new division included a number of auxiliary units (including three battalions of field artillery, a medical battalion, a mountain engineer battalion, an anti-tank battalion, and a signal company). With the completion of the three-infantry regiment triangle, the 10th Light Division (Pack, Alpine) came into official existence—the “Light” in its name meaning both that at an authorized strength of roughly thirteen thousand men, it was smaller by about a thousand men than a regular army division, and that its heaviest artillery pieces, 75 mm howitzers, were of lesser caliber than the standard 105 mm and 155 mm weapons. The men of the division were authorized to wear a distinctive patch on their uniforms, two red bayonets crossed against a blue powder keg–shaped background, forming the Roman numeral ten. The following year, mountain troopers were authorized to wear their ski boots and ski caps off-base, another morale-builder.

With the creation of the 10th, the Mountain Training Center was now officially dissolved. A hundred-strong Mountain Training Group remained as its legacy. Although some of the Mountain Training Group’s personnel stayed on at Hale, others were dispatched to Seneca Rock, West Virginia, to instruct flatland troops in rock climbing and other outdoor skills. Soldiers from other units, meeting instructors from the 10th Mountain Division, were amazed at the low-key, non-military quality of the instruction. Sergeant James Goodwin of the Mountain Training Group, who came to Seneca Rock in 1943, recalled listening to another instructor, an Austrian refugee, gently encouraging some reluctant trainees to tackle a steep rock pitch. “Men, climbing rocks iss like making luff to vimen. It takes courage, but it’s lots uff fun!” The young men thought about that for a moment, and then all turned eagerly to the challenge.

Despite the fact that its authorized numbers were fewer than that of a regular division, the 10th remained understrength. The army had suspended the NSPS’s role in recruiting mountain troops in the summer of 1942, with the result that many qualified skiers and mountaineers joined other units. At the army’s request, the Ski Patrol resumed its recruiting efforts at the start of 1943, with the goal of gaining two thousand recruits in the space of ninety days to fill the ranks of the new 86th Regiment. Civilian skiers and mountaineers, along with rangers, trappers, timber cruisers, and other men with outdoor backgrounds, still headed to Camp Hale, but the NSPS was finding it necessary to dilute its standards to meet the quota. Minnie Dole, in an interview with a New York journalist in January 1943 about the recruiting effort, told him that the NSPS was “eager to contact husky schoolboys and collegians who have a burning desire to serve with mountain troops . . . Almost any Eagle scout has the makings of a mountain trooper.” It was under this loosened mandate that recruits like Marty Daneman came to serve in the 86th.

Recruitment efforts were aided by the mountain regiments’ skillful courtship of the press and public favor, overseen by public relations officer and filmmaker Captain John Jay. Jay’s documentary film about the training on Mount Rainier in 1942, They Climb to Conquer, and a 1943 follow-up, The Ski Patrol, wowed civilian audiences and were popular among the soldiers at Camp Hale, who enjoyed seeing themselves and their friends on the screen. At Jay’s behest, an attractive young skier named Debbie Bankart, one of the few female ski instructors before the war, took a print of The Ski Patrol on a national tour of schools and ski clubs, distributing application forms after each showing. She proved one of the 10th’s best recruiters.

Newspaper and magazine reporters were frequently invited to watch demonstrations of the skiing and climbing abilities of the troopers in the field. One early feature story that ran in the Denver Post in mid-January 1943 proclaimed in its headline, “Troops Training at Camp Hale Are Tough Triple-Threat Men; Must Be Able to Ski, Ride Mules and Use Mountain Motorized Equipment; None But Real He-Men Need Apply.” The Saturday Evening Post, a weekly magazine second only to Life in popularity and influence in the 1940s, devoted its cover for March 27, 1943, to an illustration of a kneeling ski trooper in white camouflage outerwear. The model for the cover was Horace Quick, a former Park Service ranger and member of the 87th Regiment. Purists noted that the stiff-soled mountain boots worn by troopers could not possibly bend in the middle as illustrated. But the image delighted Minnie Dole, who bought a thousand copies of the issue, and the cover was used as a poster to drum up interest in the mountain troops.

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Hollywood also helped, with a couple of films that celebrated the cinematically screen-pleasing maneuvers of the ski troops on their home territory. A 1943 Warner Bros. documentary short, the twenty-minute-long Mountain Fighters, filmed at Hale, featured a fictional lead character named “Sven Torger,” based on the real Torger Tokle, and included thrilling scenes of ski troopers schussing the slopes. It was followed in 1944 by Paramount’s I Love a Soldier, starring Paulette Goddard, a soppy feature film about a wartime courtship, mildly redeemed by still more thrilling downhill racing performed by some of the best skiers at Camp Hale. The official postwar History of the Mountain Training Center noted drily that as a result of the avalanche of favorable publicity cascading out of Camp Hale, “the average American citizen seemed more interested in the ‘ski troops’ . . . than was the War Department.”

Manufacturers also liked to link their corporate image to the mountain troops. The Goodyear rubber company ran a full-page advertisement in the weekly magazine Collier’s in the spring of 1944, depicting ice-ax-wielding troopers on high mountain ridges, taking the “‘High’ Way to Berlin,” with Bramani rubber soles on their combat boots, while Winchester firearms ran a similar advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post, depicting a skiing trooper with an M1 Garand rifle strapped to his back, describing such men as “the finest of our fighters . . . superb physical specimens.”

