Bowerman and the Men of Oregon Page 10

  Perhaps not coincidentally, Barbara was soon pregnant. Keeping pace down the block was MarAbel Frohnmayer. The Frohnmayers were delivered of their first child, Mirajean, in 1938. A month later Barbara gave birth to a son, Jon.

  Life in Medford in those years was so good that, in the memories of all involved, it would seem like no time at all until war clouds thickened. “We were in Eastern Oregon with Jon,” Bowerman would recall. “On the Sunday, we were driving back to Medford and heard the Japanese had come on in and dropped the bombs on Pearl Harbor.” Looking over at Barbara, Bill simply executed a U-turn. “I just drove right to Vancouver Barracks and took a physical, and went back to Medford for a month while they decided what to do with me.”

  Because he’d been in ROTC and the Army Reserve, he was made a second lieutenant and assigned to Ft. Lawton, near Seattle. The camp was essentially a staging ground for sending troops to Alaska, where an invasion was expected.

  “But they classified me limited duty,” Bowerman would remember with disgust. “I’ve got a scar on my left eye. I got it when I was a boy, ten or twelve, playing mumblety-peg. All it did was nick it. Hell, I could see like an eagle. But they gave me theatre officer, athletic officer. I was doing everything except washing the dishes.”

  Their second son, Jay, was born December 17, 1942, a year into Bill’s war. Barbara would remember her husband “chafing at the bit, wishing he could go with the men he was always sending off.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Tenth Mountain Division

  JAY’S BIRTH WAS NOT THE ONLY SIGNIFICANT EVENT FOR LIEUTENANT Bowerman that December: He finally got an assignment he could sink his teeth into. In January 1943, the family left Ft. Lawton and drove to Southern California, where they found a little house for Barbara and the kids on the beach at Topanga Canyon.

  Bill then took a train to Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colorado, elevation 9,500 feet. Arriving in February, Lieutenant Bowerman was sent to the just-forming Eighty-Sixth Regiment, which was joining the Eighty-Seventh Regiment in making up what would become the US Army’s Tenth Mountain Division. (The Eighty-Fifth Regiment would be activated in July.)

  Commissioned at Ft. Lewis in December 1941, the Tenth had been created to give the United States a counterpart to the Finnish soldiers on skis who had been so effective against the Russians in the 1939–40 Winter War. With Charles Minot “Minnie” Dole using his National Ski Patrol to recruit for it, the Army would assemble the nation’s best skiers, climbers, forest rangers, even falconers. It would then wash out huge percentages of them to find and anneal the toughest for mountain combat.

  Its first volunteers had vacated college ski teams and resort slopes worldwide to become the cadre that would teach those next in line. Indeed, the Tenth’s very first officer was former Oregon ski coach Paul Lafferty. So when Bowerman sensed he could be stuck showing movies for the duration, he had begun a vigorous correspondence with his fellow Beta. Bowerman would never be a great skier, but his years at Crater Lake had taught him the basics, so Lafferty expedited Bill’s transfer to the Tenth’s mountain training center at Camp Hale. It didn’t hurt that Bill knew a little about mules; they were to be the unit’s prime means of supply.

  By the time Brigadier General George Price Hays took formal command of the division in late November 1944, the 14,000 men of the Tenth had survived three years of Darwinian trial. In Hays, who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in World War I and had commanded an artillery division on D-day at Omaha Beach, the Tenth had a leader fully capable of welding its smart, polyglot, outspokenly independent troops into an effective tactical weapon. During his first meeting with his officers and noncoms, Hays would earn an approving roar with the remark, “Hey, if you’re going to risk your life, you might as well do it in good company.”

  Lieutenant Bowerman was made a platoon leader in First Battalion, C Company. Among the lifelong friends he would gain from the Tenth was another Bill, Bill Boddington, the CO (commanding officer) of A company. They bonded for a host of reasons. Both were over thirty, far more seasoned than the usual lieutenant. Boddington, too, had employed his connections, having pleaded with Minnie Dole in a New York elevator for a slot in the ski troops. And Boddington twice had been on the US Olympic men’s field hockey team. In fact, during the Berlin Olympics in 1936 he had come within a few feet of Adolf Hitler. “There was a reception,” he told Bowerman, “and we all marched in and he gave us the old Nazi salute. I was so close I could have reached out and hit him.”

