Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

A lone, low-flying British Stirling bomber winged over the German-occupied Department of Correze, south of the Loire in the Massif Central. It had taken off three hours earlier from a base in England and joined the bomber stream of Stirlings and Halifaxes destined for Germany. Over France it had faked an abort and looped out of the stream, turning west toward England, all the while descending. When it was low enough to become invisible to German radar, it had made another turn, this time to the southeast.

This particular Stirling was not fitted out with bombs. Packed tight within its narrow fuselage were a ten-man French SAS reconnaissance team, parachute-equipped cargo pods, and a three-man OSS Jedburgh team, code-named "Team James." The SAS troops were commanded by a Captain Wauthier. Team James consisted of an American lieutenant, Jack Singlaub; an American technical sergeant, Tony Dennau; and a French army lieutenant, whose nom de guerre was Dominique Leb.

Singlaub, the team commander, was a Californian who had come to the OSS out of the 515th Parachute Infantry Regiment, at Fort Benning, Ceorgia (he was also demolition-qualified, having trained for it after he'd broken an ankle and needed something useful to do).

Dennau was a Sinatra-sized ball of fire from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who actually enjoyed jumping out of airplanes in the dark and then hiking through hostile countryside. He was the radio operator, but was also a terrific shot.

The Frenchman was a Breton aristocrat whose real name was Jacques Le Bel de Penguilly. Since Nazi reprisals against Free French officers' families were common, Maquis officers often concealed their true identities. Jacques (Dominique) was a necessary part of the team. His French was of course more fluent than the Americans', but even more important, he had a far better sense than Singlaub of the intricacies of the French political scene. The Free French were fiercely divided into contending factions, all hoping to lead the nation after the war — with Monarchists on the far right, Communists on the far left, and the followers of General de Gaulle in the center. With the notable exception of the Communists, the factions kept their differences out of the struggle with the Nazis. The Communists, no less than the others, wanted to kick the Nazis out, but they were as much interested in achieving an end state after the war that favored their cause. They cooperated when it suited them. Jacques was a Gaullist.

Singlaub was jammed against the Stirling's forward bulkhead, bent under the weight of his parachute. Though Dominique and Dennau were close by (similarly hunchbacked), there was no conversation. The roar of the engines and the wail of the slipstream made talk impossible. They all wore British camouflage smocks and para-helmets. On his chest, Singlaub carried a musette bag containing codebooks and 100,000 French francs. A leg bag held extra ammunition and grenades. He was armed with a Spanish 9mm Llama pistol, a weapon chosen because of the relative availability of 9mm ammunition in occupied Europe.

The engines changed tone and the aircraft slowed.

Aft, the tough, highly trained SAS troops gathered around a rectangular hole in the aircraft's rear deck — the jump hatch, or Joe hole, as it was called. Soon, they were dropping through the hole, one by one. Then a crew member pushed their cargo pods after them.

The Jeds were next.

They proceeded aft toward the dark, howling rectangle.

"About three minutes," the RAF dispatcher shouted into Singlaub's ear.

They hooked up their static lines. Then each man checked the snap-clips of his teammates on the deck ring, and double-checked his own. Looking down through the hole, Singlaub could just barely make out the dark masses of forests and the lighter blotches of fields. No lights were visible, and few roads.

Three orange signal flares lit the night below, the Maquis drop-zone signal. Meanwhile, Singlaub knew, a Maquis controller was flashing a preset code letter to the pilot. If the code letter was correct, they'd be dropping through the hole before they started another breath.

"Go!" the dispatcher shouted, smacking Singlaub's helmet. And the young lieutenant went feet first into the dark, 800 feet above the countryside, ankles and knees together, hands tight against the wool of his trousers. He hurtled through the dark for a moment, then the chute opened with the familiar whomping sound he knew so well. (Unlike American chutes, which burst open the moment the static line went tight and could easily malfunction, British chutes didn't deploy until the suspension lines went taut — a much safer system. On the other hand, American paratroopers carried a small reserve chute on their chest; Brits did not. If their chutes failed, that was it.)

Singlaub checked his canopy, noting two more canopies above him — Dominique and Dennau. Behind them, four smaller canopies also opened: their cargo pods.

He had trained long and hard for that moment.

It had begun on an October morning in 1943 in Washington, D.C., in an office in the Munitions Building. IIe'd gotten there after answering a call for Foreign-language-speaking volunteers who were eager for hazardous duty behind enemy lines (he spoke fair French). The outfit issuing the call was the OSS — Office of Strategic Services — about which Singlaub knew very little, except that it was involved in secret intelligence and sabotage operations overseas and was commanded by the legendary General "Wild Bill" Donovan. That seemed pretty good to Singlaub.

A grueling interview determined that he might have what the OSS needed, and he was ordered to show up in the headquarters parking lot the next morning for transportation to the Congressional Country Club. The name was not a joke. At one time, congressmen had actually gone there to drink and play golf, but the war had turned it into an OSS training camp. It still retained its congressional luxuries however: crystal chandeliers, leather chairs, oil paintings in expensive frames, good china.

In fact, training at the Congressional Country Club did not seem discordant to the average OSS volunteer. Before Franklin Roosevelt had picked him to run his new intelligence organization, Donovan had been a Wall Street lawyer with the kind of blue-blood, Ivy League connections that were common at the time. It was only natural that he had built his OSS out of the same privileged, clubby extended family. Most senior officers came from Ivy League — dominated professions, as did many who were present for the orientation with Jack Singlaub that October morning. To his immense relief, however, it wasn't only the social elite he saw there. Also present were hardened-looking airborne lieutenants like Singlaub who'd come out of OCS or ROTC, as he had (the war had cut his college career short).

The welcoming colonel made instantly clear what they'd be facing:

"You've been brought here," he said, "to evaluate your suitability for combat duty with resistance groups in enemy-occupied areas…. I'm talking about guerrilla warfare, espionage, and sabotage. Obviously, no one doubts your courage, but we have to make certain you possess the qualities needed for a type of operation never before attempted on the scale we envision.

"Guerrillas move fast, operating mainly at night, then disperse into the countryside and reassemble miles away. The skills required of a guerrilla leader will be the same as those shown by the best backwoods fighters and Indian scouts." Singlaub brightened when he heard this. He had always loved outdoor sports — hunting, fishing, camping — more than the regimentation of playground and team sports. All during high school and college, he had spent whatever time he could trekking the High Sierras. He was happy in the woods and the wilderness.

"We aren't looking for individual heroes," the colonel concluded, "although your courage will certainly be tested in the coming weeks. We want mature officers who can train foreign resistance troops, quickly and efficiently, then lead them aggressively. If we are not completely satisfied with your potential, you will be assigned to normal duties."

Over the next weeks, Singlaub and his companions learned, and were tested on, the basic skills of guerrilla warfare — how to move stealthily at night (over grassy fields that had once been manicured fairways); how to take out targets like railway switches, power transformers, sentry posts, and bridges. But most important, they were tested on how well they could handle what they'd be up against psychologically. Behind the lines they'd be on their own. How well would they hold up? How well could they handle the inevitable crises and screwups? How well would they handle men who were incompetent or overaggressive or nuts?

To that end, ringers from the training staff were inserted into teams in order to screw things up. How well the team handled this subordinate was often more important to their final evaluation than how well they placed demo charges on a railway trestle.

Once they had successfully passed over these hurdles, the OSS candidates were sent to what was called Area B-1. This had once upon a time been a boys' camp in western Maryland, and later FDR's weekend retreat, Shangri-la. After the war it became the presidential retreat now called Camp David.

Here the training emphasized tradecraft, and especially hand-to-hand combat.

