The following is an excerpt of an oral history by Meverell (Mev) Good created by Linsey Lee of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum that appears in the exhibit and book Those Who Serve, Martha’s Vineyard and WWII. Mr. Good died on Feb. 9 at the age of 91.

I was born Jan. 20, 1924 in St. Louis, Mo., at 1:15 a.m., on a cold, windy night. Forty-five minutes, 115 years after Edgar Allen Poe. Pearl Harbor had come Dec. 7, 1941. When Pearl Harbor was hit, I called up my friend Phil Cady and I said, “Where’s Pearl Harbor?” And he said, “I don’t know, it’s out in the Pacific.”

To enlist just seemed the thing to do. There was no thought given to it. Oh, we were going to lick the Japs in six months, believe me! If you didn’t live through the period it was hard to believe it. And so I went East to school, and arrived in Princeton in June, 1942. The first thing all of us did was register for the draft.

“Enlist in the Mountain Troops.” Well, it sounded sort of nice, skiing. I didn’t meet any of the requirements. I didn’t ski. I didn’t do any of that. I was not a rock climber. Sort of a 90-pound weakling.

Mev Good, far left, with Army buddies at St. Peter's Basilica, 1945.

Courtesy Martha's Vineyard Museum

Mev Good, far left, with Army buddies at St. Peter's Basilica, 1945.

Courtesy Martha's Vineyard Museum

So then they had all these people volunteering to go, skiers from all over the world. Everybody that skied wanted to get in it. I was probably one of the early non-skiers, non-mountain climbers. In fact, on my application it has “non, non, non, non, non.” But I got three letters of recommendation, and got in.

So I get out there with all these big athletes and skiers. There was Torger Tokle, who was the world’s champion jumper. They had Paul Petzoldt, who at 17 climbed K-2, the second highest mountain in the world and on and on. Bob Pastor, who had fought Joe Louis for the heavyweight championship, was in my company. What the hell am I doing here? But I could hold my own in tennis with them.

So we’re out in Colorado, and we go through the training — marching, climbing with a full rucksack, learning how to rappel down a mountain. Then one day I get sick, and they put me in the hospital. I had scarlet fever. And then I also developed the Pando Hack. I was told that they didn’t feel I physically could stand it. So I went up and got a job in division headquarters. It was not where I wanted to be, but I was still with the Mountain Troops.

I was in what they call special services. And we were to support the troops in any way that would keep their morale as high as possible. Set up entertainment for them. And we set up a basketball team. We would go around the state playing basketball for the 10th Mountain Division.

I remember at Camp Hale I was on the rifle range with a big fellow, a sergeant from Kentucky next to me, and he said, “You a college boy?” And I said, “Yes.” “Would you help some of my men write letters home?” A lot of these guys couldn’t read or write. So I started writing letters home. “Dear Mother, I am fine. The food is good. Love, Wilbur.”

So after doing that, I said, “Can we help them with their reading?” “Would you?” the sergeant said. So we took these fellows who never knew how to read, and we gave them comic books. Mickey Mouse. And then we moved them up to classic comics. And plots of well-known books like Tale of Two Cities, Ivanhoe. You know their favorite book of all the classics? Tale of Two Cities because the poor people cut the king’s head off. They thought that was great.

In June we got the orders to go. We’re going to go to Camp Swift, Texas, in May of 1944, or June. Now here’s mountain troops, been in the mountains, so we’re now down in Camp Swift, Texas. Hot. And we sit around there all summer.

So then about November the allies are stymied above Florence, Italy. Can’t move. They came into Rome earlier in ’44 and it’s late ’44, and they can’t move about above Florence. So we get the call. We were the perfect troop, the 10th Mountain Division. We were trained as an infantry division, and we’d been in the mountains and we’d been also on flatland. So we had both that type of training, mountain training and flatland training. So we were sort of ideal troops to go anywhere. We’d sweated it out in the summer and frozen it out in the winter. Some of the division went over in December of ’44. We went over in January of ’45 and landed in Naples.

The U.S. troops had gotten to Florence, but made no headway because of the Apennine Mountains. North of Florence is Riva Ridge, a 2,000-foot vertical ridge. And the Germans were perched on top. That’s where the Germans could fire down on all the troops.

The 10th Mountain had what they called a 10th Reconnaissance Group, which was made up of the best skiers. They were trying to locate a route in this sheer, 2,000-foot ridge to scale. No one thought anybody could scale it. In fact it had been tried, I don’t know how many times. They went out under night, and they hid in haylofts, chicken coops, everything like that. And then they looked to see how you could get up the ridge. Sent a crew out and finally decided this is the route.

The 86th Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division, they were ones who made the climb. Best mountaineers they could find. And up they went and did it, and surprised the Germans on top. Nobody thought they could do it. And that was the beginning of the rout in Italy. The 10th Mountain went from Riva Ridge almost to the Austrian border in no time at all. All the way. In fact, at one point they were fighting the SS troops.

The 10th Mountain Division had the highest casualty rate per combat day in the southern theatre. The 10th was a division of 15,000. Nine hundred seventy-two were killed in action and 3,882 wounded. I was in division headquarters. Division headquarters, you were always behind the front line, but the thing in war, there was always an odd plane coming over, an odd mine.

The war ended in Italy in May. And the war was still going on in Europe. And in Japan.

Since we were the last division in Italy, we were to be the first out. When we were told to go we weren’t quite sure where we were going, but it turned out we were going to lead the invasion in Japan. Above Tokyo, I understand, there’s some cliffs. And since the 10th had done a pretty good job and we were trained to do mountaineering, we said, “Well, I guess we’re going to go to Japan.”

And the estimated casualties were going to be 100,000 allied troops and two to three million Japanese. Because we were up against what they called the Code of Bushido, which the Japanese believe in: Death Before Surrender. And the troops already knew how the Japanese fought. So chances of you and me talking here today was very remote because the engineers are the group that are sometimes out in front of the infantry, putting bridges down and that. So that was what we were going to do.

I guess we were one day out of Gibraltar, and I came up on deck and somebody said, “They’ve dropped a bomb.” We didn’t know what the bomb was. Turned out to be the atom bomb. And the war was over.

It was a great relief, frankly. We don’t have to go, because we’d all seen enough of this death and dying to know it wasn’t no movie. Nobody can tell you unless you’ve been there, there’s no way of explaining it. And so we were, I don’t know, we were both happy and sad. We had left so many people.

I came home to St. Louis, met this girl I knew with a bottle of wine. We sort of looked at each other and were very quiet. And she and I were thinking the same thing, as I remember. That some of our friends weren’t coming back. So I remember we drank a toast to them, and then turned and faced the night of our new world.