Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  The struggles for Riva Ridge and the Apennine mountains cost the Tenth 203 dead, 686 wounded, and 12 missing. They’d taken 400 prisoners and killed many more men than they’d lost. Before Mt. Belvedere, Ralph Lafferty would recall, “Regular Army guys would see your Tenth Mountain shoulder patch and want to fight you. We were college boys coming to play war.” After Belvedere, that hazing stopped cold.

  They had made themselves known. If General Truscott and his subordinates were amazed by what the untested Tenth had accomplished, the German high command was equally astounded. Field Marshall Albrecht Kesselring would later write that the attack “might imperil our whole operational plan for the spring.”

  Bowerman fully intended to assist in that imperiling, but first he had to help collect the fallen and transport them to Graves and Registration. Ralph Lafferty would remember bodies “contorted like twist-ties” strewn on a hillside and troops, on orders from the regimental commander, stuffing them into mattress covers. The CO, Lafferty would say, “knew how terrible it is to morale to see your friends in pieces.”

  As Bowerman followed the collection squads, he somehow mastered an essential skill: to register the deaths of comrades in grisly, unforgettable detail without being wrecked by it. No one he returned to after the war felt that he had been scarred by his immersion in brutality. Unlike the many for whom war is defining, Bowerman didn’t find himself as a man on the battlefield. Rather, he made the war his job and treated its risk much as he treated the Regular Army bureaucracy. He held his nose and got on with it. When the war ended, he would be the first one out the door.

  After Mt. Belvedere, the division didn’t simply sit and wait. There were weeks of fluid, vicious fighting, pressing ever northward. Its three regiments leapfrogged, blended, and passed through each other according to terrain and enemy movements, all to prepare the tactical ground for one last, overwhelming offensive. Bowerman was often out in a jeep observing, tailoring supplies to the needs of the moving units. His favorite jeep driver was Sergeant Joe Litecky from Minneapolis. “Our minds worked alike,” Bill would say. “He was my guardian angel, getting us out of some places we both sensed we shouldn’t be in.”

  April 14, 1945—one day after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt—would be the bloodiest day for the Tenth, with more than 500 lives lost. The Allies carpet bombed the German positions in the last line of hills south of Bologna and the Po and shelled them with cannon fire. Still, when the Allies attacked, resistance was greater than any they had ever faced. The German artillery and mortars were devastating. Mules carrying ammunition were hit and the ammunition exploded. On a hill near Castel d’Aino, a platoon from the Eighty-Fifth’s Third Battalion, just taken over by Second Lieutenant Robert J. Dole, was ordered to capture a prisoner on night patrol. “We took them by surprise,” said his sergeant, Stan Kuschick. “And then there was a firefight. A minefield, protected by German machine gun fire, blocked our movement. Bob, in a gutsy move, led the platoon up front with two scouts. Machine gun fire killed the scouts and hit Bob. I saw he was barely alive. He looked gray.” Dole, later US Senator from Kansas and the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, was at first paralyzed from the neck down. He would spend forty months in Army hospitals and lose the use of his right arm.

  Days later, Ralph Lafferty went down. An executive officer for his battalion, he had just taken over a company because its commander was badly wounded. “I got two doses,” he would recall, “first from mortar fire and about twenty minutes later someone stepped on a mine, an S-mine, that kicks up in the air and breaks and sprays balls of shrapnel.” In all, Lafferty took fragments in his chest, hand, and—he was sure from the pain—heel. “I was carried out of there on a door by two German prisoners. They took me to our medical collection station, which wasn’t far because as we attacked they moved right behind us.”

  But they could only bandage and drug him. He was forced to stay there during German counterattacks. He didn’t feel life slipping away, but he was still bleeding and far from any real help. “I knew you could take a surrette of morphine every four hours,” Lafferty would say. “I had a stopwatch, and every four hours I would notify the medic of the time. I was pretty faint. I was naked by then. They strip off your clothes to see what happened to you. I was just in a blanket.”

