By Dan Balkin
It was 1942, in the midst of WWII, and young Art Hilger’s toes must have been tingling from the cold. He and his 10th Mountain Division comrades-in-arms had already served against the Japanese in the Pacific. His best friend and fellow soldier, Tom Cochran, a forbearer of the famous Cochran ski racing family from Vermont, had been killed by a Japanese landmine on their previous deployment. The 10th Mountain Division had
great grandson Jake,
who still enjoys that first
HoliHut his grandfather
built in 1962, wearing
his WWII 10th Mountain
Division uniform.
returned stateside to do some final high altitude alpine training to prepare for their next mission: help defeat Hitler’s Axis Powers in Europe. Art and his fellow soldiers / mountaineers trained at Camp Hale, a now deactivated army base near Vail, Co. They were all expert skiers and as part of their training had slept outside on a mountain. It snowed that night, and when Art awoke in the morning, he clawed at the snow and reached the surface. His friends were not there. Thinking he had overslept, he shouldered his gear, strapped on his skis, and skied down to the nearest village. Art, however, was the early riser. His fellow soldiers were all still buried beneath the night’s snow, and as they awoke, they saw Art’s ski tracks and followed them.
The 10th Mountain Division was the brainchild of Minnie Dole, the founder of the National Ski Patrol. Despite initial and prolonged resistance, Minnie persuaded WWII Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall to form a U.S. Mountain Division. Minnie had studied the role of mountain troops in WWI, and knew that when combat ascended to the mountains, trained mountain troops were invaluable. Camp Hale in Colorado was created, and as the prior sleeping outdoors in the winter story emphasizes, the training was very arduous. On being sent to Europe, Art Hilger and his fellow 10th Mountain Division servicemen lived up to their motto, “Climb to Glory.” By 1944, the Allies had opened numerous war fronts against the Nazis and the Axis Powers. One of the fronts in which the U.S. and our allies were advancing was in Mussolini’s Italy (Mussolini created the template for fascism, which Hitler copied). The Germans, to bolster Italian defenses, had formed a daunting string of interconnected fortifications in the Apennine Mountains known as “The Gothic Line.” The German’s thought the Gothic Line was impregnable because their fortifications were perched atop tall sheer cliffs. The 10th Mountain Division saw it differently. Under the cover of night, Art Hilger and his fellow mountain soldiers scaled a formidable cliff known as Riva Ridge. Had they been detected by the Germans, death would have been inevitable as they were exposed and defenseless on the ascent. Fortunately, the daring assault plan worked. On February 19th, 1945, our Greatest Generation Mountain Troops stealthily assembled on top of Riva Ridge, burst upon the surprised German defenders, and captured one of their key fortifications. The epic Battle of Riva Ridge raged on for two more weeks as the 10th Mountain Division stubbornly fended off German counterattacks. The Germans eventually retreated, and another route leading our troops into the heart of Nazi Germany was established.
Art’s son, reflecting on his dad’s wartime service, and helping inform this article, wrote these two beautiful lines: “My dad wrote my mother almost every day he was away, so I have boxes of inadvertent history. It reads like a love story set in the most turbulent times when oceans were wider and death was close.”
When WWII ended, Art’s daring and grit were undiminished. In 1962, when HoliMont was still a big gamble, Art decided to join the club as a charter member and doubled down on his bet by building the first chalet in the HoliHuts, the club’s original development. It was a wise wager. Art’s Granddaughter Molly and her family are club members and still use their family’s beautiful chalet. Someone once said about WWII, “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” Art Hilger and members of the Greatest Generation nobly fulfilled life’s expectations.
Caption: 10th Mountain Reunion in 1972. Art Hilger is to the far right.
Art Hilger’s 6-year-old great grandson Jake wearing his WWII 10th Mountain Division uniform.