Charlie Moran in his Tenth Mountain Division uniform from World War II. Photo courtesy of the Morans
ORLEANS — Almost 59 years ago, a soldier named Charlie Moran was one of 600 young men who climbed a steep mountain in Italy all through one February night. He was carrying a full pack with guns, ammunition and supplies that probably weighed 60 pounds. It was foggy and dark, and the terrain was impossibly steep.
Or so thought the Germans who waited unsuspectingly at the top.
In February 1945, Riva Ridge was taken by surprise by the troops of the Tenth Mountain Division in what became a major turning point in World War II.
“We were scared to death,” recalled Mr. Moran in an interview at his home recently.
Mr. Moran was one of about 250 Vermont veterans of the Tenth Mountain Division inducted into the Vermont Ski Hall of Fame in a special ceremony in November. A permanent exhibit honoring the Tenth Mountain Division is open this winter at the Vermont Ski Museum in Stowe.
The troops camped at the base of the ridge the day before they were to scale the 1,500-foot cliff.
“As soon as it got dark, the climb started. It was led by those who had done the preliminary work,” Mr. Moran said.
A few scouts had already climbed it and picked out the best spots. After most of the night, the troops reached the top.
“The next morning the sun came up,” he said. “They didn’t know in front of us that we were there.”
The troops had been told to dig foxholes to sleep in. They couldn’t get any deeper than about six inches, so there they slept (or tried) until the next evening when they were supposed to attack.
But some German scouts found them, and the Germans attacked first. The Tenth Mountain Division fought back and eventually won — even after about 36 hours of essentially no sleep.
“I think some of ’em were sound asleep when the Germans attacked,” Mr. Moran said.
Charlie Moran at his home in Orleans. Photo by Bethany M. Dunbar
A portable tram was built in a day and a half. It was pulled by a rope tow and was used to bring up supplies and ammunition and to bring wounded soldiers back down.
The Germans had been using Riva Ridge as an artillery outpost. It was in a strategic location near Mount Belvedere. According to a 1995 article in Skiing Heritage magazine, the ridge was secured with only 17 killed, 38 wounded and three missing.
“The rest is history: the Tenth Mountain thereafter thrust the Germans backward more than a hundred miles through the Apennines and into the Lombardy Plain, across the Po River and up the shore of Lake Garda. Pinned against the Alps on the Austrian border, the Germans surrendered to the Allies on May 2, 1945.
“Riva was the start of all that.”
Like many World War II veterans, Mr. Moran shrugs off his personal contribution to the war effort, saying many others did more brave deeds than he did. He said he has not talked much about his war experiences with his children until recently. It’s not because it was too traumatic.
“I didn’t know they were interested,” he said.
They are, and they are not the only ones, as evidenced by the interest shown in the new exhibit at the ski museum in Stowe.
Governor Jim Douglas, Major General Martha Rainville, and Andrea Mead Lawrence (an Olympic gold medalist in skiing), were among the speakers for the hall of fame induction ceremony in November.
Local veterans Ken Elliott of Barton; Everett Griffin of Barton, who died in action; and Tom Broome of West Charleston, who died after the war, were also in the Tenth Mountain Division.
Mr. Moran got into the Tenth Mountain Division because he didn’t make it as a pilot. He was a skier, though, and skiers were what they wanted for this division. He was living in New York state at the time.
For training, the troops went to Camp Hale in Colorado, which was located at 10,000 feet above sea level.
“You couldn’t run very far without collapsing,” he said.
This photo of Riva Ridge appears in Skiing Heritage magazine.
The troops were trained in bitter cold and got used to carrying enormous heavy packs. One description, written by a soldier named Scollay Parker and published in Skiing Heritage magazine, went like this: “Mine was so heavy that to get it on my shoulders, I had to lie down on the ground, put my shoulders through the straps, roll over on my hands and knees and finally stand up in a forward-leaning position.”
Another description in this article told of trying to hike through neck-deep snow. The temperature dropped to 50 below that night. The soldier could not get warm in his sleeping bag, even with all his clothes on, so he got up and walked up and down in the camp area all night to keep from freezing.
The Tenth Mountain Division has a rather strong alumni group, Mr. Moran noted. He went to a reunion in New York in 1999, and the first person he saw was his platoon sergeant, George Fuge.
One of his favorite memories of training days was when the troops were sent to Texas. The troops had just left Colorado and were equipped with all wool clothes for high altitude training in snow and cold. Texas was hot and dry, and one day a shipment of 5,000 mules came in on a train, by boxcar. The animals were supposed to be used for packing gear. It didn’t work out. The mules were let out of the boxcars and started wandering around. Sergeant Fuge came to get Mr. Moran, knowing he was a Vermont boy he figured he might have some idea what to do with all the mules.
“We spent the weekend catching mules,” Mr. Moran said with a wry smile.
After the taking of Riva Ridge, the troops pushed on. When they got to the Po River, many got hepatitis from drinking the water from a contaminated well. Mr. Moran was too sick to fight for quite some time after that.
Toward the end of the war, the mountain division was no longer needed in active duty, but the troops were on call, stationed in Colorado again. Mr. Moran said there was a point system. Anybody who had 50 points could go home, but he had 49. He had to stay until February 1946.
“So we played golf all day right through until January,” he said. “Some big resort there had opened the doors for us. They treated us pretty well.”
Many of the Tenth Mountain Division troopers went on to open ski resorts after the war.
Mr. Moran went to the University of Vermont, which he got through in three years. There he met his wife, Polly. In September 1950 they got married.
He had studied mechanical engineering and worked for companies in New Hampshire and Connecticut before a chance newspaper article led him back home. The article had a story about a big fire in Woodstock. He read the story and on the same page as the end of the article was an ad for a mechanical engineer for Orleans Manufacturing.
“I was the first engineer up here when they were starting to expand,” he said. Later he was a production manager and briefly managed a plant in Maine. Later he worked as a business manager for the Orleans-Essex North Supervisory Union.
The Morans had seven children, and they wanted them all to get a chance to learn to ski. It seemed the best way to accomplish that was to start their own ski tow in a nearby steep pasture. The tow was run by a tractor, on a wheel that came out of an old elevator at the furniture mill.
“I guess the village put up the poles for us,” Mr. Moran said. They even did some night skiing.
“As the kids learned to ski they wanted to go to Jay or Burke,” he said. As their children grew up, the Morans lost enthusiasm for spending all their spare time on the ski tow, and it kind of went by the wayside. Over the years they ran it, he said, they put a lot of kids on skis.
The Morans’ children are all grown up and gone, and they are spread out all over the map. One son is an assistant attorney general in Washington state, one daughter teaches migrant farm workers, and another daughter works for a county health department.
Mr. Moran is not the kind of person who would have sought out attention for his activities during the war.
“It wasn’t the type of thing you could walk up to a stranger and talk about,” he said. He said he has watched some of the war movies and found Saving Private Ryan fairly realistic except the troops were all very young.
