Army & Navy – OPERATIONS: The Black Devils

Twenty-five months ago the War Department announced that a special U.S.Canadian force of “supercommandos” was being formed. By last week, a lifted censorship on its doings revealed that the Force had lived up to its promise of becoming one of the Army’s elite—a tough, secret, widely trained outfit that had fought its way through some of the hottest spots of World War II.

The Special Service Force was born during a visit by General George Catlett Marshall to Prime Minister Churchill at Chequers in 1942, and a glamorous career was laid out for it. It was to be used in a suicide raid on hydroelectric plants in Norway. Later its mission was changed to simultaneous paratroop raids on key power plants scattered through Europe. Another gleam in the planners’ eyes: a parachute raid on Berchtesgaden to kill Adolf Hitler.

History Anyhow. The S.S.F. did none of these errands, but it made history anyhow from the day its 35-year-old commander, wiry, long-nosed Colonel Robert Frederick, began combing out recruits from 8,000 “volunteers for extremely hazardous missions.” Those he selected (some were U.S. Regular Army men, a half Canadians, the rest U.S. citizen soldiers) were picked for ruggedness, military skills and calculating recklessness.

The training of the S.S.F. never ended. Its troops learned all the commando tricks. They learned to march 57 miles in 24 hours with full packs. They became ski troops, qualified as parachutists, were whisked from Vermont to Florida to Montana to find the right ground for learning new skills.

They were armed and clothed with U.S. equipment, drilled English-style, saluted either flat-handed like the British, or finger-tips-to-forehead, G.I.-fashion. Two of the three top commanders were men from the U.S., most of the battalion leaders, Canadian. Most top sergeants were Canadian; most junior officers, from below the border. Troops from the two countries got along together, despite the pay differential in favor of the U.S. soldiers.

Every enlisted man was a noncom except for a few private ratings, kept handy for “busting” unruly members. The Force wore its own branch insignia (crossed arrows), its own shoulder flash (a vertical “Canada” lettered on an arrow, topped by a horizontal “U.S.A.”).

The Dry Run. The Force’s first mission was Kiska, where two regiments went ashore in rubber boats with instructions to use nothing but their icepick-shaped stilettos on the Japs. There were no Japs there, but the Force made the most of it, learned more about living and marching in the field, refused to be tempted into “trigger-happy” firing.

Last winter the Force turned up in Italy; along the road to Cassino they captured peak after mountain peak. Then they moved to the Anzio beachhead. There for 99 nights they painted their faces black and roamed through the German positions. The diary of a dead German paid them their most cherished tribute: “The black devils are all around us every time we come into the line and we never hear them come.”

The Force worked hard and bloodily to maintain the legend, pasted their divisional stickers on the bodies of Germans they knifed and on enemy equipment they disabled. When Allied forces broke out from the beachhead, the Force spearheaded the attack, led by Robert Frederick wearing a bandage around a neck wound.

After Rome, Forceman Frederick became a major general (at 37) and took the airborne command for the invasion of southern France. Colonel Edwin A. Walker, one of the regimental commanders, took over, led the outfit in its toughest fight yet, a landing in rubber boats on Levant Island, which guarded the approaches through Cavalaire Bay.

The Cost. Before the S.S.F. reached Rome, it had lost more than half the men who sailed from Kiska, including two regimental commanders and nearly all battalion C.O.s. At Levant, where the Germans fought bitterly from their camouflaged hideouts, the casualties struck deep again. By then, because Canadian replacements were fewer, the outfit was more than two-thirds U.S. and many of its officers were ex-noncoms commissioned on the battlefield.

Forcemen were satisfied with the job the outfit had done. Beyond its combat deeds, the inspiration it had given to other outfits could not be measured. But fighting men had a word to explain the outfit’s success. The word was “guts.”