On April 29, 1945, the 86th Mountain Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division fought its way through a series of tunnels on the eastern shore of Italy’s largest lake, Lago di Garda. Company L of the 86th captured Tunnel Number Five, and found the remains of forty German soldiers who had been killed when demolition charges meant to collapse the roof of the tunnel detonated prematurely. The gruesome scene led them to call the place “the Tunnel of the Dead.” But the tunnel had not yet reaped its full harvest.
While L Company’s 3rd Platoon occupied Tunnel Number Five, Companies I and K hiked up the mountainside to march north by a different route on the heights. It was difficult terrain, and the column moved slowly.
3rd Platoon continued their advance up the road until they encountered more resistance. Sgt. Bob Krear recalled, with some confusion on his part regarding the numbering of the tunnels,
There was some fire coming from the south end of tunnel six directly ahead of us, pinning down our men and preventing further progress. I was one of a group of men in my platoon who climbed up the mountain slope to outflank the tunnel and attack it from the rear.
The north end of tunnel six and the south end of tunnel seven were very close to each other, and when we peeked over the rocky ridge at the north end of tunnel six we saw a group of about six Germans standing together at the south entrance to tunnel seven. We could have hit them with rocks! They did not appear to be in the least concerned about the American troops at the south end of tunnel six. The situation obviously called for the use of an automatic weapon, and Gene Sisler, my friend from Idaho, was now my BAR man. However, when Gene, who had been a lifelong hunter and a crack shot, hesitated at the prospect of committing such a slaughter, Lt. Quentin Hanson, our Platoon Leader and replacement officer from Freeport, Texas was very eager to do the job. These Germans were “sitting ducks,” and Hanson missed them all with the BAR! They dove into the seventh tunnel and escaped.
My Garand Rifle was a replacement for the one I had brought overseas with me, and from which I had somehow become parted. I had not had a chance to sight in my new rifle, we had been moving so fast, and it was obvious from an experience that I was now to have that my rifle’s sights were badly out of alignment. After Hanson’s fiasco, another German left tunnel six on seeing that he was being cut off, and hugging a vertical stone wall on his right for protection from our fire he crept toward tunnel seven. However, he was not safe from me because I was directly above him. I quickly placed my sights on the middle of his back, squeezed the trigger, and missed him badly to his left!
At this time a fourth platoon machine gunner, George Gundel from Montana, arrived with his light machine gun and immediately sprayed the entrance to tunnel seven, sending bullets ricocheting through the tunnel and sending its occupants fleeing for the town of Torbole a short distance to the north. The tunnels were now all ours, but the Germans were not done with us.
The obstructions to the south prevented any of the armor, artillery or heavy equipment from proceeding beyond the collapsed Tunnel Number One. The weather continued to clear, and at 1100 hours the Germans opened a brisk artillery fire on the road, which the Allied forces were largely unable to counter. The mountain troops took shelter inside the tunnels. Pfc. Lloyd Fitch recounted that,
Whenever we exited a tunnel and were out in the open, the Germans would spray us with mortar and machinegun fire from the opposite shore. Their guns also pounded the high cliffs above our heads, causing an avalanche of rocks to cascade down on us. We didn’t waste any time running between tunnels.
The main body of L Company moved toward Tunnel Number Six and waited there for Companies I and K to come abreast of them on the high ground to the east, so that some concerted effort could be made to attack to the north. One man named Harris began to suffer from battle fatigue. He could not make himself leave Tunnel Five and go out into the German artillery fire. Several times he was coaxed out onto the road with the marching column, only to turn around and run back into the tunnel. Eventually, his comrades were able to extricate him from his shelter and get him to follow the rest of the company up the road. None of them could have known it, but getting Harris to leave the shelter of the tunnel may have saved his life.
Following behind the rifle companies, Company M moved into Tunnel Five. The northern opening of Tunnel Four had the only modestly effective radio reception to both L Company on the road and I and K Companies on the mountain, so that was where the battalion command post (CP) was established. Capt. Everett Bailey was there, serving as the Battalion Executive Officer while Maj. Drake attended a meeting with a group of regimental officers inside Tunnel Five.
A photograph of the 3rd Battalion command post on April 29, 1945 just moments before a German artillery shell struck inside of Tunnel Number Five. (Click photo to view larger)
The north opening of Tunnel Five pointed directly toward the German 88mm guns at the northern end of the lake. After several failed attempts, one of the German gun crews managed to fire an airburst shell directly into the tunnel. Lt. David Brower was with Capt. Bailey at the battalion CP, and he recalled that,
An ominous message came back from the Battalion Commander’s radio operator. “Send up all the litter teams you can get!”
Captain Everett Bailey, now the Battalion Executive Officer, relayed the message to the aid station, farther back along the road.
Soldiers don’t panic easily. But Lt. Butterwick, who came running back to our CP about then, was pale. A piece of shell fragment an inch across had ripped into, but had not entered, the top of his steel helmet, and was still embedded there, although he didn’t know it.
“Major Drake’s been hit,” he said to Bailey, “and he wants you to take over. They got a direct hit inside the tunnel.”
Capt. Albert Meinke, the Battalion Surgeon, was the one who received Bailey’s radio call for help. He recounted that,
Word came that all medics were needed in the next tunnel ahead, which was now only a short distance away. I started off at a trot with the rest of the medics following. We ran right into the tunnel, and continued to the forward end. The scene that greeted us there looked as if it should have been in a nightmare or a horror movie.
