Heroes of U.S. Special Operations

Remembering Green Beret 1LT Loren Hagen Medal of Honor Aug. 7, 1971

As the US involvement was winding down in Vietnam in 1971, there was still dangerous work being down by the Special Operations Forces working under the cover of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group). This in the shadows unit was once active all South and North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos but as the war was winding down for the US, these special operators from the Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and USAF Air Commandos, their function was to mainly aid in a safe withdrawal of US forces.

But intelligence was tracking a large force of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units heading just across the DMZ only about 12 miles east of Khe Sahn. This NVA force could threaten the cities of Phu Bai, Hue and Da Nang where the majority of US troops left in the country were stationed.

In a cruel postscript to the Tet Offensive of just three years before, Khe Sanh was abandoned by the South Vietnamese. A result of their abortive and costly offensive in the spring, the ground that the Marines fought and bled so hard for was simply abandoned to the NVA.

Recon Team Kansas’ Mission: The mission to find out what was happening outside of Khe Sanh was given to Recon Team Kansas. The team consisted of three American Special Forces, 1LT Loren Hagen, and SGTs Tony Anderson and Bruce Berg and eight Montagnard tribesmen. The mission was a prisoner snatch in the middle of what was thought to be close to 10,000 NVA was a difficult one and the team decided on a course of action.

Hagen decided to land openly at an abandoned US firebase. With the NVA bound to react to them on the ground, the team would make a show of getting into a short firefight and then act like it was withdrawing out of the area by helicopter. But half of the team would remain and ambush the NVA troops sent to check out the US withdrawal and then snatch a prisoner. It was decided to beef up the team by adding three more American SF operators, SSG Klaus Bingham, and SGTs Bill Queen and William Rimondi which brought the force to a total for 14 men, six US and eight indigenous.

Recon Team Kansas landed at dusk on August 6 and Hagen immediately went about improving their positions and he deployed his men to cover the three slopes that converged on their hilltop. The NVA must have had the team under surveillance and known exactly where they were. Hagen’s men saw NVA campfire’s on the opposite ridgelines, something that was out of the ordinary for the enemy. By midnight NVA troops were probing around the bottom of the hill and shooting from all directions, trying to draw the team out. But the team held their fire and stayed quiet.

At 1 a.m. an Air Force AC-130 Spectre gunship raked the bottom of the hill with 20mm Vulcan fire and 40mm grenades. By 3 a.m. the situation became ominous. The team could hear the sound of trucks bringing troops into the area and tailgates opening. The NVA were moving large numbers of troops into attack positions. Just before dawn, more troops arrived. Just before dawn, the helicopter lift for the false extraction was taking off along with an Air Force Forward Air Control (FAC). Their arrival time was in just 30 minutes from their takeoff.

As daylight began to brighten the hill, Hagen could see large numbers of NVA completely encircling the hill. They estimated that the number of troops needed to do that was 1000. The NVA were determined to overrun the small force of SOG warriors before their air support arrived on station. Unbeknownst to the SOG men were that they had landed right near the NVA’s latest venture, a six-inch fuel pipeline that ran thru the DMZ and into South Vietnam.

This was to be vital for the upcoming 1972 Easter offensive where the NVA would deploy large amounts of armor. Elements of two NVA divisions were massing in the area, the 304th, and the 308th. More troops were pouring into the area concealed by an early morning fog. The hill would be assaulted by two regiments of NVA, about 2000 Infantry.

The Enemy Assault: The NVA had done a superb job of scouting the team’s positions. Their attack began with a well-placed RPG round that blasted the bunker of SGT Berg and the fire erupted on all sides. Anderson opened up with an M-60 machine gun at a wall of NVA that were rushing up the slope. Hagen saw the RPG impact on Berg’s position and despite an incredible amount of fire coming in all around his position, he didn’t hesitate. He yelled that he was going to Berg and made it only about 10-12 yards when NVA fire all around him cut him down, killing him instantly.

Bingham tried to crawl out from his position to reposition a Claymore mine when well-aimed NVA fire took him out with a head shot.

A Montagnard trooper, in the position below Anderson, fired several bursts but was cut down almost immediately by heavy return fire. The situation, already dangerous was becoming increasingly dire. In just the first few minutes, the team had four men dead and was in serious danger of being annihilated before the air support could arrive. Anderson as the senior man took charge.

He bolted over the hill to look for Hagen, dodging a flurry of grenades lobbed by the approaching NVA. He saw a huge group of perhaps 100 NVA Infantry coming straight up the hill. He cut loose an entire belt on the M-60.

Anderson kept up an enormous amount of fire from the M-60 as the NVA were hurling grenades at him from all angles. Miraculously, he survived and kept the NVA troops from overrunning their position. The Cobra gunships having got the call, left the Hueys and raced to the team’s rescue on the hill.

Anderson was hit by grenade fragments, finally knocking out the M-60. But he didn’t miss a beat and was firing his CAR-15 when he was hit in the elbow with small arms fire knocking him to the ground. Already peppered with grenade fragments, he kept the fire up.

The NVA had split the perimeter in two. All of the Montagnards save two were dead. Anderson grabbed them and somehow reached the hilltop where Queen, already wounded and Rimondi, the only member of the team not hit were firing furiously at the NVA. Their radio smashed by AK-47 fire and grenade fragments, Anderson was trying to reach the FAC with his hand-held survival radio. It was shot out of his hands. Rimondi tossed him his radio, the team’s last.

The NVA were now at point-blank range and the team was out of grenades. Just when the NVA were about to overrun the last of the team, the Cobra gunships arrived.

The lead gunship rained down 20mm cannon fire all around the team, decimating the NVA closest to the team members. The fighters arrived and they swept the hillside with Vulcan cannons and napalm. That crushed the NVA assault. The veteran NVA troops knew it was time to withdraw and where just seconds before they were poised to annihilate the SOG troopers, it was they who had to turn tail and run.

Finally, the Hueys arrived and the team was able to evacuate most of the dead. Anderson supervised the loading despite being wounded several times by grenade shrapnel and small arms fire. Rimondi and Queen both suffered multiple shrapnel wounds. Both Montagnards were wounded.

