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Known more formally as the 1st Special Service Force, the Devil's Brigade was a joint Canadian-American venture that began July 9, 1942, at Fort William Henry Harrison, Montana. Airborne-trained and honed to the sharpness of a cold steel blade, the Devil's Brigade saw most of its action in Italy, but also fought in France, where it was inactivated in 1944. Its forte was close-quarter combat against numerically-superior forces, a task which it accomplished with a raw power that gave the brigade its nickname.
Darby's Rangers was the moniker given to the 1st Ranger Battalion in honor of its commander, Maj. William O. Darby. The unit was activated June 19, 1942, in Carrickfergus, Ireland. It fought throughout Western Europe, but achieved its greatest fame when it scaled the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc as part of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
Merrill's Marauders was the title given to Col. Frank D. Merrill's 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), a 3,000-man force that staked out a piece of Burmese jungle and dared the Japanese to challenge it. They did, and wound up losing to the Marauders in five major battles and 17 skirmishes. The Marauders' greatest feat, and the one that made them an inspiration 20 years later to American soldiers once again slogging through Asian jungles, was their march of miles through thick Burmese foliage en route to the capture of an airfield at Myitkyina.
In the Pacific, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger established a small elite force and called them the Alamo Scouts, probably after his native San Antonio. In perhaps their greatest feat, the Scouts led U.S. Rangers and Filipino guerrillas in an attack on a Japanese prison camp at Cabantuan, freeing all 511 allied prisoners there. Never numbering more than 70 volunteers, the Alamo Scouts earned 44 Silver Stars, 33 Bronze Stars and four Soldier's Medals by the end of the war. In nearly 80 hazardous missions, they never lost a man in action.
Besides these organized special operations efforts, a number of U.S. Army officers conducted guerrilla operations behind Japanese lines in the Philippines. Colonel Russell Volckman, who later would play an important role in the birth of Special Forces, escaped from the enemy and formed a Filipino guerrilla band in northern Luzon, which by 1945 consisted of five regiments. Major Windell Fertig, a reservist, raised his own guerrilla force that ultimately totaled some 20,000 fighters.
These special operations units of the second World War were known as the Army's elite. Their philosophy was simple: shock the enemy with quick strikes and deep thrusts, leaving him paralyzed and confused. It was the 20th-century application of principles first formulated by Rogers' Rangers, and it became the basis of the modern-day Ranger force.
But at the same time, in areas that even the Devil's Brigade and Darby's Rangers never ventured, there was a whole different ball game being played by a whole different team. It consisted of small parachuting units operating behind enemy lines, developing a network of contacts, giving instructions to local fighters, and waging guerrilla warfare on a helpless enemy. It was a new kind of special operations, taking a bit of the Swamp Fox and a bit of Mosby, and combining it with new techniques of airborne and guerrilla fighting. There wasn't a name for it yet, but the agency that developed it was called the Office of Strategic Services.