  “Well,” said Bowerman, “let’s get you another chance.”

  They were classic Tenth material. As Barbara would describe it, “The Tenth was like an Ivy League club—a mixture of Regular Army leaders and citizen soldiers, some from expensive colleges. Occasionally officers objected to noncoms coming in the officers’ club. But some corporals were world-class heroes to men like Bill, who were only officers because they’d been in ROTC. Bill would host these great skiers and be frowned upon by the colonels.”

  Camp Hale’s barracks housed 17,000 men and 3,900 horses and mules. On clear days the view was glorious, but the little Pando Valley was so hemmed in by peaks that the air grew polluted from coal smoke and troop trains. Bill and his men coughed for weeks with “the Pando hack.” General Lloyd Jones, the Tenth’s first CO, took over in July 1943. He later developed a bronchial condition that worsened in Camp Hale’s smog and was replaced by General Hays in 1944.

  Bill and his men learned military skiing and snowshoeing. Testing the equipment and themselves, they climbed peaks, rappelled cliffs, and struggled through deep powder under huge rucksacks. The attrition rate was inhuman. In eighteen months, one sergeant trained 1,100 men to get 184 for his company.

  The men of the Tenth got to try out the first snowmobiles and snowcats. They fired “pack howitzers,” 75 mm cannon that would break down into six parts—one per pack mule, with more mules to carry ammunition. That arrangement required 1,200 mules per battalion. Bowerman became an S-4, the regimental supply officer, and Boddington his assistant. “I was the proud owner of 200 mules,” Bowerman would remember. Fortunately, some champion rodeo cowboys had been sent to help.

  In April 1943, Bill wrote Barbara to come stay nearby. She threw the boys and a playpen in the back of their Ford station wagon and soon found lodging in Glenwood Springs, thirty miles away. The men could leave camp on weekends, so from Friday afternoon to 4 a.m. Monday mornings Glenwood Springs was Party Central. “It was not the life we’d ever lived,” Barbara would remember. “It was tremendously exciting. I indulged too, mildly.” Barbara had never had a drink of alcohol until the war, never drank coffee until the war. “But it all heightened the drama,” she would say. “Everything was important, everything could end tomorrow, so everyone savored. Most in the crowd were college kids.” No account of the much-memorialized Tenth leaves out its love of song. The men belted out cadence chants while in the mountains and wrote and rewrote lyrics for the tunes brought by Austrian or Nordic skiers

  In the din, Oregonians sought one another. Paul and Jeanne Lafferty were already old friends of Bill’s, Paul as a fraternity brother and Jeanne because Bill had helped her through chemistry class. Lafferty’s younger brother, Ralph, had gone to Eugene’s University High when Bill was doing his student teaching at Oregon. During the week, Bowerman and Ralph Lafferty had the two front rooms in a Bachelor Officers’ Quarters at Hale, where they’d booby-trap the hall with crisscrossed skis, Lafferty would say, “just to hear people crash when they came in late.”

  That summer, at age thirty-two, Bill felt he was in the best physical condition of his life. He ran in the Army and was the division champion in the 440. Against an all-black division with one Olympian, though, he was fourth. His best time in the service equaled his best at Oregon, 48.8 seconds.

  In the fall of 1943, Bill was ordered to a six-week officer-training course at Ft. Benning, Georgia. He returned to Camp Hale a captain, in plenty of time for a physical ordeal that would surpass anyth
ing they would experience in the war. On March 26, 1944, the entire division, 12,000 strong, their long, flat-board skis tied atop their heads like little steeples, trudged out into the wilderness for maneuvers called the “D-Series.” For six weeks they would bivouac and war game in the open, often above 13,000 feet. As soon as they were exposed in the snowfields, a blizzard hit and it fell to thirty below. No fires were permitted. More than a hundred men with frostbite had to be evacuated in one night.

  Bowerman, his metabolism burning huge meals as if he were on hay crew, was in his element. He stayed clearheaded in the high camps, even improving on the Army’s way of supplying troops on ridges, leading his mules in shortcuts across the valleys. It was a matter of sheer survival. The men’s boots froze to their feet and the ones who got altitude sickness were washed out. “But Bill just gloried in that,” Barbara would say.