For all the glamour that clung to the ski troopers like a dusting of powder snow, the mountain regiments still faced a deficit of qualified recruits in the summer of 1943. Accordingly, over the next few months the army transferred several thousand non-volunteers to the ranks of the 10th, many of them assigned to the 90th. A large proportion of the newcomers were, in the mysterious logic of military decision making, drawn from southern units, along with a group of NCOs from Hawaii. Few of the transfers were happy to find themselves at Camp Hale or in the ski troops, and they radiated gloom. They were given the mocking nickname “Pineapple Boys” by more experienced mountaineers. Glen Dawson, a leading Sierra Club climber and skier assigned to the Mountain Training Group on joining the 10th, noted in his journal in November 1943: “At first most of the men here asked to come, but to fill up the division a large number were shanghaied and they hate it here. It seems like they are spoiling whatever morale the volunteers had.”

The youngest, rawest recruits often developed in a few months’ training an expertise in coping with mountainous terrain that many of their NCOs and officers failed to match. Marty Daneman, who less than eight months earlier had arrived at Hale with no outdoor experience at all, in December 1943 wrote to his girlfriend describing one officer’s back-country incompetence. On the second day of an overnight training exercise, his company was heading down a ridgeline back to Camp Hale when “the Major noticed that our artillery liaison officer was missing” and someone would need to climb back up the mountain to find him. “I was elected—so I climbed all the way up again, found the Lt., pondering over a map, & led him down. He was very much ashamed & I don’t blame him,” Daneman observed, before adding charitably, “tho it is easy to get lost up there.”

Among the wave of unwilling and incompetent additions to their ranks, the mountain troops also gained a few particularly well-suited recruits in 1943. One of their number was Paul Petzoldt, a Wyoming climber who, on the 1938 American K2 expedition, reached an elevation of over 26,000 feet on the world’s second-highest mountain before having to turn back. When Petzoldt arrived as a thirty-five-year-old private at Camp Hale, he was put to work scrubbing floors. A medical officer recognized his name and came up with a better assignment. He arranged for Petzoldt to be promoted to sergeant and put in charge of a squad to experiment with toboggans, zip lines, and other techniques for quick evacuation of the wounded from mountainous terrain. On maneuvers, where cases of frostbite were common, as well as the occasional broken leg, and in one case acute appendicitis, Petzoldt supervised evacuations.

Another celebrity figure in mountain sports arrived at Camp Hale in late May 1943. “Friedl Pfeifer, One-Time Head of Sun Valley, Joins Skiers,” the Ski-Zette trumpeted in a headline in the July 16, 1943, issue. The thirty-two-year-old Pfeifer had been first assistant ski instructor at Hannes Schneider’s Austrian resort at St. Anton for more than a decade when the Nazi Anschluss and Schneider’s arrest prompted him to flee to the United States. There he was hired by Averell Harriman to oversee the Sun Valley ski school, where he coached a string of Hollywood celebrities in the Arlberg technique, including the actress Claudette Colbert and actor Gary Cooper. For three years running, Pfeifer won the United States national slalom ski championship. He also fell in love with a Salt Lake City girl (daughter of a bank president, no less), whom he married in 1940. It was a seemingly idyllic life for a wartime refugee until, on an early morning two days after Pearl Harbor, federal agents pounded on his door, informed him he was being arrested as an enemy alien, put him in handcuffs, and hustled him away from his wife and newborn son. It was several weeks before his family secured his release from a North Dakota detention center. As a non-citizen with a wife and baby he could have sat out the war, but he chose instead to join the mountain troops, where he was among the most highly qualified of the 10th’s ski instructors, along with other St. Anton alumni like Luggi Foeger, Toni Matt, and Herbert Schneider. On an early training exercise in June, Pfeifer was part of a detachment that made a twenty-mile march across the mountains, ending up in the down-at-the-heels mining town of Aspen. Camping at the base of Aspen Mountain, he was reminded by the view of the mountains surrounding St. Anton am Arlberg in the Austrian Alps and, as he later put it, “felt at that moment an overwhelming sense of my future before me.”

Other newcomers to Camp Hale that spring and summer included a contingent of several hundred women from the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), soon renamed the Women’s Army Corps (or “WACs”). They served in positions from the mess halls to the hospital to the motor pool, freeing up male soldiers for other roles. They were a welcome addition, as far as the men of the 10th were concerned.

Not so another group who arrived toward the end of the summer—several hundred German prisoners of war. Robert Ellis, now serving with F Company of the 85th, reported to his family: “About 300 German prisoners were brought here the other day, and we see them being taken here and there in trucks, closely guarded of course. They look quite healthy and wear the hats of Rommel’s Africa Corps.” In addition to good health, the German prisoners seem to have retained high morale, marching smartly to and from labor assignments, singing as they did so. They did not behave like defeated men, and the Americans in the camp took their behavior as deliberately insolent. Some fantasized about turning their rifles from the targets on the firing range onto the passing columns of prisoners. Harris Dusenbery wasn’t among them, but wrote mildly to his wife in October, “The boys say that those prisoners fare a lot better than the soldiers do here.” Fraternization between the two groups was officially forbidden, but as far as the men of the 10th were concerned, the rule was unnecessary; they weren’t looking to make friends with the enemy.

In the winters of 1942–43 and 1943–44, there was no better place in the world to learn to ski than Camp Hale. Soon after it opened, New York Times reporter Frank Elkins wrote yet another column about his favorite wartime topic, the ski troopers. “These soldiers,” he noted in late January 1943, “receive the finest ski instruction in the world and get paid for it.” Army publicists probably had mixed feelings about the characterization; it would be attractive to recruits, but it reinforced a Camp-Hale-as-Sun-Valley theme they were not eager to promote. As a simple observation, though, it happened to be true.