After Action Report: Of Recon Team Kansas’ 14 men, nine were dead and the rest wounded. The Air Force counted 185 dead NVA on the hill and at least double that amount were wounded. Despite being outnumbered more than a 100-1, the SOG troopers, with timely air support were able to throttle an NVA battalion.

Hagen was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. It was presented to his family. Anderson who took over and somehow led the men out of the maelstrom received a Distinguished Service Cross. He later accompanied the bodies of the Montagnards back home to their village for burial. Queen, Rimondi, Berg, and Bingham were awarded Silver Stars.

Hagen’s Medal of Honor citation reads:
1st Lt. Hagen distinguished himself in action while serving as the team leader of a small special reconnaissance team operating deep within enemy-held territory. At approximately 0630 hours on the morning of 7 August 1971 the small team came under a fierce assault by a superior-sized enemy force using heavy small arms, automatic weapons, mortar, and rocket fire. 1st Lt. Hagen immediately began returning small-arms fire upon the attackers and successfully led this team in repelling the first enemy onslaught. He then quickly deployed his men into more strategic defense locations before the enemy struck again in an attempt to overrun and annihilate the beleaguered team’s members. 1st Lt. Hagen repeatedly exposed himself to the enemy fire directed at him as he constantly moved about the team’s perimeter, directing fire, rallying the members, and resupplying the team with ammunition, while courageously returning small arms and hand grenade fire in a valorous attempt to repel the advancing enemy force. The courageous actions and expert leadership abilities of 1st Lt. Hagen were a great source of inspiration and instilled confidence in the team members. After observing an enemy rocket make a direct hit on and destroy 1 of the team’s bunkers, 1st Lt. Hagen moved toward the wrecked bunker in search for team members despite the fact that the enemy force now controlled the bunker area. With total disregard for his own personal safety, he crawled through the enemy fire while returning small-arms fire upon the enemy force. Undaunted by the enemy rockets and grenades impacting all around him, 1st Lt. Hagen desperately advanced upon the destroyed bunker until he was fatally wounded by enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire. With complete disregard for his personal safety, 1st Lt. Hagen’s courageous gallantry, extraordinary heroism, and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty, at the cost of his own life, were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon him and the U.S. Army.

For our readers who are aspiring to become members of the Regiment, this is a valuable learning lesson. Frequently you’ll hear during the Selection courses and the qualification rites of passage where the candidates are placed in stressful environments where they’re physically and mentally exhausted and they’re expected to think and act clearly. This mission was a great example of that. They’re proof that the system works and their courage and coolness under intense fire shows just what kind of men the Regiment is looking for.

Despite being outnumbered more than 100-1, and facing the prospect of being overrun at any second, the SOG warriors regrouped and fought their way out of an impossible situation. This is the never quit attitude and the drive to succeed against all odds.

Photos Courtesy: DOD

Book Review: Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage

As a former Special Forces soldier, I love reading books about the Special Operations Forces of not only the United States but other countries as well. But after devouring everything I could get my hands on about Special Forces during the Vietnam war especially those men from SOG some of whom trained me when I was a young pup, I went in search of the beginnings of SF.

Both Special Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency owe their direct lineage to the OSS, (Office of Strategic Services) that was started from scratch just before the United States entered World War II and by war’s end had over 10,000 men and women in their ranks. They became the war’s intelligence gathering, espionage, unconventional warfare, sabotage and subversion experts in just a few short years.

Working in close cooperation with the British, OSS patterned their organization from the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and many of the later leaders of both Special Forces and CIA came from the OSS ranks.

After graduating and teaching in-house from the Special Warfare Center’s Advanced Special Operations Techniques course, I tried to learn everything possible about our predecessors “the Glorious Amateurs” as they were called who comprised the Jedburgh Teams and the Operational Groups that were textbook definitions of what our UW training called for. But what about the leader of the OSS? Who was William Donovan?

Douglas Waller’s intensive biography of William “Wild Bill” Donovan who rose from humble beginnings to be a successful lawyer, a World War I hero with the 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division and later became the head of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)is a fantastic read.

Donovan was born to poor Irish-American parents and worked his way from poor beginnings to a law degree from Columbia Law School where one of his classmates was the future President of the US Franklin Delano Roosevelt and married into a wealthy Protestant family.

During World War I, Donovan served mainly with the storied New York “Fighting 69th” mainly Irish Regiment. He was a cool customer under fire and his men loved him and that is where he got the nickname “Wild Bill” for his courage under fire. His closest friend in the Regiment, Father Francis Duffy, was his chaplain and the poet Joyce Kilmer his adjutant. He was awarded the Medal of Honor and the French Croix de Guerre for his heroism in France.

When he finally received his Medal of Honor, he immediately took it off and presented it to his regiment. “It doesn’t belong to me,” he said. “It belongs to the boys who are not here, the boys who are resting under the white crosses in France or in the cemeteries of New York.” He left the medal in the 69th’s New York armory and never retrieved it.

After the war he went into the law business and was very successful, building political connections on the way. He traveled extensively to Europe, building up more contacts along the way. Despite being very much an anti-FDR Republican, the President respected Donovan and asked him to travel to London and gauge whether the English would hold up under the German attacks of early WWII. The American Ambassador Joseph Kennedy was a firm defeatist and thought Britain doomed.

Donovan met with Winston Churchill and the two were of the same mind. Hitler needed to be defeated and to do so would require attacking the ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe. He returned to tell FDR that Britain would fight on that America needed to end its isolationism and join the British.

Donovan started the war-time intelligence and special operations organization from scratch and built it into the premier organization that deserved much better than to be disbanded at war’s end.

Just before the US entered the war several of the aides of FDR as well as Donovan were lobbying the Roosevelt administration on the need for a coordinated American intelligence service partnered with the United Kingdom. This was echoed by Admiral Godfrey, Britain’s Naval Intelligence chief, and his aide, Commander Ian Fleming. Fleming as many of you will recall was the author of the James Bond books. Donovan spelled out his feelings on how the organization should be run and organized was sent to Roosevelt in a memo.

