Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces sic-3 Read online

  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-viole
nt 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.