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VIDITIATICO, Italy - In making a documentary about the 10th Mountain Division, film producer Abbie Kealy thought she might get a better sense of knowing her uncle killed in the division’s assault on Mount Belvedere.
She got that – and mountains more.
“The reason I was so interested in this is because of my uncle, Stuart Abbot,” Kealy said. “I didn’t know as much about him as I wanted to know. The more I got to know about him, the more I got to know what a great story this division was and how many great lessons it has for everybody.”
And the bigger the mountain this film would become.
The ambitious project has literally taken Kealy around the world - across America to interview scores of World War II veterans, to Afghanistan via C-17, C-130, CH-47 and UH-60 aircraft where she met the young men and women of today’s 10th Mountain Division (LI), and finally to Italy, to film reenactments at the actual sites of the division’s battles against its German counterpart.
Her effort gained momentum when author and historian McKay Jenkins approached her for photographs of her uncle. McKay was writing a book, “The Last Ridge,” about the 10th Mountain Division. Using Stuart Abbott’s exhaustive journals and letters donated by Kealy’s family to the national archives, as well as that of a few select other 10th Mountain Division veterans, Jenkins’ book aimed at giving the historical account a very personal feel.
“For a long time I wanted to do this film but never really found the right opportunity, then when McKay came to me, I thought, ‘Aha!’ This is the time to do it.”
Kealy is using the book’s title for her film. She found a Hollywood celebrity, David Hyde Pierce of “Frasier,” to narrate it. Pierce is also a descendant of a World War II 10th Mountain veteran. And Kealy found nearly 80 veterans who were willing to talk on camera, all with several stories to tell.
Kealy scrubbed the archival record for every inch of film about the 10th Mountain Division. The film record before the division shipped to Italy in 1945 was excellent, perhaps unmatched by any other Army unit. Hollywood filmmakers frequented the division’s mountain training grounds at Camp Hale, Colo., captivated by the unit’s unique designation as ski troops. But after that, the visual record of the 10th Mountain Division, particularly in Italy to close out the war, dropped off precipitously.
Having been to Italy to see the 10th Mountain Division’s campaign trail once already, Kealy knew much of the terrain was virtually unchanged since the war. She decided filming reenactments on location would complete the record of her uncle’s unit.
“The goal with the reenactments was to try and create a visual record where there really was none,” Kealy said. “I really wanted viewers to get a sense of what it was like to have your hand on the rock, what it was like to be pushing off, what’s it like to be looking for your next hand- and foothold, what it was like to be in a battle in an uphill situation.”
The reenactment Kealy described is the division’s storied assault on Riva Ridge, a ridge of six or seven peaks that jet almost vertically 3,000 feet from a skinny river valley. In a nighttime assault, Soldiers from 10th Mountain’s 86th Infantry Regiment silently ascended the super steep slopes, surprising the Germans on top. The German soldiers were watching for activity on nearby Mount Belvedere, ready to rain artillery on any American trying to capture that important vantage point. No one watched the steep southern slope of Riva Ridge. The Germans thought it was impenetrable, because it was so steep.
“When you actually start reenacting you realize, whoa, this is really difficult,” Kealy said. “They were operating under horrible conditions.
“That is really something difficult to understand from the pictures and movies that have been shot from the bottom of the ridge. I really felt it was important for people to understand what the physical obstacles were, and we made a big effort to capture that – not only on Riva Ridge but other areas that are big in legend but small in critical visual record. We were really setting out to recreate that visual record.”
That presented a daunting task for Kealy and her cameraperson, Emmy Award-winning Richard Chisholm.
“This film is a very modest budgeted documentary film and it’s worth making, but it’s not like we can afford to shoot ‘Saving Private Ryan,’” Chisholm said. “In terms of these reenactments, it is very tricky because we can’t shoot a whole battle when we only have three or four actors and one little video camera. So what do we do?