  The division passed every test, endured every extreme, and marched singing into camp fit for war. But the Army in it’s wisdom would leave the Tenth without a mission for a while yet.

  That momentous spring of 1944, while the Allies were moving slowly up the Italian boot, while the Russians were crushing German lines on the Eastern Front, while the Normandy invasion, at terrible cost, made it a three-front war in Europe, Bowerman and his men felt doomed to shiver in Colorado, playing no part. Insult was added that summer when the men, so acclimated to cool mountains, were entrained to the hundred-degree heat and humidity of Camp Swift, Texas, thirty-eight miles east of Austin. “They had washed out those who couldn’t stand the altitude,” Barbara would observe. “Now they washed out those who couldn’t stand the heat.”

  Their mules, meanwhile, were shipped off to Burma and Bowerman’s men later had to break hundreds of new mules that had spent months in boxcars. “Mules that have been sitting around for a while are just like a bunch of kids,” Bowerman would say. “They raise hell as soon as you turn them loose.” Jon Bowerman, then five, would never forget: “Mules were stampeding up and down the street, and the Missouri and Arkansas mule skinners were running around yelling things you could hardly understand and it was better if you didn’t.”

  Then, late in 1944, with the Germans dug in for the winter in the mountains of Italy, someone figured out how to put the Tenth to work. They finally had a mission and they were shipping out across the Atlantic. Bowerman’s Eighty-Sixth Regiment had two weeks’ notice. For Barbara, this good-bye was the most daunting test of her positivism. She could hardly believe her prayers would keep him safe.

  Just before they went overseas, Bowerman was made a major, a staff officer at division headquarters in S-2, intelligence. Then he developed a hernia and had to go into the hospital. He was not there very long and was well on the mend, but when he got back to headquarters, Ralph Lafferty would recall, “the chief of staff, a West Pointer he’d offended somehow, said they were full, so he had to go back to supply, and all those mules.”

  The 2,000 troops and thirty-five officers of the division’s Eighty-Sixth Regiment sailed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, on December 10, 1944. At sea, their orders were revealed, and applauded. They were going to Italy. On December 23, they landed at starving, bombed-out Naples and took a rusty Italian freighter north to Livorno.

  In January 1945, the Tenth took up positions beside the Fifth Army, which was stalemated against the Germans in a valley in the Apennine Mountains, central Italy’s corrugated spine. The Allied forces’ main objective was highway 64, the north/south road connecting Pistoia, which they held, and Bologna, which they did not. If the next ten miles of mountains could be taken, including a series of three peaks—Monte Belvedere, Monte Gorgolesco, and Monte della Torraccia—the road into the vast, flat Po Valley would be open and the Germans would have to retreat to the Alps. Four times Allied infantry had taken Mt. Belvedere. Four times they had been thrown back. The American Fifth Army could neither shell the Germans off the heights nor break through their lines below.

  When Hays reported for duty, Major General Lucian K. Truscott, recently given command of the Fifth, informed him that the Tenth’s assignment was first to capture Mt. Belvedere, “then proceed by stages to capture all the high ground to a position east of the town of Tolè.” When Hays asked Truscott, “Who is going to share the bullets with us when we attack?” Truscott answered, “No one.”

  Hays soon determined that the key to a successful assault on Mt. Belvedere and points north lay in first taking a 31⁄2-mile-long, 2,000-foot-high mass of shale and scrub oak—the Mt. Manzinello-Pizzo di Campiano Ridge, later codenamed Riva Ridge—which overlooked Mt. Belvedere. From Riva Ridge, the Germans could rain artillery and mortar fire down upon the Allies. Indeed, the Germans had been so successful in stopping the Fifth’s advance that they regarded their positions on Riva Ridge as impregnable.

  Hays sent the best scouts in the Eighty-Sixth to find out if that was really the case. One was eighteen-year-old John Skillern from Eugene, Oregon. “Skillern was a hell of a soldier,” Bowerman would recall, “He was one of my recon men and he was so good that he got bumped up to sergeant. ’Course he was just a kid. Every time he absorbed too much Chianti he’d screw up and we would have to make a private out of him again. But he reconnoitered that thing.”

