Photo By Michael Strasser | The new 1940 Winter Maneuvers exhibit inside the 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum...... read more read more
FORT DRUM, N.Y. (Feb. 5. 2025) -- A new exhibit inside the 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum Museum helps explain the origin of winter training at Fort Drum.
Doug Schmidt, museum curator, said that skiing was a recreational activity for some Soldiers and used in some small unit training on military installations along the northern border. Then in 1939, the II Corps Area began planning for its first winter maneuvers, and Pine Camp (now Fort Drum) was designated as the ideal training grounds.
“We’ve found accounts in newspapers that the planning for this began in the fall of 1939, before the war between Russia and Finland,” Schmidt said. “That is historically significant because the winter war is what led Minnie Dole to campaign for the Army to create a mountaineering unit, which would become the 10th Mountain Division.”
Because planners didn’t have experience developing a regimental exercise on winter warfare, Schmidt said they looked outward for subject matter experts.
“This is when they found Rolf Monsen in Lake Placid,” he said. “He was an expatriate from Norway, who had served as a conscript in the Norwegian army, so he had military ski training expertise. He was also part of three U.S. Olympic Ski Teams.”
The Army contracted Monsen to advise and oversee the ski training at Lake Placid and Pine Camp during the 1940 winter maneuvers.
“This is before the expansion of Pine Camp, and all of the facilities on post were designed more for summer training,” Schmidt said. “So, they used the abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) from the New Deal program, just north of Deferiet, as their base.”
The 28th Infantry Regiment had been stationed at Fort Niagara and Fort Ontario since 1934, as well as Madison Barracks and Plattsburgh Barracks by 1939 when they were attached to II Corps Area of First U.S. Army. They would be the first Soldiers to conduct the winter training at Pine Camp.
Soldiers were issued skis and overwhites (white camouflage uniforms), but they were using the old CCC winter caps that resembled what would later be issued to 10th Mountain Division troops.
“At this time, you see in news articles that reporters were making references to how these Soldiers looked similar to the Finnish ski soldiers fighting the Soviets,” Schmidt said.
Photographers also captured the first appearance of the M1 Garand in training at Pine Camp, as the 28th Infantry Regiment Soldiers used the new clip-fed, semi-automatic rifles during the maneuvers.
“The M1 Garand is really only about two years old, so this was probably the first time that the weapon was fired at Pine Camp,” Schmidt said.
The maneuvers were billed as largely experimental, and it would inform Army leadership about its potential as a future training program.
“From what I read, there was a lot of trial and error involved,” Schmidt said. “They were seeing if they could mount a set of skis to a litter to help with casualty evacuations, and learning to mount the 50-caliber machine gun and tripod on skis to make it more maneuverable through snow. One of the companies tested the new Army winter sleeping bag, sleeping under the stars, and we have a picture of these Soldiers supposedly waking up in the morning all nice and warm.”
The First Army commander, Lt. Gen. Hugh A. Drum – for whom Fort Drum would be named – had visited Pine Camp to observe the winter training.
“We learned a lot from the photographs taken at the time,” Schmidt said. “We included in the exhibit some photos that show the kind of tactics they incorporated into winter training, like a simulated chemical attack where you see Soldiers in gas masks and skiing through smoke.”
Some of the Pine Camp training was delayed due to blizzard-like conditions, but copious amounts of snow proved to be beneficial.
“We have pictures of Soldiers doing cross-country skiing down a road as there’s a civilian car passing by them,” Schmidt said. “The snowplows created these big berms of snow along the side of the road that Soldiers used as defensive positions.”
The 26th Infantry Regiment participated in training at Lake Placid the following winter, and Monsen again served as an adviser.
“Then it was the winter after that, 1941-42, when the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment was activated at Fort Lewis, Washington, and that is basically when the story of the 10th Mountain Division really picks up,” Schmidt said.
Newspapers at the time reported on the success of the winter maneuvers at Pine Camp, and that Soldiers were able to acclimate to cold-weather training and learn new skills. It might not have revolutionized Army training, as one headline put it, but Schmidt said it shows that Army officials were keenly aware that they were lacking in winter warfare capabilities.
“The Pine Camp maneuvers reaffirmed what some of the civilian experts were saying all along,” Schmidt said. “For the purposes of warfighting, it would take a lot longer to turn Soldiers into skiers, as opposed to recruiting experienced skiers and climbers and then turning them into Soldiers.”
And it wouldn’t be long before the Army signed off on the formation of ski and mountaineer troops, which led to the activation of the 10th Mountain Division.
Schmidt said that winter training exercises would continue at Pine Camp, then into the Camp Drum era, but it was mostly known as a summer training installation until the expansion of Fort Drum to become the home of the 10th Mountain Division (LI).
“We know about the task force from the 82nd Airborne Division that conducted some winter training here in 1947,” he said. “That was famously the winter of the Pine Camp Barracks fire.”
Five Soldiers died when the barracks they were sleeping in was destroyed by fire on Dec. 10, 1947. They had just arrived at Pine Camp to participate in Exercise Snowdrop. This was the only structural fire in Fort Drum history that resulted in fatalities.
Schmidt said he expects the Pine Camp Winter Maneuvers will be displayed in the temporary exhibit case through Mountainfest in June. The previous exhibit showcased the origin of Pando Commando and the story of its artist, Staff Sgt. Tatsumi Iwate.
To learn more about the winter maneuvers, visit home.army.mil/drum/about/news/around-and-about-fort-drum-1/d-series.
The 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum Museum is located in Bldg. 2509 on Col. Reade Road, off Route 26. The museum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free.
Community members can find information and driving directions to the museum on the My Army Post app, which can be downloaded from Google Play or the Apple App Store.
| Date Taken: | 02.05.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 02.05.2025 08:25 |
| Story ID: | 490138 |
| Location: | FORT DRUM, NEW YORK, US |
| Web Views: | 13 |
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