Most new recruits began their ski training on B Slope, which rose from 9,300 feet at the south end of the camp to the top of scenic Taylor Hill, nearly twelve thousand feet high, which visually marked the end of the camp’s vista when seen from the valley floor. There were four skiing slopes located around the camp, each with its own five-hundred-foot rope tow, but B Slope, which faced north, had the best snowpack and was the most used. On B Slope, recruits learned cross-country skiing, climbing (sidestepping, kick turns, herringbone), and the basics of downhill technique. Twenty-year-old Brooklyn-born Arnold C. Holeywell arrived at Hale at the end of February 1943, assigned to E Company of the 86th. In early April he wrote to his mother, clearly thrilled with the training he was receiving: “Well, this starts 5th week here at Camp Hale! And this morning for the first time I went skiing. It was great! The sun these days is bright and hot. It sure adds to the pleasure of skiing. You don’t know the enjoyment of being able to ski in a place like this . . . We would ski for about 50 feet then stop in the shade of a pine and then start off again. What fun. I’m really enjoying this army life.”

After gaining familiarity with the basics on B Slope, the trainees that first winter at Hale moved up to Cooper Hill, above Tennessee Pass. (Later on, all instruction, including beginning skiing, would be offered on Cooper Hill.) Several dozen ski instructors, housed in barracks thrown up before the war for a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp, awaited the students. For an enlisted man, being designated a ski instructor was the best assignment in the mountain regiments. Dick Nebeker, just out of high school, arrived at Camp Hale in January 1943 to join C Company of the 86th Regiment, and without spending any time in basic, was immediately dispatched to Cooper Hill because of his previous experience as a ski instructor at the Alta ski area in Utah. “This was really living!” he recalled after the war. “I had a white tape armband to identify myself as a ski instructor. I could instruct and order lieutenants and captains, and was only 18.” The instructors had their own cook, handpicked by Walter Prager. As Nebeker remembered fondly, “We had good chow and slept in a warm barracks in our eider down sleeping bags.”

 

Dick Nebeker (left) with two other soldiers, Cooper Hill training area, 1943.

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Donald B. Potter was on the Williams College ski team, completing his third semester at the college in early 1943, when, like a lot of other Williams skiers, he decided to drop out and enlist in the mountain troops, initially assigned to B Company of the 86th. Within a few weeks of his arrival in March, he too was taken out of basic training to join the ski instructors on Cooper Hill. After his first day on the slopes, he wrote to his sister back in the Adirondacks, where he had learned to ski as a child, that being a ski instructor “is swell for one’s own skiing” and that he had already learned a “powerful lot.” He went on: “G.I. skiing is regular snow plow, stem & stem christies—it’s no different from any other controlled method (under such names as Arlberg, etc.) I have an advanced class, and it looks like I’ll have a chance to really make something out of them.”

Fresh from Fort Benning, Second Lieutenant Frederick C. Miller arrived at Hale in February 1943, initially assigned to B Company of the 87th Regiment. He had skied before the war so went directly to Cooper Hill. “This skiing we do each day is not exactly like the civilian skiing I used to do,” he wrote to his mother during his first month at Hale:

 

10th Mountain Division ski instructors, Cooper Hill.

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We have steep slopes, good tows and equipment and all, but it’s all done with 35-lb packs, so we may become used to them. . . I’m in an advanced class—the highest—and the instruction is given by men who last year were receiving $5 an hour [a very good wage in 1942] for the same job. My instructor is especially good—he comes from Hannes Schneider’s School at North Conway—Arthur Doucette . . . I never felt so well on skis before. As a matter of fact, I expect to be picked for special instruction and made an Officer Supervisor of enlisted instructors. Hope I can climb mountains half as well as I can ski down them.

For the recruits dispatched to Cooper Hill, getting there on foot was part of the training. On Monday mornings, troopers set out on a seven-mile march up Highway 24 wearing eighty- to ninety-pound packs, their skis attached to their knapsacks, and rifles slung over their shoulders. Once atop the pass, they would bivouac for the week in their two-man nylon tents. Every day for five days, they were out on the slopes eight hours a day, sometimes longer, taking the T-bar ride to the summit of Cooper Hill, making the mile-plus run to the base as their Austrian instructors bellowed, “Bend zee knees!,” and then lining up to do it again. Sometimes on clear nights they’d keep skiing in the moonlight until 8 or 9 p.m. On Fridays, they marched back down to camp. They would repeat the same routine the following week (and if they failed to master the basics, they might be back for a third week). At the end of ski training they took a proficiency test, which, given the quality of instruction, most of them passed. Marty Daneman, the self-described “ski trooper who didn’t know how to ski” when he arrived at Hale, felt that by the time he was done with B Slope and Cooper Hill, and passed the proficiency test, he “could ski with the best of them. Well almost.”

 

10th Mountain troopers with skis attached to rucksacks.

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In warmer weather, outdoor training shifted from the slopes to the cliffs east of camp, and another set of cliffs about three miles north of camp along Homestake Creek. There troopers learned the basics of rock climbing, including rope craft, five kinds of knots (overhand, square, butterfly, bowline on a bite, and bowline), belaying, rappelling, and the Tyrolean traverse. They had excellent equipment, better than that available to prewar civilian climbers. Harris Dusenbery wrote to his wife after attending rock climbing school in praise of the new nylon climbing ropes, which he described as “wonderful so soft and pliable . . . Also they have 10% stretch in them. This comes in very handy in breaking falls.” And the troopers had the benefit of instruction from some of the country’s leading climbers, although there were never quite enough of them.

