In the winter of 1945, Hugh Evans’ friend died in his arms in a barren Italian battlefield. Enraged, he stormed the Nazis, shooting some and taking many hostage. He was just 20 years old. As an old man, he’d recount memories of dozens of Germans popping out of foxholes, their hands up in surrender, to a documentarian.
“And why they didn’t finish me off going over the hill is just the luck of the draw, is what it amounts to,” he said in footage from 2003 donated to the Denver Public Library.
The act earned him a Silver Star commendation from the Army, but it’s not the kind of story he told his daughter, Susannah Evans LeVon. Looking out on thousands of graves in neat rows at the Florence American Cemetery, south of Florence, hits home the danger these men faced, “and how lucky my dad was to survive and to live (to) a ripe old age of 97,” she said.
Susannah, from Grand Junction, and her daughter Katy LeVon, from Denver, traveled to Italy in September to retrace their late father and grandfather’s footsteps, 80 years after the end of World War II.
At the cemetery, they placed flowers on the graves of 10th Mountain Division soldiers who never made it home. For Katy, it was emotional knowing these were her grandfather’s friends and “he’s looking down on us at the same time.”
The women were part of a group of nearly 100 descendants of the division who traveled through the Italian countryside this fall — keeping alive a tradition the veterans started themselves in the 1960s. Known for being tight-knit, the men had been so shaped by their time learning alpine fighting skills together in Colorado and their experience helping liberate Italy that they kept returning to the country every few years.
Hugh, Susannah and Katy’s father and grandfather came back more than a dozen times and helped organize many such trips. Susannah first came along with her eldest daughter more than 20 years ago. This time, she and her husband brought along her other two grown kids.
As this year’s group of descendants visited museums, monuments and little towns that still remember the 10th’s bravery, the LeVon women hoped to meet locals who knew their father and grandfather. After all, he was the kind of guy who made friends wherever he went, they said.
As the group hiked up Mount Belvedere, which Susannah’s dad helped capture, she could feel him encouraging her up the same rocky, steep slope he ascended 80 years before.
Italian military veterans met the group at the top of the tough climb. Hopeful, Susannah asked a 92-year-old man with a white beard and a feather in his green cap if he knew her father.
As soon as Franco Torri heard the name “Hugh Evans,” he teared up and hugged her.
“He loved you. He loved you,” Susannah said, tears in her eyes as they embraced.
Just like her dad, Torri loves to sing. As he hugged her, he sang out a few lines from “Sul Cappello,” one of the most famous songs of the Italian mountain troops. “He knows my mother and my father,” Susannah said.
“My father sang beautifully,” she said. “He said he had a bella voce. They sang songs and they drank together.”
Torri later invited Susannah and her family to his home in a nearby village and presented her son with a pair of vintage skis — a piece of history linking her family with her dad’s experience of this place.
Her father loved Italy, Susannah said, and it meant so much to feel how beloved he was in this country. In 1985, Hugh helped create the International Federation of Mountain Soldiers to promote friendship and peace, bringing together men whose countries were once enemies.
In an undated video interview sometime before his death in 2021 with the American Veterans Center, he described the horrors of war, as well as and the gratitude he felt to have survived and had a happy life, with a wonderful career and family.
“You have a greater appreciation of all those wonderful things because of the experience that was just the opposite,” Evans said in the video.
His family spent more than a week traveling through the Italian countryside. And while his granddaughter Katy isn’t prone to crying, at a farewell dinner for the group, she choked down tears as she described how she had hoped to feel her grandfather again on this trip.
She got her wish.
“Meeting people who still remember him after all this time and being able to share that with my family has been life-changing, so thank you,” she said, to applause.
This trip reinstilled life lessons he taught “about grit and resilience and moving forward,” she said, away from the crowd. “Always, always forward.”
Sempre avanti is the Italian phrase, and it became the 10th Mountain Division’s slogan. It’s also the last line of her grandfather's obituary.
Susannah said her dad would be pleased that his family came on this trip, carrying forward a past he came to embrace.
“I think he’s up there smiling down at us and just enjoying that we’re meeting his friends,” she said.
Italy is where he once could have died. Instead, it’s where he found joy, decades later.
The 10th Returns
The 10th Mountain Division troops trained in the Colorado mountains and helped win WWII in 1945.
This story is part of a series that follows a group of their descendants who returned to Italy and retraced their steps.