  Out of the night leaned a familiar face. It took Lafferty an instant to believe it. “I don’t know how Bill found me.”

  Bowerman had been doing “the usual roaming,” anticipating the supply needs of units that were coming up from the rear, if it could be called a rear. The fighting was so fluid that some hills were safe while others were receiving shells from the huge German 88s. Bowerman spoke with the medics and said to Lafferty, “Let’s go. Let’s move you now.”

  Bowerman didn’t have Sergeant Joe Litecky with him, so he ran out, flagged down a jeep, and ordered the driver to help him load Lafferty in the passenger seat and stand clear. Violating a standing order, he took the wheel himself. “Officers absolutely were never permitted to drive,” Lafferty would say.

  “We had something of a trip,” Bowerman would recall. He knew where he wanted to go, back where the offensive had begun, on the lower slopes of Mt. della Spe, where there would be a medical transfer unit. But the road had so many convolutions and switchbacks that he had to drive cross-country in places, using his sense of where different American units were and were not. At one point he had to pass under some tracer fire across a canyon. He would look over at Lafferty to see if his color was still lifelike and, seeing that it was, tell them both to be patient. Eventually he made it out. An ambulance took Lafferty on to an Army surgeon operating in a schoolhouse near the town of Pistoia.

  Lafferty’s telling of this story would still have morphine’s calm clarity forty-five years later. “I remember seeing a big garbage bucket of arms and legs in the waiting area,” he would say. “The surgeon asked if I needed blood, and I said I didn’t think so. I felt pretty good. I was concerned about my hand. I couldn’t get it to open. They said, ‘Don’t worry about your hand, guy. We got more to worry about than that.’”

  The surgeons took out a rib to remove all the shrapnel that had lodged in Lafferty’s chest and abdomen. “I got hit at 2 p.m. and was operated on at 10 a.m. the next day, and that would have been a lot longer were it not for Bill. I sure give him credit for getting us moving right then. If he didn’t save my life, he sure improved the odds.”

  Lafferty finished out the war in a Pistoia hospital. His heel hurt so much that he was amazed to find no wound there. The doctors finally convinced him they hadn’t missed any metal and sent him home. A year later, after he was out of the service, the Army shipped home his gear. When he put on the boots, one felt odd. “In that heel, just under the insole, was this big ball of shrapnel that had come through two inches of rubber and stopped just in time.”

  If he had to choose, Bill Bowerman would later say, he would take saving people and supplying people over killing people. But the Allied offensive was on the verge of shoving the Germans into the Po Valley, and Bowerman’s fighting merit had not been lost on his superior officers. “My contention,” Bill would often say, “is this division was successful because they were all outdoorsmen. They all could read a situation and they could act.”

  As a prime example of that ability, Bowerman was asked to leave supply duty and take command of the Eighty-Sixth’s First Battalion. He accepted. A few days later he earned his highest decoration. As he would tell the story, “We were on reconnaissance, going down the road in a jeep. At the end of the road was a building. And we took fire from there and my Jeep went right over and we dropped off the road into a ditch. We got our asses back out of there. This is when nobody knew who was where, what areas were friendly or not. All we knew is we got shot at. So we headed back up the road to warn our guys and see if we can’t get somebody with a bazooka. I don’t know what the hell I was going to do with a bazooka.”

  En route he flagged down an American tank
with a jammed turret. The gunner could shoot but not maneuver. Bill talked him into attacking the house with machine guns. “So I get up on his tank and we go down the road and he’s firing his machine gun and I’m riding behind the turret, and Jesus, the Krauts, it looked like somebody kicked an anthill. They hit the ditch running and hit the other side of the road running. And my tank guy fired his cannon at them, and about that time, here came a guy out from the house and started waving his arms. He turned out to be an American colonel. So I rescued an American colonel by accident. They had captured him somewhere, and he was so glad to see us he recommended me for a Silver Star. It was purely an accident, but I took it.”