Among the best-known climbers in the mountain troops was David Brower. In 1939 he and three other Bay Area climbers garnered national attention for the first ascent of Shiprock, a lofty isolated peak on New Mexico’s high desert plains, an achievement he chronicled in an article in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. Brower first arrived at Hale in late 1942 as a thirty-year-old private, departing in January for Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, and returning in May as a second lieutenant to an assignment as instructor with the 86th Regiment. Brower’s Manual of Ski Mountaineering, published by the University of California Press in 1942, was already a basic text for instructors throughout the 10th Mountain Division, and he contributed to writing the army’s own field manual for mountain fighting.

Most of the 10th’s rock climbing and mountaineering instructors had been active before the war in regional outdoor organizations like Brower’s Sierra Club in California, the New England–based Appalachian Mountain Club, and the Seattle-based Mountaineers. The outdoor clubs proudly publicized the military service of their members during the war. The December 1943 issue of the journal of the Mountaineers, for example, listed several hundred members then in uniform, mostly in the army (including twenty-year-old Seattle native Fred Beckey, a private with the medics in the 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment who arrived at Camp Hale in July, and who in a long postwar climbing career would be credited with over a thousand first ascents). The same issue of The Mountaineer included an article by another member serving in the military, Lieutenant John W. James, also of the 85th, who called Camp Hale “the ski school and mountaineering school of the world.” Climbing, unlike skiing, remained a fairly exotic pursuit in the United States in the 1930s, counting its enthusiasts in the thousands rather than the millions. And its leading figures never quite gained the celebrity of the star skiers of the prewar era—in part because climbing didn’t lend itself to dramatic film portrayals in the way skiing did. But the war would boost the popularity of mountaineering as well as skiing. In his article, Lieutenant James predicted that when peace came, many veterans of the 10th would continue to climb mountains “for their own enjoyment and exercise,” and that as a result, the “future of mountaineering is most surely in good hands.”

―

One other skill the mountain troops were expected to learn was how to care for, pack, and lead mules. While trucks and jeeps delivered supplies to soldiers on the front lines in flatland units, mules were better suited for the rough, roadless terrain that the mountain troops would encounter. Each regiment had attached to it a quartermaster company of full-time mule skinners, many of them former cowboys and including a couple of rodeo stars, along with several hundred mules. The pack artillery battalions attached to the division (the 604th, 605th, and 616th) drew their cadre from prewar artillery units in which artillerymen had long familiarity with mules and used them to transport their 75 mm pack howitzers, which broke down for transportation into six parts. The mule skinners of the quartermaster and artillery units were under strict orders not to mistreat the mules, and having spent enough time in their company, they knew how to get the most effort out of them. Individual artillerymen were assigned a single mule to care for, including grooming and feeding. There was never much love between men and mules, but as Sergeant Charles Webb of the 616th recalled, “Once a soldier and his animal became acquainted and accustomed to each other, it was better that the assignment did not change.”

The army thought it would be a good idea if regular mountain troopers also had some familiarity with mule packing. No one seems to have written home after time devoted to such training with much enthusiasm about the experience. Marty Daneman reported to girlfriend Lois in December 1943 at the start of his week of mule duty: “By the end of the week I should not only be a first rate mule skinner, but I should smell like 1 as well—There is nothing which smells as ‘sweet’ as a mule.” Harry Robert (Bob) Krear, twenty-one years old, a former member of the Pennsylvania State University ski team who joined L Company, 86th Regiment, in the fall of 1943, felt aggrieved after he was kicked in the stomach “by a mule that did not even know me, and I had not even uttered a bad word in its direction.” Earl E. Clark, a second lieutenant who had joined the 87th soon after its formation, was put in temporary charge of the mule pack trains bringing supplies up to the mountains during maneuvers in June 1943, a new experience for the young officer. It “introduced several thousand new cuss words into my vocabulary,” he noted in a letter home. First, the mule he was given as a riding mount tossed him into a very cold mountain creek. Then, during the first night out, all of the mules stampeded, many of them shedding their loads as they ran free, so that Clark and his men spent the hours until dawn gathering up the strays and reloading them with boxes of rations and ammunition that weighed between 80 and 110 pounds each. “What an animal!” he concluded, not affectionately.

In addition to their training in outdoor skills, the men of the 10th were also, of course, being trained to kill. Here too, Camp Hale’s location and climate turned out to be not entirely advantageous. Private John Parker Compton wrote to his brother Jim, a marine lieutenant, in late October 1943, a few weeks into basic, to report on his training on the firing range. His platoon had spent the week putting in thirteen-hour days, every day, practicing marksmanship with their newly issued M1 rifles: “Through rain, snow, and sleet 54 recruits in their third week trudged the two miles to the range—complete with knapsacks, rifles, and lunches. When we got there the sun was still behind the mountains, but there was light enough to start firing by seven-thirty. We all practiced till Thursday from 200, 300, and 500 yards . . . We fired kneeling and off hand from 200 yards, prone from 500, and prone, sitting, and rapid fire from 300. I forgot to mention rapid fire from the sitting position at 200 too.” On Friday they were tested (“record fire”), and Compton got the highest score in the platoon, qualifying as an expert at 189 out of 210, “only 6 points from the all-time camp record.” The M1, he concluded, “is a beautiful rifle. I clean it every night for an hour.”

