by Oliver North
SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT “BOB” DOLE
Company I, 3rd Battalion, 85th Infantry,
10th Mountain Division
18 May 1945
I became a member of the enlisted reserve in December 1942 and got one of those “ninety-day wonder” commissions from Officer’s Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in November 1944.
I’ve always wondered how I ended up in the 10th Mountain Division. I’m from Kansas, where there aren’t any hills—much less mountains. The division was full of great skiers and mountain climbers—but I had never learned to ski.
At one time, you had to have at least two letters of recommendation to get into the 10th Mountain Division. The idea for such an outfit had come from the president of the American Ski Patrol—Minnie Dole. I don’t think he’s any relation but maybe that’s why the Army sent me there.
I arrived in Italy just before Christmas, 1944, and by early January of’45 I was in a replacement depot with a whole group of 2nd lieutenants when we were told to report to the units up on the Gothic Line. Second lieutenants were sort of expendable in those days.
I was ordered to the 10th Mountain. General George Hayes, the division commander, was revered by the “mountaineers.” He was a great leader. When I arrived in early February ’45, the division was fighting on Mount Belvedere. The company commander in Company I, 3rd Battalion of the 85th Regiment was Captain Butch Luther, the great All-American football star of Nebraska. And a day or two after I got there I remember seeing his helmet, with a hole right between the captain’s bars. He was killed and several second lieutenants were killed or wounded. Our new company commander was Captain Jerry Butcher.
Company I sustained more killed-in-action than any company in the 10th Mountain Division. Our company always seemed to be on the cutting edge when things were happening. But when you come in as a replacement you kind of feel like, “I’m the only stranger in the town here. Are they going to accept me?” Are they going to say, “This guy doesn’t know anything?” Or, “You’re one of these ninety-day wonders out of Fort Benning. Where have you been while we’ve been training at Camp Hell?”
But I needn’t have worried. They were good soldiers and they accepted me as one of their own. I was assigned as a rifle platoon commander, replacing a lieutenant who’d been killed.
Sergeants Carafe and Kuschick were my two leading NCOs. They helped me get the lay of the land, ran things, and helped me along. They showed me around our lines and took me out on orientation patrol right after I arrived.
A few nights after I joined the company I was leading my own patrols. One night a week or so later, we were out on a night patrol, probing the German positions, and we ran into some Germans. In the ensuing fight, seven of us were slightly wounded. That was my first combat experience—and for weeks afterwards it was like that every night in those cold Italian mountains.
In the daytime we kept in our foxholes and tried to stay warm without getting hit by enemy artillery or mortars. At night we patrolled in the mountains and tried to keep from getting killed by rifle fire and grenades.
I remember back in the States, right after I came into the Army, seeing guys training with broomsticks when I was in the 75th Division. We weren’t very well prepared back then. But these men in the 10th Mountain were well trained, experienced, and disciplined—mentally and physically.
Winter in the mountains of Italy is very cold. Our winter equipment wasn’t the best—and I remember never being able to get warm the whole time I was there.
We were supposed to start a big push to punch through the German defensive line on April 12, but President Roosevelt died that day. Of course everyone was in tears and shock—we were just kids, we didn’t know anything about politics—but we knew our president died, and he was our commander in chief. So that delayed everything for two days.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened, had he lived, and had our offensive went off as scheduled. Maybe I wouldn’t have been shot, who knows? But the offensive was postponed. After a couple days to get over the death of our commander in chief, it all started again on the fourteenth of April. That day we got up quite early about 5 a.m., got everything together, and started down the road and then up the hills.
There was a hill—number 913—that’s the height of the hill in feet—near a little village called Castel Diano. The hilltop was our first battalion objective. After we cleared the village and took Hill 913 we were to move on to our next objective—Hill 785—but I never made it to 785.
