Guarding history of WWII 'ski troops'

On a crisp Sunday afternoon 62 years ago, Dan Kennerly played a touch football game at Emory University that he would never forget.

Kennerly was having fun with some buddies from Decatur only weeks before his freshman year at the University of Georgia, where coach Wally Butts had offered him a football scholarship.

The game ended. Four of the 12 boys on that field would be killed in World War II.

And Kennerly, who had never seen snow stick to the ground, would survive a fish-out-of-water stint in the "ski troops" of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division.

Serving alongside several Olympians and forefathers of the country's ski industry, Kennerly relied on his athleticism in becoming a skilled mountain climber and infantryman. His platoon helped win key battles against the Germans in the Italian mountains.

Kennerly kept a detailed journal that escaped the censorship of letters home. As veterans die off, his memories give historians critical details of the Italian campaign. "He brought an incredible Southern instinct for storytelling to the war," said McKay Jenkins, a former Atlanta journalist who mined Kennerly's material for a recent book, The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe, now in its second printing.

"You take a man with that kind of instincts and put him in a setting where material for storytelling is infinite, and he didn't miss a thing. It's not just about bombs going off, but the smell of garlic [that he and other hungry soldiers] pulled from the ground."

At 82, living near Helen --- the closest Georgia has to an Alpine village --- Kennerly still studies military history. He's been mesmerized by it ever since, as a boy, he touched the cork leg of a Civil War veteran who lived nearby.

At 20, Kennerly was so enraged by the Japanese attack that he wanted to skip his UGA football scholarship and sign up for the service. But his mother begged him not to. He arrived in Athens a 5-foot-11, 180-pound guard.

Coach Butts toughened him ("He chewed me up one side and down the other"), and after a 10-1 season, Kennerly found himself at the 1943 Rose Bowl. The 9-0 victory over UCLA, making the Bulldogs consensus national champions, would be Kennerly's football highlight.

The 10th Mountain Division caught the imagination of Kennerly and many Americans, thanks to hype from Hollywood film crews and Life magazine. Some of the foremost American and European skiers and mountain climbers were part of this elite group. They prepared to defend America from Japanese attacks in Alaska or a German invasion through Canada, or to take on the Germans in the Alps.

Kennerly had never skied, never climbed anything higher than Georgia's Blood Mountain, and never been farther north than Tennessee. He had heard about 10th Mountain Division soldiers getting to hunt elk in Colorado and requested that assignment. His syrupy drawl confounded his superior officer.

That chutzpah helped him survive intense training in the Colorado Rockies alongside world champion Swiss ski racer Walter Prager, future U.S. Olympic coach Friedl Pfeiffer, celebrated mountain climber Paul Petzoldt and Norwegian world record-holding ski jumper Torger Tokle.

"I was the oddity," Kennerly recalled. "I would start to talk and everybody would get quiet and I would hear someone whisper, 'What did he say?' The first thing I learned was that 'damn Yankee' was two words, not one. We all had the same hopes and dreams and fears. I was just the one who talked funny."

He bunked with Georgia halfback Jack Pounds, also from Decatur Boys' High. The pair learned to build snow caves, prevent frostbite and make bedding from evergreen boughs.

Their athletic stamina and ability to adapt and take orders helped get them through. "For anybody who had been coached by Wally Butts, anything else was a piece of cake," Kennerly said.

The division deployed to Italy in December 1944. The Apennine mountain range had become an important German fortress, allowing troops to take up ridge positions overlooking the highways throughout the region. The Germans easily picked off any attempts to take over the Po Valley, a breadbasket supplying their forces.

Allied commanders focused on conquering Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere, the most heavily fortified of a string of German-controlled mountain ridges. American troops had tried for 18 months, without success, to pierce the ice- and snow-covered strongholds, losing strength as units left to fight in France.

Now the ballyhooed 10th Mountain soldiers would get their brief but bloody taste of combat, but without most of their specialized gear. It never arrived.

