From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces

Memoirs & bios by career military people are not among my nonfiction favorites, & when I have read them, they're by people that have bucked tradition & the system: in general, I like tales of underdogs & rebels. So it's interesting to read on the Internet gushing praise for the granddaddy of U.S. Special Forces, Aaron Bank, when he helped create those U.S. Army forces, later called the Green Berets, thru dogged determination & steadfast bucking of tradition & the system, thereby eliciting the chagrin & ire of his superiors. After the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed by Executive Order in 1942 & under the direction of WWI hero Col. "Wild Bill" Donovan, mainly as an intelligence-gathering agency, the call went out for people, civilian & military, with European language skills. After a career as a world traveler & multi-lingual lifeguard & PT aide @the upscale Biarritz vacation resort on France's Bay of Biscay, American Bank is suddenly at Camp Polk, LA, in the ( & his) early 40s (he enlisted in his late 30s) & deemed "too old" for combat. When recruiting ads for language skills appeared on the barracks bulletin boards, Bank ignored the old Army adage, "never volunteer." Volunteers were indoctrinated into hand-to-hand combat, map-reading, sabotage, intelligence gathering, & recruitment of guerilla forces, in Scotland & later at Petersborough, north London, by soldiers of the British OSS equivalent, the Special Operations Executive (SOE: another American, Virginia Hall, also trained with & worked for the SOE; her story & that of her codenamed prosthetic leg are told in the book, Wolves at the Door, by Judith Pearson). Eventually, Bank's operation---to parachute into France & recruit & train dissidents & anti-Nazis---was named the Jedburgh Mission, after the 12th-century Scottish guerilla fighters that punished British invaders. It was, as Bank tells it, a dicey game; moreover, as he states several times, trained cadres in civilian clothing or in the uniforms of the enemy were not subject to the edicts of the Geneva Convention: prisoners could be shot immediately. After the liberation of France, Bank was eager to take on a new mission & he soon received it; to conduct the fabled Operation Iron Cross: capturing, if possible, but killing, if necessary, Nazi brass that were expected to retreat to the Alpine Redoubt in Austria. This was the ultimate test of his unconventional warfare (UW) & guerilla tactics skills: to cull teams of saboteurs & shooters from German POWs. Some were German army soldiers; some were communists & other anti-Nazi types taken from German POW camps when France was liberated. Some will dress in civvies; some will dress in German army uniforms. They will carry German weapons & use German explosives. Bank, who spoke German but less fluently than he spoke French, would pass himself off as a collaborating Frenchman from Martinique & hope that Nazis had no clue what a