As we moved up on Hill 913, Company I was the point for the battalion and we began to take a lot of fire—and a lot of casualties. My platoon was in the lead for the company and my radioman, Corporal Simms, was hit first by the Germans firing down on us.
I ran to get Corporal Simms to try to get him back into some cover. As I was dragging him back toward a hole, I felt this blow to my neck and this stinging in my right shoulder. It must have been a shell fragment—too big for shrapnel from a grenade—because it broke a couple vertebrae in my neck and pretty much messed up my shoulder.
I lay there for a long time with a lot of firing going on around us—and I remember Sergeant Kuschick wrote an “M” with my blood on my forehead—M for morphine so that the medic would give me some when he got to me. Sgt. Kuschick stayed with me for quite a while before the platoon had to move on up the hill. Before he left to continue the attack, he jammed my rifle with the bayonet into the dirt beside me and put my helmet on the stock so our company medics would see it and know—somebody’s there who needs attention.
I waited a long time. Finally the medics and litter bearers got to me and they started to carry me down the hill. It was very rough going and I remember being scraped along the rocks a couple of times. I just vaguely remember the sharp pain in my back. Then everything kind of went black.
I recall waking up in a field hospital where there was a whole line of wounded soldiers, all on litters. It turned out that the 10th Mountain Division suffered more casualties that day than at any other point in the war. We had a total of maybe five hundred or more killed and that day.
Despite the losses, the 10th Mountain made all its objectives that day—and went on to take Hill 785. A few days later Company I crossed the River Po. Unfortunately, I wasn’t with them for all of that—or for the big celebration when it was finally over on May 2.
From the field hospital I was brought back to the Italian coast, then eventually put on a hospital ship back to the States, and ultimately got back to Russell, Kansas. I spent four years in rehabilitation. I couldn’t use my left arm, and it took me about eleven months to get on my feet again. I had a blood clot in my lungs, and had tremors in my hand, for which they injected snake venom
Then I lost a kidney, and everything just seemed to be going downhill. I lost about seventy-five pounds. But then I’d look around and see somebody who was really sick. You think you’re pretty sick, until you see them carting somebody out who died in the bed next to you.
You say, “I’m still here.” But it was a long recovery. You say, “I can’t be too discouraged,” yet you get discouraged anyway. I couldn’t dress myself. I had to ask somebody to help me with my shirt, and for a while, help with normal functions, like going to the bathroom and things like that. But once I got beyond that, I learned I could do most anything with a buttonhook. I can get dressed. I don’t have much feeling in my right hand. But I’ve learned to adapt, and it works out pretty good.
On 14 April 1945, the day that Bob Dole was wounded, the 10th Mountain Division breached the German defensive line and opened a hole for other Allied troops to pour into northern Italy. But it came at a terrible cost. Of the 19,734 soldiers who served with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy, nearly 5,000 were casualties—nearly a third of them on the day that 2nd Lt. Bob Dole fell. His regiment lost 370 men killed in action, 1,427 wounded, and three who were captured and made POWs. But the seven-day offensive reached its goal, breaking the back of German resista
nce in Italy.
10th Mountain Division in Italy.
Thanks to the courage of the Mountaineers, the Allies were able to cut off a German retreat into Austria and sweep through to Trieste, Yugoslavia—where Mark Clark’s army met the advance force of Marshall Tito’s Yugoslav army. By then, the man responsible for so much death and destruction in his homeland of Italy was dead. On 28 April 1945, Italian Communist partisans captured Benito Mussolini, his mistress, and a dozen other fascists near Lake Como, as they were attempting to flee to Switzerland. They were all promptly executed.
The twenty-two-month-long battle for the boot had tied up—and eventually destroyed—more than a score of German divisions. Though the bloody Anzio-Cassino battles would turn out to be the most costly killing field in the European theater, the Germans who fought there could otherwise have been used against the Allies in France or later on, in Germany.