For that they had probably the best instructor in the world, the British Major William Fairbairn, the inventor of the world-famous Fairbairn double-edged fighting knife (the commandos' close-in weapon of choice) and the developer of the hand-to-hand training course for the commandos. Fairbairn's philosophy was simple: You trained for months with a wide variety of Allied and enemy weapons until you handled any of them as instinctively as a major-league ballplayer swung a bat.

And so from early morning until late at night, that's what they did — not to mention the morning runs, the labyrinthine and dangerous obstacle courses, the nighttime crawls through cold, rain-soaked woods to plant demo charges, or the hours practicing encryption and clandestine radio procedures.

In December, Singlaub sailed for England on the Queen Elizabeth. There, his training continued, now under the auspices of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE, the umbrella organization that managed all the British unconventional warfare groups). The SOE ran clandestine training sites around the world, as well as squadrons of airdrop and reconnaissance aircraft, speedboats, and Submarines; and it maintained enough forgers and mapmakers to keep several companies of James Bonds busy. SOE espionage and sabotage teams had worked in occupied Europe for some time, but now OSS liaison teams had been placed in France and had joined the covert effort. Soon, OSS teams would be given a much larger role.

The training in England was no less grueling than that in Virginia and Maryland. Initially, the focus was on parachute training and live-fire exercises; but there was also increasing emphasis on real-life situations the teams might run into — clandestine tradecraft and living cover stories. Men who failed these tests were sent back to regular units.

After a time, three-man teams were formed — an American or British officer, a French counterpart, and an enlisted radio operator. These teams were to be air-dropped into occupied France, where they would help organize, train, and lead Maquis resistance units in support of the Allied invasion. It was hoped that by then Maquis troops would number in the tens of thousands, and that the occupying Nazi army would find itself attacked on two fronts — Americans, Brits, and Canadians driving west from Normandy, and Maquisards making life hard for the Germans in their rear areas.

In order to minimize Nazi reprisals against civilians, it was essential that the major Maquisard offensive not break out until after the invasion had been launched. And then Maquis objectives and timetables had to be coordinated with overall Allied goals. This would require considerable psychological, political, and military acuity — in a fiercely high-stress, high-threat environment.

The operation was named JEDBURGH, after a castle in Scotland, and the teams were called Jedburgh Teams.

Singlaub landed in waist-high brush, rolled to the ground, then picked himself up and, as he gathered his chute into a bundle, made sure that Dominique and Dennau had come down safely fifty yards away.

Darkened figures emerged from the trees, calling out softly in French. Some separated from the rest in order to grab the cargo chutes. Most of the others spread out into a periphery defense. A single figure approached, their contact, a British SOE officer named Simon. They had landed about three kilometers from a village called Bonnefond, he explained, and about twenty kilometers from a German garrison in the town of Egletons.

After months of training, Jack Singlaub was at last in occupied France. He was twenty-three years old.

Soon the three newly arrived Jeds were ready to go. The heavy radio was stowed in Dennau's rucksack; Singlaub had slid a magazine into their submachine gun and readied the weapon; they had disposed of their chutes and shouldered their rucksacks; and Simon and the Maquis were leading them off into the night-shrouded woods. As they went, Singlaub noted with professional satisfaction that the Maquis troops were both well-trained and well-armed. They kept a good interval in their column, there was a point squad ahead, and flankers were on the sides.

Here was the situation they faced: At that time, 8,000 Maquisards of the Force Francaises d'Interieur (FFI) operated in the region. Of these, 5,000 belonged to the well-trained and well-armed Gaullist Armee Secrete (AS), while most of the rest were Communist Franc Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). Though there was little love or cooperation between the two, Maquis attacks on German garrisons and convoys had grown since D Day.

Meanwhile, a breakout seemed near out of the Normandy beachhead. Once it came, Allied armies would race west along the Loire. An increasingly likely second Allied invasion — from the Mediterranean coast up the Rhone valley — would put further pressure on the Germans.

The Loire rises in the south of France, flows vaguely north and west to Orleans, about a hundred kilometers south of Paris, then turns west and flows into the Atlantic. The major artery passing through Correze, Route Nationale 89, connected Bordeaux on the coast with Lyon on the Rhone (which is east of the Loire and flows south into the Mediterranean). Route 89 was the main German logistics — and escape — route from southwestern France. For that reason, German forces along the highway remained potent: Better than 2,000 veteran artillery and armor-equipped troops were divided among four heavily fortified garrisons along the highway (at Tulle, Brive, Egletons, and Ussel), while specially trained mobile anti-Maquis troops, equipped with light armor, trucks, and spotter planes, continued at the ready to sweep up Free French units. The Germans intended to keep Route 89 open.

On the other hand, the terrain gave a big advantage to the Maquis. The Massif Central was rugged, offering plentiful choke points. Both road and rail lines through Correze ran along narrow valleys. There was God's own plenty of bridges, viaducts, culverts — lots of targets. And to make matters more interesting, an Allied breakout from Normandy would cut off the Germans in southwest France, while an Allied sweep up the Rhone would close the box and trap them. The time was growing ripe for a major Maquis uprising in the Massif.

Airdrops had equipped the Maquis with modern weapons. They wanted — and needed — more, but it was a good start. Team James's job was to train the Maquis units in the use of those weapons and to be the liaison between the Maquis and Allied headquarters for further weapons drops. They would also be involved in sabotage and ambush operations as needed. And, not least, they'd be expected to lead the Maquis troops against the Germans, in whose eyes the Jedburghs were spies and not soldiers. If captured, they could expect torture and execution. (Poison pills had been issued to those who wanted them. Singlaub did not.)

As they marched to the farmhouse that would become their first command post, or PC—poste de commandement, as the Maquis called it — (it was the practice to move PCs frequently), Simon pointed out landmarks and explained the current situation to the three Jeds: "All the local German garrisons are surrounded," he said. "They won't come out at night for fear of ambush. But Egletons is a tough nut — a reinforced company of Hun infantry, with at least a platoon of SS, occupies a commanding position over the Correze valley. The proper lot of machine guns, several antitank guns, and maybe some mortars. They've also got a wireless, so they're in contact with their division HQ in Clermont-Ferrand." Clermont-Ferrand was the base for one of the Wehrmacht specially trained anti-Maquis units. "The German garrisons at Brive and Tulle are larger than the one at Egletons," Simon continued, "but we have more Maquis companies surrounding them; they don't have a wireless; and we've cut all the phone and telegraph lines." He grinned in the moonlight. "Poor buggers don't know what we're up to."

It was an interesting situation for guerrillas. The enemy was reeling, nervous, vulnerable, yet far from defeated, and still very deadly. The time was ripe for forceful actions, yet overconfidence could ruin everything.

Soon after dawn, there was a war council. Present were Jack Singlaub, Dominique, Simon, Captain Wauthier (he and his SAS troops had arrived earlier after a long hike through the woods, somewhat more lightly equipped than they'd hoped, having lost through various mishaps four of their cargo pods), and the local Maquis commander, a tough, smart, and very professional former French regular army officer whose nom de guerre was Captain Hubert. Hubert had arrived not long after Wauthier, driving an ancient Renault whose better days long predated the war, and commanded a 3,000-strong Gaullist AS unit called the Corps Franc de Tulle.

Once the SAS guys and several squads of Hubert's Maquis set up perimeter defense around the PC, the council began. Hubert in particular had important matters to discuss, chiefly:

His troops were poorly armed. Only about a third of his men carried weapons — captured German Mauser rifles, Schmeisser submachine guns, and a handful of British Sten guns and pistols. The best-armed Maquis in the Correze were the troops of the region's AS commander (whose nom de guerre was Patrick). An enormous American airdrop, with more than seventy B-17s taking part, on Bastille Day, July 14, had provided Patrick with enough rifles, Sten and Bren guns, grenades, pistols, and a few bazookas and British Piat antitank weapons to equip his own 2,000-man unit, but had left few leavings for Hubert.

