Tennessee Pass
He crouched by the slick, polished slab and traced his forefinger over names chiseled into the granite.
“There’s Stepnowski. There’s Koski,” 82-year-old Al Wiedorn said. “Zeigler is almost at the bottom. He’s the first one I found dead. Steiner was the second.”
Awarded Bronze and Silver Stars and a Purple Heart for his own bravery in the face of German fire that night in 1945 on Italy’s Mount Belvedere, Wiedorn then paused silently by the monument, indelible memories taking him back.
Enveloped in mist, he and about 200 other surviving World War II mountain-warfare veterans on Monday were honoring their 999 dead in what was billed as the final official reunion of their 10th Mountain Division.
They prayed and cried and ever-so-gingerly hiked in these same mountains above Leadville where they began, training on skis and with climbing gear for three years at Camp Hale before heading to war.
The knowledge that this would be the last official reunion for the men who trained and fought together infused many with a sense of finality both welcome and melancholic.
Returning was “strange,” said Harold Dumm, 95, the oldest, who uses a wheelchair. “Glad I came.”
Sons and daughters planned to hold informal reunions in the future to keep war memories alive. Some planned to scatter ashes of veterans in the mountains.
Monday’s ceremony – laying a wreath of red and white flowers, bowing for Chaplain Webster Barnett’s prayer to “help them to go safely to their home in due time” – also honored current U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Civilians send soldiers to war. … (Today’s troops) are doing what civilians require of them,” said Earl Clark, 88, chairman of the 10th Mountain Division Foundation. “They are carrying on a great World War II tradition of the 10th Mountain Division.”
The notion that fighting in World War II was more noble than fighting in Iraq is erroneous, several said.
“It didn’t feel noble at all,” said Wes Carlson, 85. “The nobility stuff comes from people out on the side observing. War is drudgery.”
Yet Carlson’s brother, Ed, 89, who tried to enlist but was kept out for health reasons, said he still regrets not being able to join Wes in combat.
A few veterans were treated with oxygen Monday. Walking about in a light rain at an altitude of 10,500 feet left them short of breath.
Others remain fit. Organizer Hugh Evans, who read a poem called “Soldiers Don’t Cry,” still skis the high peaks. He stays at high-mountain huts 10th members built as a gift to Colorado.
Russ Minott, 86, puffed a cigar as he gazed down a cloud- shrouded ridge he and others once scaled, camping for weeks, sometimes without tents.
When it comes to war, Minott tries not to think too much, he said. “Keep it light” has been his approach.
“It’s done. I did it. Why go back?” The combat was too ugly to dwell on, he said. “That’s why I don’t get into it. It’s a part of your life you go through.”
As Wiedorn touched names of comrades he had found dead – looking “like they were just lying down” – fellow veteran Paul Williams, 84, approached. Their units fought together in the campaign to kill entrenched German troops.
Wiedorn had been remembering how some Germans on the mountainside yelled “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and then opened fire.
“You guys were supposed to protect us,” Wiedorn told Williams.
Williams said: “You guys almost killed us.”
The swiftness with which war memories resurface, the vividness after decades, is startling, Williams said later.
“These things don’t fade.”
And the mountain division’s “Hollywood-ized” special skiing skills were seldom used in war, Williams said, recalling mostly tedium, hardship and emotional trauma.
Once, out of ammunition and food, “we ate tree bark” and traded tiny bits of saved food. And “we dug hundreds of holes,” some with water at the bottom, he said.
“You’d sleep, or try to sleep, with one blanket, in a hole.”
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.
The battle for Mount Belvedere
10th Mountain Division soldiers received the order “Fix bayonets, move out” at 11 p.m. on Feb. 19, 1945, signaling that the highly trained troops were about to see their first major combat.
The mission was to push German troops out of the Italian mountains northwest of Florence and as far back through the Alps as possible.
By the morning of Feb. 20, the mountain and surrounding ridge were theirs – but at a cost: 192 dead, 730 wounded and one captured.
Source: The 10th Mountain Division Association
