School of War - Ep 240: Lance R. Blyth on Mountain Warfare

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Lance R. Blyth, command historian at the North American Aerospace Defense Command and author of Ski, Climb, Fight: The 10th Mountain Division and the Rise of Mountain Warfare, joins the show to discuss the history and tactics of fighting at altitude.        ▪️ Times     •      01:31 Introduction     •      01:41 Marine     •      04:55 L.A. riots              •      07:22 From horses to skis     •      10:13 Antecedents              •      13:56 Advantage                 •      15:40 The Germans         •      17:55 The Winter War               •      22:51 French surrender     •      25:58 Specialized divisions     •      31:37 Volunteers      •      33:49 Training     •      36:50 Delay and Italy               •      42:16 No doctrine      •      45:29 The Gothic Line     •      52:00 Success     •      55:35 Afghanistan Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Men have been fighting for the control of mountain passes since the Spartans held the line for days at Thermopylae, and no doubt for a long time before that as well. But the advent of modern mountaineering as a sport in the introduction of more accurate small arms and fires led to a new style of mountain warfare emerging in the 19th century, fighting on skis up on the ridge lines in unbelievably extreme conditions. Today, the story of the 10th Mountain Division and its savage record in World War II. Let's get into it. It is a 50 for war where the experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in France. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean, thanks for joining the landing ground. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Dr. Lance Blythe.

He is command historian of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD, and also U.S. Northcom, the United States Northern Command. He is the author recently of a very interesting book about Mountain Warfare and the 10th Mountain Division, Ski, Climb, Fight, the 10th Mountain Division and the rise of mountain warfare. Dr. Blythe, Lance, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks so much for having me on. I deeply appreciate being here. You're a Marine.

Tell me about how that came to pass. I'm a Marine. I went to high school up in Northern Wyoming, Sheridan, Wyoming, and made money by doing some cowboying up there as a kid and determined that that was a really dirty, dangerous, potentially get you kill, business, lots of early mornings, sleeping outside at night. So I decided to go to school and join the Marine Corps.

Now I will point out I didn't think that through. So, yeah, so I graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1988, was commissioned, basic school, Alpha Company 89, infantry officer's course, and then I signed out to 3rd Battalion First Marines, Vector 3-1 out at Pendleton and stayed there until I got off active duty in 93. And then just did reserve time wherever I felt it was cool. My longest chunk of reserve time was as a reserve maneuver controller or coyote 3 Mike with the old tactical training exercise control group at 29 Palms.

I did that from 97 to 2007. And finally in 2012, headquarters from the court finally caught up with me and said, you have enough time. Do you want to retire? I was like, okay, yeah, why not? So I am now awaiting paid age 60, which is coming really, really quick. So now, given your timing, did first Marines go out to the Gulf War? Yes, I did the first Gulf War.

And in fact, we stayed out there as a Mew, the old Mew sock program. My first pump, I was in a rifle company, India 3-1. We were the small boat company, the old Mewu, USOC program. And we also had the cliff assault mission. So we had assault climbers and so forth, because we were told, like, 80% of the usable beaches in the Pacific were backed by some form of cliff. So we could do the vertical mission as well. And then we did that. And then we did the Los Angeles riots also, as we were the Air Alert Battalion. So those are really the two things that I was able to do. Then we also stood up the 31st Mu over in Okinawa before, in 92, 93, before

We came back and I got out. One of my favorite sort of too good to check apocryphal stories about Marines comes from the L.A. riots. And I think it was told to me in a class about fire and movement at some point early in Quantico about what we mean about suppression and covering fire in the Marine Corps versus what you see in the movies when people say cover me. And the story goes, you know, there you are in the L.A. riots. Marines partnered with LAPD. and you know something's happening and the cop is going to move and the cop shouts cover me to which the young Marine quite reasonably starts putting rounds through the windows of the house

that has whatever the concerning party is inside of it and the cop looks back in horror says what the hell are you doing I said cover me not not just shoot at people and the Marines just uncomprehendies like you want me to cover you this is this is covering you probably not true but maybe who knows maybe you'll tell me it's true it's as far as I know true and in fact I know the really marine officer who put them into that situation no kidding oh this story is like lore in quantico really oh i am that's that's no a bunch of board marines guy up a headquarters company first marines was like okay fine go out the cops there was a one the man in the house had outstanding warrants and so when the first police officer showed up with one marine called the second officer

who had two marines and yes first one to the door the herpinside shot the officer in the leg through the door. He goes to the ground. That's when the other officer asked for cover to go forward and retrieve him. And the Marines opened up. And in fact, when the cop stopped and looked back, I was told the last corporal in charge looked at him and said, what are you doing? Go. And was getting a smoke grenade ready to cover him. Because if you're going to extract, I was right, we're going to put down fire, put some smoke, upsecure it. And then we'll go pull the casualty out. I guess I was told the Perkinside called 911 to surrender. That's sorry. It's grim stuff, but that's amazing.

He hit the ground. I mean, it was cover, right? There was no specific. So they just covered the entire house. Immediately divided up into three sectors and proceed to suppress. You know, Lance, life is all about context. It really is. Yes. So well, so your service then, not so much the riot stuff, but the muse stuff, it kind of, in a way, it links to the book. I mean, cliffs to mountains, and maybe you'll tell me, I'm curious, you know, to the extent your upbringing in a place like Wyoming, links to two, but also I was reading, it's really interesting because the 10th Mountain is interesting in the whole kind of, in two ways.

One, obviously, its service in particular in 1945 is really interesting, and it plays an important role in what, you know, what to me is a neglected campaign, which, you know, just the war in Italy general, generally speaking. So that's all very interesting. But two, just at a conceptual level, Like, what does it mean to have an infantry unit that you are, I'm not even sure the technical terminology I want here, but you're preparing for a particular kind of terrain. And that's, you know, it's a specialized unit for terrain. And I was sort of sitting there thinking, well, what is what are the comparisons? And then came to my mind, well, obviously Marines, a Marine division is kind of the obvious comparison, you know, a division that traditionally is, you know, naval infantry and whatever that involves. And then, you know, you have experience that's the sort of meaningfully relates to, to 10th Mountain.