Nevertheless, Patrick had put these forces to excellent use. His unit had set up permanent ambushes at three points along Route 89, had completely surrounded the German garrison at Brive, and blocked the southwest approach to the Correze valley, while a smaller but equally well-armed AS unit had blocked the valley's northeast entrance.

Not only did Hubert's troops crave a piece of this action, but many of them, he added pointedly, had been waiting for weapons for three years, ever since they'd escaped the Nazi Blitzkrieg. "My men are ready to fight the Boches," he said. "But we cannot do it with naked hands."

When Dominique asked him for detailed requirements, after which contact would be made with London, Hubert (ever the professional) instantly produced a typed list, which he had already long ago prepared. And then he continued, turning even more serious: "There is another matter," he said carefully. "The FTP has recently come into this neighborhood in force, especially south of the highway, in the hills around Egletons — the area which has been my own operational area. They are commanded by a onetime schoolteacher and army corporal who calls himself Colonel Antoine. Antoine commands 3,000 well-armed troops," having received their weapons during the massive American Bastille Day airdrop. "Previously, they operated in the Department of Lot-et-Garonne to our south. But now they are here.

"Antoine is not at all interested in cooperation with us," Hubert continued, not hiding his scorn. "He is very political. Yes, he wants a public victory over the Boches. But he certainly does not want to share the victory with us."

Hubert's implication was simple and ominous. If Hubert's troops weren't brought up to the armed strength of Antoine's, the Communists had a good chance of gaining the credit for liberating central Correze, in that way setting the stage for their postwar political agenda. Many FTP soldiers were good, brave, and dedicated, and had fought hard and taken many casualties, but they were poorly trained — more an armed rabble than a well-disciplined fighting force. Even if they wished to coordinate operations with the AS, which they showed little inclination to do, coordination with them would not come casy. Needless to say, relations between the Communist FTP and the Gaullist AS were tense.

Meanwhile, Hubert went on, word had come from higher up that General George Patton's Third Army had at last broken out from Normandy and was driving cast at full throttle between the Loire and the Seine. That meant his southern flank was exposed — a situation that typically left Patton unconcerned: "Let the other son-of-a-bitch worry about flanks," he told an aide. Be that as it may, his right flank was exposed, and the FFI had been given the job of protecting it. Specifically, their mission was to blockade the German forces south of the Loire and west of the Massif Central.

Meaning: The political strain between the FTP and AS had instantly turned dangerous. The blockade would require carefully coordinated actions. But if groups like Antoine's maintained an independent, politically motivated strategy, and continued to resist cooperation, the Germans could crush each center of resistance in turn, like beads on a string. This would also inevitably mean bad news for civilians because of savage Nazi reprisals.

Just after D Day, a pair of over enthusiastic Maquis botch-ups had brought on Nazi massacres in the towns of Oradour-sur-Glane and Tulle. In Tulle, the Nazis hanged nearly a hundred men from lampposts. In Oradour-sur-Glane, the SS jammed hundreds of men into barns and garages and hundreds more women and children into the town church, then machine-gunned the men and set fire to the barns, garages, and church. No one inside — men, women, or children — survived the flames. After that, they looted the town and killed the few people who'd tried to hide in cellars. They left behind a ghost town.

No doubt about it, Hubert had made a powerful case — military, political, and humanitarian — for getting weapons for his troops. Dominique and Singlaub promised to do what they could.

Later that morning, word came that an OSS operational group had blown up a rail bridge on a northern spur to the east-west line connecting Bordeaux with Lyon, while another band of saboteurs had taken a hydroelectric plant out of action. This cut off power both to an arms factory in Tulle and to the electrified rail line between Correze and Bordeaux. Other Maquis commanders had their eye on Route 89 bridges and were asking for explosives.

This presented Lieutenant Singlaub with a problem. Though the bridges were legitimate targets, closing the highway was not a good idea. The Route 89 corridor through Correze was terrific ambush country, while a closed Route 89 would simply drive the German traffic north toward the more open country near the Loire — and expose Patton's flank. Conclusion: It was best to keep pressure on the German garrisons along Route 89 but to leave the bridges intact and keep the highway open. This decision soon became the first Team James operational order to the Maquis.

Over the next days, Dominique and Singlaub reconnoitered, paying special attention to the German garrisons at Brive, Tulle, Ussel, and Egletons — heavily defended, with sandbagged windows, barbed-wire entanglements, and machine-gun emplacements. Well-trained and disciplined Maquis forces had isolated each of these garrisons; barricades and roadblocks had been set up. Soon there would be coordinated attacks.

Meanwhile, seven of Antoine's FTP companies, together with two of Hubert's AS companies, were laying siege to what was to prove the hardest nut to crack, the garrison at Egletons.

Unhappily, this "joint" arrangement was working no better than previous FTP-AS acts of "cooperation." As ever, the Communists intended to go their own independent way.

This situation grew more complicated a day or so later, when Patrick's regional intelligence officer, who called himself Coriolan, passed on disturbing news: Informants within Antoine's FTP units had warned Coriolan that on the previous night Antoine had pressed the attack against Egletons, and had done it without informing Hubert of this operation, or bothering to coordinate his attack with the AS companies taking part in the encirclement.

Worse, the poorly trained FTP troops screwed it up. Instead of catching the Germans off guard, their attack was so inept that the Germans had managed to retreat in good order back into a fortified and practically impregnable refuge in the Ecole Professionelle, a three-story stone-and-concrete complex on a ridge at the edge of town. Because they were in radio contact with their regional headquarters and defended by heavy machine guns and a 37mm antitank gun, they were as comfy as rats in a sewer. Before long, an armored column would come to relieve them. And air support wasn't far away.

The choice was clear. The Jedburghs had to go to Egletons (where they would join Hubert, who was already there), do what they could to salvage the situation, and prepare to ambush the German relief column. Since collaborators and spies were everywhere, the three of them (and a ten-man AS escort) had to hike over backcountry Maquis trails — maybe twenty-five kilometers point to point, but closer to fifty on the ground. It took them a day.

That evening they linked up with Hubert, who had set up his PC on the ground floor of a stonc house with a walled garden, perhaps 500 meters from the northwest corner of the Ecole Professionelle. His two companies had taken positions in neighboring houses and along a sunken road, while the FTP troops were in pockets ringed around the other three corners of the school compound.

After Hubert's briefing and a quick look around, Dominique and Singlaub tried to link up with the FTP and conduct the kind of reconnaissance needed for a realistic attack plan, but quickly decided to put that off until daylight after they were warned off by FTP sentries, whose hostility was palpable.

The next morning, the Communists' suspicion and hostility was little diminished, but nevertheless, the two Jedburgh officers managed to talk their way into the FTP area.

Once again Singlaub was struck by the indiscipline of the FTP troops, who were firing Bren guns sporadically at the stone facade of the school, to no real effect except to send stone chips flying. Uncoordinated fire is like an unfocused lens — a waste.

When Dominique and Singlaub asked for directions to the FTP commander, sullen Communists pointed out a bullet-pocked house near the school. the way there was dicey, since much of the street was in view of the school, and there was so much glass and rubble underfoot it was impossible for the two Jedburghs not to make noise and call attention to themselves. This was made worse by the FTP soldiers they passed en route, all of whom seemed bent to point them out and challenge their presence.

Bent low, they raced down the street, then passed through a garden and burst through the back door of the house closest to the school. While Dominique stayed behind to guard his rear, Singlaub climbed up to the slate-roofed attic to see what he could learn. A small, square window opened onto the school, two hundred meters away. He opened it and stealthily raised his face to look outside.