“Strategy, without information upon which it can rely, is helpless,” Donovan’s memo said. “Likewise, information is useless unless it is intelligently directed to the strategic purpose.”

Like any other new or upstart organization, Donovan made several enemies in the highly politicized seas of Washington. The new unit and the commander of OSS had the ear of the President and besides the service intelligence chiefs who never cooperated with one another and always jockeying for position, Donovan and OSS made enemies with the FBI and especially the Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover hated Donovan with a passion and kept files on all of his comings and goings and tried to discredit everything he did as well as accusing him of some outlandish things, all of which were proven false. When Donovan passed away in 1959 of dementia, Hoover tried to spread the rumor that it was from syphilis.

Through Donovan’s leadership and ability to get things done, in just two short years, Donovan along the British SOE had infiltrated several teams into occupied France before the D-Day landings and they supplied, trained and advised French Resistance groups that proved invaluable for the war effort. Just prior to the invasion, the Resistance and OSS/SOE had planned on cutting the French rails in the Normandy area in 1050 places. The accomplished the mission in 950 of them. This operation was Donovan and the OSS’ finest hour. Led by extraordinary agents such as Virginia Hall, the missions were an unqualified success. The book is filled with the many successes and the few failures of the organization.

The men who served Donovan during the war years as he called them “PhDs who can win a bar fight turned into a veritable who’s who in the later years of both CIA and the US Army Special Forces. Allen Dulles, William Colby were OSS operatives who became the Directors of National Intelligence. Aaron Bank was an OSS veteran who conducted successful missions in Europe. He went to Vietnam, then French-Indo China and met with the Viet Minh guerrilla chief Ho Chi Minh. He tried unsuccessfully to get the US to support Ho despite his Communist leanings over the return of French colonial rule which he saw as an upcoming failure.

Eventually, Donovan’s enemies got the ear of Harry Truman who took over from FDR after the President died in the latter days of WWII. Truman recognized that the US needed a professional intelligence service but not one with Donovan at its head. He had OSS disbanded after the war and then two years later created CIA with many of the same people that Donovan employed.

For the aspiring Special Operators out there, this should be required reading. It gives the background on where the units are today and how they got there. I would also encourage our readers to check out the novels of W.E.B. Griffin on the OSS as well. They were fantastic. We’ll review other books on OSS in the future.

The detail of Waller’s work is extraordinary and it is will quickly become a book that the reader can’t put down. It is a tremendous biography of a great, courageous but still flawed man who unfortunately didn’t live to see how large his former organization had become or the influence it would have around the world. His legacy is alive and well today.

Photos Courtesy: CIA, Wikipedia, and the US Army

Could The War in Vietnam Been Avoided? the Case of Ho Chi Minh and OSS

There have been countless books written about the war in Vietnam as the United States was involved in a very costly war in terms of human loss and what the conflict did to tear apart our country as a whole. But could the war in Vietnam have been avoided in the first place? In the closing days of World War II, the US’ OSS (Office of Strategic Services) had sent a team in Indochina to work with the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh. He pleaded to the US and President Truman to help Vietnam gain its independence. His pleas were ignored, Truman and the US backed the French to take back their colonial empire and the rest is history.

Was Ho’s plea a clever Communist tactic just to get economic support from the US and help a fledgling country get on its feet? Or was he, as tried to portray himself, a fervent Vietnamese nationalist who just wanted to free his people? The answer may never be known completely but the truth may be a little bit of both.

Ho Chi Minh traveled in his formative years, gained an education from the French school in Hue and traveled abroad first on a steamer to France and later lived in the United States for a short time working menial jobs in Harlem and Boston.

After World War I, he went to France, got into politics, especially when it came to Vietnamese independence. He wrote letters to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and US President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles peace talks asking for civil rights for the Vietnamese people. Ho pointed out that the self-determination proposed in the peace talks should include Vietnam and end the French colonial rule there. He asked for freedom of the press, freedom of association and assembly. Supposedly he claimed that his hero was George Washington who freed America from British colonial rule. But it all fell on deaf ears.

During this time, he fell under the sway of French socialists and became a member of the Parti Communiste Français (FCP). He studied in Moscow and moved to China where he taught young people at Whampoa Military Academy. He bounced between Europe and Asia until World War II broke out and in 1941, Ho returned to Vietnam to take control of the Viet Minh Independence Movement.

Ho commanded 10,000 guerrillas of the Viet Minh known as the “men in black” in fighting not only the Japanese occupation forces but those of the Vichy French as well. In April 1945, Ho met with Archimedes Patti the OSS Station Chief in Kunming, China. The two struck a deal where the Viet Minh would provide intelligence on the Japanese and rescue downed US aircrews. The US would supply them with communications gear, and small arms as well as the training to properly use them.

In July of 1945, the OSS parachuted a team into Vietnam codenamed the “Deer” team, about 70 miles west of Hanoi. They were met by the Viet Minh and treated as heroes. They were brought to the austere headquarters of the Viet Minh where the team found Ho close to death suffering from malaria and dysentery. He was treated by the medics where he made a full recovery.

During the training to teach the Viet Minh how to use the US bazookas, light machine guns and hand grenades, the OSS’ interpreter PFC Henry Prunier, from Worcester, Mass. was teaching a Viet Minh, named Mr. Van how to throw grenades with the overhand lob which was foreign to the Vietnamese. Mr. Van’s real name was Vo Nguyen Giap who later defeated the French and led the war against the Americans. Once Ho learned Prunier was from Massachusetts, he regaled him with his stories about his time in Boston.

The Viet Minh rescued a downed US pilot and Ho personally brought him to China to return him to American authorities. There he asked to meet Claire Chennault, who led the Flying Tigers in the early days of the war. Ho still talked to the OSS men about Vietnamese self-determination and asked them if he was any different than George Washington.

