The Winter Army

The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America’s Elite Alpine Warriors

Maurice Isserman, professor of history

The unlikely combination of Ivy League ski team members, park rangers, European refugees, and even a few Olympians formed the first specialized alpine fighting force in American history — the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. Deployed into combat in Italy at the start of 1945, this elite crew of soldiers ultimately broke the last line of German defenses in the Northern Apennine Mountains, spearheading the Allied advance to the Alps and the final victory of World War II.

Maurice Isserman, the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History, chronicles the men of this mountaineering unit from its inception to its decisive role on the Italian front. Drawing from hundreds of diary entries and letters written by 10th Mountain soldiers to family and friends back home, the author provides frontline views not only of such famous battles as Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere, but also about the bonds of brotherhood formed under the most harrowing of circumstances.

Among the letters is one by Marty L. Daneman from Chicago, who enlisted right out of high school in the spring of 1943. After extensive training in skiing, snowshoeing, and rock climbing, he arrived in Naples on a troopship in January 1945, still shy of his 20th birthday. 

Isserman writes: 

His outfit moved up to the front-lines later that month, but saw little action at first. ‘Crazy as it may sound,’ he wrote in late January to his 18-year-old fiancé Lois Miller, waiting
for him back home in Chicago, ‘I’m almost anxious to get into a hot spot, out of simple
curiosity how I’ll react. I’d like to prove to myself whether or not I can take it.’ 

Three weeks later, on February 20-21, he had the opportunity to satisfy that curiosity, when the 10th attacked Mount Belvedere, a crucial high point overlooking the highway that ran between Allied-occupied Florence to the south, and north through the Apennines toward the Nazi-occupied Po Valley. The letters he wrote to Lois after Belvedere suggested that he had done a lot of growing up in the short time since he last wrote:

“When it was over I shook for 3 days, jumped at every noise, & couldn’t hold a meal. And came out with a hate for war I’ll never lose. I don’t think anyone except a front line soldier, who has endured the mental agony of shelling, seen the gaping, ragged shrapnel wounds in flesh; seen his buddies die before him & smelled the sickly odor of dead men can develop the hate of [war] I now have.” 

Also included among the letters are several by Saranac Lake, N.Y., native Donald Potter,
who would later serve as a professor of geology at Hamilton from 1954 to 1988. In early 1943, Potter was in his third semester at Williams College where he was a member of the ski team. Like several of his teammates, he decided to drop out and enlist with the mountain troops. Within a few weeks of his arrival for training at Camp Hale in the Colorado Rockies, Private Potter was taken out of basic training to join the ski instructors.

Isserman writes:

After his first day on the slopes, [Potter] 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.”

But life as a soldier in training wasn’t a typical day on the slopes. The men were required to complete training maneuvers at altitudes of up to 13,500', lugging 90-pound rucksacks and camping for extended periods in blizzard conditions with temperatures dropping to 30 degrees below zero. The simulated combat environment also prevented them from lighting fires or burning anything for warmth.

In 1944, Potter, by now a second lieutenant, wrote to his mother from an unidentified location (since his letters were subject to official censorship) describing a Christmas Eve service he had attended the evening before:

“Christmas carols were sung with quite a bit more meaning that most of us have ever put into them and then to end it up we sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ until every beam and rafter in the chapel was standing on end. I’ve never heard anything like it before.”

On the evening of Jan. 3, 1945, Potter boarded the USS West Point and set sail for Italy. Twice during the course of the next few months he would be hospitalized for injuries suffered in the line of duty. He would later receive the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service in combat.

Although the 10th Mountain Division served in combat for only four months, it had one of the war’s highest casualty rates. Nearly 1,000 of the 13,000 soldiers in the division died, and thousands more were injured. Isserman concludes the book like this: “The views from Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere today are of a beautiful and peaceable landscape in an imperfect but better world. The men of the 10th helped to make it so. Sempre Avanti.”