Some of his OSS training in England came in handy just then — how to make quick, accurate recons. It was like a meditation technique: The idea was to clear your mind of conscious thought, focus your gaze like a camera, and let what passed before you register as though your mind were photographic film. Singlaub panned his eyes across the school courtyard across the road and the school walls and windows, noting the timber barricades, overturned concrete slabs, and heavy furniture blocking the windows. Shadowy figures moving in the shrubbery probably indicated a machine-gun crew.

At that moment, angry shouts came from below. And he could hear Dominique cursing. Meanwhile, off to the side he could see FTP soldiers down in the street stupidly pointing fingers in the direction of his own attic window, effectively spotting him for the German gunners. In OSS school, they'd had to go through what were called "bungler exercises," in which the trainees would be subjected to unexpected, frustrating, and often stupid annoyances to see how they would react. This was different. It was the real thing. The German gunners quickly got the point and started spraying the window from at least two machine guns, but not before Singlaub had scrambled down the stairs and out the back door. By then, the machine guns had opened up on the front windows. Dominique was waiting for him, his face white with fury — not so much at the Germans as at their own supposed friends.

"Let's get out of here," Singlaub said to him, "in case the Krauts have got a mortar over there."

There came then a loud crack and a deep-throated metallic clang, as the 37mm antitank gun blew a hole through the slate roof under which Singlaub had just been hiding. Slate fragments showered down as he and Dominique scuttled away.

A little later that morning, they were set to meet Antoine (they had so far never set eyes on him), for a tactical conference in a stone barn on the other side of the sunken road. But the Communist leader was proving to be elusive ("He's been called away on urgent operational matters," it was explained), and his chief of staff showed up in his stead.

By then it was clear to the Jeds that taking the school with the weapons they had — Bren guns, Sten guns, rifles, pistols, and hand grenades — was not going to happen. Their alternatives: a long siege (a bad idea, in view of the Germans' ability to send help to their Egletons garrison from their headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand), or a quick, perfectly coordinated attack, supported by mortars and bazookas.

Antoine's intention, relayed by his chief of staff, was to continue the siege indefinitely. "There are SS inside! We will pin them down." In other words, Antoine was happy to engage in a silly operation in order to reap the political benefit derived from making a few of the hated SS troops moderately miserable.

And so Antoine ordered the siege to continue.

Meanwhile, word had come that Captain Wauthier had received an airdrop the night before. Now the strength of his SAS unit had grown to thirty men, and he had mortars and British Piats (which were like bazookas). With this added firepower, Dominique and Singlaub reasoned that it ought to be possible to break the siege at Egletons in a few hours… and rake in the Germans heavy machine guns and antitank guns, which were badly needed.

A runner was dispatched to Wauthier with the request.

And then, at 0900, the Nazis in the Egletons garrison got their help, in the form of three Luftwaffe Heinkel-111 medium bombers. The Heinhels swooped down low for bomb runs, one after the other, while Hubert's Maquis and the Jeds dived for cover.

The first plane dropped a stick of 100-kilo bombs that blasted the row of houses facing the school. The concussion shook everything nearby, and the red-flickering tailgun swept up afterward.

When the second I Ieinkel lined up on FTP positions, several brave — or recklessly foolish — Communists raced into the center of the road and fired rifles and Sten guns at the plane, braving machine-gun fire from both the school and the Heinkel's nose gunner. Two bombs dropped out of the plane into somebody's garden. They exploded moments later.

A time delay! Singlaub realized. So the low-flying bombers could escape the blast. If properly coordinated, he quickly reasoned, Bren guns, which fired the same.303 round as a Spitfire fighter, might throw off the bombardicrs' aim and take the pressure off the Maquis front-line positions.

Dominique grabbed four Bren gunners from the FTP units, while Singlaub rounded up four from Hubert and set them up in the sunken road. Singlaub gave instructions and Dominique translated. The Heinkels were now making single bomb passes that took them directly overhead. As a bomber approached, he and Dominique would estimate its speed and altitude and hold up fingers to indicate how many plane-length leads the gunners should allow when they fired — one finger equaled one lead, two fingers equaled two, and so on. A clenched fist meant no lead.

A Heinkel was now coming in below 200 feet, lined up directly above the sunken road. The Bren gunners crouched at the ready. Singlaub could clearly see the pilots in their leather helmets. He took a breath and stepped out, with one finger raised. "Fire!"

But then the pilot saw them, and at the last minute banked right. So the rounds that hit only raked his left wingtip.

Better luck next time, Singlaub hoped.

The next Heinkel drove in from Dominique's direction, and Dominique was standing there, clearly visible, his fist beating against the sky. "No lead!" Singlaub yelled. The Brens coughed and rattled as one, with accurate, coordinated fire, hosing the green-painted bomber with a Spitfire's firepower at point-blank range. Shards of glass scattered from the nose, holes appeared in the belly and right engine nacelle, and you could see oil streaming along the base of the wing.

The pilot banked hard left, aborting the bomb run, and limped away on one engine. His right engine was out and throwing clouds of smoke. He slowly lost altitude as he staggered north over the Correze valley. Singlaub later learned that the Heinkel had crashed and burned a few kilometers away.

The Maquis screamed and howled, wild with the ecstasy of the kill. And Singlaub was no less thrilled. "My heart thudded in my throat and temples," he recalled later. "My breath was ragged. I was caught up in the rage of battle."

At 130 °Captain Wauthier and his SAS platoon sprinted into town under a rain of bullets. The Heinkels had been replaced by three Focke-Wulf 190 fighter-bombers, which were strafing anything that moved, and punctuating that with fragmentation bombs. The superbly trained SAS troops seemed indifferent to all this, and looked very glamorous in their red berets.

Soon SAS NCOs had taken charge and were preparing mortar positions. The plan was to lay down a mortar barrage on the school courtyard. It was hoped this would drive the German troops indoors and allow the Maquis to push their Bren gun positions forward and dig them in. Singlaub decided to act as forward observer and direct the mortar fire.

In the meantime, Dominique would try to track down the elusive Antoine and do what he could to convince him to allow his forces to join the attack, or at least to lend troops for ambushes north of town.

Singlaub returned to his early-morning observation position in the attic of the house near the school. This time, FTP troops he passed on the way included Bren gunners who'd fought the Heinkels with him that morning; they greeted him with welcoming smiles. He was no longer persona non grata among the Communists.

He made his way carefully up the stairs of the now-much-damaged house. The roughly planked attic floor was littered with slate fragments and splintered wood from the 37mm shell. Entrance and exit holes in the steeply raked roof indicated the shell's path. He crouched low, slithered across the floor, and took up a position he hoped would be invisible.

Moments later, the first SAS mortar round arced into the courtyard, driving German soldiers out of shallow foxholes in a hedgerow into the cover of the school. Singlaub shouted down to a young FTP sergeant, who was acting as his relay, "Correct fire twenty meters right, and then forward." The next round dropped on a timber barricade near the school's administration wing. Another covey of enemy troops raced into the school. Singlaub was beginning to feel good. Now they were getting even for the heavy air attacks they'd faced that morning. A few rounds later, the mortar rounds had nicely bracketed all of the German outside positions, and it was time to drop a few rounds onto the school itself. Since several machine gunners had set up positions in the school attic, Singlaub directed fire onto the roof (like the local houses, slate-and-timber), with the aim of driving the Germans down to lower floors. For this job, Wauthier added phosphorus to the high-explosive rounds. Soon, fires were burning merrily in the attic.