So tell me about how life experience has played into this and how you came on to the subject in general. Yeah, I always say I'm an adult onsets here. I grew up on the horse and cow side of things. That's not something my family did. And so I kind of got into it after I got out to a little bit of snowboarding and then got back to Colorado a couple of 18 years ago. And winter is the longest season here in the mountains. It starts, well, now and goes until June in some places early July. So my wife and I were like, how do we get out?

We got into kind of backcountry skiing where you go into the mountains on neural power. You manage the risks inherent therein and do that. So January of 2019, we were out on Chicago Ridge, which is both ski cooper, but it overlooks Camp Hill to the north and ski Cooper to the south. And it was a cold day. It was the snow going in was crap. It was my 110-pound wife is skimming across the top. and I'm sinking in six to eight inches with every stride.

I was soaked, soaked, I was cold. I was frustrated. And then so we started out, we did find something to ski. Started up on the second skin up, and the clouds lifted a bit, and I could see hail. And to get my mind off of anything, I like, well, what did they do? How did they ski? What were their techniques? What was their gear like?

And so I got home that weekend and started looking at the books of the library, and none of them, many of them very good. McKay Jenkins, Maurice Iserman, definitely worth reading any interest, both great authors, great scholars and great gentlemen. But couldn't answer the questions I wanted and I realized the questions I was asking was far more around these ideas of mountain warfare, unavoidable because of my background, I believe, and my ultimate interests. And so when I'm downloading, you know, stuff, you know, downloading Field Manual 100,

10, Act 5 from 1939, I was like, okay, it's probably time to do a book out of this. Yeah, fair enough. And, you know, I think about the history of mountain warfare, and I, you know, this is not my world or my background. And, you know, my mind goes to like Hannibal Crowsing the Alps with his elephants and things like that. And then obviously of the First World War, where there's a tremendous amount of relevant history, immediately relevant history to your subject and to the creation of the 10th in the early 1940s. Are there other antecedents that are important to, or is that, you know, the, I, you know, I know, I know a little bit about, mountain war fighting in World War I just because of, you know, Ernest, Ernest Hemingway, like farewell to arms, like there's literature that comes from these awful fights in the Alps that don't get as much attention as the Western Front. It was just brutal combat. Is that really the start of this conversation, or are there other things we should pay attention to? To start, the intellectual genealogy of this, that's actually the first part of the next project.

Yeah, back to Giber in the late 18th century, trying to defend the French Alps, compartmentalized, comes up the idea of the standing division. operating along that. Klausvitz and Germany both have to deal with this. Indeed, when I was trying to figure out what I meant by mountain warfare, I had to go back and do dig around through this. And I went all the way back, you know, pulling across in the Alps. I was looking at Outsi the Iitzman, for Christ's sake. They dug out of a glacier in the Italian to roll what a decade or so ago. And so it came up on Klauswitz's war. Mountains introduce an inhibiting factor to operations. and that's one that got me started thinking through this process.

But it's really a mid-19th century phenomenon, a modern phenomenon, in my opinion. Klauswitz argues this. Frederick Engels of all people was a well-known military correspondence in the mid-19th century, and with the chance that there might have been a war between the German Confederation and the Swiss Federation, he wrote on this. And it begins to point out that the range of weapons and the open order, had suddenly made fighting in mountains far more likely. Please, he just fought on the valley floors and mass,

and it was making it more likely. So it comes with, you get the change to, that we know about, of artillery, long-range artillery, long-range firearms. But it also arises with mountaineering as a sport, as a practice that's a mid-19th century invention by British Mountaineers, who went to the Alps and said, how do you climb that mount?

The local said, why? Who wants to climb that mountain? But got picked up on the rapidly rising middle class across France and Italy. The second alpine club is the Italian one. And this Italian Alpine Club especially was very interested in placing the mountains, though they were in the new state of Italy's borders at the center of Italy, trying to create an Italianess. And so they got very interested in it.

there's being a member of the Alpine Club was something you did if you were an upper middle class individual or middle class army officer in Italy at this time, northern Italy. And so that's where the first mountain troops in 1872 are in fact Italian del Pini, who were raised as local self-defense forces to buy time in the Alps for the rest of the Italian army to mobilize into the Port River Valley. So it's really a modern, a modern phenomenon. That's really interesting. And it's modern because of mountaineering, as you put it, but also just, I guess I'm going to try to put this in layman's terms and you tell me how close I am to the mark or how far off.

But, you know, before accurate riflery and sort of the evolution of fires, I guess sort of like the peasant who's like, why would you climb that? It's like, well, why would you go up there to fight? Like fighting the mountains, I presume, without really having never looked into it, it's you have to get through the mountains. So there's probably clashes down and passes as a regular. I know there are as a regular feature of military history, but why would you climb up that ridge? Like what is there, what's the goal? Like, what's the advantage of being up that ridge if you can't touch anything from it? Is that kind of the basic insight? I believe so, yeah, how to do that ridge. And I also wonder too, and now I'm just speculating, you know, rise of better mapmaking.

If you got off trail beforehand, you just wander off and never find your way back. And once you get modern map-making and modern compasses and barometers, knowing where you are elevation-wise, is almost as important as knowing direction in the mountains. Then you can start to navigate through, move larger forces through. So that does become. And that's something that as the French will bring in mountain forces after the Franco-Prussian War, 1888, they create the chasseurs, Alpins, and then reinforce them with Alpine Infini regiments within a few years. Then the Austro-Hung And the Bulgarians take some of their local troops out of Austria, Landis-Schutzen, and turn them into mountain troops along a similar model.

