10th Mountain Division fought in northern Italy
BY MARIA PREKEGES
Memorial Day is mainly intended to honor U.S. soldiers who died in battle. However, common usage has extended to commemoration of all U.S. armed services veterans, whether they died in battle or later of wounds, by accident or from natural causes.
Forty-five Sun Valley area men are remembered for their service as ski troops in the 10th Mountain Division in World War II. The division served in northern Italy, where it was subjected to 110 combat days. Before the war ended, about 1,000 of the division’s soldiers, out of some 30,000 who served in the unit during WWII, were killed in combat.
The Sun Valley soldiers are commemorated with a monument that sits today in Baldy Circle in Sun Valley Village. Placed by the 10th Mountain Division Foundation, the monument is a large boulder with plaques providing the names of the 45 men and a brief description of their service.
Some of the men were drafted into the Army, but were given a nonbinding choice as to where they would like serve. With their experience as skiers, the men were naturally selected to the newly forming Mountain Division, which was looking for skiers, foresters, loggers and others with outdoor experience who, according to the division foundation, “could take care of themselves out of doors in all four seasons.”
The division’s troops received special training for fighting in mountain and Arctic conditions. In Italy, in addition to mountain fighting, the soldiers served as “light infantry,” which were specialized units that typically served in armed reconnaissance or as advance troops in major operations. As such, they often experienced heavy combat.
One of the Sun Valley men who served in the division was Nelson Bennett, who died earlier this year at the age of 101 and is also known as a founder of the Sun Valley Ski Patrol.
Information on Bennett, who was interviewed in 1986 by John Huckins, is available at The Community Library in Ketchum. Information there records that Bennett was originally from New Hampshire and learned to ski as a child on barrel staves and homemade bindings. He loved skiing and eventually moved to Sun Valley and worked on Bald Mountain, where he was appointed to head the ski patrol in 1941. He was drafted after the United States entered World War II.
“In 1941 I signed up for the draft, and back then you could indicate the service that you had a preference to be in, but with no promises,” Bennett said in the interview with John Huckins. “So I put down the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment that was formed at Fort Lewis, Washington, and that was the nucleus of the 10th Mountain Division.”
Bennett said he began training with the division in 1942 after reporting to an induction center in Utah along with Brute Hurley, another Sun Valley man who served in the division.
Also serving in the division was Barney Bell, who was interviewed in 1987 by Shirley Huckins. Information on Bell is also available at The Community Library. Bell reported that he learned to ski in the Wood River Valley in the late 1920s.
“We would go out Quigley,” Bell said in the interview, “and we would climb and climb and climb. And you didn’t have any ski boots or bindings or nothing, so Dad would cut an inner-tube tubing and fix it around my heel and up over my toe. And we’d get up there, and we’d ride a long pole just straight down. You couldn’t turn on those kind of skis, so we’d be up on those mountains, just come straight down.”
Bell said when he underwent training at Fort Collins, Colo., with an elevation over 5,000 feet, he had an advantage over trainees who hadn’t lived at a high elevation.
“Those poor devils had to lay around for six weeks to two months,” Bell said. “They just couldn’t hack it.”
Bell said that, after training, the Army provided the ski troops with “big, heavy wood, white wood skis.” For clothing, “we had special, a lot of special stuff. They called them mountain warfare clothes, warfare pants, and a big light (white) jacket.”
The soldiers were also given down sleeping bags that Bell said we’re taken away from them when they went to Italy because “they didn’t want us to get trapped in the sleeping bag.” They were given lighter sleeping bags, instead.
“That’s why we always looked for a big, heavy pine tree and we’d dig underneath there, you know, to get that shelter,” he said.
Bennett and Bell both attest that living in the Sun Valley area helped with their training and service in the division.
The 10th Mountain Division was deactivated after the war but was reactivated in 1985 and today is based at Fort Drum, N.Y. According to the 10th Mountain Division Foundation, the division has had the most deployments of all U.S. Army divisions since its reactivation.
Elements of the 10th Mountain Division have served in Operation Desert Storm, in Hurricane Andrew disaster relief, in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Sinai Peninsula and at some 20 deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During World War II, the division’s soldiers had a battle motto of “sempre avanti,” which is Italian for “always forward.”