Things were going so well that Singlaub forgot where he was — and that the Germans would be looking hard for the forward observer — or that he was silhouetted against the 37mm exit hole as he crouched beside the circular entrance hole. His carelessness did not go unnoticed. In a flash, steel-jacketed machine gun rounds were clattering against the slate, spraying the entrance hole, and madly ricocheting about the attic.

He was hit.

The next thing he knew, he was sprawled on his back. "My skull [was] ringing like a gong," he said. "It was as if someone had thrown a bucketful of rocks in my face. I felt the blood, warm and salty, on my right check, then saw thick, dark drops raining on the floor. My hand went to my ear and came away sticky red. There was blood all over my para-smock now. The pain began after the initial shock, hot and persistent. 1 got control of my breathing and took stock. My head moved all right on my neck, and there was no spurting arterial blood. So I must have been superficially gouged by slate and bullet fragments."

The side of his face wasn't pretty, but he was not seriously hurt. What came upon him then was a tightly focused rage.

When the machine gun turned its attention to the house's lower floors, Singlaub took one last glance at the school, and there he noticed for the first time the barrel of the 37mm gun swiveling beneath camouflage netting in the hedgerow seventy meters away. The crew was wearing camouflage gear and had leaves threaded onto their helmets, but from his angle, they were clearly exposed.

This was too good a chance to pass up.

Almost without thinking, he dashed down the stairs and out into the back garden. When they saw the bloodied side of his head, the FTP soldiers rushed forward to give Singlaub aid, but in fact the injury looked far worse than it was. And besides, at that moment he was practically unstoppable. Without offering more than a mumbled explanation in his uncertain French, he grabbed their Bren gun and a spare thirty-round magazine, and without looking back, made his way to the edge of the garden, then raced thirty meters down the street to the cover of a bomb-blasted plane tree, which, at sixty meters from the hedgerow, was in easy range of the gun's position.

By the time he reached the tree, most of the bleeding had stopped — not that that mattered much in his current frame of mind. He worked his way quickly around the trunk, leveled the Bren, and sighted on the hedgerow and the Germans. Four long bursts, and the magazine was empty. In went the fresh one. The soldiers around the gun jerked into activity, intending to turn the gun toward this mad attacker, but they were toppling over satisfyingly before they could reach it. A German soldier trained his rifle toward the plane tree but then was flung backward, his arms flying.

The second magazine exhausted, Singlaub raced back to the shelter of the garden. As he ran, he was aware of someone shooting at him, but he wasn't hit.

Back in the garden, he gave up his Bren gun to the awed, wide-eyed FTP troops. He'd been possessed by a god; they weren't used to that. One of them took a cloth, dipped it in a bucket, and reverently washed his wound. Then the young American lieutenant sat down with his back against the fieldstone wall, lifted his face to the sun and billowing afternoon clouds, and let his pounding heart grow quiet.

The attack was going well: Most of the Germans in the courtyard had been driven back into the school buildings. Wauthier's SAS Bren teams had moved forward along the school's left flanks to a commanding position over the courtyard, and though Dominique had had no success locating Antoine, his company commanders had agreed to work under Wauthier. That night, Wauthier radioed a request to London for an air strike the next afternoon. The plan was to again pin down any Germans in foxholes with mortars and Piats, or better, to drive them again back into the school. Then, just before the air strike was scheduled, the French would pull back a couple of streets, and British Mosquito bombers would dive-bomb the school.

The catch: Maquis operations were not exactly top Allied priority just then. Hubert had yet to receive his promised arms drop, for instance. And besides, there were more pressing preoccupations, such as the invasion of southern France earlier that morning by Allied armies under General Alexander Patch. All the Maquis units in south and central France were expected to support the invasion, which meant all of them were requesting more of everything.

During the night, the Germans in the school tried to push back into positions in the courtyard. And by morning the Focke-Wulfs came back, with a full array of strafing, fragmentation bombs, incendiaries, and high-explosives.

That afternoon, the time approached for the planned Mosquito attack. Mortar shells again ripped into the courtyard. SAS troops moved close in and fired their Piats. It all went swimmingly. The Germans pulled back into the school. But no Mosquitoes. The only planes in the air were Focke-Wulfs and Heinkels. There was nothing to do but keep down and wait.

During the night, Coriolan brought heartening news: First, the Maquis had breached the defenses of the German garrison in Ussel, and the garrison had then surrendered. Second, the more powerful garrisons at Tulle and Brive, besieged by Patrick's forces and Hubert's remaining companies, had agreed to surrender — but with a condition. They'd been promised that an American officer would accept their surrender.

That meant Singlaub, who set out in a gazogene farm truck to take care of that chore. At Tulle and Brive, Singlaub produced an ornate document, which he had signed, promising the German commanders full protection of Supreme Allied Headquarters, and the German companies laid down their arms. It was a good haul — rifles, machine guns, cases of grenades, and a 75mm field gun. The weapons from Tulle went directly to Hubert's men, and were most welcome.

As soon as the ceremony was over, Hubert and Singlaub climbed into the gazogene truck for the return journey to Egletons.

There optimism remained low, despite the surrender of three German garrisons. The Luftwaffe was strafing everything that moved (Singlaub and Hubert had to hike the final few kilometers into town), and Luftwaffe bombs had turned much of Egletons into rubble, most notably the barn they had been using as a PC. Even so, Tony Dennau, their radioman, had stayed at his post in a corner of the building, sending messages to London even as the barn took direct hits. In the walls and ceiling all around him were numerous shrapnel scars. "Il est formidable, " Wauthier beamed, indicating the radioman, when Singlaub and Hubert entered what was left of-the barn.

Dominique was at Antoine's command post down the street. And so, surprisingly, was Antoine, a tough little guy with a commanding, intelligent voice. When Singlaub arrived, Antoine and his staff were all atwitter with rumors that the troops of the Tulle garrison had not surrendered, but had broken free and were on the way to break the siege at Egletons, threatening the Free French forces' rear.

Though Singlaub carefully explained that he had been present when the entire Tulle garrison had surrendered, that information did not satisfy Antoine, who was in the process of sending teams from his already tightly strained companies out along the road to Tulle to establish ambush positions.

Meanwhile, Coriolan had arrived with news that the German relief column was finally moving out of Clermont-Ferrand-2,000 heavily armed men in 150 trucks, defended by a pair of armored cars with automatic weapons.

Tulle, it should be noted, was west of Egletons, while Clermont-Ferrand was cast. Diluting the strength of the forces in Egletons chasing phantom Germans could make the situation in Egletons perilous. Even more important, a terrific opportunity was presenting itself to ambush the relief column on the road between Ussel and Egletons. Antoinc's troops were essential to add strength to that effort and to maintain pressure on the Egletons garrison. But Antoine would have none of that. It was an article of faith that Germans from Tulle were on the way to attack his rear. He would stop them.

By nightfall, the town was quiet. Dominique and Wauthier had left to set up ambushes on the highway. The civilians were abandoning the town, and carrying with them the Maquis wounded. Remaining behind, for the moment, were Singlaub and Dennau, and the remnants of Hubert's and Antoine's troops. But as soon as all the civilians had been reported out of danger, Singlaub ordered the FTP and AS forces to fall back into the forest. Though he knew Dominique and Wauthier would damage the German relief column, there was no way they were strong enough to stop them with the forces at their disposal.

Singlaub and Dennau grabbed their codebooks, their radio, a few emergency rations, their bundles of one-hundred-franc notes, and some spare Sten gun magazines and marched with the Maquis through the still-burning streets of Egletons. Soon they were passing through upland pastures and then forest trails. As they hiked through the darkness, they could just hear the distant rumble of land mines and the rattle of heavy machine guns — Dominique and Wauthier ruining the Germans' evening.