And they all practice moving large units, really upwards of a battalion through the mountains, across glaciers, cross through these passes, and so forth. So that becomes one of their standard practices that they learn to do. So, yeah, it does have to do a lot with movement and getting around and moving forces into place for an advantage or to prevent, to, to, to, season advantage other to prevent it or hold it yourself. And so obviously then there's savage fighting throughout the Alps in World War I and the U.S. Army, you talk about in the book, the U.S. Army pays attention to this. And it pays attention to German doctrinal publications that stem

from that you cite one that's treatise by William Balk. Talk about, talk about, you know, so much of, you know, 20th century American military practice comes from paying careful attention to the Germans. Talk about, talk about this aspect of it. Yeah. Obviously, we get. In the interwar period, the Army is small, and so the decision is made to focus on education. And so throughout the really Fort Leavenworth Commandant General Staff, and part of that is there's all these translations going on of documents for these training officers to use. And William Balk was a German general. He was head of, he was kind of the G6 for the invasion of France.

He lost his position after that. But he had written a well-known book called Tactics before World War I, and he updates it in immediately following the war. And he adds in, hey, nobody thought we were going to fight in mountains, at least on the German side. And so that gets translated and gets used. And then there's some other German publications are translated in what basically comes to military review, which began as a series of translated foreign articles primarily. And then it gets into some of the commanding general staff, 1934, 1935 class, did some map exercises around mountain warfare. It's more like the Rift Valley War, the Rift War in Morocco, more of a colonial, but they do do some of that.

And then there's also other writings on it in the Army, to the extent that when the Army does its first operations manual, that F-100-5, there is a pretty good section on mountain operations in there. That really forms the basis. So the Army did know about it. The thing is they didn't know much, especially about those, the techniques and technologies, the gear and the skills that you would need it to carry it out. And then the other major thing that happens, this is now the early days of World War II,

but before America's entry into the war is the Winter War, which I guess there's like a twin component to this. There's mountains, but then there's cold weather. And these two things often merge, though actually they're obviously different. But the Winter War gets everyone's attention, and this starts to really spur action, right, towards the creation of specialized units. Exactly, that it is the winter war between the Soviet Union and Finland.

And the Finns had great successes, operating units on their more northerly flanks on skis, being able to, the Russians had to advance along the roads. The fence could send cut off forces through the woods off the roads and then cut the forces off into what they called motis, which is to understand the Finnish word for a kindling pile or a pile of wood. Now, they often could not close these Russian strong points. That was very difficult to do. They didn't have a lot of heavy weapons on the finish side. But that took the imagination of a lot of Americans, including a lot of American skiers.

And skiing was something that was growing in the 1930s, a growing middle class, upper middle class in the West Coast cities, many of whom were not going to go to Europe to ski during the Depression, of ski clubs being organized. You would show up slightly tipsy Friday evening, after after drink works. You'd jump on the train. You had no idea where you were going. The ski clubs would wait to the last minute.

They had agents in all the New England mountain towns to say where the snow was best, and then you'd head out and go ski for the weekends with your friends and then come back. And so, of course, a lot of these people were not as surprisingly eating injured, so the National Ski Association agrees to create the National Ski Patrol

system or national ski patrol, basically volunteer patrollers who would have some basic medical skills, who would go on the slopes and help someone who was injured. And the head of this was a guy by the name of Charles Minot or Mini Dole. The Dole family is still around. Truck Stoll is one. He's up in Colorado. He's up in Vail, Colorado. I've met him a time or two. Good guy. And he and his buddies are having drinks one night in February, 1940. The Finns had managed to smash up a Soviet division. About a week prior, it made all the paper front pages. It had also caught the attention of the Assistant Secretary of War at the time. And he says, hey, could we do this if we had to? And they're sitting in that Adirondack, they're sitting in that kind of natural war path

between the U.S. and Canada. And we always forget that the U.S. and Canada actually, those are our old enemies. We keep reading each other up and through there along that Taekonda Roga and all that. So their things- We'll settle accounts eventually. Yeah, exactly. We always tell the Canadians that were with at NORAD or they often will do it too. You know, they burned our capital. I don't know. A lot of us don't feel that bad about it. But it is always an ongoing fun, fun fact. But so Dole and his friends were like, hey, does the Army, what is the Army doing? We don't know. Could they use our help? And so they start working on. They start trying. And they try and they fail pretty regularly until the summer of 1940. And Dole is able to exploit one of his Yale connections. who's now working for a new Secretary of War, Henry Stimson,

and gets a meeting with George Marshall in September of 1940. And he goes in and meets with George Marshall. George Marshall was impressed, and Marshall did not impress easily from what I understand, and said, yeah, we will take your help because they didn't know much about it. Because the Army had decided in the summer of 1940 with the new defense plan, Rainbow 4, to move, be ready to move forces to Greenland with approval of the, you know, the Danish government exile, or it's in Newfoundland, which was, of course, not part of Canada. It was a separate colony, or up to defend Alaska.

And so to do that, they told all the divisions they were mobilizing that fall to do ski patrols. And so it's often, Dole would later remember that, and it's often argued, he started this process. The fact is, is that he could not have known. Those plans often were not declassified to the 1970s, that in fact, the army had realized, We may need some ski troops. We may need some ability to operate in cold weather. So throughout the winter of 40 into 41, they do execute a series of ski patrols across about five or six divisions from upstate New York at Pine Camp or Ford Drum, now Fort Drum,

all the way out to Lewis and Osnalded Fort Lewis up on around Mount Rainier. It's fascinating, you know, I mean, just zooming out from mountain warfare for a second, just all the planning considerations you're talking about here, how much the pre-examined. pre-1945, or I guess we would say here, the pre-even Pearl Harbor, militaries, planning considerations are focused on hemispheric defense. Like we might need mountain troops because we might need to fight in the Adirondacks. You know, it's kind of just jarring here in 2025 to sort of hear about it. But it was a very realistic potentiality.

