What does Dole say? He writes that he arrived to take up his assignment on "the morning of February 25." But he never mentions that the 10th Mountain Division went on a second offensive March 3-6, suffering 549 casualties, among them the famed U.S. ski-jump champion Torger Tokle. I/85 played only a reserve role in this advance, which may explain Dole's failure to mention it. Dole's 3rd Battalion suffered virtually no casualties.

At any rate, the 10th, which had been badly bloodied in the major February 19-25 offensive that dislodged German troops entrenched on Monte Belvedere, was gearing up for another attack on the still formidable German lines. Dole writes in his autobiography that his "chief task was finding ways to keep everyone busy: cleaning weapons, doing calisthenics, going on patrol." For the next month and a half we were hunkered down in foxholes and bunkers, rarely seeing anyone, even good friends, outside our own platoon or squad (one reason I never met Dole). During this time, I Company was subjected to shelling and machine-gun fire while on front-line duty, but it was not under constant fire, any more than were the other companies in the division. The commanding general instituted a policy of rotating one battalion at a time to a rest area; individual soldiers were also given one-week leaves to cities like Rome. As for Sergeant Jennings's description of I Company as the "spearhead of attack," during March and early April of 1945, the division was in defensive positions and hardly "spearheading" anything.
 

The only truly aggressive actions Dole is known to have engaged in after his arrival and before the April 14 attack were two night patrols for the purpose of taking prisoners. Neither accomplished its mission. According to regimental historian Woodruff's account, "Co 'I' sent out an ambush patrol at 1900 17 March of 16 men, led by Lt. Dole. An ambush was set...with part of the patrol and the rest moved forward. Enemy MG [machine gun] and mortar fire suddenly opened up on the patrol, inflicting 4 light casualties. No prisoners were taken but one German was killed or badly wounded. The patrol was forced to withdraw because of mortar fire." Two nights later, Woodruff states, Dole led another patrol but ran into a Company K patrol engaged in a firefight with the enemy and halted. "Later they were fired upon, and thinking it might be the Co 'K' patrol, Lt Dole withdrew to prevent a clash of friendly forces."

The three men quoted above, along with Frank Carafa (who served for a time as Dole's immediate subordinate), are the four people most often interviewed about Dole by biographers; all agreed that he was a good guy, unassuming, respectful of their advice, popular with his men. There is no reason to dispute this. Dole was evidently soft-spoken and willing to listen to those with greater combat experience. As a green replacement taking over a unit that had been through some severe fighting, listening to the veterans and learning from them was in his own interest.
 

Dole's version seems to have gotten chewed up in the myth-making machinery. Richard Ben Cramer, in his book Bob Dole, is the only one of the biographers to give Dole's account. Hilton says only that Dole "suffered a slight leg wound in March 1945, and earned a Purple Heart, but he went right on leading his platoon." In his 1994 biography Bob Dole: The Republicans' Man for All Seasons, Thompson, the Kansas City Star reporter, who had interviewed Dole, says, "One of his group pulled the pin on a hand grenade and threw it.... A small grenade fragment cut into Dole's leg and lightly injured several others. The men were patched up and each was awarded a Purple Heart."

Most significant, in a 1982 Washingtonian article currently being distributed by the Dole campaign, which Dole praises in a cover letter as "events brilliantly captured in print by my friend Noel Koch," Koch says nothing about Dole's errant toss of the grenade. Rather, he quotes Dole as saying, "I think one of ours might have bounced off a tree and rolled back.... Sometimes it was like a shooting gallery in the dark. You didn't know where the stuff was coming from or whose it was." Apparently, Dole approved this revisionist version.
 