The, next day, Singlaub linked up with Dominique and Wauthier in a ruined church. The ambushes, as expected, had not stopped the Germans, but had delayed them. And they had knocked out an armored car and six trucks, and killed at least twenty-five enemy soldiers.

The relief column arrived in Egletons at dawn, loaded up the entire garrison onto the trucks, and rumbled off to Tulle, where they hoped to do the same thing. But of course they were a day late for that. Then they turned back toward Clermont-Ferrand.

That afternoon, eight camouflaged Mosquitoes showed up (the war's most beautiful warplanes), and elegantly swooped and dived, dropping bombs that flattened the school buildings. But the horses were out of the barn. The Ecole Professionelle had been emptied of Germans.

They were disappointingly late, but by then, the capture of the Correze garrisons, the siege of Egletons, the sabotage, the surrender of thousands of troops along with the seizure of their weapons, and the aggressive ambushes on the highways, had put the fire out of the Germans in Correze. The area was effectively liberated — not that there was a letup during the next weeks.

Route 89 was kept open, in the expectation that the German First Army Group still garrisoned in southwest France would continue to use it as an avenue of escape. Dominique and Singlaub trained Antoine's and Hubert's troops in the use of the captured weapons, while sending out demolition teams to destroy the bridges on the side roads. Hubert's ambushes along the highway continued.

Hubert, meanwhile, came up with a scheme to use a fleet of trucks and scout cars he had captured to create a mobile attack force that would harass the retreating German columns to the north, between Correze and the Loire, and keep them too occupied to pose a danger to Patton on the other side of the river. The Free French command authorized this plan, even though Hubert had not yet received the arms shipment he had long ago requested (thousands of tons of munitions, officially destined for the Maquis, sat in warehouses in England, a typical wartime foulup; Maquis demands during the uprising were so many and so pressing that the distribution system cracked under the strain). Hubert had to strip some of his ambush teams of weapons in order to equip his mobile force. Dominique and Singlaub helped by getting hold of a fast 1939 front-wheel-drive Citroen and setting off on a series of lightning reconnaissance missions for him. The Germans staggered their convoys to protect them against Allied air attacks, but they staggered them at predictable intervals. The Jeds simply waited for an interval and then cruised blithely between them. The results were gratifying. Hubert's force made life hell for the Germans for weeks.

Antoine's FTP, meanwhile, pulled out of the war to devote themselves to the political fight that would break out after the German surrender. The Communists took over the town of Tulle, with its arms factory, and got the factory running again (they had to force the technicians and engineers to work for them). The commissars above Antoine wanted weapons for the revolution they hoped to ignite after the war. That was more important than further participation in the liberation of France.

On September 26, with Paris and most of France liberated, Team James returned to England for further assignments. For Jack Singlaub, that was to mean a mission to Southeast Asia — a story for another time.

Jack Singlaub's Jedburgh experience is certainly a compelling yarn, but it offers more than that. The story offers a model for the elements of unconventional warfare, as well as for the skills needed by special forces soldiers. It's one of the primary texts in what might be called the Special Forces Bible.

These are some of the more outstanding elements and skills it illustrates:

• The special soldier can expect to operate in arcas deep beyond the official lines of battle, where the zones controlled by one side or the other may be indistinct, or even meaningless. Likewise, he may have a hard time telling good guys from bad guys, and the official names or political pedigree of a leader, group, or faction may also not tell him much about who and what he is facing.

• He can expect to operate in a high-threat, high-stress environment, with little or no support from his parent organization.

• Hell need to be expert in all the basic soldier skills, not only as a military practitioner but as a teacher. He also needs to be familiar with a wide range of foreign weapons and systems, and he should be expert in various forms of hand-to-hand combat.

• He needs to be reasonably proficient in the language of the country in which he's operating, and knowledgeable about the culture, political situation, and physical conditions of the people.

• Since he'll be operating behind the lines, he must be able to live a cover story and handle other aspects of the tradecraft of the secret world.

• He must have the psychological strength to handle the stresses with which he'll be faced: living on his own, the absence of support, the inevitable scrcwups of others, inevitably magnified by the absence of support.

• He must be endowed with considerable resourcefulness, flexibility, and ingenuity. More important, he must demonstrate a high level of psychological, political, and military acuity. He must be able to sell, persuade, cajole, browbeat, and convince people who dislike him, distrust him, and are doing their best to con him. His best weapon in this conflict will often be his ability to do his job so well that his adversary/friend can't help but come to trust him.

• The stakes he faces are high. He and his team represent on their own the policies of their country. They will often have to make choices on how to implement these policies with little or no guidance from above. They have to be competent to make the right choices. At the same time, their choices directly affect not only the lives of the guerrillas or partisans with whom they are working, but — perhaps more important — the lives of both "innocent" and "involved" civilians.

Each of these elements and skills comes more alive within a historical context — which brings us to Colonel Aaron Bank, who learned them at the same school as Singlaub, and later became one of the founders of U.S. Special Forces. Aaron Bank is on every Green Beret's shortlist of Great Ones.

AARON BANK

Aaron Bank, another Jedburgh, parachuted into the south of France in 1944 and operated in Provence, where his experiences closely mirrored Jack Singlaub's: attacks on strategic facilities and convoys, guidance and instruction of Maquis, conflicts with Communists. Following the liberation of France, Bank, who spoke passable German, and who was by then a major, was asked by his OSS superiors to create a special operations company of dissident German soldiers. Their mission — personally assigned by Bill Donovan himself — was to capture Hitler alive, in the event he and his henchmen attempted to barricade themselves in what the Nazis chose to call their National Redoubt in the mountains of Bavaria. The European war ended, the Redoubt proved to be a myth, and Bank's mission was aborted. Later, Bank was sent by the OSS to lndochina, where, among other things, he spent a pleasant day or two traveling with Ho Chi Minh, as well as several fascinating months increasing his knowledge of peoples' wars and guerrilla operations.

The OSS was disbanded in September 1945, and Bank was brought back — somewhat reluctantly — into the main body of the Army. There he sorely missed the old Jedburgh thrill of always being on the edge of the action, and the Jedburgh freedom of operating on his own behind the lines (though he knew some traditionalists were uncomfortable with giving people like him so much leash — they called it lax and unmilitary). But he was himself a good soldier, and went where he was sent without public complaints.

Far more important: He was certain the Army was losing something essential when it did not pick up the capabilities abandoned with the dissolution of the OSS Jedburgh teams and operational groups (the latter were teams of thirty men that could be split into two teams of fifteen — precursors of the twelve-man Special Forces A-Detachments). During World War II, operational groups were inserted behind the lines in Europe and Asia (primarily Burma), where they performed direct-action combat roles, such as sabotage, or linked up with guerrillas and partisans, as the Jcdburghs did.

Bank believed that the postwar Army required similar units, but ones that were even better trained, equipped, prepared, and staffed. In his view, special operations forces designed to organize, guide, and equip indigenous resistance or guerrilla movements could turn out to be as essential as any of the conventional combat arms in the U.S. arsenal.

In 1947, the CIA was formed, with a mission to re-create the intelligence operations of the OSS. It was also given a covert, special operations role, to deal with resistance movements and guerrilla organizations, but it was never comfortable with it. Even after the creation of the CIA, Bank continued to feel a strong need for the Army to take on the entire task once performed by the Special Operations branch of the OSS.

This conviction was not shared by the majority of the Army. Conventional soldiers tend to see unconventional warfare primarily as a sideshow, peripheral to the real action — that is, regular infantry, airborne, tanks, artillery — and more than a little outrageous. "To the orthodox, traditional soldier," Bank writes in his memoir, From the OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces, "it was something slimy, underhanded, illegal, and ungentlemanly. It did not fit in the honor code of their profession of arms."