This had been the site where the day before a contingent of German soldiers had met disaster when the explosives they were placing to blow up the tunnel had gone off prematurely and killed a lot of them. Rock and rubble, including body parts of these Germans, still littered the far entrance of the tunnel, and was perhaps three or four feet deep. Now a German 88mm antiaircraft airburst had exploded some 30 or 40 feet inside the tunnel while more than two companies of our men were in it. There must have been over a hundred of them lying sprawled, one atop of another on the tunnel floor. This tunnel wasn’t very long, and about halfway through I began stepping over the bodies of the fallen. Many were still, but a lot of them were moving and moaning. It was hard to know where to begin. I did notice, however, that there was not a lot of blood in evidence, and I hoped that most of them were suffering only from concussion, and not from serious shell fragment wounds.
Then I noticed a Red Cross helmet on one of the men lying nearby. I had passed him, but now I turned back, and as I kneeled down beside him, I recognized him immediately. He was one of my M Company aid men, T/5 Charles T. Ladd, from Massachusetts. His face was pallid, his pupils were already dilated, and he was taking his last three or four gasping breaths. In less than a minute he was dead…There was nothing I could have done.
I don’t specifically remember Major Drake’s wounds. They were relatively minor, but serious enough to need definitive surgical repair, so I sent him back to the casualty pickup point early, along with the first of the litter wounded.
I observed the rest for a while, and again encountered the phenomenon of men, even under such terrible circumstances as these, not wanting to be evacuated. They absolutely did not want to let their comrades-in-arms down, and they didn’t ever want to be assigned to another unit. I let most of them return to duty, but did do a lot of quick and repeated neurological examinations in order to be sure I wasn’t sending someone back into combat who was incapable of functioning properly.
One German 88mm shell had inflicted terrible casualties. Seven men were killed and forty-four wounded, most of them of Company M. Maj. Drake’s evacuation made Capt. Bailey the new commander of 3rd Battalion, just as it was about to be embroiled in a battle for the town of Torbole, at the northern end of the lake, that would drag on for twenty hours. But the Tunnel of the Dead had one more casualty to claim from the 86th Mountain Infantry Regiment, this time from battle fatigue. Capt. Albert Meinke later wrote that, at 1400 hours,
I was abruptly introduced to yet another crisis. There were inside the tunnel [tunnel five] near its rear entrance, several small rooms, which had been hollowed out of the solid rock and fitted with heavy doors. An officer – I don’t remember which one – came up to me and asked if I would take a look at Colonel Cook, the regimental commander, who was now in one of them. He told me that Colonel Cook was acting strangely, seemed incoherent at times, and had issued some orders that didn’t make sense. As we walked together to see the colonel I kept thinking that the regiment didn’t need this, with another battle just about to begin.
When I arrived inside the windowless, candlelit room, there were several other officers present. I don’t remember who they were now, but they corroborated the story I had just heard. Colonel Cook just sat there, motionless, his face drawn and expressionless. He exhibited typical symptoms of combat fatigue, but it appeared that he had not yet succumbed completely. I was able to question him, but answers were slow in coming. Yes, he had not slept in over 48 hours. No, he didn’t feel sick. No, he had no pain. No, he had not been injured. Yes, he didn’t know what day this was. The Colonel was very obviously in no condition to lead.
Some of the other officers present now joined the halting conversation, and after a while the colonel agreed that he was “overtired” and “not thinking clearly.” I persuaded him to give up command to John Hay, who was then the executive officer of the regiment. He also agreed to go to the rear under some pretext, and hole up somewhere for eight or ten hours of sleep. Then, if there was still a problem, we could decide upon something else. To the best of my knowledge, that is exactly what he did, and since that time I have never ever heard another word about this incident from anyone, anywhere.
That afternoon and all night I stayed near the rear of tunnel number 5 with my aid station crew, listening to the sounds of the battles for Nago and Torbole.
But the whole story of this tunnel has not yet been told. Archaeological evidence gathered from the Tunnel of the Dead decades later would reveal a wealth of artifacts, and raise some new questions about the events that transpired there.
This blog is part of a larger body of research culminating in the publication of the book ‘Heroes in Good Company: L Company, 86th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division 1943-1945’ which is available in select bookstores and on amazon.
Bailey, Everett C. personal interview by author. December 24, 2010.
Brower, David. Remount Blue: The Combat Story of the Third Battalion, 86th Mountain Infantry, 10thMountain Division. Unpublished Manuscript, c. 1948. Digitized version edited and made available through the Denver Public Library by Barbara Imbrie, 2005.
Carlson, Bob. A History of L Company, 86th Mountain Infantry. Self-published Manuscript, 2000.
Feuer, A.B. Packs On!: Memoirs of the 10th Mountain Division in World War II. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2006.
Jenkins, McKay. The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of America’s First Mountain Soldiers and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe. New York: Random House, 2003.
Krear, H. Robert. The Journal of a US Army Mountain Trooper in World War II. Estes Park, CO: Desktop Publishing by Jan Bishop, 1993.
Meinke, Albert H., Jr., Mountain Troops and Medics: Wartime Stories of a Frontline Surgeon in the US Ski Troops. Kewadin, MI: Rucksack Publishing Company, 1993.
Wellborn, Charles. History of the 86th Mountain Infantry Regiment in Italy. Edited by Barbara Imbrie in 2004. Denver, CO: Bradford-Robinson Printing Co.,1945.
A photograph of the 3rd Battalion command post on April 29, 1945 just moments before a German artillery shell struck inside of Tunnel Number Five. (Click photo to view larger)