  At sunset, before Skillern and the others set out, Bowerman put his binoculars on the east face of Riva Ridge, a connected series of peaks that wouldn’t look out of place in Wheeler County. The side facing him across the Dardagna River was an eroded cliff, 1,500-feet high, climbable in a place or two, but mostly brittle shale, scree, waterfalls, and ugly ravines, all glazed with slippery ice. At the top were Germans with their binoculars trained on him.

  The next day, Skillern and the other scouts returned safely. “Skillern came back and said it wasn’t impregnable at all,” Bowerman would recount. “He’d impregnated it himself. He’d impregnated the hell out of it. There were no Germans up there at night.”

  Over the next few weeks, as more patrols identified five routes to the top and even strung ropes up a few bad spots, the men of the Eighty-Sixth studied models of the ridge and worked out transit times and deadlines in preparation for the planned night attack, the most difficult of military operations.

  At 7:30 p.m. on February 18, 1945, with guns unloaded so no accident would give them away, in single file, 700 men of the Eighty-Sixth’s First Battalion began to climb. Their orders were to control the ridge by daylight. To illuminate the ridge without giving their positions away, the division shone searchlights not on the ridge but on nearby clouds, creating artificial moonlight. The significance of this was grasped by no one on top, although the Germans did spot one company and fired on it. The Americans had the discipline to not shoot back, and the defenders left the area without sounding the alarm. After a few nerve-racking hours, men began to crest the ridge, help their fellows up, load their weapons, and prepare to make their presence known.

  At dawn, a heavy fog rolled in, obscuring the advancing Americans as they went from bunker to dugout to gun emplacement, waking Germans with grenades or turning their own machine guns on them as they emerged. But the men of the Tenth were relatively few and facing a battle-hardened corps scattered over miles of ridgeline. The Germans regrouped almost instantly. The four mini-peaks composing the ridge all saw desperate combat for their possession.

  It was one thing to take Riva Ridge. It was another to hold it against the mortars and artillery and tenacious counterattacks of the Germans, who flooded up the gentle west slope. The experience of Lieutenant James Loose, a platoon leader from Cleveland, was typical. The Germans attacked Loose’s platoon all that day and four times that night. By their second night on the ridge, his men were out of grenades and almost out of ammunition. They had to call in pack howitzer artillery to within ten yards of their own foxholes to keep from being overrun. Loose’s platoon accounted for twenty-seven German dead. Each of his men received the Bronze Star, Loose the Silver.

  Bowerman all this time was helping load climbing teams with ninety-pou
nd packs of ammunition and rations for Loose and the other fighters. A few embattled US units on top, who’d been told they’d be relieved and resupplied after twenty-four hours, weren’t reached for eight days.

  Meanwhile, even before the Eighty-Sixth’s assault on Riva Ridge began, the division’s remaining regiments, the Eighty-Fifth and Eighty-Seventh, had begun moving into place against their primary objective. Traveling only under cover of darkness, they made their way to the long mass of rock, shaped like an undulant caterpillar whose three peaks were Mt. Belvedere, Mt. Gorgolesco, and Mt. della Torraccia.

  The Germans were no longer subject to surprise. They had been fortifying this ground all winter and were fanatically determined to stop the Allied drive. As the Tenth’s first 400 men slogged across a muddy slope on Mt. Belvedere, parachute flares popped above them and the night became as blinding day. The German 1044th Regiment opened up with everything they had. Worst were the mines, sending men spinning and clawing, screaming for a medic.

  But the Tenth held discipline. In small clumps, they kept climbing, avoiding the minefields as best they could, pouring their own fire into the bunkers. As Bowerman would tell it, “My friend Jack Hay, from the University of Montana ROTC, was commander of the Third Battalion, and he took Mt. Belvedere.” On Mt. Gorgolesco, Staff Sergeant Hugh Evans led a small party and took that summit. “Della Torraccia was the worst,” according to Thomas O’Neil of the Eighty-Sixth. “Only about thirty percent of our men made it to the top.” Still, the few who made it held the summit against counterattack. By dawn on February 25, the Germans had withdrawn to the north.

  “But the rest of the Army was sitting on their asses to see how the mountain boys did,” Bowerman would remember decades later, with scarcely dimmed disgust. “They weren’t ready to move. So we sat there for another six weeks. And the next time it was tough.”