Yeah. Nobody knew how it was going to turn out. And I think there's, I think a Michael Nyberg is written on that summer of 1940. That surrender of France was, that was the biggest. geopolitical table flip of the 20th century. No one expected France to go. All the planning had been. We will come in on the side of the Allies.

It'll be France and Great Britain, fighting together will, and it wasn't going to be that. And they were not convinced that the British could stand or would stand. And so this war plan, Rainbow 4, Mobilization Day, M-Day, was the day that the Germans or the Italians got control of the French Navy. Because the German, Italian, and French Navy, with the Royal. Navy off the board would be large enough to take on the American Atlantic fleet. Yeah, we had, we had Michael on the show years ago, actually, when that book came out to talk about it. So people were more than welcome to go back and check that episode out. You know, this is around, it's not

that long after this moment of intense crisis that Nicholas Speakman writes, what is it, America's strategy and world politics, I think is the name, where it's, it's funny. If you read it today, there's, you know, several chapters that are just, they sort of stand the test of time and they're brilliant analyses, but then something like 80% of the book is devoted to like a very careful, dispassionate, clinical analysis, is hemispheric defense militarily possible? That is to say, in this scenario where the war-making potential of, you know, the British and Spanish, etc., French, rather, empires is consolidated. I guess Spanish is irrelevant at this point, but the British and French empires is consolidated under German control, et cetera, that say the Germans

have even defeated the Soviet Union. Could we just retreat behind the two oceans? and survive. And Speakman lays, I mean, we're talking about like metallurgy in Brazil and all this really in the weeds. And his basic answer is, no, it won't work. It simply won't work. We won't be able to survive. But it's just, it really is like it takes you to another time to talk about these early years of the 40s. Yeah. And that time, that that flash to bang, we think is so quick, December 7th, 1941 and away you go. And that, no, the flash was way in the summer, at least in 1940. for the Army. It's, what, 36 for the Navy when they get the Navy acts? So part of doing this project was a realization about around mobilization how long it takes to get a society to moving

towards war. Well, let's talk about the 10th Mountain Division then, which starts its life as the 10th Light Division, I suppose. How does this actually come to pass that you, I mean, you have these actually, you know, maybe step back even from that. Just let's stick with your point about mobilization broadly. As 1940 turns to 1941 and then obviously post-Prol Harbor, what is the Army organizational scheme here? How many divisions do we decide to create? How is that all going to be organized? And where do we find one to be the Mountain Division? Yeah, there is, there's two strands here. One is the Army had a portfolio in the summer 1940 of specialized units. So there were amphibious divisions and jungle divisions and parachute divisions and mountain divisions. And

that the mountain was one, but they had three divisional numbers, 10, 12, and 14 set aside for mountain units in their mobilization plan. It was a plan. It briefed well. Who's to say what it did? In the summer of 1941, Roosevelt looked back at his chiefs in about Rainbow Four and said, what would we need to execute this? How many forces? And so everyone did in their numbers on the back of an envelope, and this, of course, is the great victory plan that would be leaked to the press a few days prior to Pearl Harbor. And in that, the Army said, we're going to need over 200 divisions, organized in, you know, three or four field armies. We will need to, you know, have these armies, this field army may operate in the Andes, this one may, or in Alaska, so it'll need a couple

mountain divisions. This one will go overseas, may have to go into Spain or go into Norway, so we'll need some mountain divisions. So out of that 200, there was a thought you may need as many as eight mountain divisions. And part of this process was, is the Army realized as early as 1940, December of 1940, that it would need a mountain camp or camps to train these divisions in. Because that's how the Army mobilized and trained at this time was by divisions. And so throughout 40 and 41, the Army's G3 is pushing to get, hey, can we have a camp? But we don't have money. So they do the surveys for it. And they find a couple locations, primarily one here in Colorado, one up in Wyoming.

One in Wyoming was a trumpeter swan nesting site. FDR's uncle was president of the Audubon Society, so that one went away. So there's this valley, high alpine valley in Colorado, remnant of a last glacier called Pando Valley became the selected site. But again, no money to build the camp. But they had made the decision already quite early on. And a lot of that was through the intervention of the other group, part of this, that's the American Alpine Club,

who had climbers and mountaineers. Now, they're who also had the same question, but they had an easier path to the War Department because Stimson had been a member of the American Alpine Club back in his younger days, and so they still had his address and just wrote him a letter, and the American Alpine Club met with an individual,

a general officer, we're not sure who, and showed them all the stuff they'd taken on K2, ropes, tents, packs, sleeping bags, petons, carabiners, and pointed out how, long it took to learn to use of equipment and the fact that none of it was made in the United States and that became a big emphasis to to it on members of the American Alpine Club would end up in the office of the quartermaster general designing specs for gear and then and then helping getting helping field it throughout the war so by the end of

1941 there is not going to be a mountain division no requirement no mountain camp to train them out yet but they say we'll put together a test force one battalion will raise out at a November of 41, and they go back to National Ski Patrol, said, hey, can you help get us volunteers for this? Because in the Army and this time, if you volunteered, you got to pick where you went. If you were drafted, you got sent. You volunteered, you picked where you went. So that's why, you know, people had volunteered to go to the Navy or the Marine Corps or the Air Forces. And so they get about, they get about several hundred volunteers, captains of, you know, Olympic caliber skiers, captains of skis teams that, you know, in their, in their squirrel

skin coats and jalopies and showing up out of McCord. They bring them together. Of course, then Pearl Harbor happens. And this is a test unit. What is it going to take? You got to test the equipment you're trying to make. You got to test how do you train people to do this. So they do that primarily up on Mount Rainier, a couple national ski patrol, national park service lodges, Paradise Lodge up there on the mountain. And they have a blast. They ski on the government time for day and day out. It was pretty monotonous, but they learned how to move, do a lot of really good movement. They do some big movements and get it and get some things figured out. To the extent by summer of 42, the army began, has authorized a mountain camp to be built at hail called camp hail here in

