RUTHFULLY YOURS

But every now and then, someone will offer up tales of a different genre altogether—stories that do not fade when the après-ski drinks wear off. These are the ones about the men who went to war on skis and later helped to build the resorts that are by now legendary among amateurs and professionals alike: Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin, Washington State’s Crystal Mountain, New Mexico’s Sandia Peak, Vermont’s Sugarbush, Oregon’s Mount Bachelor, Utah’s Alta.

Meet the men of the 10th Mountain Division. Their peacetime achievements are themselves remarkable: Five of them were on the United States ski team in the 1948 Olympics, and a sixth was their coach. All told, five dozen ski areas across North America bear their mark, from selecting the terrain to designing the trails to installing the ski tows, lifts and funiculars. Their postwar achievements—basically building an industry out of an avocation—were set in motion by their unusual training as the nation’s World War II ski troops. It was in such an undertaking that they harnessed their reverence and respect for the mountains and then set out to share their sense of wonder—and their remarkable skills on skis.

Their training and wartime exploits are at the center of “The Winter Army,” a captivating account of the 10th Mountain Division by the Hamilton College historian Maurice Isserman. It is good to have the stories of these men between hard covers, for their heroics occurred three-quarters of a century ago and are in danger of disappearing.

I knew some of these pioneers, learned to ski from them in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and spent long white afternoons hearing the stories of two of them, Herbie Schneider and Arthur Doucette. They both ran ski schools in the 1960s and imparted to their charges an undying love of mountain air and an enduring contempt for a certain kind of casual skier: the “sports,” as they were known, with airs of adventure who took to skiing in too-fancy (and, for the women, too-tight) outfits only because there was too much snow on the ground to play golf.

These figures come alive in these pages, none more so than the legendary Charles Minot “Minnie’’ Dole, who was the director of the National Ski Patrol System in its fragile infancy in the 1930s and who worried, as U.S. involvement in World War II drew near, that the country had what he described as a “tropical army,” which is to say one better suited (in terms of training and haberdashery) to combat in Aruba than in the Alps. He set out to fix that, and the result was a Project Mercury-style effort to train ski troops to fight the way the Finns did against the Russians in 1939 and 1940: in white cloaks and on skis.

Leaning on a combination of Austrian Alpine and Scandinavian cross-country technique, the Army drew upon skiers from across the country and worked to transform them into soldiers, and when the supply of the mountain men wore out, they sought out flatlanders, many inexplicably from Hawaii. A handful of accomplished skiers set about showing them how to maneuver and fight in the harshest conditions: wind, pelting snow, the meteorological mess we now call wintry mix. They learned to apply “skins”—sometimes burlap, sometimes finer cloth—to their skis for uphill traction and downhill control. They were also trained in the use of snowshoes, ice axes and crampons. And they were instructed in the art of how to pack and lead mules.

All this activity on white snow at Camp Hale in Colorado was considered fodder for the national media, which seized upon these men for product advertisements and magazine stories. A headline in a Denver Post story captures the sort of publicity the ski soldiers spawned: “Troops Training at Camp Hale Are Tough Triple-Threat Men; Must Be Able to Ski, Ride Mules and Use Mountain Motorized Equipment; None But Real He-Men Need Apply.” One of those he-men appeared on the front of the Saturday Evening Post. The cover became a poster.

But soon the emphasis on glamour was replaced by the need for grit. Though Minnie Dole conceived the ski division as primarily defensive and domestic—he worried about an invasion of the continental United States—the men were eventually shipped to Italy. Standing as proof that this was a government operation, the men got to Italy but most of their specialized winter equipment did not.

Even so, one combat patrol was sent to destroy a German artillery observation post on a high ridge line: The Americans, aided by an Italian partisan guide, aimed to destroy it in late January 1945, only months from the end of combat in Europe. “We tried to creep and crawl under fire with skis on, a brand new experience,” said Staff Sgt. Dick Nebeker, who had been a ski instructor before training members of the ski troops. “The guns would fire, and we would scramble laterally on our bellies to find some low spot. The tails of our skis made a give away noise, like dragging a stick along a picket fence.’’ They ended up ditching their skis and moving across the ridges on foot.