The reason the identity of Dole's number two is important is that Carafa is the source of the oft-repeated story establishing Dole's courage and fighting spirit. Carafa has told biographers that the company commander had ordered him to lead an attack on a machine-gun nest, with Dole providing covering fire, but that Dole volunteered to lead it instead. Carafa, now 74, recently gave a somewhat modified version of the circumstances under which Dole came to lead the attack. Carafa now says that the company commander merely suggested that he command the squad because he had been acting platoon leader before Dole arrived. When they returned to the platoon and explained the mission, "Dole said he would take the squad and I would give him covering fire." Carafa agreed that it was Dole's duty to lead the attack, since he was the platoon leader. Yet in an interview, another member of Dole's company, who prefers to remain anonymous, characterized Carafa's memory of the incident as containing inaccuracies.

Cramer makes no reference to Carafa's story in his description of the same action. He says simply, "Dole could have stayed in the middle [of the platoon], too. But he knew his job, and he did it." Out of modesty, perhaps, Dole is reticent about the incident in his autobiography, quoting Carafa's account and then saying, "I don't remember the exact sequence myself."
 

The "Bob Dole Story" on the Dole for President homepage on the Internet gives this account a slightly more heroic twist: "In the middle of heavy shelling, Lieutenant Dole saw his radioman go down. As he crawled out of his foxhole to try to rescue the wounded soldier, he was hit by Nazi machine gun fire." Katharine Seelye, writing in The New York Times on the fifty-first anniversary of the incident, relates a similar version, only she says he was hit "by a shell or bullet or cannon fire -- there was too much flying metal to know." These versions make Dole's commendable action more admirably sacrificial.

Since Dole says he does not remember what happened next, perhaps because he was given morphine, we must rely on the accounts of Nencioni, Kuschick, Carafa and Jennings. But the recollections of fifty years after the event must be approached with caution. Kuschick, for example, was quoted in a 1992 book, Soldiers on Skis, as saying the wound that crippled Dole occurred when their platoon was sent out on a night patrol to capture a prisoner. "It was dark, we took them by surprise, and then there was a firefight.... Bob, in what was a gutsy move, led the platoon up front with two scouts. Machine-gun fire killed the scouts and hit Bob. I went to him and saw he was barely alive. He looked gray." Dole, who wrote the foreword to this book and presumably saw the galleys, for some reason failed to correct Kuschick's story.
 

In the April 14 attack Dole did his duty, but his actions were hardly the stuff of heroism. It was his job to lead his platoon, and dragging a wounded (or dead) comrade into one's shell hole was a common occurrence in the heat of battle. Even the friendly chronicler Noel Koch wonders why a war wound invests the bearer with an aura of heroism. "Heroism," he says, "involves choices, and Dole perceived no choice between leading his men and not leading them." As a member of Dole's platoon, Stanley Jones, put it in a recent interview, Dole "was a good soldier, but no more a hero than any other soldier."

Dole was promoted to first lieutenant in April 1946 and to captain in February 1947 even though he had been undergoing operations and rehabilitation in hospitals for the past two years. Hilton says that Dole referred to the second of these advancements as a "bedpan promotion."

And so the truth about Dole's war record is considerably less than awe-inspiring. Yet the myth endures, and with the candidate running on the contrast between his and Clinton's military record, his campaign isn't eager to give a more accurate account. Dole, at the behest of his handlers, is less reticent about his service than in the past, but he mainly speaks about his wound and rehabilitation. He has passed up several opportunities to correct the exaggerated versions in biographies, and in the case of his self-wounding has even approved a sanitized account in which his maladroitly hurled grenade goes unnoted. Journalists continue to portray him as a hero, winner of two Bronze Stars. Joe Klein, for example, writes in Newsweek that Dole knows "what guns do. He also knows what politicians do, which is rarely anything quite so dramatic as leading an army into battle." Such attempts to make political capital out of Dole's war service go beyond the respect due him for the role he played as a soldier with the 10th Mountain Division.

Robert B. Ellis, a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer, is now a wildlife photographer and environmental activist. One of the original ski troop volunteers, he received a Bronze Star for his service with the 10th Mountain Division in World War II. He is the author of a memoir of that service, See Naples and Die (McFarland).

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