{"id":7737,"date":"2016-05-27T16:57:20","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T16:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idsunmedia.com\/?p=7737"},"modified":"2016-05-27T16:57:20","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T16:57:20","slug":"sun-valley-men-served-as-wwii-ski-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2016\/05\/27\/sun-valley-men-served-as-wwii-ski-troops\/","title":{"rendered":"SUN VALLEY MEN SERVED AS WWII SKI TROOPS"},"content":{"rendered":"

10th Mountain Division fought in northern Italy<\/i><\/span><\/h2>\n

BY MARIA PREKEGES <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"This
This monument, placed by the 10th Mountain Division Foundation at Baldy Circle in Sun Valley Village, commemorates the Sun Valley area men who served as ski troops in World War II. Weekly Sun photo by Brennan Rego<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s soldiers, out of some 30,000 who served in the unit during WWII, were killed in combat.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201ccould take care of themselves out of doors in all four seasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

The division\u2019s troops received special training for fighting in mountain and Arctic conditions. In Italy, in addition to mountain fighting, the soldiers served as \u201clight infantry,\u201d which were specialized units that typically served in armed reconnaissance or as advance troops in major operations. As such, they often experienced heavy combat.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"The
The 10th Mountain Division with supporting tank units moves forward during the \u201cbig push\u201d at Bologna, Italy, on April 14, 1945. Photo courtesy of Army Center for Military History<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIn 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,\u201d Bennett said in the interview with John Huckins. \u201cSo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would go out Quigley,\u201d Bell said in the interview, \u201cand we would climb and climb and climb. And you didn\u2019t 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\u2019d get up there, and we\u2019d ride a long pole just straight down. You couldn\u2019t turn on those kind of skis, so we\u2019d be up on those mountains, just come straight down.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t lived at a high elevation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose poor devils had to lay around for six weeks to two months,\u201d Bell said. \u201cThey just couldn\u2019t hack it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bell said that, after training, the Army provided the ski troops with \u201cbig, heavy wood, white wood skis.\u201d For clothing, \u201cwe had special, a lot of special stuff. They called them mountain warfare clothes, warfare pants, and a big light (white) jacket.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Shoulder
Shoulder patch of the 10th Mountain Division.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The soldiers were also given down sleeping bags that Bell said we\u2019re taken away from them when they went to Italy because \u201cthey didn\u2019t want us to get trapped in the sleeping bag.\u201d They were given lighter sleeping bags, instead.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why we always looked for a big, heavy pine tree and we\u2019d dig underneath there, you know, to get that shelter,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Bennett and Bell both attest that living in the Sun Valley area helped with their training and service in the division.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

During World War II, the division\u2019s soldiers had a battle motto of \u201csempre avanti,\u201d which is Italian for \u201calways forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,81,18],"tags":[103],"class_list":{"0":"post-7737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-heritage","8":"category-history","9":"category-news","10":"tag-history"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}