Colorado and they expand the unit out to a full regiment. And so they go back to the National Ski Patrol, say, hey, can you help raise more people? So they help bring another 2,000 volunteers in. By now they're starting to run out of the people who really have the skills innate because most these skills. There were probably only a few hundred. There were less than probably 20, well, we would consider mountaineers qualified and maybe a couple hundred of equivalent of backcountry skiers that had those skill levels. But if you wanted to volunteer and be there, that was a big plus. So they raise another regiment. They move it up to Camp Hale in November of 42, and they decide to raise a second regiment and again, get more volunteers. And at this point,

the National Ski Patrol system says, could we just have a standing contract for this? And that's, they'd be began. They ultimately would send about 8,000 volunteers to the mountain troops. About 6,000 would actually go with the division. Sorry, just to interject, these original regiments, I guess in the book, you talk about the 87th infantry, but these are all volunteers at first, or are there also troops who are like, congratulations, you join the Army, and you will be a mountain soldier? They were all volunteers, or at least people who were interested, to go to the mountain troops.

The Wyoming Cowboy that trained me, Walter Bales Jr., joined the Army in the summer in 1940. He could see the war coming. He was too short for the Marines at the time. Wait, what was the hype for the Marines? I think it was like 5-10 maybe. It was not six foot, but it was close. Got it. And this is a sought-off kid. One cowboy, sought-off people, but also grew up in the middle of depression, calorie-deprived. And so he got sent up to Hale to be a mule packer because he knew animals. And in fact, I just talked to a bunch of families down in the Arkansas Valley out of Pablo,

who have all these family connections through not the ski side of things, but the mule packing side of things. So what happens is this expansion, especially in early 43, the Army is like, we need to build this out. So they grab a whole bunch of what they called fillers, guys out of divisions that already gone through their basic training and put them on a train, sent them to hail. Well, they pulled them out of the 30 and 31st divisions that were recruited primarily from the side. and have been training in the Mississippi Delta and sent them right up, these poor souls right up to the mountains. And this would happen another time or two to Caddra, another regiment at one point. They brought in a bunch of guys from Hawaii. And then by the late 43 to really fill out the light division, they, you know, were falling, telling people to,

you know, okay, every third man step forward at an armored infantry battalion, you know, you're going to the mountain troops. So in the end, we think of out of, out of, of the, the roughly if you take the 15,000 men who will go in the division, 6,000 were probably volunteers, but the majority were not. So many came to love the mountains and came back, but a lot of those support troops were not, and most of those volunteers end up in the infantry units. So you have these troops gathering at Camp Hale. Talk about, and I really, we can't compress, you know, multi-month training program into a few

minutes, but we'll do our best. You know, what do you learn? What is, what is mountain warfare training at Camp Hale? Yeah, so they first try to just do it as part of the regular training. So basic training will include ski training. You learn how just to move around on skis, how to go on the horizontal cross-country ski for about a week, and then they take up to them out and they show you how to basically snowplow. And they do some more advanced snowplow techniques with increasingly heavier packs.

And that's really it. Most of the time is devoted to cross-country movement techniques. And basics of like, you see that ridge there, you see. see that, that could avalanche, stay away from it. And but I think a lot of the training in the end was ultimately for the, the battalion regimental and divisional staffs. How do you supply, keep units alive in this train? The men, they had to show how to bivouac, how to dig a snow shelter, put a line it with boughs, put your, you know, get sleeping bag in. Their tents had a lot of condensations. They didn't like using them. If they could build a snow shelter, they much preferred that. And so

it was a lot of it was just basic survival and mobility techniques, most of which were simply adopted from civilian practices is what they used. And then as they got more, they begin to move, you know, to company, platoon and company level stuff and doing, you know, live fire attacks during, you know, rain or snowstorms, they would do it. But a lot of the basics of this, where they would get up on Monday morning and put on their packs and they would hike up a couple thousand feet back into the mountains and set up camp and do their spend the week training and then come back. And a lot of those places where they set up camps today are part of the 10th Mountain Division hut system to see where they went and trained. So that was just a lot of it. It was just how to move

in and through the mountains, how to take advantage of terrain. Don't attack uphill. Try to attack downhill. Save your fire to the absolute last minute because you're not going to get more ammunition sort of thing. And then by the winter of 44, when they're moving into bigger regimental, you know, they're executing battalion-level live fire attacks in two-foot of snow and single-digit temperatures on skis. So they got pretty good at doing it. But they learned that the best way to do it is to take a unit that's already trained and then train it in the mountains. Don't try to do both at once. Sorry, what's the what's the hut that you said there's a hut series? Yeah, there's the 10th Mountain Division Hut Association and they run a series of huts across Colorado, many of which are in locations

that were 10th Mountain Division trained. And they're often in or near Bivouac sites, whole Bivouac sites. they would put their tents up. Got to get it. So it's 1944. I mean, American troops have been in combat at this point for going on two years, right? Since the fall of 42, we've got Americans in Africa. Right. Or late fall, right?

So we're taking our time here, getting this unit ready to go. I guess, one, what attributes to the delay and two gets sent to Italy? What's besides the obvious, which there are mountains there, but there are mountains in other places, too. Why do they go there? Yeah, so the tribute to the delay is obviously late 42. we have to remember the United States ran into a manpower crisis, a shipping crisis, a all sorts of limitations on this large-scale mobilization. So things get pulled back. That's one of the reasons

why we, you end up going to North Africa, you're not going to overload Britain with troops and invade France right away. So this that's the first part of it. So the second part of it is there's no no theater can come up with a requirement for mountain troops. Now, John, 5th, 1943, that should have been the requirement when the decision is made to go to Italy, but no one thought of it, as far as I can tell. I am curious about that and hope to look to that in this next project. So there is no requirement for it. And then finally, General Liza McNair, who hated every good idea he ever met,

found a good idea he liked. And that was the light division. The idea you could get a 12,000-man combat division's worth of combat power out of 9,000 men. if you just equip them and use them right. And the 10th division gets activated in the summer of 43 as a light division. But these, along with their companion's 71st and 89th divisions, were experimental units. So from the summer of 43 until the summer of 44, it is an experimental unit. It's not on anyone's tables available for deployment, as far as I'm aware.

