By Maurice Isserman
While I was conducting research for a book on the United States 10th Mountain Division, which has fought in some of America’s most ferocious military campaigns over the last century, I came across a letter that stopped me cold. “Thanks to the failure of the press, and to the stupidity of Hollywood,” wrote Sgt. Denis Nunan, camped in a small town in Italy, to his mother on March 23, 1945, “the Home Front has no real conception of war, and only by letters home can the truth be made known.”
As a child growing up in the aftermath of Sergeant Nunan’s war, my own conception of that conflict was shaped largely by the “failure of the press” and, even more, “the stupidity of Hollywood.” I found John Wayne’s portrayal of an airborne leader on D-Day, in the 1962 epic “The Longest Day,” particularly compelling, especially the way he delivered commands like “Hit the dirt, men!” As if following the Duke’s orders, in games of make-believe war, my friends and I were forever “hitting the dirt.”
Even as I began writing my book, I repeatedly caught myself channeling my 11-year-old self. More than once in early drafts I described the soldiers of the 10th “hitting the dirt” when they came under hostile fire from the Germans in the mountains of northern Italy. Only gradually did I come to realize the full import of Sergeant Nunan’s letter, and start to work its lesson into my writing. In later revisions, I’d wince when I came across the phrase, roll my eyes and try to come up with a different way of describing their combat experience.
Another word I eliminated was the adjective “heavy,” which kept creeping into early drafts — “heavy shelling,” “heavy casualties,” and so on. “Heavy” is blandly suggestive of burdens stoically borne rather than horrors unwillingly endured. Such euphemisms do not come close to the “truth” of warfare, in the mountains of Italy or anywhere else.
Instead of channeling John Wayne, I channeled Sergeant Nunan. Rather than invoking Hollywood clichés, I leaned on soldiers’ letters home. The 10th Mountain Division Resource Center at the Denver Public Library is home to nearly 700 collections of papers donated by Second World War veterans of the division, amounting to between 15,000 and 20,000 wartime letters, as well as scores of wartime diaries.
Among the letters I found preserved in the archives were several hundred written by Marty L. Daneman, who enlisted in the 10th right out of high school at age 18 in the spring of 1943. He arrived on a troopship in Naples, Italy, in mid-January 1945, still short of his 20th birthday, a corporal with the Headquarters Company, Second Battalion of the 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment. 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 Feb. 20, he got his wish when the 10th attacked Mount Belvedere, a high point crucial to German defenses overlooking the highway that ran north through the Apennine Mountains toward the Nazi-occupied Po Valley. The letters Daneman wrote to Miller after the battle 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.
He also gave Lois a memorable description of what it really meant to hit the dirt in heavy shelling:
At 1st you wonder if you’ll be shot & you’re scared of not your own skin, but of the people that will get hurt if you are hit. All I could think about was keeping you & the folks from being affected by some 88 shell. I don’t seem to worry about myself because I knew if I did get it, I’d never know it. After a while I didn’t wonder if I get hit — I’d wonder when. Every time a shell came I’d ask myself “Is this the one?” In the 3rd phase I was sure I’d get it & began to ½ hope that the next one would do it & end the goddam suspense.
When the initial fighting was over, it was time to retrieve and bury the dead. Daneman dragged the bloated bodies of his two best friends off the mountain.
Dan L. Kennerly, also of the 85th Regiment, a 22-year-old private from rural Georgia, and machine-gunner in D Company, wrote a diary entry describing what he saw when he came upon the corpses of soldiers from his regiment spread out along the ridgeline connecting Mount Belvedere to adjoining Mount Gorgolesco:
They all have a pale yellow, waxy color, like artificial fruit. There is a strong scent. At first I cannot place it, now it comes to me, it’s the odor of a slaughter house. What I’m smelling is blood. Near the low point of the crest are eleven bodies in a row. … Their bodies have been chopped to pieces and lying in every type of grotesque position. One has the top of his head shot off, his brains have spilled out onto the ground. Glancing into the cavity, I recognize the stump of the spinal cord. It reminds me of a watermelon with all the meat gone. This is the most horrible sight I’ve ever seen.
Five days of fighting, beating off repeated German counterattacks, left the 10th in control of the high ground all along the Mount Belvedere massif, as well as neighboring Riva Ridge — vital objectives that division planners thought might take two weeks to secure. The cost to the 10th in those five days was 192 killed and 730 wounded.
There was more fighting in early March, and then a lull until mid-April, when the Allied command planned a general offensive to break out of the northern Apennines and drive the Germans out of Italy altogether. When the attack was launched on April 14, the 10th was in the vanguard, where it would remain until it reached the gateway to the Alps on Lake Garda two weeks later.
April 14 proved to be the division’s costliest day in Italy, with 553 casualties, including 114 dead. Among the seriously wounded that day was a recently arrived replacement platoon leader in the 85th Regiment, Second Lt. Robert Dole of Kansas, later a Republican senator and Republican presidential candidate. He was struck down in the attack on an objective labeled on Army maps as Hill 913.
Murray Mondschein, a medic with the Third Battalion of the 85th Regiment, also took part in the assault. In a letter sent in early May 1945 to the girlfriend of a buddy who had been wounded in February and thus missed the April offensive, he wrote, “You can tell him that 913 made Belvedere look like kindergarten.” A month after the battle, he still seemed in shock at what he had witnessed:
Oh Christ! What’s the use — you tell him that he wouldn’t recognize the [Battalion]. Most everybody he knew are all killed or wounded … The fellows died everywhere, beneath the blooming apple blossom trees, along the ridges, the peaks, in their fox holes, on the trails. Tell him the aid station had four direct hits in one afternoon, and to my last day I don’t know why we are still alive … Tell him I can still hear the guys yelling, “Medics, medics, medics.”
And so it continued down to the final days of April 1945, as the 10th approached the crossroads town of Riva Del Garda, where they cut off the German path of retreat to the Brenner Pass and Austria.
On May 2, the German armies in Italy surrendered. Mountain troopers Nunan, Daneman, Kennerly, and Mondeschin all survived the war. A total of 975 10th Mountain soldiers who fought on the Italian front did not. An additional 3,900 were wounded.
Dan Kennerly’s mention of the smell of a “slaughter house,” in the diary entry he wrote following the battle to seize Mount Belvedere, echoes a famous line in Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel “A Farewell to Arms” about an earlier war in Italy: “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.” The men of the 10th were a well-educated and well-read bunch, many of them dropping out of college to volunteer for service with the mountain troops. It’s possible that Kennerly had read Hemingway before going to Italy, and some of the famous writer’s influence may have, consciously or not, crept into his own account. But the language in the letters and diaries written from the front by the men of the 10th rarely was shaped for literary effect.
There was simply no time to think about such things, as they scribbled a few words here and there in brief moments of respite from the fighting. And yet, the soldiers wrote with passion and candor, and a determination to share with those at home what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., seriously wounded at the Battle of Antietam about 80 years earlier, had called “the incommunicable experience of war.” With apologies to Holmes, to me the words that the men of the 10th wrote in Italy 75 years ago continue to communicate, as fresh and accessible to readers today as in 1945.
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