With the war winding down, Ho began writing letters to now President Harry Truman who took over after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in April. Roosevelt favored Vietnamese self-determination. Ho in his letters, the first was written on August 17 began to ask Truman for help. His letters were ignored, however State Dept. cables from the time speak of Ho and his Communist leanings and it was clear that the US was not going to support him, despite the recommendations of the OSS team leader Major Allison Thomas and later Aaron Bank. Bank met with Ho and although he had Communist leanings felt like he was worth supporting.

Thomas in his reports to the OSS Station in China downplayed the Communist side of Ho’s personality and tried to play on the nationalistic side of things. “Ho definitely tabooed the idea that the party was communistic” since “the peasants didn’t know what the word communism or socialism meant—but they did understand liberty and independence.”

With the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945, Ho and the Viet Minh entered Hanoi and proclaimed their independence. His choice for their own Declaration of Independence mirrored the words of Thomas Jefferson.

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”

Ho wanted US support for the Vietnamese independence movement and asked for our help in not allowing the hated French from returning to their colonial empire.

That was not to be, the US began to tacitly and then actively support the French return to Vietnam. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1950s where Ho Chi Minh finally broke with his attempts to cultivate American favor.

Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist? Yes but more so, he was a fervent Vietnamese nationalist. After suffering under French rule for so long, it is doubtful he wanted to replace the French controlling his country with bosses from Moscow and Beijing calling the shots. But he was a pragmatist, he couldn’t take on the French alone and if the US wasn’t going to help then he was going to seek out those who would.

In a footnote to all of this, Prunier, the OSS interpreter, several times turned down opportunities to join the CIA after the war. Instead, he returned to Massachusetts and the family masonry business. However, in 1995 the U. S. Indochina Reconciliation Project, which had been established a decade earlier as a non-profit group to help facilitate relations between the United States and countries in Indochina asked him and the surviving members of the OSS “Deer Team” to return to Vietnam.

Giap remembered his OSS trainer and grabbing an orange, he aped the overhand movement that Prunier had trained him in 50 years prior. “Yes, yes, yes!” Giap exclaimed. Another Vietnamese soldier kept grabbing Prunier’s arm and calling his name. The Americans were stunned that they were held in such high esteem so many years later. Prunier donated his uniforms and papers from the OSS mission to the Vietnamese Museum of Military History in Hanoi. There they are prominently displayed and the museum’s Director General Le Ma Leung, who was a veteran of Khe Sanh, called Prunier’s donation “one of the most significant historical contributions that the museum had ever received.”

We’ll never know if the US could have held sway over Ho Chi Minh and turned him away from the Russians and Chinese. Even if the US had gotten involved in Ho’s bid for independence from France, would Vietnam have gone Communist? It is a great question and we may never really know the answer. Chances are they probably would have but the US lost an opportunity to stop a war from ever happening at the cost of 58,000 American lives.

Photo Courtesy: OSS archives

Green Beret From 19th Special Forces Group Killed in Afghanistan

One American Special Forces soldier was killed and 11 others wounded during a battle with Islamic State fighters in eastern Afghanistan according to US military sources.

SSG Aaron Butler was killed and his teammates injured as he was clearing a building when a booby trap exploded, killing him and injuring several of his teammates according to Utah Governor Gary Hebert.

Butler was assigned to the 1^st Bn, 19^th SFG(A), a Utah National Guard unit but was a full-time soldier and was the honor graduate of his Special Forces Qualification Course, graduating in 2016.

The military said in a statement that several Afghan forces were also wounded in the fighting on Wednesday in the Achin district of the Nangarhar province, a militant stronghold. It did not specify how many forces were wounded.
And in three southern provinces, Taliban attacks on Wednesday killed a total of three civilians and 15 Afghan policemen, Afghan officials said Thursday.
The Utah National Guard said the American soldier who died was one of its members and that 11 other National Guardsmen were among the wounded. The names were withheld pending notification of family members.

Butler was a former high school champion wrestler and had stated back then, that his desire was to someday become a Special Forces operator. His friends and family described him as a “force of nature” and a “leader, not a sit in the back kind of guy.”

Funeral services are pending but tentatively scheduled for next Saturday, Aug. 26.

To read the entire article from SF Chronicle, click here:

Photo courtesy DOD, Butler Family

Disaster at Dieppe Aug.18-19 1942, A Valuable But Costly Lesson for D-Day

Operation Jubilee was a large scale prelude to the D-Day invasion that would take place in less than two years. The British Commandos had been having great success with hit and run raids especially in Norway. But by 1942, political pressure was being put on Churchill and Roosevelt by Josef Stalin to open a second front.

Churchill knew that eventually, the Allies would have to go across the channel and stay. So they attempted a bold raid that would include over 6000 troops, 160 tanks and 60 squadrons of aircraft, along with destroyers with 4-inch guns for direct support fire from off-shore. The sleepy French resort beach at Dieppe was chosen because that would put the raiding force in easy covering distance for the Spitfires and other fighters. The German defenders were from the 302nd Infantry Division. They had ample artillery and reinforcements close by.

On the night of the 18th of August, the flotilla of 252 ships under the command of Vice-Admiral Lord Mountbatten sailed from four south coast ports. They sailed to just 8 miles off the coast of Dieppe undetected, arriving at 0300 hrs (3 a.m.) on the 19th. The 2nd Canadian Division was to seize Dieppe and vicinity and hold it until the demolition tasks were complete. Then re-embark and return to England. In supporting, roles were the men of the No. 3 and 4 Royal Marine Commandos, who with 50 officers and men of the US Ranger Battalion.

By 0330, 5000 men were in their assault landing craft and heading towards the beaches behind the small gunboats that would lead the way. All was going according to plan as smoothly as an exercise until 0347 when all hell broke loose. The gunboat leading No. 3 Commando into “Yellow Beach” at Berneval and Belleville-sur-mer ran into five German armed trawlers who fired star shells to illuminate the scene. The gunboat was ripped to shreds, most of the crew wounded on the deck and as a result of pure chance, the 20 landing craft of No. 3 Commando were dispersed. Only one landing craft with 3 officers and 17 Commandos hit the beach at Belleville-sur-mer. Armed with personal weapons and one two-inch mortar, they harassed the German “Goebbels” battery to the extent that their fire was ineffective for much of the crucial parts of the battle.

