The Combat Story of the 3D Battalion, 86Th Mountain Infantry of the 10Th Mountain Division
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Remount Blue The combat story of the 3d Battalion, 86th Mountain Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division. This copy of the original document has been expanded with a number of recollections, marked in cursive, by others who were also there and shared these experiences. CONTENTS Chapter Page Preface 3 1 Overseas Pay 6 2 Patrols Were Active 8 3 Belvedere Breakthrough 13 4 Combat Infantrymen on Torraccia 15 5 Don’t Stop Now 24 6 Static Again 26 7 Final Push: Out of the Apennines 31 8 Final Push: Across the Po 39 9 Pursuit in the Alps 47 10 Occupation 53 11 Break It Up 60 Excerpts from General Hay letter 61 3 REMOUNT BLUE The combat story of the 3d battalion, 86th Mountain Infantry - Preface - Some of the veterans of the 3d Battalion, 86th Mountain Infantry, may remember the Po Valley plains near the little town of Castenedolo as the place where a few men in the outfit began to write the Battalion’s diary. Each of the companies was asked for a few qualified volunteers, and in such hot and sticky shade as these men could find they started a job that really hasn’t been completed yet. It was intended that the history of Remount Blue - code name for one of the best battalions in the business - should appear in book form. But the way to the hoped-for book is not yet cleared of trip flares and tactical wire. There were too few advance orders to begin to finance it, and the Eastern publisher who kept us on the string for nearly three years by promising to publish the book became frightened last May at the prospects of rising costs and falling markets. We have been left in the lurch. A book-length manuscript is still on hand. The story it tells is pretty complete, from the day the mountain- troop idea was no more than a gleam in “Minnie” Dole’s eye, to the final break-up. There are sketches by William Reyes, of I Company; photographs by men in the Battalion as well as by the Signal Core; other photographs of German mountain troops in training; maps; photostats of German documents; an especially humorous account of the D Series by William Hosking, of Headquarters Company; an appendix of Mountain Troop songs, a battalion roster, and a checklist of books and articles about 10th Mountain and the smaller units that cadred the regiments. The text as a whole, while still centering on the 3d Battalion, has been revised so as to be of interest to many others than those who served in the Battalion. The manuscript as a whole, has been highly spoken of by many who have read it and checked it over. But for all that, it isn’t in print. We shall have to hope that it will all come out someday in good form, and that you’ll be after a copy when it comes. Our story here passes right by all the preliminaries; it is concerned with the Battalion’s most important role - what it did overseas. Even so, it is the work of many men, some of whose names may already be starting to slip from your minds, but whose accomplishments, combined with your own, you won’t want to forget: Henry H. Burnett Greenleaf W. Pickard William D. Drake Merril Pollack Richard M. Emerson Edward Reilly Linwood M. Erskine, Jr. Ernest A. Ross Paul T. Hodul Wilbur G. Vaughan Frank J. Kiernan Archie Vaughn Curt Kreiser Richard F. Weber Specific acknowledgment of the work of these men is not made in the text. Others who have contributed are mentioned by name with the parts they have written. I hope that those of you who were really in the thick of it will not be too troubled by the occasional intrusion of personal anecdotes about what the rear echelon - in the person of Blue 2 - was up to. My main job in these pages was to fill up the holes in the story that existed here and there, to supply as well some needed transitional passages, and finally, because editing is my job, to throw a few commas around and try to get most of the spelling to agree with Webster. Grateful acknowledgement is made to George Earle for excerpts from his History of the 87th, as well as to the IV Corps historian for his contribution to the necessary over-all view. I am obligated to Lt. Col. John Hay for encouraging - if not needling - the project. Thanks are due to Roland Moody and Leo Healy for checking facts and adding accounts. And finally, special thanks are due my wife not only for many hours she spent on the retyping of various drafts of the manuscript, but being a damned good editor’s editor. May the result remind you, if not of happy days, at least of important days, and of friendships you made in a few months that will last you a lifetime-even if some of those friends aren’t going to be around. David R. Brower University of California Press, Remount Blue 2 Berkley 4, California, Remount Blue 6 Chapter 1 But if GIs approaching Kwajalein in an assault boat subjected to small-arms and mortar fire could sing "Happy OVERSEAS PAY Birthday to You" while making an amphibious landing on a When we boarded our converted luxury liner, the Jap-held atoll, certainly we could think of cheerful subjects S. S. Argentina, the order was "Get in your bunks and stay while moving into a peaceful, if some- what upset, port of there until further notice." But the problem at hand still Naples. Tomorrow could well take care of its own troubles. remained how to lower same, when they were ceiling high, This was new; the war damage, the small craft, the Neopo- five deep, and there were such slight encumbrance banging litans were interesting; and for the first time for most of us, around one's neck as steel helmet, rifle, gas mask, pistol we were now foreigners. belt, pack, and duffel bag. Strong legs and stout hearts plus This did not mean that we no longer gave conside- the ability of some of the men to stand on their heads finally ration to rumors about our future. We had already pumped accomplished the order. Shortly after daylight the trembling the ship's personnel well enough to know that Italy would of the ship told the still conscious that the 86th Mountain be our destination; we had reached conclusions, hardly Infantry, leading the 10th Mountain Division, was moving wrong, about the date of our landing from the presence of and was starting on a new pay scale. the Christmas-dinner ration in the galley. And now we were We were told that we would be fed two meals a day hearing that we'd have two weeks to rejoin our equipment on the trip across. For most of us, during the first days, that and gather more of it in billets just outside Naples; we was two too many. The safest place to be was on the top would then move up within artillery range of the Germans deck, where you could get seasick to your heart's content for training for another two weeks or so; following this we without fear that someone above you was doing likewise. would be indoctrinated into combat piecemeal, key officers As the days sped by we became acquainted with the big and NCOs playing visiting firemen to the organizations on ship, and a few words of the language of the sea. The ship's the line, picking up what battle lessons they could before loudspeaker would inform us to "muster" down in the the entire regiment gave its training the combat test. "galley" for evening "meal." We frequently patronized the We unloaded at the dock and moved by truck out "ship's store," regardless of what it was called, especially to what was ironically called the "College," at Bagnoli, just with cigarettes at five cents a pack. Everything possible was up the coast from Naples. The college had never been com- done by the ship's personnel to make the men comfortable; pleted and bombs had already started to tear it down. The they kept the soldiers and the Air Corps separated whene- buildings, with an elaborate touch of camouflage, had been ver possible, and even let us have some drinking water oc- used previously to billet German troops. To us it was just a casionally. Many men took advantage of the warm sunshine bunch of cold stone walls with all the windows missing. to lie on the decks when there was room. We learned that Walking, on pass, through the rubble of Naples ordinary soap would not lather in salt water, the importan- we could see the barefooted children, dressed in whatever ce of the strict blackout, the meaning of the word convoy. scraps they could beg or steal, some crippled by bombing We watched the ships in our convoy as they changed speed or perhaps by malnutrition. The older people were little and direction to complicate any submarine's attempt to line better off. They would pick up a cigarette butt as soon as it up its sights on us. Our ship led the convoy. hit the ground. At each mess hall, crowds of civilians waited Certainly it wasn't with a tourist's eye that the 86th to pick up scraps of bread, the mess-kit garbage, and the had it's first glimpse of Italy.