“The answer is, to me, that we shoot sort of nostalgic dream sequences that are mixed in with their stories, their interviews, and still photographs, creating little glimpses of emotions and glimpses of the texture of war in the mountains,” Chisholm continued.
“The other thing we were photographing is the topography, which if you avoid modern architecture and telephone poles, is timeless,” he said. “My job as the cameraperson is to kind of squeeze paint onto the pallet and the film gets made on the editing table. The more paint I can squeeze out the better the film might be.”
Even without the threat of enemy fire and 90-pound rucksacks on their backs, Kealy, her cameraman and the tiny team of reenactors were challenged by Riva Ridge. Six to eight inches of snow blanketed the entire Appenine Mountain region two days before filming the reenactment.
Fortunately for Kealy’s crew, four Italian mountain men, called “Alpini,” accompanied them on the climb. Months earlier, these men – three in their 70s – cleared and marked a route all the way to the top of the ridgeline.
“We’re so grateful for the Italian Alpini for creating a path for us,” Kealy said. “We’re so lucky to have these people who are still grateful to the Americans that they are willing to clear these miles and miles of path for us to climb.”
After dinner one night, an elder Alpini known as Franco walked the film crew to a site in Lizzano, a couple of miles from here, where he said the 10th Mountain Division headquarters was situated during the war. He told the crew of an encounter in front of the division camp with an American Soldier. The Soldier gave him a small ax and asked him to cut some wood. Franco, about 10 at the time, did what the Soldier had asked him to do, but he accidentally broke the ax. Franco said he returned with the wood and the broken ax, frightened that the Soldier might beat him, or worse, not give him a decent wage for his hard work.
“He was not mad at all,” Franco said about the Soldier, whom he remembers as dressed in all white – one of the uniforms of the 10th Mountain ski troops then. “And he paid me in chocolate.”
For Franco and many Italians in this mountain region, the taste still lingers.
“I guess they felt like they had no food, no hope – they were out of luck,” Kealy said about the local Italian populace during German occupation. “Then, the 10th Mountain Division came in and was so kind to them and gave them food, and instead of taking their women and children and putting them into forced labor, they took care of them. They have never forgotten that.”
When talking to current 10th Mountain Soldiers in Afghanistan last winter, Kealy said she heard stories of similar gratitude from Afghans.
Beyond that, she said her interviews with current and veteran 10th Mountain Soldiers uncovered several uncanny resemblances to each other.
“Interviews that I have done with current 10th Mountain out in Afghanistan had a lot of the same themes about battle that came out in the close to 80 interviews I’ve done with the (WWII) veterans. There are a lot of similarities in what they have to say, whether it is about luck, or about knowing if you’re coming back, or this bond you have with your fellow Soldiers. I could almost intercut these interviews with different Soldiers, and it would all still make sense. The sentiments are very strong.”
Kealy said she hopes the film will foster a better relationship between the past and present Soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division.
“They might not necessarily be aware of each other as they could be, but I am really hoping this program will pull them together that way.”
With reenactments and most of the interviews for “The Last Ridge” done, Kealy’s major effort moves her from the great outdoors to an editing studio, where she will have to somehow fit this larger-than-life legacy of one of the Army’s most unusual units into a 90-minute documentary format.
When she finally comes out with her film ready to be aired on PBS, she will have climbed and conquered her own mountain in getting to know an uncle who died in battle before she was born, but she said she hopes she will have uncovered so much more for all 10th Mountain Division Soldiers and their families to enjoy for decades to come.
“I think that (the documentary) is not really a tribute to (my uncle) but a tribute to all these 10th Mountain Division Soldiers and the remarkable things that they accomplished.”
| Date Taken: | 02.17.2006 |
| Date Posted: | 01.08.2016 12:53 |
| Story ID: | 185878 |
| Location: | IT |
| Web Views: | 58 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, History-maker: Producer films division documentary, by MAJ Cain Claxton, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