CHAPTER 8
WAR IN THE SKIES 1941–1945
In the summer of 1939, when World War II began in Europe, the entire United States Army Air Corps consisted of fewer than 1,200 combat aircraft, and the U.S. Navy had less than 900. These planes—fighters, transports, bombers, and patrol aircraft—were spread from the Philippines to the U.S. East Coast. That same summer, Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe massed more than 4,000 combat aircraft for the attack on Poland.
The disparities in air power had been growing since Hitler came to power. By 1935, Germany’s reinvigorated armament factories were turning out modern, low-wing fighters and multi-engine bombers. During the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1938, hundreds of German pilots gained valuable combat experience that would benefit the Luftwaffe when war in Europe began.
U.S. military planners were not ignorant of these realities. Air power advocates were simply unable to convince isolationists in Congress to appropriate sufficient funds for building a modern air force. In the midst of the Great Depression, expenditures for military aircraft and training pilots was problematic even though the employment of aircraft in World War I—first for reconnaissance and observation, then as a means of supporting armies on the ground with bombs and guns—had galvanized the imagination of strategic thinkers around the globe.
In Italy, Giulio Douhet postulated in 1921 that future wars could be won by airpower alone, employing massive bombing attacks—not against an adversary’s front lines, but against the enemy’s cities and war production centers. British, Japanese, and German aircraft designers, military officers, and political leaders seized on Douhet’s theories to start modernizing their respective air forces.
In the United States, the most outspoken proponent of air power was U.S. Army Air Corps Brigadier General Billy Mitchell. In July 1921, with scores of politicians and military brass looking on and cameras documenting the event, Mitchell’s aircrews—flying WWI-era aircraft—bombed a group of obsolete American and captured German vessels anchored off the Virginia Capes. Though the “unsinkable” battleship Ostfriesland went to the bottom, the demonstration failed to convince opponents that America needed a large, independent air force.
Two years later, in a 1923 report that he described as “the masterpiece” of his career, Mitchell predicted—nearly two decades before Pearl Harbor—that a Pacific war would begin with a naval and air attack on Pearl Harbor at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning! He was off by just twenty-five minutes.
But Billy Mitchell’s unwavering and assertive manner made him more adversaries than allies. He resigned from the military in 1926 after being exonerated in a court martial for insubordination. He died ten years later—still advocating the need for a modern, independent Air Force.
Throughout the 1930s, opponents of military expenditures in the midst of the Great Depression pointed to the two vast oceans that protected the continental United States from attack by enemy bombers. But as Europe and Asia edged closer to conflagration, Roosevelt was able to convince Congress to start building small numbers of more modern fighters and bombers. That also required that pilots, aircrews, mechanics, and aircrews be trained to fly and maintain them.
By the time Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, new designs for modern fighters and bombers were coming off the drawing boards and U.S. aircraft companies were being granted small contracts for prototypes to be tested by the Navy and the Army Air Corps. Equally important, thousands of young American men were enrolled in government-subsidized civilian pilot training.
Many of those who sought to fly before Pearl Harbor were inspired by the accomplishments of solo pilots like Charles Lindbergh and the heroic exploits of World War I pilots. Articles, books, and movies about Erich von Richtoffen—Germany’s “Red Baron”—and America’s leading “ace”—former race car driver Eddie Rickenbacker—captured the imagination of millions.
Those who flew small, one-seat, single-engine fighters were depicted as modern incarnations of ancient knights—doing battle one-on-one. Instead of four-legged steeds, these warrior-pilots had sleek, lethal machines, powerful engines, and the ability to twist, turn, climb, and dive through blue sky.
For tens of thousands of young American men, these were alluring images in the midst of the privations of the Great Depression. Nearly all of those who volunteered—and could pass the demanding physical and eyesight requirements for pilot training—knew that Rickenbacker had twenty-six “kills” and that the Red Baron had eighty. Though few would admit it at the time, most of them nurtured the idea of becoming an “ace”—and knew that such a designation required five air-to-air kills.
