Thom reviewed Winter Army by Maurice Isserman
Review of 'Winter Army' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This is a fairly complete history of the 10th Mountain division, the US "ski troops" from WWII. This book was referenced in one I recently read about the Finnish Winter War, which partly inspired the creation of this corps.
This history spends a lot of time on the logistics of creation and the training in Colorado at more than a mile of altitude (problematic - no battles were ever fought that high, and altitude sickness caused plenty of problems). In addition to skiing, they also trained for mountain climbing, which was somewhat used during the war.
The latter portion of the book covers front-line combat, including adding troops to this division with no actual mountain training. They saw a lot of service in the oft-forgotten Italian campaign, but were mostly underutilized for their specialty. Their greatest impact may have been after the war, contributing to recreational skiing through being instructors …
This is a fairly complete history of the 10th Mountain division, the US "ski troops" from WWII. This book was referenced in one I recently read about the Finnish Winter War, which partly inspired the creation of this corps.
This history spends a lot of time on the logistics of creation and the training in Colorado at more than a mile of altitude (problematic - no battles were ever fought that high, and altitude sickness caused plenty of problems). In addition to skiing, they also trained for mountain climbing, which was somewhat used during the war.
The latter portion of the book covers front-line combat, including adding troops to this division with no actual mountain training. They saw a lot of service in the oft-forgotten Italian campaign, but were mostly underutilized for their specialty. Their greatest impact may have been after the war, contributing to recreational skiing through being instructors and helping found destinations like Aspen and Vail.
Thoroughly researched, but the story was rough in a few patches. A good history with interesting tidbits (e.g. Bob Dole joined the 10th as a reinforcement and was wounded in action). Contains several pictures and a few maps.