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Fighting Skiers: The Dartmouth Men of the 10th Mountain Division
“Probably if we were a little sentimental, we might have admitted that what kept us lingering there, knowing that supper was growing cold and mess sergeants wouldn't wait on our leisure, was that we had known Balch Hill together, and the bells from 9:55 to 10:15, and the Pompanoosuc in May. But we didn't speak of these things, nor even mention Dartmouth.”
—Charles B. McLane '41, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, June 1943
Camp Hale, 9,500 feet up in the Colorado Rockies, was a notoriously unsentimental place. In winter, temperatures of 30 below and snow depths up to 12 feet weren't uncommon, and the altitude and the haze from coal-burning stoves made even breathing a chore. Nonetheless, it was at Camp Hale that the Army chose to build and train its new 10th Mountain Division, and so it was there that McLane—the first soldier to report to the division's first regiment, the 87th Mountain Infantry—found himself in the company of dozens of Dartmouth undergrads and alumni. In all, 107 would serve in the 10th Mountain Division during World War II—a remarkable number for one division, given that the College's enrollment was just under 2,400 in 1940, the year before the U.S. entered the war.
And yet, given that Dartmouth then (as now) had a stellar ski team, it wasn't so remarkable after all. The idea for the division came from C. Minot Dole of the National Ski Patrol and Roger Langley of the National Ski Association, who admired the ski-oriented tactics of the Finnish troops in the 1939 Russo-Finnish War. The tactics could be taught, they decided, but recruits had to be adept skiers. Of those, Dartmouth had an ample supply.
Very ample. In his 2005 book, The Boys of Winter: Life and Death in the U.S. Ski Troops During the Second World War, Charles Sanders recalls how Jacob Robert Nunnemacher, son of a Milwaukee department store owner, chose to come to Dartmouth:
“Jake took one look at the Dartmouth Ski Team roster and knew it was the place for him. It was the Who's Who of college ski racing, probably of all time. . . . Though Olympians Ted Hunter, Linc Washburn and Warren Chivers were among the stars who had graduated after leading the team to near sweeps of the U.S. collegiate races over the previous four seasons, Howard Chivers, Charles McLane, Percy Rideout, and Olympians Dick Durrance and John Litchfield all remained. . . . So off Jake went that fall to join the legendary Dartmouth ski circus.”
Their leader was Coach Walter Prager, a Swiss émigré and internationally recognized skier. At least, he was recognized by everyone but the U.S. government, which initially drafted him into the Coast Guard. His son, Kari Prager '69, a California businessman, says, “He didn't even know how to swim. In Switzerland all the lakes were freezing—recreational swimming was not something you did when he was growing up. . . . They were just kind of fussing around, getting him through training, when the 10th Mountain Division was started, and that division had a lot of hand-picked troops that knew how to ski, how to climb—knew something about Alpine sport. And so he was plucked out of the Coast Guard. And, because of his experience, they made him a sergeant.” Despite not knowing English well, and knowing less about the Army, First Sergeant Prager was ready to lead. Years later, Kari found among his father's effects a Bronze Star he earned in combat; though his father never talked about it, friends said he earned it while shuttling food and ammunition to his troops in the midst of a mortar barrage.
The division entered combat in August 1943, securing the Aleutian Islands in Alaska from Japanese incursions. It was there that the first soldier with a Dartmouth connection, a former ski instructor named Roger Day Emerson, was killed in action. In December 1944, the 10th crossed the continent and the Atlantic Ocean to fight in the European theater. Well regarded for their thorough training, they joined the effort to recapture the Italian mainland, in particular the strategic, fortified enemy points that lay along the spine of the Appenine Mountains in northern Italy. Dartmouth soldiers again distinguished themselves; several at the cost of their lives. In February 1945, Staff Sergeant Roger William Herrick '40 was felled by shrapnel while attacking a German machine gun nest on Mt. Belvedere. In April, three more alums—First Lieutenant Robert Whitbeck '31, Captain Joseph Jonathan Duncan '40, and Sargeant Jake Nunnemacher '40—were killed over the course of ten days in a final, successful move to crush the German resistance.
At that point, the war was largely over for the 10th Mountain Division. German forces surrendered in early May, and the Japanese the following August. One hundred and two men of Dartmouth came home and—like McLane who earned his doctorate and taught, and Prager who coached the 1948 U.S. Olympic ski team—got on with their lives.