In 1939 and 1940, several hundred young aviators left the United States for England, China, and Canada—not to avoid the war, but to test their proficiency and courage against the Germans and Japanese. Americans serving with the RAF “Eagle Squadron” and Claire Chennault’s “Flying Tigers” quickly learned that the enemy aircraft and pilots they went up against were tough adversaries. Becoming an “ace” turned out to be a lot tougher than some had thought.
Robin Olds was a second-year cadet at West Point when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The son of a WWI ace, he had heard of his father’s exploits in open cockpit aircraft over France—and had long ago decided to become a pilot. Second Lieutenant Olds arrived in England in May 1944, after graduating with honors from the military academy and flight school. His first assignment was to help protect the Normandy landings from German air attack. Olds dutifully attacked ground targets, but he was at heart a fighter pilot, and looked forward to the challenge of meeting the enemy in air-to-air combat.
LIEUTENANT ROBIN OLDS, USAAF
Over Occupied France
21 September 1944
Dad took me up on my eighth birthday in a biplane with an open cockpit. I still get a thrill thinking about it. From the moment I felt the breeze on my face, I wanted to fly.
I remember Sunday, December 7, 1941—when one of my classmates at West Point came running up to me excitedly saying, “They bombed Pearl Harbor!”
“Who did?” I asked.
“The Japanese,” he said—as though I should have known.
After graduation and flight school, I was sent to England, where our squadron flew missions over Normandy. By August, I’d been flying combat missions for more than three months and never saw an enemy airplane—but then in August, our zone of operation shifted and all that changed. Flying alone over France, I got a chance to smoke two German Focke Wulf 190s.
Just eleven days later another pilot and I, flying in P-38s, came upon a gaggle of fifty Messerschmidt 109s, and I radioed my group leader and said, “I’m going after some bandits, headed north.” I could have given him more details, but hell, they were my bandits. I didn’t want to share them with anybody.
The first one still hadn’t seen me when I slid in behind him for the kill.
But just as I lined up my gun sight and was about to pull the trigger, both engines quit on my plane. I was so excited I had forgotten to switch fuel tanks after dropping my empty tanks—but I shot him down anyway. To this day, I may be the only fighter pil
ot in the history of aerial warfare that ever shot down an enemy airplane while flying a “glider.”
After getting my engines restarted, I downed another ME-109, and then rolled into a dive. As I got closer to the ground, my controls froze. I remember saying to myself, “You’re just going straight down and crash, and that’ll be it.”
But I managed to pull out at the last instant and just barely cleared the ground. So I said, “This boy has had it—that’s enough. No more fighting now, I just want to go home.”
As I started my turn for home, I looked over my left shoulder and there was another ME-109 shooting at me. And I thought, that’s not fair—can’t he see that I’m scared and want to go back to base? I mean—he’s taking an unfair advantage of me.
Instinctively, I pulled a hard break, and that old P-38 of mine shuddered, almost turned, and stopped. The poor 109 pilot overshot my position and I just rolled the wings level—now he was right in front of me. So I took aim and shot him down. Then I went home.
The competition in the skies to rack up “kills” was fierce. All claims of air-to-air victories were supposed to be verified—either by another flyer who witnessed the enemy airplane go down, or by gun cameras that provided a permanent visual record of hits and kills. The squadron intelligence officers who tallied the scores would often say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
But not all gun camera film could be recovered. Charles “Chuck” Yeager had such an experience over France. Yeager was, by his own description, “just a West Virginia farm boy.” Born in 1923, he never even got close to an airplane until he was eighteen. His first flight didn’t go very well.
LIEUTENANT CHARLES YEAGER, USAAF
Over Occupied France
23 September 1944
I enlisted in September of ’41, just after finishing high school, and became a ground crewman on AT-6s. I was on liberty that Sunday and heard on the radio that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor—and that we were to report to our base.