Sometimes it was so cold the men could barely squeeze the trigger of their rifle, and sometimes the fog and blowing snow were so thick that the targets on the firing range disappeared from sight. Then weapons training shifted to fifty-foot indoor ranges built into concrete-walled training halls. Inside, soldiers could fire only .22-caliber rifles; missed shots from the heavier .30-caliber M1s would have soon chewed the wall behind the target to bits.

Camp Hale was a noisy place most days. When they weren’t on one of the base’s firing ranges (there were separate ranges for practicing with pistols and machine guns), the troopers might be found practicing tossing hand grenades. They assaulted pillboxes with flamethrowers, bazookas, and dynamite. They blew up barbed wire entanglements with Bangalore torpedoes. Trainees were also required to take what was called an “infiltration course,” which reminded Private Albert Brockman of “one of the scenes you see in the movies of the western front in the last war.” Except it was a lot more realistic than a movie, because while they were advancing on an entrenched “enemy” position, live machine gun bullets were being fired over the soldiers’ heads, and real dynamite charges were exploding to their left and right. Brockman offered a graphic description of the experience in a letter to his father:

When you first climb over the trench after hearing the machine gun bullets going over you would be surprised how low you can get to the ground. The bullets sound just like someone snapping their finger real loud when you are in a trench. You crawl forward about 5 feet and see two holes that have dynamite in them. There’s no way to go around so you go between them and about that time they go off, dirt showers down on you and you can’t hear anything. Then you come to a barbed wire fence and after you get through that you come to a trench filled with water. You climb through that and then the dynamite really start to go off and dirt comes down in torrents . . . Once a rock from one of the explosions hit my helmet and I thought it was a bullet. I ground my face in the dirt and left it there for the rest of the course . . . I was never so dirty in my life as when I finished that.

The reward for all the arduous training during the week, dependent on good behavior and passing inspection, was a weekend pass, available every other week, allowing soldiers thirty-six hours’ freedom off-base, from noon on Saturday to midnight on Sunday. Denver, the nearest big city, was a four-hour drive over mountain roads that were a questionable proposition in wintertime. The few soldiers with private automobiles could subsidize their own trips to the city by charging passengers from the camp a stiff one-way fare of between $1.50 and $3.50. Denver had restaurants and bars and movie houses and, at least compared to Hale, clean air and low altitude. The Brown Palace Hotel on 17th Street in downtown Denver, built in 1892 and famous for housing the “Unsinkable Molly Brown” after she survived the sinking of the Titanic, was a favorite if expensive place to stay. The men of the 10th did not endear themselves to the hotel’s management the night a group of them, equipped with the green army climbing ropes, famously demonstrated rappelling technique from a perch on a high balcony to the floor of the hotel’s atrium.

Colorado Springs to the southeast, and, like Denver, several thousand feet lower in elevation, was another favorite location for a weekend pass. Robert Ellis got his first weekend leave after two months of training and reported to his family that it was “absolutely wonderful to get away from camp and its interminable routine for a few days.” With three friends from his company, he’d “had the grandest time just laughing and talking and walking in the parks and avenues. It’s a beautiful resort town and would be a great place to spend a real vacation.”

Leadville was much closer, forty-five minutes away by bus, but because of its reputation for prostitution and illegal gambling was off-limits to soldiers until February 1943, when, supposedly, the worst illicit attractions had been contained. The authorities made a show of closing down the most notorious commercial offenders against public order and morality, and wholesome alternatives were promoted, like the shows and dances for the soldiers sponsored by the local USO club. For the most part, though, the main attractions remained bars and brothels.

College and fraternity affiliations provided some soldiers with opportunities for off-base relaxation with those from similar backgrounds. “Nine of us from Williams went to Glenwood [Springs] this weekend,” nineteen-year-old Private Donald Potter wrote his mother a few months after arriving at Hale. “We stayed at the Summers’ ranch. George Summers is a fraternity brother so they are glad to have any Williams men and especially Sigs. They have an amazing place—a peeled log summer mansion with every gadget imaginable. We did some riding, lots of singing and plenty of relaxing on a nice green lawn.”

Some soldiers got off the beaten track and had genuine adventures in doing so. Among them was Private Arnold Holeywell of Brooklyn. On a Saturday in early September, he set off shortly after noon with a buddy, hitchhiking to Grand Junction, nearly two hundred miles away at the confluence (hence “junction”) of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers in western Colorado. It took the two troopers seven hitches and eight hours to reach the town, and after checking in to a hotel they made their way to the Cone Inn, a local dancehall. Denver and Leadville streets were crowded with men in uniform, but for at least this one weekend, not so Grand Junction. That proved advantageous. Holeywell wrote home to his mother: “I must say it was really great because we were the only GI’s in the town and we had the pick of any of the girls. After looking the situation over we saw two very attractive girls. We invited them over to our table and struck up a good conversation.” Several hours of talking, drinking, and dancing ensued, before they escorted the young ladies home to their respective parents’ houses, with another date set for the next morning. “You know you have to work fast on a 36 hour pass,” twenty-year-old Holeywell confided. “You can’t waste any time and we didn’t.” Which wasn’t quite as racy an observation as it sounded in what was, after all, a letter to his mother. The next day they took their new female acquaintances out on Grand Lake in a speedboat lent to them by the father of one of the girls, and after the weather turned bad, the novice sailors accepted a tow from another boat back to the yacht club. “What fun,” Holeywell concluded. “We were the talk of the town.” All that, and the two happy troopers still managed to get back to Camp Hale before the midnight deadline on Sunday.

