The 10th Mountain Division was a truly superb fighting force. They trained intensively for three years in skiing, rock-climbing, cold-weather survival, amphibious landing, mule handling, and mountain warfare. They captured enemy positions by scaling cliffs in the night, by fierce attacks in rough terrain, and were always able to maintain momentum. They punched a hole in the last solid German defensive line in Italy and advanced straight to the Alps, un-phased by any natural feature. German commanders said they were the toughest troops they faced in the war. Their own commander, Gen. George Hays, said that “Never in its days of combat, did it fail to take an objective, or lose an objective once it was taken. Never was so much as a single platoon surrounded and lost.”
The men themselves knew their unit was something truly special, but when it came to their actual military contribution, they often told a less celebratory version of their outstanding service. They referred to themselves as the “Sunday punch kids,” and said that they had come in as fresh troops at the very end of a long and terrible war. They knew they had performed their duty extremely well, but that they had done so standing on the shoulders of millions of others who had gone before them. The 10th Mountain Division accounted for less than one third of one percent of the US combat deaths during World War Two. And the United States accounted for less than two percent of all military deaths during the war.
None of this is meant to diminish the value of their service, nor the tragedy of their 975 dead (and 3,871 wounded) in a brutally short period of time. It is meant to take that sacrifice as a reference point to illustrate the enormous scale of the Second World War in Europe. This video is an animated map of that conflict from beginning to end. It is 4:29 in length. The 10th Mountain Division landed in Italy at 4:07.