  As the Germans retreated through the fertile Lombardy Plain, they tried to blow every bridge behind them to delay their pursuers. So for Bowerman’s First Battalion, speed was everything. On April 30, the lake towns of Nago, Riva, and Torbole fell to the Americans. In Torbole, Bill Boddington got out ahead of the attack and had to lie in a ditch for two hours while the Third Battalion fought their way toward the town. He watched the Germans retreat to Trento and Bolzano, higher up. Beyond, the snowy Alps rose in a beautiful wall to the Austrian border, an improbable battleground.

  In the town of Riva, while getting his bearings, Major Bowerman got a call from Regimental Intelligence saying they had captured a German colonel on his way across the Brenner Pass. After hearing what the colonel had to say, Bowerman did what he’d been told to do in officer school—“use initiative appropriate to the situation.” He ran out and grabbed a captain, a couple of lieutenants, and an interpreter, Staff Sergeant Julius Keller. He told them that he’d heard a few Germans were in the mood to surrender. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get a few Lugers.” Bowerman had promised Bill Hayward that he’d bring him one of the German pistols.

  With Bowerman driving, they headed up the road toward Brenner Pass. They were stopped at a German Army checkpoint about fifteen miles outside of Riva. With Keller translating, Bowerman told the soldiers he was on the way to a meeting with the German high command and they let him through. Keller began to suspect Bowerman was out for more than souvenirs.

  A few miles later they were stopped at an SS checkpoint. This time simply mentioning the high command was not enough. Keller quietly told Bowerman that the SS (for Schutzstaffel, the Nazi party’s storm troopers) was a political arm that thought it should dominate the army. When Bowerman insisted that the SS lieutenant call the commanding general, the lieutenant replied, “I cannot call the general. I am only a lieutenant.”

  As Keller would tell the story in a memoir thirty years later, Bowerman, “drawing himself up to his full height of an All-American football player, which he was, answered, ‘I am a major and I order you to call the general and tell him a group of American officers would like to talk to him in his headquarters.’”

  Rank worked wonders. The lieutenant phoned the general, who agreed to talk with the major. With Keller interpreting, the general (who “sounded very friendly”) said that he would send a staff car to bring the major and his interpreter to headquarters. The jeep and the other Americans would have to wait. It was a calculated risk, but when the staff car arrived fifteen minutes later, Bowerman and Keller got in.

  The car took them to the fifteenth-century Castel Toblino, where Keller took note of the intimidating number of armed guards. Convinced they would have to make an escape, he tried to memorize every turn and every door. And he tried not to worry about the disgraceful state of his uniform. At least Bowerman “made an impressive figure,” he would write, “over six feet tall with shoulders nearly as wide!” Noticing empty nail holes where pictures had once lined the hallways, Keller whispered to Bowerman, “They are getting ready to move!”

  At length they arrived in front of the general, a fatherly looking man in his late sixties. Bowerman addressed him immediately. “General,” Keller translated, “you surely know you cannot resist our air force, artillery, and troops standing by to blast you off the map. Do you want to avoid this bloodshed? We come to you with an offer to accept your surrender.”

  “It was like a movie scene,” Bill would write to Barbara. “The general’s office was a large room and there were staff officers all over the place. The general informed me that he had 4,000 men in that area. So I went with him to look over his troops in all the little villages. It was quite a deal.”

  In the end the general admitted his situation was hoffnungslos (without hope), but declared that he had no authority to surrender on his own. He said he had already sent a messenger, a colonel, to headquarters to ask for such authority and had to wait for the colonel’s return.

  Bowerman gave the general until ten the next morning. At that point, he said, “whether you have received orders or not, you will march your troops in orderly columns without arms down the road. If you do not, we will attack.”

  But the general was afraid his men would be shot by the Italian partisan resistance. “So we finally arranged that his troops would keep their arms and the next day I was to send men to disarm the partisans,” Bill would write Barbara. “Then the Germans would move down and be turned over to our commander.”

  Bowerman and Keller were escorted back to their jeep, where their comrades had traded cartons of cigarettes for Lugers. Only then did Bowerman explain what had moved him to take such a chance. “Regimental Intelligence had grabbed that messenger colonel,” Bowerman would remember. “We knew they knew it was hopeless. We knew it was over.”