With limited opportunities for relaxation off-base, the morale of Camp Hale’s soldiers depended to a large extent on what went on in camp and the immediate vicinity. The camp had an enlisted men’s club, NCO club, and officers’ club. There were three movie theaters, each of which offered two shows nightly. There was a recreation center with bowling alleys, pool tables, and a soda fountain. In the course of 1943, USO tours brought Hollywood actresses like Jinx Falkenburg and Jane Wyman to camp to entertain the troops. World heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, an army sergeant, fought an exhibition match in October (and, in the rigidly segregated US Army, may have been the only black soldier to visit Camp Hale during the war).

Some of the speakers who came to Hale to give public lectures reflected the special interests of the camp’s residents. German-born Fritz Wiessner, a naturalized US citizen since 1935, and probably the best overall climber in the United States throughout the preceding decade (and also the exclusive manufacturer of the wax the troopers applied to their skis), gave an illustrated talk about the expedition he had led to K2 in 1939. “The Himalayas sure are terrific looking mountains,” Donald Potter wrote enthusiastically to his mother after hearing Wiessner’s talk. “This man came within 100' of reaching the summit . . . The pictures were marvelous and he was awful interesting.”

Then there were those who made their own entertainment, like eighteen-year-old Stuart Abbott, a former Boy Scout and avid amateur naturalist (he volunteered at the Field Museum of Natural History as a high school student in Chicago), who arrived at Hale as a member of L Company, 86th Regiment, in December 1943. Within days he wrote home to a seventeen-year-old Chicago friend, urging him to enlist in the mountain troops on his next birthday. Camp Hale, he admitted, “is a long way from no place & that doesn’t help those who feel they have to see the bright lights.” But Abbott found living in “more or less of a wilderness” enchanting, marveling at the deer tracks that came right to the edge of camp, and the mountain lakes, now frozen over, that he was sure would teem with trout come spring. The state of Colorado awarded soldiers the same hunting privileges as state residents, and on an army base there was no shortage of weapons. Abbott intended to take full advantage: “Here is the chance to put to practice all your dreams of the past about camping hunting etc. Of course your time is limited but I am determined to make the most of the weekends. You can hunt all you please . . . One of the boys that came in with me has gone out after snow-shoe rabbits this afternoon with a borrowed carbine & stolen ammo. Nobody cares, it is a common enough practice with little risk attached.”

And in addition, there was skiing and climbing; the very things that the men trained hard at during the week were also available for weekend diversions. Stan and Jean Cummings took full advantage. Stan Cummings was one of the lucky few who had a spouse accompany him to Camp Hale. Both he and his wife, Jean, were 1940 college graduates, he from Brown University, she from Pembroke College. Marrying the summer following graduation, they moved to Chicago, where Stan went to law school and Jean pursued a master’s degree in science. He arrived at Camp Hale in the summer of 1943, age twenty-five, assigned to A Company in the 85th, and was soon promoted to staff sergeant. Jean followed him soon after, finding a civil service job on the base, first as a clerk-typist and then as a lab technician in the hospital. They spent almost every weekend on one outdoor adventure or another, which Jean chronicled in letters to Stan’s parents. In late September her husband took her rock climbing for the first time, on the same one-hundred-foot-high cliffs to the northeast of camp where he had learned the basics only a few weeks earlier. “I went up and down places with no trouble at all that Stan said some of the fellows got scared over and wouldn’t even try,” she wrote proudly. “As you can see we lead kind of a strenuous life out here—I’m sore from something after nearly every week-end.” Three months later, just after the New Year, they spent a day on Cooper Hill: “We went up in a truck with a bunch of other fellows and there was a terrific crowd there the whole afternoon. I have never seen really good skiers before, but on that hill were the champion skiers of the world. I was always afraid they would bump into me but as Stan said, they have such perfect control that they can stop on a dime. Of course, there were also some of the worst skiers in the world, which includes me.”

 

Ski troopers outside the Jerome Hotel in Aspen, Colorado.

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Others went farther afield on weekends to ski at Steamboat Springs in Colorado or even Alta, an eight- to ten-hour drive away in Utah. Charlie McLane, back from Officer Candidate School, brought a station wagon with him to camp, and he, Percy Rideout, and three or four others would somehow make the round trip in a weekend, putting in a full day’s skiing in the deep powder, and still be back in time for 6 a.m. reveille Monday morning. Aspen, which had so enchanted Friedl Pfeifer on first view, soon became a favorite of Camp Hale’s best skiers, although it was an eighty-two-mile drive on a roundabout route through the intervening mountains. The Jerome Hotel provided cheap lodging, and a lethal concoction called the “Aspen Crud,” combining a milkshake with bourbon, proved a favorite after-ski drink. And the skiing was glorious. Pfeifer was not alone among the mountain troopers in thinking that Aspen would figure in their postwar lives. He and Percy Rideout dropped by a meeting of the Aspen Town Council and hatched plans for a postwar ski resort that they thought had the potential to rival Sun Valley in elite appeal.

