Instead of channeling John Wayne, I channeled Sergeant Nunan. Rather than invoking Hollywood clichés, I leaned on soldiers’ letters home. The 10th Mountain Division Resource Center at the Denver Public Library is home to nearly 700 collections of papers donated by Second World War veterans of the division, amounting to between 15,000 and 20,000 wartime letters, as well as scores of wartime diaries.

Among the letters I found preserved in the archives were several hundred written by Marty L. Daneman, who enlisted in the 10th right out of high school at age 18 in the spring of 1943. He arrived on a troopship in Naples, Italy, in mid-January 1945, still short of his 20th birthday, a corporal with the Headquarters Company, Second Battalion of the 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment. His outfit moved up to the front lines later that month, but saw little action at first. “Crazy as it may sound,” he wrote in late January to his 18-year-old fiancé, Lois Miller, waiting for him back home in Chicago, “I’m almost anxious to get into a hot spot, out of simple curiosity how I’ll react. I’d like to prove to myself whether or not I can take it.”

Three weeks later, on Feb. 20, he got his wish when the 10th attacked Mount Belvedere, a high point crucial to German defenses overlooking the highway that ran north through the Apennine Mountains toward the Nazi-occupied Po Valley. The letters Daneman wrote to Miller after the battle suggested that he had done a lot of growing up in the short time since he last wrote:

When it was over I shook for 3 days, jumped at every noise, & couldn’t hold a meal. And came out with a hate for war I’ll never lose. I don’t think anyone except a front line soldier, who has endured the mental agony of shelling, seen the gaping, ragged shrapnel wounds in flesh; seen his buddies die before him & smelled the sickly odor of dead men can develop the hate of [war] I now have.

He also gave Lois a memorable description of what it really meant to hit the dirt in heavy shelling:

At 1st you wonder if you’ll be shot & you’re scared of not your own skin, but of the people that will get hurt if you are hit. All I could think about was keeping you & the folks from being affected by some 88 shell. I don’t seem to worry about myself because I knew if I did get it, I’d never know it. After a while I didn’t wonder if I get hit — I’d wonder when. Every time a shell came I’d ask myself “Is this the one?” In the 3rd phase I was sure I’d get it & began to ½ hope that the next one would do it & end the goddam suspense.

When the initial fighting was over, it was time to retrieve and bury the dead. Daneman dragged the bloated bodies of his two best friends off the mountain.

Dan L. Kennerly, also of the 85th Regiment, a 22-year-old private from rural Georgia, and machine-gunner in D Company, wrote a diary entry describing what he saw when he came upon the corpses of soldiers from his regiment spread out along the ridgeline connecting Mount Belvedere to adjoining Mount Gorgolesco:

They all have a pale yellow, waxy color, like artificial fruit. There is a strong scent. At first I cannot place it, now it comes to me, it’s the odor of a slaughter house. What I’m smelling is blood. Near the low point of the crest are eleven bodies in a row. … Their bodies have been chopped to pieces and lying in every type of grotesque position. One has the top of his head shot off, his brains have spilled out onto the ground. Glancing into the cavity, I recognize the stump of the spinal cord. It reminds me of a watermelon with all the meat gone. This is the most horrible sight I’ve ever seen.

Five days of fighting, beating off repeated German counterattacks, left the 10th in control of the high ground all along the Mount Belvedere massif, as well as neighboring Riva Ridge — vital objectives that division planners thought might take two weeks to secure. The cost to the 10th in those five days was 192 killed and 730 wounded.

There was more fighting in early March, and then a lull until mid-April, when the Allied command planned a general offensive to break out of the northern Apennines and drive the Germans out of Italy altogether. When the attack was launched on April 14, the 10th was in the vanguard, where it would remain until it reached the gateway to the Alps on Lake Garda two weeks later.