  And it was. Shortly, another message came through the battalion switchboard. The Germans had signed the surrender in Caserta, near Naples. The entire war in Italy was over.

  “Delirious celebrations started in the street, dancing, singing, rifle-fire in the air,” Keller would write. And the next morning it was a hungover group of mountain soldiers who took custody of the 4,000 Germans of the Fourteenth Army who came marching down the road as Bowerman had specified. “It was,” Bill wrote Barbara with Bowerman understatement, “a rich experience.” Three weeks later, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin and Europe was at peace.

  Nineteen thousand two hundred and ten men served in the Tenth Mountain; 978 were killed in action, 3,882 wounded, and 28 taken prisoner. One of the last entries in its official history reads “4 May 1945, Lt. Col. Jack Hay’s 3rd Bn of the 86th reached Resia Pass in the Alps on the border of Italy and Austria.” That farthest reach of the unit was to liberate some champagne for Bowerman and friends and to assign a few mules to feed starving people.

  In later mule-related tales, Bill loved to say that when the war ended, the Army records showed that he had 200 mules, but there were 201 in the corral, so he shot one to balance the books. The truth according to Barbara was a little softer: “After the Italian war ended Bill turned loose a lot of mules, and peasants grabbed them up. Then a week later he got an order to turn them in. Bill shrugged and said, They’re gone. So that was another time he was worried whether he’d be praised or brought up on charges.”

  Bill was aboard a troopship bound for America in August 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Japan had not yet surrendered. The troops were given a month off until their next assignment, so Bill headed for Medford, where Barbara and the boys were waiting.

  Barbara, so unshakably positive, was beginning to doubt. She had received a telegram saying Bill would be home for a month and then shipped out for Japan. “Talk about your good news/bad news,” she would say. “I knew the South Pacific was a horrible place to be . . . Then suddenly, bang, it was over. The Empire of Japan surrendered as his plane touched down at the Medford airport.”

  That night the citizen soldier became pure citizen again. The next day, he strode onto the Medford High football field and asked Al Simpson if he needed an assistant. He told his principal to pencil him in for his usual classes. And he dropped a Luger on his superintendent’s desk and said he’d gone a whole war and never heard anything more profane than what Hedrick had taught him in the ten
th grade.

  And after a month of doing all these things, he was absent without leave. “I was supposed to go back to Camp Swift,” Bowerman would say, “because I’d been renamed Division Supply Officer. I was going to have to check in all our trucks and equipment. I had my orders in hand. Everybody did. I didn’t even respond.”

  One blustery day, when the pear leaves were blowing across the fields, a pair of soldiers with MP armbands hailed Bowerman at practice to say he was under arrest. “Yeah?” said Bowerman. “For what?”

  The MP, who was from Portland, answered, “Because you refused to obey an order to return somewhere in Texas where your people were to reassemble to be disbanded.”

  “You think you are going to take me back to Camp Swift,” said Bill. “In the first place, I’m not going. In the second place, you are going to look pretty funny. I’ve got four Bronze Stars and a Good Conduct Medal. I’ve got a Silver Star for gallantry in action. In the third place, the war is over. I’m a schoolteacher. I’m back here teaching school. In the fourth place, if you try to take me out of here we’ll have a riot and you’ll get arrested, right here in my Jackson County.”

  “Well,” said the MP, “I’m going back to the Adjutant General’s office.”

  Where someone must’ve taken a look at Boweman’s service record, for the Army wrote that he could officially muster out at Camp Carson, in Colorado. One of Barbara’s favorite photos shows him there, holding up his honorable discharge papers. His medals would arrive in the mail a couple of years later.

  Bill Boddington, to his chagrin, wound up taking over Bowerman’s supply duty and having to check everything in. “God, it’s amazing we stayed friends,” Bowerman would say. Spared, knowing how blessed he had been, he was ready to do right by the life he had so amply defended.