But before anybody’s postwar dreams could be realized, there was a war to be won. And it wouldn’t be won in Aspen. It did not escape the attention of the men of the 10th in 1943 that while they were out skiing, others wearing the same uniform were fighting and dying. Denis Nunan, a thirty-two-year-old private from New York, had served with C Company of the 87th since Fort Lewis days. In January 1943, a year after his enlistment, he was excited by rumors that the mountain troops would soon depart for an invasion of Norway, but those proved false. At that moment the only ground fighting in the European theater was in North Africa, where American and British troops had landed the previous November. The US Army ran into trouble as it pushed eastward into Tunisia, and was bloodied by the veteran soldiers of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. In February, watching Camp Hale troops in camouflage whites serving as extras for the filming of the Warner Bros. pseudo-documentary The Mountain Fighters, Nunan wrote to his mother and wondered about the propriety of “us parading up and down in front of a camera, while the boys in Africa are being pushed all over the map!”

In fact, a feeling of sitting uselessly on the sidelines began to grip the mountain troopers as the months passed at Camp Hale and contributed to declining morale. It was one of the reasons why increasing numbers of 10th Division men sought to transfer to other units. “Everyone here seems to be trying for a transfer to the air corps,” John Parker Compton wrote his parents in November 1943. “2 more fellas went to the paratroops,” Marty Daneman wrote to girlfriend Lois in December 1943. “I may go too.” According to one informed estimate, of the nearly eighteen thousand men who trained as mountain troopers at one point or another at Camp Hale between December 1942 and June 1944, almost ten thousand were gone for one reason or another (from Pando Hack to voluntary transfer) before the division was shipped overseas in December 1944, a 54.8 percent attrition rate.

Historians have long debated what motivated the soldiers who fought in the Second World War. Was it essentially a matter of loyalty to the men with whom they served—“primary group” or “small unit” cohesion? Or was there a broader sense of agreement and association with a greater cause—patriotism, anti-fascism, the “Four Freedoms”—that underlay their willingness to risk their lives? For a long time the consensus lay with the former; in more recent scholarship the pendulum seems to have swung back toward the latter. In letters from Camp Hale, mountain troopers rarely spoke about war aims as such. But occasionally they did. Some ski troopers were well aware of the stakes involved in the life-and-death struggle overseas to determine the fate of the world, as can be seen in their reaction to the “Why We Fight” documentaries produced by Frank Capra during the war.

Oscar-winning Hollywood director Capra (It Happened One Night, 1934; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) enlisted in the army in December 1941. Assigned to the Army Signal Corps, he was given an assignment directly from General George C. Marshall to produce a series of films illuminating American war aims, to be shown to soldiers as part of their basic training. Capra conceived of the series as a “counterattack” on Nazi propaganda films, especially Leni Riefenstahl’s celebration of the Nazi Party’s annual Nuremberg rally in her 1935 documentary Triumph of the Will. The first in Capra’s series, Prelude to War, came out in 1942; the last, War Comes to America, was finished in 1945. In between were several films focused on specific theaters of war: Britain, China, and Russia. The last, titled The Battle of Russia and released in 1943, featured graphic footage of the fighting in Leningrad and Stalingrad, as well as Nazi atrocities against Russian civilians. It was shown to Marty Daneman’s company at Camp Hale in December 1943. Afterwards, Daneman wrote to Lois, sharing his reaction: “This morning we saw a picture on the battle of Russia. . . Did you ever feel hate—I mean real hate & the desire to kill people. That’s the way this picture makes you feel about the Germans & you can’t help it. Not when you see pictures of the 10–11 year old girls they’ve raped & the frozen bodies of murdered civilians. It’s really horrible darling & I’m glad that scenes like those won’t ever take place in America.” Daneman’s response may have been atypical; many soldiers probably welcomed training films on any subject, chiefly as an opportunity to sit in a warm, dark theater and make up a little for lost sleep. That Daneman was Jewish, making him a distinct minority within the mountain troops, may also have inclined him to greater sensitivity to the horror of Nazi atrocities, even if in 1943 the full extent of the Holocaust remained obscure outside occupied Europe.

Of course, the mountain troops also drew an unusually high proportion of foreign-born soldiers whose homelands had been conquered or annexed by Germany, men like Norwegian Torger Tokle and Austrians Herbert Schneider, Ernst Engel, and brothers Rupert and Werner von Trapp, whose family’s flight from the Nazis would later be celebrated, and considerably romanticized, in The Sound of Music. Earlier in 1943, the Ski-Zette featured a four-part series by an Austrian Jewish refugee serving as an NCO in the 10th, chronicling the persecution of Jews in Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938. He wrote anonymously, in an effort to protect relatives still at risk in his homeland. Drawing on personal experience, he described the confiscation of his apartment by a Nazi official, and his subsequent imprisonment. Such firsthand accounts, from men they knew, were probably more believable to skeptical 10th Mountain soldiers than official propaganda.

Harris Dusenbery, newly recruited to the 86th, may have seen the same screening of Capra’s Battle of Russia as Daneman; in any case, he too wrote home that December to his wife, Evelyn, to share his thoughts on the larger question of “Why We Fight.” A Reed College graduate, twenty-nine years old when he enlisted, married and with a child born before Pearl Harbor, he could have stayed at home in Portland, Oregon, with a draft exemption. But for his own reasons, including the fact that he had two brothers in the service, he volunteered for the mountain troops. He hoped for a combat infantryman assignment in the belief that he “could expect a greater measure of freedom in the ski troops as a simple rifleman” than in other military occupations. At Camp Hale, Dusenbery was reading the Meditations of the Roman Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, which he must have packed in his bag when he left home because it was unlikely to be found in the post library. He was much taken with the ideals of Stoicism, especially the belief that although human beings have little control over what happens to them, they have much control over how they respond to what happens to them. “The best way of avenging thyself,” Marcus Aurelius argued, “is not to become like the wrong-doer”—a good philosophy for a soldier.