Six other landing craft of No. 3 Commando hit the beach at Berneval and came under devastating machine gun fire. Barely a handful survived to reach the beach and once there, were pinned down under murderous fire.

On the far right flank, No. 4 Commando hit the beach in a textbook raid. On time and right on target, they completely destroyed the “Hess” battery and by 0730 were off the beaches and on their way back to England. Sadly, this was to be one of the few success stories of the raid.

The German defenses of Pourville had withstood the guns of the destroyers, and fighter bombers and the smoke screen was ineffective. The “Rommel”, “Hitler” and “Goring” batteries gave the Canadians coming ashore hell to pay. The Saskatchewan Regiment and the Queen’s Own Cameroons were under heavy fire.

On Blue Beach, disaster struck the Royal Regiment of Canada. They’d been delayed coming ashore, had been spotted via searchlights and attempted to make the landing in daylight. The Regiment was nearly annihilated. 27 officers and 516 men went ashore. Only 3 officers and 57 men were rescued off the beach.

The attack on Dieppe itself foundered on the beach. The Essex Scottish and Royal Hamiltons landed as the smoke screens lifted and they too were hit with murderous machine gun crossfire. The Essex Scottish couldn’t reach the sea wall, the town itself was out of the question. The Germans poured direct 75mm and 88mm artillery fire right at the men on the beaches. Coupled with highly accurate mortar and machine gun fire which enfiladed the beach, success was impossible.

The Essex Scottish men as individuals fought back fiercely, men were using their bodies as bridges over the barbed wire. A small group of 12 men made it to the Esplanade where they hurled grenades into gun positions, and fighting house to house harassed German patrols for over an hour before being forced back to the beach.

White Beach on the right fared equally poorly. The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry was coming under direct fire from 47mm and 37mm anti-tank guns coming ashore. Machine gun and mortar fire raked the beach into a death trap. Nearly all of the officers and senior NCOs were killed or wounded. One small group attacked the Casino and held a small foothold for a short time. Another group coming off the beach tried to storm up a cliff and the entire group was killed on the slope.

The tank landing craft, so crucial to the success of the operation were battered as soon as they emerged from the smoke screen. The assault groups of Sappers coming off of the tank landing craft were annihilated. One group of 71 had just nine left in less than ten minutes upon hitting the beach and four of them were wounded. Of the total of 314 Royal Engineers, nine officers and 180 men were killed upon landing.

Despite the fire, 17 tanks in the first wave made it to shore. Six reached the Esplanade. One climbed the steps of the Casino and they fired everything they had at the enemy until their ammunition was spent.

Only 28 tanks made it to shore, all of which were destroyed by the Germans. Because of the extremely heavy casualties including the Signalmen and beach groups, the commanders on ship were completely in the dark. At 0600, the commanders committed his reserve blindly, the Fusiliers Mont-Royal right into the center of the beach and they were immediately forced to dig in on the beach to stay alive. Of this group, 288 officers and men were eventually forced to surrender.

The Royal Marines were thrown back into the breach at 0830 but as soon as they came out of the smoke screen, the murderous fire began raking the landing craft. Their commander, Lt. Colonel J.T. Phillips signaled for the craft to turn around.

By 0900 the decision was made to start a withdrawal of the troops. There could be no orderly withdrawal as units had ceased to exist and it became an exercise in grabbing whoever they could off the beaches. At 1022, the destroyers lined up and to follow the rescue ships in as closely as possible firing with everything they had. The fighting on the beaches took another three bloody hours to get the remaining men off the beaches. The raid had been a colossal, bloody failure.

The Canadians had lost 215 officers and 3164 men. Total losses for the raid were 494 officers and 3890 men. Canadian casualty rates were about 68 percent. Of the 1000 Commandos, 247 were lost. All of the vehicles that made it to the beaches were lost. The Royal Navy lost 81 officers and 469 men including a destroyer (HMS Berkeley) and 33 landing craft. The Royal and Canadian Air Forces lost a total of 111 planes shot down. Of the 50 American Rangers, six were killed, four were wounded and six were taken prisoner. German casualties totaled 591 with the Luftwaffe losing just 48 aircraft.

The bloody lessons learned at Dieppe would serve the Allies well when they came ashore in France to stay in 1944. It would provide the Allied planners a blueprint on what was needed to successfully conduct amphibious operations. They included:

Proper preliminary artillery support, including aerial, naval bombardment;
Sustained element of surprize;
Better intelligence concerning enemy fortifications;
The avoidance of a direct frontal attack on a defended port city; and,
Better re-embarkation craft
Specialized Armored vehicles for the engineers to clear the beaches

Another lesson learned was that the Allies learned that taking a port city would render the harbor and piers useless through the action of taking them. Therefore they would construct prefabricated harbors, “Mulberries” that would be towed to the beaches. They wouldn’t make the same mistakes in Normandy.

Photos Courtesy: Wikipedia, the Canadian Forces, Dieppe Raiders Association

Operation Foxley, The Special Operations Executive Mission to Kill Hitler

The British Special Operations Executive, SOE, put together a plan, “Operation Foxley” which was to be an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944. If the British had actually put the plan into action, historians believe that millions of lives could have been saved, the war shortened by many months and eased the suffering of untold amounts of people. Winston Churchill initially supported the planning of this operation.

Although detailed planning was done to facilitate the attempt, it was never put into action. SOE had several plans on taking out Germany’s Führer, including blowing up his train or by using poison. Neither of those had much of a chance of success. The SOE then planned on using a sniper to kill Hitler when he visited the Berghof, Hitler’s home in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.

SOE became aware of a facet of Hitler’s routine that made the attempt possible. One of his former security guards was captured in the fighting in Normandy during the early summer of 1944. This prisoner revealed that while at the Berghof, Hitler always took a 20-minute morning walk just after 10 a.m.and have breakfast at a teahouse on the premises. They learned that Hitler wanted liked to be left alone during this walk, leaving him unprotected along the edge of a wooded area, where he was out of sight of sentry posts. The Berghof was part of a large complex on the Obersaltzberg. Many high-ranking Nazi’s had houses there so that they could relax in comfort when Hitler was there. Whenever Hitler was at the Berghof a Nazi flag was hoisted from the main house and could be seen from a café below in the town of Berchtesgaden.

