Tenth Mountain Division: Southern Sons on Skis
Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee
The Tenth Mountain Division was unlike any unit in American military history. Trained for winter warfare at high altitude, its soldiers learned to ski, climb, and fight in the mountains of Colorado before deploying to Italy in the winter of nineteen forty-four and forty-five. They scaled sheer cliffs in the dead of night to dislodge German defenders from seemingly impenetrable positions in the Northern Apennines, breaking a stalemate that had lasted months.
This memorial in the Great Smoky Mountains region honors the Southerners among them, the sons of Appalachia and the Deep South who joined a division known for its Ivy League outdoorsmen and western ski instructors. The division's Eighty-Seventh Mountain Infantry took part in the Kiska landing in the Aleutian Islands, where the Japanese had already left, and the division then saw brutal combat in northern Italy, suffering significant casualties in the final push that helped crack the Gothic Line.
After the war, veterans of the Tenth Mountain Division founded or helped launch dozens of American ski resorts, transforming winter recreation in the United States. Their mountain warfare legacy lives on both in special operations doctrine and in the ski slopes they built when they came home.
