The Last Ridge by Mckay Jenkins

Author:Mckay Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307432377
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

ON DECEMBER 11, the first third of the mountain troops, the 86th Regiment, shipped out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, on the USS Argentina. Three weeks later, the 85th and 87th Regiments filed onto the largest and fastest passenger ship in the United States, the USS West Point, a converted luxury liner once known as the SS America. The remainder of the division, notably three artillery units, left two days later on a smaller army transport boat, the General Meigs. As they loaded onto the ship, a band played “Over There” and the Notre Dame Victory March; a team of women from the Red Cross gave each man a canvas bag containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor blades, cigarettes, and playing cards.

In all, just under 14,000 soldiers boarded the ships: three infantry regiments of about 3,000 men each, plus three artillery battalions; the 126th Engineer Mountain Battalion; a battalion of medics, ambulance drivers, and veterinarians; and companies of headquarters men and assorted smaller units. Each infantry regiment consisted of three battalions of 1,000 men; in addition to headquarters men and medics, each battalion consisted of three rifle companies of 180 men each and one heavy-weapons company—a group of men trained to fire heavy .30-caliber and .50-caliber machine guns and 81-mm mortars. Rifle companies were divided further into four platoons of 40 men each: three platoons of riflemen and one of weapons men armed with .30-caliber air-cooled machine guns and 60-mm mortars.

Over the next few months, an additional five thousand men would join the troops as replacement soldiers, in part because the mountain troops would suffer among the highest casualty rates in the entire Italian campaign. By the end of the war, one in five men in the division would suffer a battlefield injury. One in twenty would be killed. None of their training, it seemed, could protect them from mortars and machine guns.

As soon as they were on board, soldiers were told that for the first time their letters home would be censored. They were ordered not to write anything that might even remotely be considered classified information; anything that was would either be blacked out in ink or cut out with a pair of scissors. At least on board the ship, this was a fairly easy directive to follow. The boys still had no idea where they were going.

To Denis Nunan, the ship’s size was indicative primarily of the discomfort the boys would experience on the way over. “The larger the can, the more the sardines,” he wrote home. The quarters on board both troop ships were extremely tight. Stuart Abbott felt as though he and the men had been “melted and poured in.” When soldiers threw down their duffel bags between bunks stacked five to a tier, there was exactly enough room for the men to stand upright, arms at their sides.

Dick Wilson and twenty-one other men were jammed into a compartment below the waterline that had been built for thirteen; they felt like they were crossing the Atlantic in a submarine.

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