The plan was for a sniper, armed with a Mauser Kar-98K and fitted with a scope to kill Hitler as he took his morning walk. However, it wasn’t going to be easy. Although he felt secure within his compound and preferred to walk alone on most mornings, there were various sentries posted around the area anywhere between 100-500 meters from the path to the teahouse. The shot would be from a few hundred meters or failing that, he could be attacked while being driven back to the main house from the teahouse.

The obvious issue for the British was the actually getting the team into and out of Germany. The two men picked for the mission were a German speaking Pole and a British sniper. The British lucked out when a German POW named Dieser told SOE that he had an uncle named Heidentaler, who lived as a shopkeeper in Salzburg, about 12 miles away who was a die-hard anti-Nazi. Heidentaler also did frequent target practice less than 10 miles from the estate and knew the area well.

The British sniper practiced with a Kar-98K and became proficient with it practicing in similar conditions with a moving target. He was also given a Luger 9mm pistol with a suppressor attached so that any unfortunate souls that stumbled upon them at the estate would be eliminated.

The plan was to have the two men parachute into Germany, make their way to Salzburg where Heidentaler would hide the men and then transport them to Berchtesgaden disguised as German Mountain troops.

Everything was ready to go and the plan was submitted in November 1944. But SOE’s Deputy Head of their German Directorate, Lt. Colonel Ronald Thornley thought the assassination was a bad idea. Hitler, Thornley argued, may be turned into a martyr and the Germans’ loss of the war could be blamed on his loss and not a flawed overall strategy. Moreover, he said, it may cause a repeat of the WWI-WWII scenario where Germany may try to rise again.

Ultimately it was decided to scrap the plan, in no small part because Churchill’s advisors believed that Hitler, with absolute power, was a terrible strategist. With his increasing paranoia and poor decisions that were becoming more frequent, it was thought that his being in charge of the German war machine was a better alternative than removing him via an assassin’s rifle and having a more apt leader continuing the war.

Hitler is was deemed, was more valuable to the Allies alive than dead. The plan was scrapped. Just a few months later, with Germany in ruins, he committed suicide in Berlin.

The suppressed Luger is now on display at the Combined Military Services Museum in Maldon, Essex.

Photos Courtesy: Wikipedia, Combined Military Service Museum,

‘Dogs of War’ Getting Increasingly Harder to Come By

The U.S. military has sent countless dogs to serve alongside soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere since Sept. 11. They have become a valuable member of the troops working in some of the toughest battlefields in the world. With increases in technology, including constructing mannequin dogs, the Pentagon is ensuring many more of them will make it home.

At any given time, there are about 1,600 Military War Dogs (MWDs) are either in the field or helping recuperating veterans. That’s approximately one dog for every three U.S. soldiers currently in Afghanistan.

These animals are, however, an increasingly precious resource. With terrorists targeting public transportation and tourist sites all over the world, global demand for bomb-sniffing dogs has surged. Canines with finely trained noses now fetch $25,000 and up on the open market, where border patrol units, the State Department, and private security firms go for canine talent. Even the war on bedbugs scoops up some of the best noses in the business. And that’s just U.S. demand.
So, out of necessity, the Department of Defense is buying up lifelike canine mannequins to better train medics that care for furry soldiers when they fall. Since these dog dolls hit the market in January, the Pentagon has purchased about 80 of them from TraumaFX, an Atlanta-based unit of defense contractor KForce Government Solutions Inc. The company, which employs Hollywood movie designers, is bidding on an additional six proposals at the moment.

While the demand for war dogs is increasing both in the war theatre as well as at home, the pipeline for getting trained dogs in the field is very limited. A well-trained dog cast somewhere around $42,000 before it is ready to get out in the field and the training lasts about four months.

That’s why buying the dog dummies are valuable assets for veterinary services that are assigned to care for them when they are hurt in the line of duty.

To read the entire article from Bloomberg, click here:

Photo courtesy DOD

Worst War Movies Ever… Don’t Waste Your Time on These Stinkers

Back in May around Memorial Day, we listed some of our favorite War Films that are guaranteed to entertain and keep your interest. We could have easily added a couple of more as the genre always has some worthy additions by Hollywood’s filmmakers. This year’s blockbuster “Dunkirk” could easily make its way into that list.

But today’s list is going in the opposite direction. These are some of the worst war films, in our humble opinion out there. In every genre, especially one as chocked full of entries as the war film category, you’ll have plenty of lousy films, that are just groan worthy from military veterans and war film buffs alike.

So watch these following films…if you dare. But as a word to the wise. You may turn it off before it is over. As some of these films are just plain awful. Normally we’d say, drum roll, please. Instead, we’ll play a dirge. In no particular order here is your Wall of Shame of Worst War Films:

Battle of the Bulge (1965) – Despite a stellar All-Star cast of Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, Dana Andrews, George Montgomery and James MacArthur this one got nearly everything wrong. The uniforms, the tanks, the history was skewed horribly.

Less than a minute into the film, the narrator, William Conrad uttered this: “To the south lay Patton’s Third Army, to the North Montgomery’s Eighth”….What? Field Marshal Montgomery’s Eighth Army, for which he rose to fame in the desert, was in Italy, not the Northern edge of the Bulge. That should tell you right away that this stinker was not going to get things right.

The German Tiger Tanks were actually M-47 Patton tanks and the American Shermans were portrayed by M-24 Chaffee light tanks. Filmed entirely in Spain, the terrain resembled the wooded, hilly Ardennes, not at all.

The film wasted a good performance from Robert Shaw, as the fanatical SS officer Col. Hessler who was tasked to break through the Allied lines. Shaw’s Hessler was loosely based on SS Colonel Joachim Peiper. No mention is made of the counter-attack from Patton’s forces from the south, the 101st Airborne’s holding of the key road junction of Bastogne or the Allied air power, which after the skies cleared, decimated the Germans on the ground.

