These American World War II Troops Trained to Fight on Skis

On a cold evening in February 1940, four men sat by a roaring fire at the Orvis Inn in Manchester, Vermont, after a day of skiing. By the time they repaired to their rooms for the night, they had conceived what became an entirely new division of the United States Army, a highly specialized unit devoted to fighting on skis in mountainous territory.

In the final months of World War II, the newly created 10th Mountain Division captured a series of pivotal peaks in northern Italy that cut off any possible retreat by Nazi forces and helped lay the ground for final Allied victory.

The inspiration for the division was a fierce battle underway 4,000 miles to the east. The previous November, a massive Soviet force had invaded Finland from the south and east, fully expecting to roll over the Nordic nation’s defenses in short order. They hadn't reckoned on valiant resistance of Finland's ski troops, who destroyed multiple Soviet divisions and humiliated the invaders for several months before Finland was forced to seek peace after sustaining heavy losses.

The four men marveled at the skill and resilience of the Finns, according to Maurice Isserman in The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America’s Elite Alpine Warriors. One of them, Charles Minot “Minnie” Dole, the well-connected founder of the National Ski Patrol Service (NSPS), observed that the Finnish resistance was “a perfect example of men fighting in an environment with which they were entirely at home and for which they were trained.”

Dole and his companions began brainstorming about the United States developing its own alpine military force. In 1940, Dole pitched the idea to Army brass, who, initially, expressed little interest in it. However, his persistence and the worsening situation for the Allies in Europe prompted a rethink.

In October 1941, General George Marshall informed Dole that he would establish a mountain infantry regiment. Reasoning that it would be more effective and efficient to train skiers to fight rather than soldiers to ski, Marshall effectively handed Dole and the NSPS the task of recruiting its members. Writing in Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of WWII’s 10th Mountain Division, Peter Shelton said, “of the fourteen thousand soldiers who constituted the 10th Mountain Division at full strength, about half were volunteers who came through the National Ski Patrol System.”

The media loved the idea. The New Yorker ran a piece titled “Minnie’s Ski Troops” in the issue dated February 21, 1942. In November that year, Life magazine followed up with a cover story. A 1943 Warner Bros. documentary short, Mountain Fighters, was followed in 1944 by Paramount’s I Love a Soldier, which featured scenes of skiing soldiers swooshing down slopes in the Colorado Rockies.

But preparation for mountain warfare was no easy day on the slopes. It began at Washington’s Mount Rainier, where Isserman noted, “few American soldiers outside of airborne troops and Rangers would undergo such rigorous training. They were on the slopes six days a week, six hours a day, for eight straight weeks, all under the expert eye of some of the country’s leading ski instructors.”

Beginning in late 1942, the program moved to a base in Colorado, named Camp Hale—informally rechristened Camp Hell by those who trained there. Isserman quotes one young arrival reporting home that “It certainly is going to be a tough three months of training, I must say. The altitude is about 10,000 feet, and you certainly feel it. My nose bled today and everyone here has a cough.” A planned five-week exercise in 1944 was curtailed after “temperatures dropped to 35 degrees below zero, tents collapsed under snow, and more than a thousand soldiers were evacuated with injuries or frostbite,” according to Military.com.

Finally, in late 1944 and early 1945, the 10th went to war. Its mission was to capture peaks in northern Italy where Nazi defenders had been bombarding Allied attempts to push north. Ironically, wrote Shelton, after all the recruitment, all the training and all the hardships, unseasonally warm temperatures in January and February 1945 melted much of the snow on the slopes. As a result, the “vast majority of 10th men never saw a ski in Italy.”

But their mountain expertise proved invaluable, as, over the course of six days in February, the 10th ascended Mount Belvedere, a peak that overlooked what was then the only major road connecting Allied-occupied southern Italy with the Axis-occupied north. In the face of intense mortar shelling, the men forced the defenders off the peak and held it against German counterattacks.

The way was now open for further advances to the north. The following month, the 10th secured more peaks. Then, in April, they spearheaded the final Allied offensive in Italy, which led to the surrender of the last Axis troops in the country. The advance also cut off German escape routes into Austria, and hastened the end of the conflict in Europe.

The cost was high: In just 114 days of fighting, the 10th suffered almost 1,000 deaths and more than 4,000 wounded. But, despite their unconventional composition, Minnie Dole’s ski troops were described by German General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin as “my most dangerous opponent.” When his forces in Italy were defeated, it was to a detachment of the 10th that he made a point of surrendering.

The story doesn’t end there. After the war, some members of the 10th returned to the area of the Rockies near Camp Hale and founded the ski resort of Vail. Other resorts—including Aspen in Colorado and Stratton in Vermont—were also developed at least in part by 10th veterans.

One designed shorter skis that made it easier for beginners to learn. The specialized gear that the division developed for the war became available to the public. Division alumni helped found companies such as Outdoor Research, ensuring that the influence of Minnie Dole’s skiing soldiers persists on America's slopes.