The episode stands as a symbol of the destiny of this Army division. Said Nebeker: “Two winters at Camp Hale trained us for 10 minutes of creeping and crawling under enemy fire with skis on.” But if the ski training wasn’t useful, the mule training was. Eventually the division discovered that it needed to employ mules in its combat in Italy; they helped move supplies and kept the troops’ momentum. Invaluable, too, was the mountain training, which included lessons in how to build an aerial tramway to whisk skiers from the base to the summit; the unit’s makeshift tramway carried five tons of supplies to their companions during the Battle of Riva Ridge in central Italy, where the division excelled and prevailed, permitting the capture of Mount Belvedere, an important strategic site.

And in truth, the ski training didn’t totally go to waste. It brought the men to what Mr. Isserman describes as “a finely honed combination of fitness, endurance, self-confidence and unit cohesion.” He adds: “Minnie Dole proved to be right about the potential contributions of ski troops to the war effort—just not for the reasons he originally thought.” More battles followed, though at somewhat less demanding altitudes. Fittingly, the 10th Mountain Division captured 10 mountains in the North Apennines in course of a three-day offensive in March 1945. It took 35 square miles of Axis territory—and 1,000 prisoners.

One of those who joined the 10th in combat was a scrawny soldier from Russell, Kan., then as now not regarded as a hotbed of skiing. Nearly blown apart on an Italian hillside in the war’s last days, he was dragged to safety by two skiers. “I can say without reservation that if those two skiers hadn’t been with me, I would have never made it,” future 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole once told me. “I would not have survived.”

Then Dole and his compatriots came back home. He went to law school and on to a political career while many of the other soldiers of the 10th planted ski areas across the continent, imparting their love of the sport and of the high peaks to millions. “We were entrepreneurial types . . . but mostly we couldn’t get skiing out of our blood,’’ said Dick Wilson, later the editor of National Skiing Magazine. “We wanted to teach the country too ski. And we did.” In so doing, the ski troops earned another distinction. “The 10th Mountain Division,” Mr. Isserman tells us, ”was the only unit in the history of the US military to use wartime skills to promote a civilian pastime.”

“The Winter Army” comes at the same time as the republication of a rather different, and thoroughly engaging, volume on ski instruction in the military, the 1912 classic “Skis in the Art of War’’ (Northern Illinois, 246 pages, $37.95) by the Russian ski evangelist K.B.E. Eimeleus, a cornet in the Imperial Russian Calvary with the 9th Hussar Regiment of Kyiv. With a sweeping mustache and a sweeping writing style, he offers a plea for widespread ski training in the Russian military. The irony is that his treatise was read, and heeded, by the Finns, who, on skis, held off the Russians in the Winter War that prompted the creation of the 10th Mountain Division.

With an approachable introduction by the justly celebrated ski historian E. John B. Allen, “Skis in the Art of War” offers advice, of course, on martial matters—e.g., on how to fire a rifle while moving on skis. (Best to watch this skill on display in the next Winter Olympics rather than to practice it at Deer Valley.) But the volume holds wisdom for the contemporary skier as well, such as: “When it is cold, pay attention to the possibility of general cooling off as well as to the chilling of specific body parts.” Mark that down for your next outing on the slopes. Also, there is this warning about riding on skis while tethered behind a reindeer. Listen up, for this is news you can use: “Say, for example, that during a ride in the woods a downed tree is in the way: the reindeer leaps over it.” And the skier behind the surging beast? Our cornet with the 9th Hussar Regiment is ready with an answer: “Sometimes, all this ends with a fractured arm or leg and even worse injuries.” So watch out for that.

—Mr. Shribman, a former Journal political reporter, teaches at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at Montreal’s McGill University.