Over the years, U.S. soldiers have been especially vulnerable to this attitude. As noted before, our army is traditionally nervous about elites. It's a citizens' army — ordinary folks. Superior soldiers and superior units are welcome, but they aren't expected to call much attention to themselves. Special forces, by their nature, call attention to themselves. A few years later, after the formation of U.S. Special Forces, assignment there was not thought to be a lucky career move.

The U.S. Army is no more friendly to oddballs and reformers than it is to elites. It is bound by rules, nervous about innovation, slow to change. Revolutionaries need not apply. Yet, as Aaron Bank knew, the Army is not a monolith. It's a very large house with hundreds of rooms. Reformers aren't exactly encouraged, but smart, politically savvy, courageous men who are patient, do their homework, and are willing to risk their careers have a shot at making their changes stick — especially if an inspired few others share the dream.

Meanwhile, during the years between the dissolution of the OSS and the outbreak of the war in Korea, Bank did his homework. Specifically, he read all he could find about unconventional warfare. What is it? How does it differ from "conventional" war? What does history say about it? Why do we have operations called "special"?

UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

Unconventional warfare is hard to pin down, but over the years, a working understanding has developed. It is far from complete, and is blind to many nuances, but it's not a bad place to start:

Unconventional warfare primarily involves operations different from the conventional fires and movement of massed troops, armor, artillery, and airpower. Normally, unconventional warfare is performed by small, highly trained units, takes place behind regular lines of battle, and involves such activities as reconnaissance, sabotage, raids, raids in force, assassination, and, above all, the training and support of friendly guerrilla forces. This comes under the overall title of direct action.

One prime example of direct action was a blowtoreh-violent joint U.S./Canadian ranger unit, called the First Special Service Force (FSSF), that so distinguished itself in World War II that it has been designated an official ancestor of today's Special Forces. The FSSF was formed to make lightning raids on targets such as the Germans' heavy-water production facilities in Norway and the Romanian oil fields, but was used primarily to crack through mountain fortifications in Italy (where it took heavy losses).

But unconventional—"special" — warfare also has other facets, as every Jedburgh knew: Screwing with your enem's head is one. Helping people in trouble — with medical aid, organizational advice and counsel, assistance in building bridges and roads, and getting clean water — is another. "Screwing with your enemy's head" is called psychological operations, or PSYOPs (in Aaron Bank's day: psychological warfare).

"Helping people" usually comes under the rubric of civil affairs (CA), a tool that's been in the special operations kit nearly as long as PSYOPs. There are many justifications for CA, including simple goodness, but its main military one is this: A population that is friendly to you and has experienced your kindness is not likely to feel kindly to — or give help and support to — your enemy.

The debate has raged over which is the purest model for "special" units — larger units such as Rangers and commandoes, which tend more to direct action or smaller teams such as Jedburghs and A-Detachments, which specialize more in teaching and training indigenous forces.

Here, as it turns out, "purest" is a blind alley, and the best answer is "all of the above."

Historically, there is no clean division between conventional and unconventional wars. The historical roots of both go back equally far. At the time of Jesus, freedom fighters fought a long, drawn-out guerrilla war with the occupying Romans. A thousand years later, Vikings launched commando-type raids from seas and rivers. During Napoleon's occupation of Spain in the early nineteenth century, Spanish guerrillas forced the French army to regret their conquest (and Spaniards gave this form of warfare its name: guerrilla in Spanish means "little war"). Robin Hood and his men were guerrillas. T.E. Lawrence was a kind of semi-freelance special operations officer guiding indigenous Arabs in their struggle to break free of an oppressive occupying power.

Traditionally, resistance, insurgent, or guerrilla movements spring up from people who are otherwise powerless to gain liberation from foreign occupation or to gain freedom from their own oppressive or tyrannical government — a prime instance of Carl von Clausewitz's most famous insight, in On War, published in 1832, that war is simply another form of politics.

Though von Clausewitz's insight has never been lost on the more thoughtful of military men, military planners don't normally give the political aspects of a problem serious consideration when they develop their strategy and tactics. They mostly see civilians as either encumbrances, props, or potential threats ("Get the damned civilians out of my way!").

Recent times have seen a change in these attitudes, a change that is reflected in the currently fashionable expression, "end state" — as in, "What end state do we want and how can we achieve it?" "End state" reflects both the military and political situation hoped for at the end of a conflict. Yet it still remains true that most military leaders do not normally consider how those under their command can affect a political situation that can in turn have a bearing on the outcome of a war.

Such is not the case with practitioners of unconventional war. Special soldiers have to be conscious of both the political implications of their military actions and the military implications of political actions — in fact, they have to be conscious of anything they do or say that could have an impact on the people they have been assigned to help and guide. Success lies far beyond the obtaining of military objectives.

This is why psychological operations and civic affairs[1] have always been part of the special warfare toolkit. It is also why flexibility, resourcefulness, and political savvy were so important to Jack Singlaub, Aaron Bank, and the other Jedburghs. It is also, finally, why governments have come to find more and more uses for military forces that have these and associated capabilities.They are precision instruments, while tanks, artillery, and the other major combat arms are, by comparison, blunt — though far more powerful.

To put it another way: Special operations are conducted against strategic and operational targets that can't be attacked in any other way. A strategic and operational target generally has to do with the center of gravity of an enemy (another term from Clausewitz), and that center of gravity can be physical, psychological, or economic. If conventional weaponry can't deal with it… special operations can.

When a nation finds it has a recurring need for these kinds of forces, then they form them into a special operations branch. During World War II, for example, the British knew they could never slug it out toe-to-toe with the German armies. Their special operations branch was intended to give them a lever that might even up the score.

By way of contrast, the Germans did not institutionalize special operations, and it's a mystery why. It is equally mysterious that, when their armies were defeated, they did not organize guerrilla and partisan resistance to counter the Allied occupation of their country. Though they had extensive experience with partisans in the USSR, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere, and knew personally how partisans could make an occupying power suffer, the Germans did not themselves choose to organize such movements.

It is especially puzzling because German commando exploits were among the most daring and resourceful ever conducted. In 1940, for example, the fortress of Eben Emael, in southern Belgium at the junction of the Meuse River and the Albert Canal, was the most powerful fortress in Europe — heavily armored gun turrets above ground, the rest in hollowed-out underground galleries, and manned by 1,200 men. None of the Waginot Line fortifications came close to it. If the Germans hoped to attack west, toward the channel ports, or south, toward France, they had to overcome Eben Emael.

After six months of training in glider operations, as well as on a replica of the fortress itself, eighty German engineer-commandos, commanded by a sergeant, landed on the roof of Eben Emael in nine gliders and launched a carefully orchestrated attack — highlighted by the first-time-ever use of shaped charges in war — that resulted in the capture of the impregnable fortress thirty hours later. Shaped charges focus blast effects in order to penetrate armor, and are now very common in all kinds of anti-armor and deep-penetration-type weapons.

But then when the operation was over, the engineer-commandos went back into the Wehrmacht war machine. The Germans saw no recurring need for a standing special operations capability.

In 1943, after the Allied invasion of Italy, the Italians kicked Mussolini out of power and placed him in exile, under heavy guard, at an isolated mountaintop hotel, where it was believed no conceivable force could rescue him. The only access was by funicular railway. On September 13, however, another daredevil band of German glider commandos, led by one of the greatest of special operators, the Austrian Otto Skorzeny, landed a hundred yards from the hotel, overwhelmed the carabinieri guards, brought in a small Fiescier-Storch aircraft, and spirited the Duce away in it.

The commandos then returned to their regular units.

