Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  Maybe it wasn’t the end of the world to Elinor, but to me it seemed like it. To complicate things further, we learned that Elinor was pregnant again.

  I fretted the entire weekend, keeping to myself and barely responding to Elinor. I finally decided maybe it was best to resign and save the Navy the trouble of kicking me out.

  On Monday I knocked on Fane’s office door. “Commander Fane, I need—”

  He rubbed the bruise on his jaw. “I been shot at, nearly drowned, cursed by a witch doctor, pissed on and pissed off—and now, can you believe I slipped and fell off my own porch?”

  He grinned. “Don’t just stand there, Bone. We have work to do. By the way, I was wrong. If you’re a candy ass, I’ve never seen one can punch harder.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A NATION’S MILITARY IS INEXTRICABLY tied to its history and geography and guided by current events, all of which mold the character of both the institution and the soldiers who populate it. Ocean borders on either side of the United States necessitated a strong Navy, while the early frontier-settler mentality produced tough, self-reliant soldiers with a strong sense of freedom and the capability to meet events head-on.

  From childhood, I possessed an appreciation of that history and tradition that lent itself to the discipline and honor code of the military. Part of it I inherited from my Navy father, part of it from a strong-willed mother, and the rest came from happenstance, perhaps, and from being born at the right time when the nation’s military was being shaped in new directions.

  The unfolding Cold War directly encouraged the development and deployment of special operations forces in both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army. In many aspects, Army Special Forces and UDTs were sprouts from a common root. Both owed their modern genesis to World War II, each taking a slightly different path toward a common goal.

  Some initial developments in special operations techniques took place in an unexpected corner of the world, even before Hitler appeared on the scene in Europe.

  During the 1930s, violent criminal gangs ruled the densely-packed Shanghai International Community in China. Well-equipped with military weapons and employing terrorist tactics, the gangs kidnapped for ransom, smuggled drugs, extorted businesses, assassinated rivals, and murdered law enforcement officers.

  A tough English musketry instructor named William Fairbairn came along to “take back the streets” by utilizing street cop methods and employing counterterrorism tactics. He established heavily-armed military-type squads whose principle aim was to kill terrorists. Riot squads busted heads while undercover officers infiltrated the gangs to provide intelligence to counteract the violence. Within a few years, Fairbairn the “town tamer” had tamed Shanghai.

  He returned to England in 1940 to instruct British SOE (Special Operations Executive) and the SAS (Special Air Services) in underground battle techniques he had developed in China. A couple of years later the United States relied upon his success and upon the examples of the SOE and SAS to help flesh out its OSS (Office of Strategic Services).

  In July 1941, with Nazism on the march and war looming, President Franklin Roosevelt created a service responsible for gathering and preserving secret intelligence and conducting special operations. He tapped William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan, fifty-eight, a wealthy Wall Street banker, to direct his newly formed office of Coordinator of Information (COI). Donovan’s stout, white-haired appearance belied his background as a cavalry troop commander who pursued Poncho Villa in 1916, and as commander of the “Fighting 69th” Infantry Division in World War I, where he won the Medal of Honor.

  Six months after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt placed COI under the military authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with Donovan still in command and renamed it the Office of Strategic Services. Formed along the lines of England’s SOE and SAS, the OSS had the primary function of obtaining information about enemy nations and sabotaging their war potential and morale.

  OSS volunteers trained at “Area F” on the grounds of the former Congressional Country Club outside Washington, D.C. Emphasis was on espionage, sabotage, “black” propaganda, guerrilla warfare, and other “un-American” subversive techniques that set a precedent for clandestine tradecraft. Columnist Stewart Alsop tallied this new breed as “missionaries and bartenders, polo players and baseball pitchers, millionaires and union organizers, a human fly and a former Russian general, a big game hunter, a history professor …”

  “They were a rough-and-tumble gang,” concluded OSS instructor Roger Hall. “They didn’t know the exact nature of their future assignments and they couldn’t care less.”

  “Their appetite for the unconventional and spectacular was far beyond the ordinary,” added an OSS captain.

  OSS operators joined with British SOE in three-man “Jedburgh” teams to work with the resistance in German-occupied France, Holland, and Belgium. Teams parachuted in to train partisans and lead them in conducting guerrilla operations in the rear to open up second fronts against Nazi occupiers. By the end of September 1944, more than a hundred Jedburgh teams dropped behind enemy lines tied down thousands of Hitler’s troops on D-Day and in the months afterward.

  OSS operated in two primary configurations—Jedburghs and larger bands called OGs (Operational Groups). Donovan also created a Special Operations Branch (SO) to liaison with underground movements and a Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) to oversee the generation of intelligence.

  OGs performed direct-action combat roles such as sabotage and attacks on key targets. They linked up with partisans to blow bridges, blast trains and rail lines, to provide reconnaissance and intelligence, and to exfiltrate downed pilots and other Allied personnel. “The OGs undertook and carried out more different types of enterprises calling for more varied skills than any other single organization of its size in the history of the country,” noted a member of the OSS psychological staff.

  OG Detachment 101, led by Captain Ray Peers, equipped and organized several thousand Kachin tribesmen to take on the Japanese in northern Burma. Peers and his Kachin slaughtered an estimated 10,000 Japanese while losing only 206 of their own. Theater commander General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell questioned Peers and a Kachin Ranger leader on how they could be so sure of the exact number of Japanese killed during one engagement. The Kachin dumped a pile of dried human ears on the table.

  “Divide by two,” he suggested.

  “To unorthodox, traditional soldiers,” said former Jedburgh Aaron Bank, unconventional warfare “was something slimy, underhanded, illegal and ungentlemanly.”

  OSS operated for less than four years before being disbanded in September 1945, one month after the end of World War II. It was one root of several that eventually grew into Army Special Forces. Darby’s Rangers, Alamo Scouts, the Devil’s Brigade, and Merrill’s Marauders provided other roots of the special forces lineage.

  In June 1942 when Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall decided to train and utilize commandos, he appointed thirty-one-year-old Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby to establish Ranger units and command the 1st Ranger Battalion, which became known as “Darby’s Rangers.” They were called “Rangers” because the term was used in early American history to designate units displaying “high standards of individual courage, determination, ruggedness, fighting ability and achievement.” Darby’s Rangers and subsequent Ranger units became known for their rallying cry “Rangers lead the way!” They were involved throughout Europe and the Pacific in direct action spearheads and assaults and made beach landings at Tunisia and Salerno. Darby was killed in action in Italy in April 1945, only days before Germany surrendered.

  The Alamo Scouts were South Pacific commandos brought into existence in November 1943 by General Walter Krueger, commander of Sixth Army. Officially named the Sixth Army Special Reconnaissance Unit, the Alamos were “selected volunteers trained in reconnaissance and raider work.” Lieutenant Colonel Frederick W. Bradshaw assumed the task of producing well-trained, highly motivated six- to seven-man teams t
o infiltrate enemy lines, gather intelligence, and return undetected.

  “This little unit has never failed the U.S. Army,” declared General Kreuger when the Alamo Scouts disbanded in November 1945.

  The “Devil’s Brigade,” the 1st Special Service Force (FSF), contributed major genes to the “bastard children” that grew into military special operations. It was originally conceived as an elite joint airborne assault force of Canadians and Americans trained to operate in mountains and snow to destroy German hydroelectric plants in Norway and the Italian Alps and target Romanian oil production.

  Instead, the FSF found itself attached to Amphibious Task Force 9 to run the Japanese out of the Aleutian Islands off the tip of Alaska. Later, events unfolded that made the Devil’s Brigade the only Allied combat outfit to take part in a “two-ocean war” when it was assigned to scale an “unscalable” mountain wall in Italy to take the Difensa enemy stronghold and hold it.

  The Devil’s Brigade was deactivated on November 22, 1944. Cut loose, its commandos along with former Jedburghs and Rangers moved east and south into the Asian theater to operate with OSS OGs or Merrill’s Marauders. Much of the brigade’s organization, equipment, training, tactics, and missions would later become standard procedure for U.S. Army Special Forces.

  “Merrill’s Marauders” sprang out of the Quebec Conference of August 1943 between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, during which they forged a joint U.S.-British Southeast Asian Command (SEAC) to open a first Allied offensive, code-named “Galahad,” against the Japanese on the Asian mainland. General Frank D. Merrill, thirty-nine, was appointed to command the regiment-sized 5307 Composite Unit (Provisional) on January 1, 1944.

  Merrill’s Marauders inserted into Northern Burma to begin what Time magazine described as “a twenty-three-day mountain march that was one of the epic infantry advances of the war. The Marauders swept east to cut Japanese supply lines, block trails and enemy movements, and destroy whatever got in their way. It was difficult terrain. High mountains, deep valleys, jungle, and numerous rivers. Men suffered from dysentery, disease, fatigue and constant hunger. Their only means of supply was through periodic air drops, which often ended up in enemy hands.”

  The Marauders marched more than six hundred miles through seemingly impassable terrain while fighting five major and seventeen minor engagements that drove the Japanese from an area the size of Connecticut. Only a thousand men of the original three thousand remained when replacements arrived.

  “In the next war,” predicted Major Samuel Vaughn Wilson, a recon platoon leader, “we are going to have to rely on Galahad-type forces—small, free-ranging units unhampered by fixed ties to their bases. The massing of armies is out in an era of atomic weapons.”