Instead, this film would have you believe that the only thing that stopped the Germans from reaching Antwerp was the lack of gas. The climactic tank battle at the end was another loosely based big tank battle at Celles. In the film, the Germans wipe out the American forces. In reality, it was the opposite. The 2nd Armored Division left 88 German tanks smoking in the hills. This film was so bad that General Eisenhower came out of retirement to excoriate it for its lack of historical accuracy.

Inchon (1979) – This stinker was produced by the religious leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the powerful Unification Church in the 1980s. He put up $30 million of his own cash to make this limp, tepid offering. The production costs ballooned up to $46 million, which would be near $150 million today. Sir Laurence Olivier was paid $1 million bucks to play General Douglas MacArthur and it is clear, he was there for the paycheck only.

Rev. Moon claimed that the spirit of MacArthur visited him during the filming giving his blessing to the project. OK…does anything else need to be added here?

The cast of Olivier, Ben Gazzara, and Jacqueline Bissett was wasted here with dialogue as dry as a buffalo fart. Olivier looked more like Emperor Palpatine than MacArthur in this one. And Moon threw in a little sex action between Gazzara and a Korean hottie while cheating on Bissett who was his wife at home to take away from the rest of this potboiler I guess to show that the war was the cause of marital infidelity. It was actually filmed in 1979 and Moon shopped for three years for a studio to release this turkey.

I didn’t make it thru the original release, falling asleep in the theater and guarantee if you are having sleep issues watch this and it will do the trick. This one was so bad that MGM didn’t even release it on video. You can find it on YouTube if you care to.

Pearl Harbor (2001) – Michael Bay took a 90-minute action film about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and squeezed it into a 3-hour 3-minute monstrosity that took severe creative license with the actual history. Starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale who are involved in a complicated love triangle during the and immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack that kicked the U.S. into World War II.

Pearl Harbor had a huge operating budget of $140 million but made a respectable $450 million at the box office. Some of it was filmed in the huge Baja Studio that James Cameron built for Titanic. And the ship scenes filmed there were still visible (the wreck of the Arizona) a few years later when I got to work on the beginning of a Narnia film there in 2009.

The numerous factual inaccuracies were pretty numerous, the Marlboro Lights in a sailor’s pocket…was inexcusable. A pretty amusing scene is where Affleck is talking to Colonel Doolittle in his office and behind the Colonel are his trophies for air racing. Look closely and there is an F-86 Saber jet from the Korean War. Affleck’s supposed action in the “Eagle Squadron” with the RAF is flawed. No American Army pilots were allowed to join. Only civilians. And what in the wide, wide world of sports is the intelligence officers and Beckinsale listening to during the Doolittle Raid? It certainly wasn’t radio chatter from the planes over Japan. They were on strict radio silence.

This one at least had some good action scenes during the actual bombing of Pearl Harbor which Bay did well although again inaccurately and had the always enchanting Beckinsale in the lead. A curious decision was the one to portray Mrs. Ben Affleck (Jennifer Garner) as a dowdy nurse, perhaps to take away from Beckinsale’s draw.

Redacted (2009) – If you’ve never heard of this one, don’t be alarmed, you aren’t missing anything. Normally I love the films of Brian De Palma but he swung for the fences with this one and missed. De Palma took a real incident about a rape of a young Iraqi girl and the murder of her family and tried to create an anti-war film about the U.S. involvement in Iraq. Surprisingly, some of the medium’s most well-known critics loved this film. Don’t waste your time, it was unmitigated trash, exploitation. He tried to shock the audience, right down to a slide show of gruesome pictures of Iraq’s war dead. We aren’t told who killed them, or who they are…it is just supposed to shock the viewer.

The message? here is that the war is making monsters out of American youth? I don’t know. It is kind of murky there but De Palma goes full-blown exploitive with the two Americans being the cartoonish, one-dimensional villains in the scene.The one perpetrator even wears a helmet mounted camera to catch the ugliness on film as the antithesis of the combat footage we’ve seen on screen during the war.

This was one of De Palma’s lesser efforts, the dialogue is atrocious and totally unbelievable for any grunts and sounds like a cliche machine.The way these guys interact with one another is a joke. Is this a unit that went to Iraq together or did they meet on the set just ten minutes before? It was just a crudely done, poorly defined film that even the “found camera footage” is unbelievable. It was a one-dimensional bit of schlock that is best left to the imagination.

Revolution (1985) – Ok, I know “The Patriot” also taking place in the Revolutionary War took tremendous liberties with the historical facts. But the cast at least made it entertaining. Revolution was one of the most horrible films I think I’ve ever been subjected to. A few years ago, I hadn’t even heard of it, and a friend of mine, said that I absolutely, positively had to watch it.

Well, I did and I agree with the original review published in 1985 with its release that it was quite probably the worst film of the year. The casting was absolutely ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong, I love Al Pacino. Some of his performances are legendary stuff, Scarface, Heat, the Godfather saga. But casting him as a trapper caught up in the Revolutionary War is a head scratcher. Where was he trapping? In Brooklyn? His accent is not American Revolution-esque unless we had a lot more Italian immigrants in the colonies than what has been reported.

Speaking of accents, Nastassja Kinski, who back in the day was quite the box office draw, has a completely different one from the actresses who play her mother and sisters. I guess we’re supposed it ignore it or assume that she was adopted.

The British characters led by Donald Sutherland, are the unequivocal bad guys here. And just in case you don’t see it first hand, the director makes sure that you do by making most of them kiddy-diddlers. Pederasty aside, it is still a horrible film that is just not worth your time. The director wasted some nicely filmed battle scenes in Yorktown by making a boring, yawner who…like the ones listed above, took great liberties with history.

There are several more we could have listed here but you get the idea. And please feel free to chime in with some of your own Hall of Shame War Films. So with Labor Day Weekend upcoming, if you’re not making one last run to the beach this summer and you’re content with sitting home and watching some of your favorite war films, do yourself a favor. Skip these five. You’ll be glad you did.

