MOUNTAIN MEN
On a wintry day in Italy in the final months of the war against Nazi Germany, Major General George Price Hays, commander of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, spoke to men from the division’s 85th Regiment. It was February 16, 1945. In three days, the soldiers of the 85th and the division’s two other regiments were slated to attack Germans holding the high ground of 3,800-foot Mount Belvedere and adjacent peaks in Italy’s Northern Apennines.
General Hays, then 52, had taken command of the 10th the previous autumn. As a young artillery officer in the previous war against Germany, he had been awarded a Medal of Honor. Weather-beaten and plainspoken, Hays reminded one of the soldiers gathered before him that day of a tough old cowhand.
The men of the 10th were eager to join the fight against the Nazis. Unlike their commander, though, they were not seasoned soldiers; their division was the next-to-last the U.S. Army would send to fight in Europe.
Their first weeks on the Italian front had been uneventful. Now, standing before the regiment as they gathered outdoors in the cold mountain air, Hays went over plans for the coming offensive, pointing out enemy positions on a large map. Mount Belvedere is the first in a line of peaks, all about 3,000 feet high, stretching northeast from the hillside village of Querciola and arrayed along a three-and-a-quarter-mile ridgeline. The most prominent of these peaks is Belvedere itself, along with Mount Gorgolesco and Mount della Torraccia. The three mountains overlook Highway 64, one of the few roads then cutting through the Apennines, connecting the region around Florence to the south—which had been held by the Allies since the previous fall—to Bologna in the north, in the northern third of Italy still controlled by the Germans.
The 10th’s plan of attack was complex and multipronged, with elements from the 85th, 86th, and 87th regiments involved in the initial assault from several sides of Belvedere and Gorgolesco. Once they had secured the summits of those peaks, the 85th’s 2nd Battalion, held in reserve, would push on to della Torraccia (see map, page 37).
Capturing these three peaks was essential to the success of the Allied offensive in Italy in the fighting to come in the spring. The Allies would not be able to advance into northern Italy without clearing the Germans from the adjoining high ground.