Like Daneman, Dusenbery believed the Allied cause was just and worth fighting for, but he had qualms about the way the argument over war aims was presented in films like the “Why We Fight” series. As he explained to Evelyn in a letter written the week before Christmas 1943:

The army tries to teach us to hate our enemies. But as far as I’m concerned . . . these attempts at indoctrination of emotion have completely failed. I can get roused up about and hate Fascism with a great good will and also the leaders of those governments arouse similar feelings. But to hate the German people or the Japanese people or even the German soldier or Japanese soldier, I seem to be utterly incapable of doing that. I can imagine a family in Berlin just like my own worshipping the same Christ we do and attempting to celebrate Christmas under the most trying circumstances, waiting in fear for the sirens, indicating that the RAF is again coming over . . . To be asked to hate a people is foolish and primitive. The same applies to the people in Japan.

Dusenbery’s efforts to sort out the ethics of warfare in terms of both Christian theology and Hellenistic philosophy may seem a little eccentric, even by the unusual intellectual standards of the 10th—but then the 10th was an outfit where eccentrics like Dusenbery could feel reasonably at home.

Dusenbery may have had another reason for rereading Marcus Aurelius in the winter of 1943. If the mountain troops were ever going to fight anywhere, the homeland of Marcus Aurelius increasingly seemed the likeliest bet. From July 1943 through the first week of June 1944, the big news from the European theater of war, at least in terms of ground combat, was the Italian campaign, first in the invasion and conquest of Sicily in July and August. That thirty-eight-day campaign proved a harbinger of hard fighting to come. Though badly outnumbered, the Germans forced their adversaries to pay a heavy price (over twenty thousand casualties) for victory, making skillful use of the island’s mountainous terrain to delay the Allied advance. The invasion sparked Benito Mussolini’s overthrow, but it also brought German troops pouring southward through the Brenner Pass to occupy their former ally.

The next step in the Allied campaign to bring the war to what British prime minister Winston Churchill optimistically described as the “soft underbelly” of Hitler’s empire came when the British 8th Army crossed the Straits of Messina from Sicily to the toe of the Italian boot on September 3, followed by the American 5th Army landing at Salerno just south of Naples on September 9. Men from the 10th followed the war news from Italy closely. “General Clark Leads American British Troops at Landing at Naples; Nazi Resistance Stiff,” read the headline in the Camp Hale Ski-Zette two days after the Salerno landings.

A few days after the Allied landings in Italy, and a simultaneous Red Army offensive to capture and cross the Dnieper River, Private Robert Ellis of L Company, 86th Regiment, wrote home: “The war seems to be going pretty well, and we’re counting on the Russians to break through. The view here is pretty optimistic with most people—officers included, thinking it will be over by this time next year.”

Allied intelligence analysts expected to meet little Italian resistance in the invasion of the mainland, about which they were correct. On September 8 it was announced that the Italian regime had signed an armistice officially taking Italy out of the war. By the beginning of October, the 8th Army captured the port of Bari and the airfields at Foggia in the east, and the 5th Army captured the port of Naples in the west. The Allies expected a rapid German withdrawal to ensue, and to be in Rome before the end of October at the latest. In that they proved sadly mistaken.

The Italian boot proved anything but a soft underbelly. Instead of withdrawing, the Germans, commanded by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, dug in along a defensive line, dubbed the Gustav Line, stretching from the Tyrrhenian Sea along the western coast to the Adriatic Sea in the east, with the area around Monte Cassino in the southern Apennines the most strongly held. What had been envisioned as a war of maneuver and mobility now turned into a bloody slugging match that soon came to be compared to trench warfare on the western front in the First World War. Except there were no mountains on the western front to contend with. A famous Bill Mauldin cartoon that ran in the army newspaper Stars and Stripes in December 1943 showed his dog-faced GI protagonists, Willie and Joe, looking distinctly confused as they cling for dear life to a sheer rock face and their sergeant gives the order to “Hit th’ dirt, boys!” Hanson Baldwin, the New York Times’ chief military correspondent, a journalist not given to Mauldin’s biting irony, would comment in a year-end summary of war news that “it is a great shame there are so many mountains in Italy.”

 

“Hit th’ dirt, boys!”

Cartoon by Bill Mauldin, Stars and Stripes, December 16, 1943.

© 1943 BY BILL MAULDIN. COURTESY OF BILL MAULDIN ESTATE LLC.

 

If there was one thing that the men of the 10th understood, it was mountains and the challenges they presented. Already in mid-November 1943, John Parker Compton, G Company, 86th Regiment, was writing to his parents: “I’m beginning to think there’s much too much over-optimism about the war . . . If things keep going very slow in Italy, I may find myself in the Austrian Alps next summer.” As a prediction of the 10th Mountain Division’s future, he was off by about a year.

As 1943 drew to a close, some familiar but long-absent mountain troopers returned to Camp Hale, the men of the 87th Regiment. They had been deployed six months earlier to fight in one of the strangest and most obscure campaigns of the Second World War. The story they had to tell of where they had been and what they had experienced over the past half year was not a happy one.

Lieutenant Earl E. Clark, Camp Hale.

THE DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY (TMD431)