Photos courtesy: IMDB

Book Review, American Guerrilla: The Forgotten Heroics of Russell W. Volckmann

Unless you’re a Special Operations soldier or avid reading buff of guerrilla warfare, chances are that you’ve never heard much of Russell W. Volckmann. But American Guerrilla, The Forgotten Heroics of Russell W. Volckmann should be required reading for prospective Special Operations troops as well as current operators (although I dislike that term). The book was written by a former Armor officer Mike Guardia who tells the life story and military career of a very important if somewhat ignored American military officer.

Guardia weaves a very entertaining read of a staff officer stationed in the Philippines just prior to World War II who didn’t retreat to Australia with General Douglas MacArthur nor surrender after the capitulation of U.S. troops on Bataan. Instead, Volckmann and his troops retreated into the jungle. There he raised at first a rag-tag army of American and Filipinos that turned into a powerful guerrilla army of US and Filipinos that reached a strength of 22,000. His hit and run raids and ambushes against the Japanese occupation forces killed 50,000 of the enemy. They tied up huge amounts of Japanese troops and kept the enemy harassed until the invasion by the Americans helped liberate the islands from the empire of Japan.

In the jungles, Volckmann’s troops made contact with Allied headquarters in Australia and helped direct Allied efforts to key enemy positions. He set up a resupply chain via American submarines for the resistance and helped direct the Allies when they returned to the Philippines. The guerrillas saved countless lives by giving MacArthur’s staff timely and accurate intelligence on the enemy. And when the Japanese began to discuss surrender terms with the Allies, Japanese General Yamashita sought out Volckmann rather than MacArthur to open negotiations.

Yet when most military historians discuss the campaign of the Philippines, Volckmann’s name is rarely mentioned while discussing MacArthur’s campaign to recapture the former American protectorate.

In the book’s final two chapters Guardia makes the case for the naming of Volckmann and not Aaron Bank as the “true” father of the US Army Special Forces. That was sure to raise some hackles in the SF community where Bank is always discussed in the highest regard possible. We’ll address that below as he makes a compelling argument.

At only 240 pages, the book is quickly and easily digested although Guardia could have delved more into the other resistance movement across the Philippines focusing on Volckmann’s sizable contribution. He also was very critical of MacArthur’s decision to withdraw to Australia, (following the orders of the President) which has always been a source of controversy. The details about Volckmann’s operations seemed a bit thin, the author could’ve used a bit more detail there. One surprising aspect of the interviews done for the book was that no former Filipino guerrillas were quoted here. The lack of better maps of the areas that the guerrillas operated in was a detriment to the book and later additions should see to that. It would make it much easier for the reader to follow along and travel

Volckmann kept a diary where he daily logged on his attempts to raise, train and lead a guerrilla force of Filipinos from Luzon. They were a thorn in the Japanese’s side, committing acts of sabotage, raids, ambushes as well as intelligence gathering that was extremely valuable to the Americans once they began their attempts to recapture the Philippine Islands.

Students of Guerrilla and Unconventional Warfare should study the struggles of Volckmann’s efforts against the Japanese that stretched on for three years. And his efforts definitely saved countless lives, yet in all the books about MacArthur’s triumphant return, he’s scarcely mentioned if at all which is a tragic oversight.

Guardia’s assertion that Volckmann, not Bank is the true father of the modern day Special Forces is based on his role in drafting the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine and the concepts for Guerrilla Warfare and Special Forces operations. He was tasked with the writing of the two Army field manuals, Operations Against Guerrilla Forces and Organization and Conduct of Guerrilla Forces for the Psychological Operations Command.

While Volckmann had a tremendous influence on the development of Special Forces, one must remember that many of the operational tenets that he wrote in the two manuals, while tried and tested under his leadership in the Philippines were already being used by the O.S.S. in their own training and operations. That in no way should denigrate from Volckmann’s tremendous efforts, as he deserves a place at the table for Special Forces founders.

Did Guardia prove his statement that Volckmann “designed the mission capabilities and operational framework” of the Special Forces? No. I am still firmly in the camp that Bank, drawing on his own experiences as a “Jedburgh” created the organizational makeup of SF that exists to this day. And the fact that it was he, Bank selected as the 10th Special Forces Group’s first commander that deserves that honor.

However, despite that, I recommend students of Special Warfare read “American Guerilla” simply from the standpoints that it is a good look at the American and Filipino guerrilla warfare efforts against the Japanese and that sometimes it is a good thing to read and discuss viewpoints different from your own…. There is entirely too little of that today.

Photos Courtesy: US Army, Amazon.com

Pakistan Tell US, “You Won’t Win War on Terror Without Us”

The government of Pakistan has made it very clear, and they are correct that the war on terror “cannot be won by excluding or confronting” Islamabad. Despite the words of President Trump (also correct) criticizing Pakistan’s penchant for allowing terrorists linked to the Taliban and the Haqqani network to hide in their territory, Pakistan vows to fight on with the U.S.

Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif made the remark Thursday at the end of a three-day conference of Pakistani ambassadors to key world capitals for formulating a comprehensive response to the new U.S. policy on Afghanistan.
U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Pakistan when he announced his long-awaited Afghan war policy last month. He accused Islamabad of harboring terrorists linked to the Taliban and Haqqani network, which are undermining U.S.-led efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and staging attacks on American forces.
The charges have strained an already fragile relationship between Islamabad and Washington.
“We want to stay engaged with the United States. There is absolutely no doubt about it … But this relationship will be driven by the interest of Pakistan. We want to have a relationship based on mutual respect,” Foreign Minister Asif told reporters after the meeting.

Pakistan has again rejected the notion that they haven’t done enough to combat terrorism. They are quick to point out the sacrifices their people and military forces have suffered economically as well.

Asif’s remarks called for the Trump Administration to recall the sacrifices that both the US and Pakistan shared back in the 1980s when the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI created, funded, trained and armed Afghan rebels, the Mujahedeen to fight the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

To read the entire article from The Voice of America, click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia