Gear: Chapter 3

Speaker 0· Soundbite0:00

They say that in the army, the biscuits mighty fine. But one rolled off the table and killed a friend of mine. Oh, Lord, I wanna go, but they won't let me go, oh, oh. Hey. Chapter three.

Avery Trufelman· Host0:20

Italy was not going down without a fight. The Second World War was raging on, and the Americans and the Allies had taken Rome in June of 1944. Great. But the Germans were still clinging to their last stronghold in northern Italy, and they were not letting it go. By the winter of 1944, the Allied Fifth Army was getting tired. They'd spent months fighting their way through the Apennine Mountains, and it felt absolutely Sisyphean. As soon as they made their way up one massive ridge, they got to the base of another, and the Germans held the high ground, peering down, unafraid to shoot. As one American army lieutenant wrote in a report, "There's about as much concealment as a goldfish would have in a bowl." The mountain range was an ingenious natural defense. The Germans, after all, were masters of skiing and mountaineering culture. They felt safe in these mountains. But the Allies had a little trick up their sleeves, because Americans know how to ski too.

Speaker 2· Soundbite1:24

Many are world-famous skiers and mountain climbers. Many are amateurs and many are greenhorns.

Avery Trufelman· Host1:29

The 10th