Though the plan to go to take Taiwan did have the light alpine division would be needed. to re as a reinforcement. So they go through all their training, and part of the, there's these continual morale ups and downs, which are normal in mountains and doing the stuff anyway, mountaineering or backcountry skiing, yeah, good days, bad days, good times, bad times.

But part is they don't have, they don't know what they're training for. So they run the big infamous D-series, kind of a, what we call us suffer fest, they have type three fun, not fun while you're doing it, not fun when you remember it. And then they do a report back to D.C.

guess what? The light division was too light. It was not going to survive in combat. So they want to turn it to a standard infantry division. And George Marshall says, no. These men volunteered to be in the mountains, figure out how to make them a mountain division. They went back to the original tables of organization. They created three years prior, slightly modified them, and said, okay, here you go. You're going to get all these extra people. You get all these extra mules. And they got this, the division got this, while they were down at Camps with Texas, getting ready for a Louisiana mover that was canceled because all the units were going overseas, late 44 manpower crisis, running out of infantry in Europe.

And so in Texas, on November 6, 1944, they got, they were officially redesignedated 10th Mountain Division. And so it's always always a good bar bet. The 10th Mountain Division was never at Camp Hale. It was called other things than, and much to, I think, the chagrin of all good Coloradoans, it was actually activated in Texas. And they learned they're going to Italy. And Italy becomes it for really two reasons, I believe. One is Mark Clark was an economy of force.

Mark Clark's theater was an economy of force theater. Troops were sent there, then many were pulled away to go to the invasion of France. So he would have taken anybody. Eisenhower looked at it and said, I can't see how to use all those meals. I don't have any requirement for it. Well, he might have if he'd want to attack the Alps, but he didn't.

And so it gets offered to Italy. They say, we'll take it. But I also think that there's a second one there. General Truscott takes command a fifth army. And Trusket had seen the French mountain troops, the colonial mountain troops from Morocco, operate to basically break the Gothic line across the Arncyon Ridge south of Rome. And it's French troops up in the mountains, spotters that can call fire down on the road. This begins to unhinged that German defense.

So he knew what he might get. So he was very, they were very, he was very happy to the. except 10th Mountain. So in December of 44, division sets sail in two echelons for Italy. All the men, the mules and horses are, the mules are sent down to New Orleans to be sent. Horses are purchased on the island of Sardinia. They had a horse-mounted cavalry reconnaissance troop. The father of our horse trainer in Wyoming was the ex-o of that troop. And I didn't know until I saw his name and then started checking. And they went with all that, but they didn't take any of their equipment. It was all left in warehouses.

because in theory, the stuff was supposed to be already in theater. I'm perplexed by the requirements question. I mean, I guess Dwight Eisenhower are looking at northwest or northern France. That makes sense. But Americans have been fighting on the boot of Italy since the fall of 43. And the southern Italian mountains, I mean, they're not the Alps. But I'm about to go hike Monte Rotundo here in a couple weeks where the 3rd Infantry Division fought. And it's no joke.

I mean, those mountains are no joke. So I'm perplexed. I'm like, these guys could have been used, you know, at least a year earlier. Yeah, it is a good question when I do not have an answer to the two points to it. One is there's no doctor and the doctrine is being written in the spring of 1944. The officer, Henry Vickler, was assigned to write that. He came back here after the war and bought a house just down the street from Haley. I've recently learned. And so there's no doctrine. There's no book to turn to. You have the little blurb in FM100-5, but that's not much. Secondly, there's no education among senior officers. They've never thought about this. The British did the same thing. They have a very well-trained mountain division, but it's up in Scotland,

but it's being held as part of the D-Day deception plan to go to Norway. And so, yeah, why no one thinks of this is still a bit of an open question. There was clothing. There was equipment. There were stoves. There were boots that could have been used. There were sleeping bags in tents that could have prevented exposure, but these types of skills were very limited to a few handfuls of Americans skiers and mountaineers.

It was simply not a well-known activity. So it is a good question of why they did not. They did train the 36 and the 45th Division before Sicily in Western Virginia with instructors that came out from Hale. But they kept it at the regimental level, and they later said, we shouldn't have basically, you know, just we should have worked through all the supply problems. And they fairy dusted that at the divisional level, and they would later pay for that. There are attempts to do some individual training. There is a mountain school with an American debt in Italy that tries to train individuals. I have no idea if this ever had any impact on anyone.

You can train them to rock climb, but if they don't have the ropes and the petons and everything in the supply system, and someone understands why they need them did they ever use it. So it's one of those. the Italian campaign is, I say they couldn't see the mountains for the seas. Every time they look at the mountains, they tried to outflank them amphibiously and never took a way to use the mountains as a way to maneuver. By the way, the German mountain officers made the same complaints about the Germans that the general staff never understood the mountainous terrain. All the mountain divisions were scattered to the winds and stuck on the eastern fronts. So only one ever made it into

Italy. Nevertheless, if I had to fight in mountains with not untrained troops, but non-mountain trained troops, I would much rather be in the defense than on offense. And the Germans, of course, famously make great use of this terrain all the way Hitler decides to fight south of Rome, and then the Germans just turn this entire peninsula into a meat grinder. Talk about the 10th and what they see when they arrive. They get on the line in January 45. And you said the Gothic line earlier referring to further south. For some reason, in my mind, what is the name of the defensive complex in the Appanines there south of the... Oh, no, I'm sorry. I flipped it. Gothic is North, Gustavis south. Right, right. So they get to the Gothic line. Talk. What is that? Talk about what they

encounter. Yeah, that's a series of defensive positions across nearly the fallback line after the line south of Rome fell. Again, a classic dermosition, a very thin set of forward post, and then well-protected all-around defenses behind from which you could counterattack. and the 10th gets put into the line, and they get put into a place below Mount Belvedere. Mount Belvedere is one of the high points of that Apennines. It overlooks Route 6 that leads through it and leads you to the Po Valley. And their first task is to basically get the Germans off of Mount Belvedere. And they're given this task by Truska.