Snafus, and the gruesomeness of infantry warfare, would become grist for Kennerly's diary. The student of military history was bent on capturing it firsthand.

"Looking up at Mount Belvedere, that looms dark and foreboding above us, I wonder what fate awaits me in its gloomy draws and crannies," Kennerly wrote in anticipation of his first battle. "All the morbid possibilities are pushed from my mind and I try not to think about them."

His division's dramatic assault on these strategic points began in February 1945. To ensure silence, they went with weapons unloaded under cover of darkness.

To scale Riva Ridge, the soldiers climbed several routes more than 2,000 feet high --- some slopes so sheer that technical ropes had to be used. By daybreak, mule teams had brought up heavy machine guns. On nearby Belvedere, Kennerly manned one of these guns. He would earn two Bronze Stars for his bravery as Allied forces pushed to the Po Valley.

Kennerly's journal writing captured the harmony of the sounds produced by flying mortar shells, the stink of a foxhole, the wrenching scene after battle. He noted how the waxy yellow skin of dead soldiers resembled fake fruit. He compared their smell to that of an Atlanta slaughterhouse where his father once took him to sell cows.

Describing the carnage of Belvedere, he wrote: "Near the low point of the crest are 11 bodies in a row. This is the remains of a squad from C Company that ran into a German final protective line. Their bodies have been chopped to pieces and [lie] in every type of grotesque position. One has the top of his head shot off, his brains have spilled out onto the ground. . . . It reminds me of a watermelon with all the meat gone. This is the most horrible sight I've ever seen. I'm gripped with fear. I feel sick and want to vomit. Now I recognize the terrible nature of infantry warfare. The stark brutality overwhelms me. I feel completely vulnerable."

Deployed for only 114 days, the mountain soldiers suffered one of the highest casualty rates of the war. Of the 19,000 men who served (15,000 who trained, and 4,000 who joined as replacements in Italy), roughly 1,000 were killed. The 4,000 who were wounded included future presidential candidate Bob Dole.

After years of training, the 10th Mountain soldiers never skied and barely used their rope skills. Kennerly soured on the idea of patriotic duty.

"Back home all politicians and writers glorify it. They make war sound so wonderful with their fancy speeches and words that any red-blooded American male feels like a yellow bastard if he doesn't join up," he wrote. "All that is a bunch of bull----. . . . There sure as hell is nothing glamorous about dying in the mud."

Kennerly returned to Athens but quit football after injuring his shoulder. He no longer had any enthusiasm about taking orders.

He went on to get a master's degree at UGA, marry and raise a family. He coached football at old O'Keefe High School near Georgia Tech and later became athletics coordinator for the Atlanta school system. He retired in 1982.

Meanwhile, the veterans of the 10th Mountain Division shaped the country's ski and outdoor industry. More than 60 winter resorts were either founded by these experts or had ski schools run by them. Bill Bowerman co-founded Nike and developed the waffle sole running shoe. David Brower became head of the Sierra Club and one of the century's most pre-eminent environmentalists.

Today their numbers are dwindling. Only 16 showed up last week for a reunion on St. Simons Island.

The books help preserve history that Kennerly never wants anyone to relive --- or to forget. That story wouldn't be half so vivid without the keen eye and pen of a Southern football player turned mountain soldier.

Kennerly soured on the idea of patriotic duty. "Back home all politicians and writers glorify it. They make war sound so wonderful with their fancy speeches and words that any red-blooded American male feels like a yellow bastard if he doesn't join up," he wrote. "All that is a bunch of bull----. . . . There sure as hell is nothing glamorous about dying in the mud."

Doesn't sound to me as though he has soured on the idea of patriotic duty, but on politicians' b.s. No one in their right mind would imagine that war was fun or glorious. Very few who fought in that war and saw what we were fighting against despised America or patriotism afterwards. This is the writer's view and isn't supported by what this brave soldier had to say.

My uncle was in the Tenth, BTW. Yes, it was horrible. And yes, he felt it was worth it to defeat Naziism, which threatened to take over the part of the world not already conquered by Stalinism.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.