And a new generation of literally cold warriors
It’s less bizarre this time, but the Army is buying “skis, snowshoes, large tents and other equipment to train troops on cold-weather survival” again.
This time it doesn’t have to share a camp with German POWs and a strange group of disloyal American soldiers.
The new buying spree comes as, once again, the military is adjusting to a different breed of warfare. “The focus is no longer the desert, or that type of training,” Maj. Gen. Peter Andrysiak of Army Alaska quite reasonably told the Army Times. “The focus is mountainous, cold environments.”
It’s done this literally cold warrior thing before, even before the Cold War. Most of it involved the Army’s storied 10th Mountain Division. Born near the start of our entry into World War II, it first trained in the suitably freezing Colorado mountains. It’d soon take on a heavily fortified German line in the winter mountains of northern Italy and, in the process, become a legend.
They were not timid men. In research for a book due out later this year, I found tales of some of them who, in the words of one 10th Mountain veteran, “vented their anger” during training not on Axis fighters but on some other American soldiers stationed at the same camp. They jumped GI’s, who looked suspiciously disloyal.
And many were disloyal. They were misfit soldiers in a misfit company, and some were planning nothing less than sabotage of the domestic war effort. Among them was the only American soldier destined to be convicted of the military’s equivalent of domestic treason during the war. He was sentenced to hang. And 10 years later, just like that, he was an insurance exec in San Diego.
The misfits’ story started as unexpectedly as it ended
By late 1942 and into 1943 the Army found that, in its sprint to build what would become an eight million-person fighting force, it had inducted a fair share of men with iffy loyalties and disturbing FBI files.
The Army didn’t really know what to do with them. Keeping them in their regular units risked “infecting” other soldiers with morale-shaking talk of a German juggernaut. And discharging them risked infecting the general population with the same morale-shaking talk, or worse.
Its solution: pluck the questionable soldiers, most of them already through training and some about to be shipped overseas, from their units around the country. It threw them together into five “special organizations,” stripped them of their guns and uniforms, gave them grunt work to do, and stashed them in remote camps around the U.S. There, they presumably would spend the rest of the war under control.
Segregating resentful malcontents in the middle of nowhere did pose other risks. They could “infect” each other, which they did.
About 250 of them eventually found themselves some 10,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains at a place called Camp Hale or, in the barracks, Camp Hole. The camp’s main business was to outfit the 15,000 trainees for mountain warfare on the self-same “skis, snowshoes, large tents and other equipment” for “cold-weather survival” that Army Alaska is buying today.
German POWs
Now formally the “special” 620th Engineer General Service Company, the malcontents’ ambitions were growing. Near their barracks, as luck would have it, were some 300 German POWs.
The men of the 620th, some German themselves, some loquacious admirers of the Third Reich and some gay, fell for the POWs. All former members of General Irwin Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps, the prisoners kept their martial posture, sang on their way to work each morning and played macho soccer in the winter with their shirts off.
In an “interesting experiment in international relations,” a few struck up relationships with some WACs stationed nearby “in the mattress warehouse.”
The misfits openly befriended the POWs, and the men of the 10th Mountain hated them for it. On their breaks from the demanding, frigid training and overnight winter camping, they took some sport in beating up the “traitors” from time to time.
In February 1944, one of the misfit soldiers, Dale Maple, helped two of the POWs escape. The plan, apparently discussed seriously by grown-up men, was to get to Germany somehow to get money and material to fuel their takeover of the camp and start blowing up key transportation hubs. After a four-day nationwide manhunt, the fugitives were finally captured in northern Mexico.
Maple and four of his confederates back at camp (not all were guilty) were court-martialed. Maple was sentenced to hang, and the others got long sentences. All, however, were soon on their unlikely way to successful careers.
The 10th Mountain Division, meanwhile, went on to glory in World War II and beyond. Some of its original members famously went on to develop Colorado’s booming skiing industry, while the division became what its website claims is the Army’s “most-deployed unit.” All handily overshadowed the stories of the misfit men of the 620th, whose histories have pretty much (and not unjustly) faded. “A Small Treason,” appearing in 2021, explores them, their times, and some much under-appreciated military reform.