Most of the senior leaders, the regimental commander, regimental commanders, divisional commander, even battalion commanders were in fact all new. had only gone through a little bit of training, if any at all. George Hayes took over command of the division literally weeks before it sailed. But their staffs knew what to do. And I think he learned, they all learned from their staffs what had to happen. So they get there, they see, you know, they're looking north. And it must have looked a lot like the terrain they were in at hail.

In the bottom of the bowl, they have a steep ridge off to their left that runs. There's a cut through that as a pass. And then the mountains go off to Mount Belvederey and on across. up to Homestead, you know, where they would have seen Homestate peak on there. In their skyline, you see the further mountains of the Apennine. So it would have been quite familiar, at least stand there, been like, oh, yeah,

this looks familiar. It's much lower terrain. It still has a lot of snow. So altitude's not a problem here. So they see that, and they immediately begin to conduct a whole number of patrols. And they spend a lot of time really dominating that terrain, which is the Germans were happy to let them.

There have been attempts to attack Mount Belvedere before, but that ridge to the left, that River Ridge, German troops up there could fire into the backs of anyone attacking that ridge. And so you had to take River Ridge first. Attempts had been made, but no one could get up there and stay in supply. So that becomes the task of how to get up onto River Ridge. And a battalion is given that task, first of the 86th. And they fall back for a couple weeks of training. They take about 70% of their troops had gone through hail. The 30% who had not, they took them to a rock quarry. They practiced rock climbing, doing it at night.

they sent out reconnaissance teams to find five routes up to the five pieces of high ground. Two of the routes would require ropes. One would require quite a few ropes. And their plan was simple. You just moved everyone up overnight. They prepared to move on skis. Stuff was flowing out of the warehouses now. They'd found it in the back of a warehouse in Naples. One story I heard, they thought it was, the warehouseman didn't recognize the words. They thought it must be for the Brazilian troops that were coming. I started to find all the gears, getting it issued. And on the night, night of February 18th, which is what we treat as legacy days out here in Colorado, the battalion moves out, climbs all five routes in silence, gets to the top, sees all

five pieces of terrain when the sun comes up. And the Germans now suddenly realize they have Americans up there and proceed to launch counterattack after a counterattack for five days. It is snow-covered terrain. It rains, but the troops take no exposure casualties. And they hang on, they hang on in large part because the system behind them knew what to do. They had 100 extra guys to carry weapons and ammunition up. They had a bunch of Italian mules that were smaller, but they had American mule packers who didn't speak Italian, but they spoke mules so they could work with the Italian mule packers and move stuff up. They managed to haul an artillery piece up onto the ridge to help break up countertacks as they formed up. Engineers built a tramway up,

to haul supplies up and bring wounded back down. So they were able to hang on to that ridge for all five days, and that freed the rest of the division to launch Operation OnClaise Mount Belvedere, which they moved across. They got on the main crest, attacked up to the high ground, and never got off that high ground. They fought down it for a couple of weeks, a pause or two in there, but they knew from their time in Colorado, stay on the high ground. Don't get off it. Don't get in the draws. And there's, again, the Regiment of Visual Staffs knew how to evacuate the wounded, how to get supplies forward, how to move it by truck and by Jeep and by Weasel and by Mule and by man. And the move wounded back the same way. They had done this.

Truscott, the Fifth Army commander, calls off the attack, not because they had been unsuccessful, had been too successful. They had, in fact, were drawing in German reinforcements, and Truscott didn't want any more Germans in that area of Italy, because despite what he had, his boss, Mark Clark, had told him Trusket at every intent of launching his main attack through the mountains as part of the coming spring offensive. And this is all happening in February of March, February and March, 1945, which, if I'm not mistaken, is one of the coldest winters on record at this point in Europe. I mean, it's just brutal, brutal cold.

Yeah, they definitely remember the cold as they go through it. Most of the time when they could, they bivouacked up in Italian houses and barns and that sort of thing. One thing they learned, Italian mountains or European mountains have a lot more infrastructure than American mountains. And indeed, people like David Brower, who was the intel officer for third battalion of the 86, would come back to be president of Sierra Club. This is where he really grasp onto the idea there should be wilderness, should be land

with no development on it, was from seeing, you know, you go to every pass. And you go to any pass in the Alps in the summer and there's a ghost house and an Umba band, you know, and people everywhere because you can ride the cable car to it. It's not like American wilderness. That's fascinating. And then so, you know, this is not the first time that the 10th success kind of causes problems, right? Because in this April offensive, which I guess is that's Operation Craftsman, which you talk about in the book, you know, the fact is these guys know how to move. Like, they know how to move in this terrain.

And so when they go on offense, they tend to move faster than their adjacent units, right? And they meet with real success in this, in this breakout into the Poe Valley. Yeah, they're able to launch the next attack. They have to break over a relatively sizable Massif. One battalion figures out, was able to get through, unhooks the rest of the division. They clear that and they clear a pass. And over this pass, they flow the entire first armored division. And as St. Oddball would point out that tanks give you a mighty nice edge in many cases. And so they attack down the ridge with an infantry division on one flank and an armored division on the other front. flank and this continually puts the Germans into that combined arms bind,

that if you try to stop them in the mountains, they'll outflank you in the valleys and try to stop them in the valley, they'll keep coming through the mountains. And they kept coming through the mountains, kept moving. And of course, the first American enter the Poe River Valley was a lead scout out of the 10th Mountain Division. So they're able to, and that basically breaks the line that the Germans said that. They were surprised by how much combat power, the 10th Mountain Division was able to create and maintain in the mountains.