IN THE WILDERNESS

From 1946 to 1951, the Army maintained an interest in rebuilding an unconventional-warfare capability, and conducted many studies, but not much actually happened. Since there was a Ranger precedent, one study looked at the possibility of starting up a Ranger group that could carry out both a Jedburgh-like teaching-and-training mission and Ranger-type raids. Another study proposed creating a special operations force using refugee soldiers from Soviet satellite countries in eastern Europe, many of whom had extensive unconventional warfare experience fighting the Nazis. These men could join up under the provisions of the Lodge Act, which allowed foreigners to join the U.S. military services and, after two years, be granted citizenship. It would be a kind of American Special Forces Foreign Legion.

Unfortunately, there were at most 3,000 men available for such a unit, which was not enough to do the job (though Lodge Act volunteers later did become a major component of early Special Forces).

Nothing came of any of these proposals.

Like all Jedburghs, Aaron Bank had some familiarity with psychological warfare techniques, such as spreading rumors to build up civilian morale or enemy fears, or to spread false information. However, Bank never imagined he himself would be assigned to a psychological warfare unit. He simply was not trained for it.

Yet that was what happened, early in 1951. Bank, a colonel by then, was with a combat unit in Korea, the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, when he received orders to go back to the States and report to the Psychological Warfare staff in Washington, under Brigadier General Robert McClure.

McClure, a remarkable man, had run psychological warfare (more accurately, created it out of nothing) in Europe for Eisenhower and, after the war, had directed the de-Nazification program for the Allied military government in Germany. The outbreak of the Korean War had pointed up to him the necessity for rebuilding a psychological operations capability.

As Eisenhower's man in charge of psychological war, MeClure had often coordinated his operations with the OSS staff, and had thus come into contact with the OSS Special Operations Branch. He had been impressed with what he saw, and when the time came for him to restart psychological operations, he successfully argued that special operations be included in his team. To that end, McClure teamed Bank with still another remarkable man, a brilliant and highly energetic lieutenant colonel named Russell Volckmann. Their job: to bring special operations back into the Army.

When the Japanese captured the Philippines during the early days of America's involvement in World War II, Volckmann became one of those intrepid Americans who did not surrender. He joined Filipino soldiers and a few other Americans on the island of Luzon in organizing guerrilla resistance to the Japanese. In Bank's words, "When General MacArthur said, 'I shall return,' Russ, who was then a captain, echoed, 'I shall remain'—with MacArthur's blessing." After three years of fighting, their initially small force had grown to something near 15,000 strong — roughly division strength — and had killed or captured many thousand Japanese. When the moment for the Japanese surrender finally arrived, the Japanese commander, General Yamashita, gave it not to MacArthur but to the guerrilla force.

To honor the guerrilla contribution to victory, MacArthur granted Volckmann — now a colonel — a place at the formal surrender table.[2]

Bank, Volckmann, and McClure pooled their experience and research, and sat down to try to resolve the many issues that had long occupied special warfare experts: the Ranger versus special operations/guerrilla support model; problems of command and control, staff, logistics, and field operations; the question of how to use Lodge Act aliens, and so on. These matters would continue to occupy special warfare experts over the next five decades.

Meanwhile, the Army itself took the Ranger issue off the table for the time being by deactivating the Ranger units then in existence, and setting up a Ranger School, where combat and other selected personnel could receive Ranger training and then return to their home units. This was good news to Aaron Bank, who was partial to the OSS and not the Ranger model for special operations. Since the Army still required deep-penetration, long-term operations, the deactivation of the Ranger units would free up personnel spaces for them.

Shortly thereafter, Bank and Volckmann were authorized to put together a Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E), the final step needed for the creation of a military unit. The questions now were: How did you make military units that would operate flexibly and resourcefully in nonstandard situations? How big should the operational teams be? How should they be composed?

Bank's preference was to put together a pool of highly trained men who could be formed into units purpose-built for specific missions. For various Army bureaucracy reasons, however, that was not a workable option. Meanwhile, the OSS offered two already proven models: the three-man Jedburgh team and the thirty-man operational groups. Though not as flexible or as "stealthy" as a Jedburgh team, the OGs were capable of conducting direct-action raids against difficult targets far behind the lines, or guerrilla actions in areas where there were no indigenous guerrillas. The ability of OGs to be split into fifteen-man teams, for greater flexibility, gave Bank another idea: Why not create a core SF field unit that was somewhat larger and more capable than the small Jedburgh team, but somewhat smaller than the OG direct-action strike units? Out of this thought came the Special Forces A-Detachment (or A Team). These were initially fifteen-man half-size OGs, but soon turned into the twelve-man units of today's Special Forces. A captain commanded, with a lieutenant as his number two (later a warrant officer), while the balance was made up of experienced NCOs. Everyone was to be highly specialized, but — for flexibility and redundancy — these specialties were to be paired. There would be two weapons specialists, two communications specialists, two medics, and so on. Everyone would also be cross-trained, not as specialists, but able to handle the other jobs in a pinch. Everyone was also to be airborne and Ranger-qualified, and, in the early days, a few people on the teams could speak fluently the language of the country in which the team would operate. Later, every Special Forces soldier received extensive and very high-level language and cultural training.

The A-Detachment was (and is) a tiny unit, which did not by itself throw a lot of firepower, but it jammed into a diminutive package a lot of rank and experience. It was also a highly flexible arrangement: Cut one in two and you had something very close to a Jedburgh team. Put two A-Detachments together and you had an OG.

The A-Detachment would operate in the field somewhere in a target country. A B-Detachment, usually commanded by a major, assisted by two other officers and nine NCOs, would run three A-Detachments, usually from some central location such as a major town or regional capital.

A C-Detachment, with the same complement of officers and NCOs, would run three Us, usually from the target country's national capital. The C was to be commanded by a lieutenant colonel, who would have a major as his executive officer.

Three Cs made a group, which was commanded by a colonel. The groups had (and still have) a regional orientation.

The Special Forces mission, as defined by the TO&E, read (in essence): "to infiltrate by air, sea, or land deep into enemy-controlled territory, and to stay, organize, equip, train, control, and direct the indigenous potential in the conduct of Special Forces Operations." Special Forces Operations were defined as: "the organization of resistance movements and operation of their component networks, conduct of guerrilla warfare, field intelligence gathering, espionage, sabotage, subversion, and escape and evasion activities."

All these people would need a place to lay their heads, and space for offices, classes, and training. They also needed a center where special operations and unconventional warfare theory and practice, policy and doctrine, and techniques and tactics could be studied, debated, and developed. If Aaron Bank and Russell Volckmann had had their wish, there would have been a facility dedicated to this purpose — a Special Warfare Center and School. However, since Special Forces were for the time being a component of the Psychological Warfare Branch, the Special Warfare Center and School would have to start out as an adjunct to a projected Psychological Warfare Center, which Brigadier General McClure planned for Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This center was approved in March 1952. It was to be, temporarily, under Bank's command. He would also, more permanently, become commander of the first unit to be activated, the 10th Special Forces Group, which was to have a European focus.

Next came recruiting, which in the early days was aimed at airborne troops, Rangers, and Lodge Act volunteers. The Green Berets still aim their recruiting primarily at airborne and Ranger forces.

On June 19, 1952, Bank activated the unit and assumed command. "Present for duty," he writes, "were seven enlisted men, one warrant officer, and me, making a slim morning report."

The numbers quickly grew.

Later that year, the 10th Group was moved to Bad Tolz, south of Munich, in Germany, but not before it was split in two. The half that stayed behind became the newly organized 77th Special Forces Group.

McClure, Bank, and Volckmann — together with many, many others who'd helped, advised, and supported them — had well and truly launched U.S. Special Forces.

It was, however, still a small and — yes — peripheral organization in those days. Until the day in 1961 when the U.S. Special Forces had its defining moment.