April 1945 must have been quite a time to be alive. You know, if you think just what three years earlier, April 1942 is pretty grim time for humanity. It's not entirely clear. That's a wild understatement that, you know, the good guys are going to win here. If anything, you might put your bets the other way. And here we are in April 1945 in this whole German field army in northern Italy, which probably shouldn't have been there anymore by this point.

And right, the commander had wanted out for some time. They're trapped up against the Po River. They have to abandon all their stuff. And they basically flee up in, I mean, long story short, they flee up into the Alps without their stuff. And that's kind of the end of the war in Italy. I'm alighting, you know, fierce combat and exciting events and all kinds of important stuff. But it's like the invasion of France in 1940 in reverse. I mean, it's total collapse.

Yeah, they're able to flow up into it and move. And they're heading, the division's heading for the main passes. That is everyone understands that they've got to seize those passes as soon as they can and get a hold of them before they can be fortified. So they are moving fast. I mean, they're, you know, at least one battalion of the 10th Mountain Division steals the, you know, the trucks or the bridges or the boats or something meant for another division in order to get across the river and just keep moving.

But they understand, and again, this is a division that's not only been in combat for four months. They have experienced leaders, but they got it figured out. And they move and they move hard. And they take, you know, basically a thousand dead in this fighting. But they, again, it's those years of time, some of these guys had been training since, you know, since that spring of 42, three years, three seasons in the mountains, it all came down to sweating across the Poe River Valley. It's an incredible story. I mean, you talk about a lot more in the book.

You talk about the Cold War history of the division all the way up through closer to the president. And we don't have time, unfortunately, to cover all of that. But, you know, I ask you about Afghanistan where the Tenth Mountain spent a fair amount of time. They retain the name. Do they retain the specialization and how relevant, I mean, there's sort of an obvious way in which it's relevant in Afghanistan. But was it as expertly and cleverly employed as it was in the Apennines in World War II in Afghanistan? Yeah. The short answer to that is no, as far as I can tell.

Yes, Tenth Mountain Division comes back in 1985 as one of the new Light Division. that can be mobilized. They're going to number at the 10th anyway. Senator Bob Dole who had served during Operation Craftsman. He was a replacement officer. With the 10th, asked SEC Army, hey, can we just call it 10th Mountain Division? And Chief Staff Army said, sure, why not? We call 101st Airborne Division and they haven't jumped out of a

plane for decades. So, but it was not to be a mountain division. It didn't have the mountain. It's in the activation order. It's a mountain division not in it's not a mountain division. And so when it shows up in Afghanistan, though the U.S. Army has a lot, has a pretty good mountain doctrine that has been developed

because of work done by the Army National Guard mountain units that are in upstate New York and the Army Mountain Warfare School that they create, nobody really, there isn't any understanding of this doctrine and understanding of it.

And indeed, Afghanistan is a weak spot in the book. I need to do a project really looking at that Peck River campaign, the Operation Mountain Lion, those, what, six years they spent up there, anyone who's seen Restrepo or those films, that's where that took place, where it was Vietnam at altitude and we're putting light infantry units in. And many of them don't have the skills to basically, you know, go out and set a climbing route

for patrol to bypass, you know, to take any potentially by surprise. They don't have the rope skills to lower, you know, a casualty down to a better landing zone. And so that causes problems in one. So there is not that level of training. And we see a lot of it come back. The Army in 2006 takes the mountain school on as not just a guard school, but now an Army school, and begin a series of processes of doctrine and so forth.

But those don't bear full fruit until after the withdrawal from that area. So that's actually the start of kind of the current wave of rethinking about this, we're thinking about doctrine, the Army. The longest time did not recognize the, if you went to the mountain school, you got a Ramshead as a device. The Army said you can't wear that. They just officially recognized it, and now you can wear a Ramshead device on your uniform if you're an Army mountaineer. And in all fairness, the current 10th Mountain Division, when General Anderson had it a few years ago, and now General Nauman is keeping it going, they're heading back to their alpine roots.

They see the value in these skills. They see the value in these capabilities. And I was recently was told that they have authorized almost 600 billets in the division, mainly NCOs to be military mountaineers, to go to the school, to get the skills, to maintain the skills. They took the light fighter school they had that did training inside the division and re-named it, the mountain training group, which is what the last group of instructors at Hale called themselves. And in fact, they used that symbol as well. So we see them out here every year in February for Legacy Days.

So they're trying to reclaim a lot of that because they see the value as a Colorado Guard unit, guard unit. They're a 157th out here. The Colorado rifles, they're a mountain unit. They're working on it hard. They recruit climbers. They recruit ice climbers, ski patrollers, EMTs to try to have a good base of those skills. And they've said, look, if you can do this stuff in the mountains in winter, it is so easy on the flats without snow.

And those mountains on the east coast of Taiwan are, well, they're still. there. Exactly. There are potential theaters for that and how do getting getting that requirement is going to be a critical factor. But right now I know that the Army is re-looking at the doctrine to update it, more so large-scale combat operations. And so a lot of these ideas, I know that the captain who's writing it has seen the book and we've talked a time or two. I've saved him a lot of work by going through all the Armyman Warfare doctrine for the last 80 years. So that's my favorite kind of book if I were that guy is when you just you know there's something you know you need to go deep on but you're just never going to have time and then someone out there it turns out like it's as

though you gave them an assignment they wrote the book that you would have written if you only had five extra years of your life well it's great to have you on lance blythe author of ski climb fight the tenth mountain division and the rise of mountain warfare there's so much more we could have talked about you should come back sometime and we should talk about norad my knowledge of which basically boils down to the movie war games with matthew broadrick And the big screen. And that's what I know of Norad. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a good, there's a very fascinating story to be told about that. Lance, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.