  “It is time to realize that most modern war is guerrilla in nature,” asserted Major General Orde Wingate, originator of the long-range penetration concept.

  Wingate was to be proved profoundly prophetic as America, Britain, and France became increasingly entangled in Indochina with communists led by Ho Chi Minh.

  “The next war after Korea,” I predicted while working with Lieutenant Reynolds in Japan, “will be in Vietnam. I can already see it coming. We’d better start preparing.”

  “So,” Reynolds teased, “Planning and Research now includes prophesying?”

  The United States readily abandoned its capability for unconventional warfare with the end of World War II and the disbanding or drawdown of its SpecOps units. A number of foresighted men—Commander Fane, Draper Kauffman, Phil Bucklew, and, I liked to think, myself—saw red clouds on the horizon and realized what was coming. Third World nations were beginning to fall like dominos to the Soviet and Sino spheres.

  Brigadier General Robert McClure realized the only way for unconventional warfare to be successful was to prepare beforehand. He had been Eisenhower’s officer-in-charge of psychological warfare in Europe, where he often worked with OSS. He was now in charge of the Psychological Warfare Center located at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He incorporated in his command a special warfare detachment and began gathering veterans experienced in guerrilla warfare. Among them were Colonel Aaron Bank, famous for his exploits with the OSS, including one operation intended to capture Adolf Hitler; Lieutenant Colonel Russell Volckmann, the former guerrilla leader on Luzon; Wendell Fertig, Volckmann’s counterpart on Mindanao; Joe Waters, who had served with Merrill’s Marauders; and Robert McDowell, a former OSS operative with Tito in Yugoslavia. Their mission was to develop a concept for guerrilla warfare in a world threatened by communism.

  Bank and Volckmann were the most influential of the group in convincing the Army that it needed permanent special forces. Initially, they thought such elements would be deployed behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern European nations dominated by the Soviet Union following a nuclear war. They would assemble survivors in the wastelands of enemy territory and develop partisan bands capable of resistance and disruption in rear areas.

  In March 1952, the Department of Army approved a Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. Three months later, on June 19, the U.S. Army Special Forces came online with the activation of the 10th Special Forces Group and an allocation of 2,500 men under Colonel Bank’s command. Although it was the first group, it was designated the 10th in order to confound the Soviets with the possibility of nine more groups.

  “Present for duty,” Bank noted that first day, “were seven enlisted men, one warrant officer, and me, making for a slim morning report.”

  Volunteers rapidly filled up 10th Group ranks, a number of them from the armies of Poland, Finland, even Russia and Germany. A change in law called the Lodge Act permitted foreign recruitment for special operations purposes. The unit adopted as its patch an arrowhead similar to that worn by Devil’s Brigade. Three lightning bolts slashing across the arrowhead signaled Special Forces’ ability to arrive against the enemy by land, sea, or air. Its motto was De Oppresso Liber: “Liberate the Oppressed.”

  Colonel Bank turned to the OGs for the Group’s structure. This produced the twelve-man Special Forces A-team consisting of two teams of six sergeants cross-trained in five specialties—light weapons, heavy weapons, combat medicine, demolition-engineer, and intelligence. A captain or first lieutenant and an operations sergeant were the leaders. The A-team was the basic on-the-ground operational element and must be capable of teaching and leading other warriors.

  A B-detachment, like an infantry company, controlled and supported three A-teams. A C-detachment (battalion) commanded three B-teams. Three C-detachments formed an Operational Group, commanded by a colonel.

  The restlessness I observed in Vietnam, from afar at the present time, resulted from the Geneva Conference of 1954 following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The conference pressured Vietnamese communists to accept the partitioning of Vietnam into a North and South, much as Korea had been partitioned following World War II. China, however, encouraged Ho Chi Minh to keep fighting to reunite the country under communism.

  Within two years of its coming online, 10th Group began preparing to send teams into Vietnam. Commander Fane and I anticipated claiming a part of the war for UDTs when it broke out, as we felt it inevitably must.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FATE, IT SEEMED, SELECTED my destiny for me. A man couldn’t go against his fate. Military career counselors had warned me that a UDT path led to delayed promotions and a stunted career, that if I proceeded on this course I would never make admiral as my father had. But wasn’t vision more vital to the nation than gold braid on my cap and stars on my shoulder boards?

  After mandatory rotation out of Red Dog Fane’s COMUDU-One, I pulled another “shore duty” at the General Line Course in Monterrey, a sort of graduate school for naval officers. I might have been a good student except my instructors bitched how I lacked commitment. Being thrust into a classroom environment or behind a desk too long took something out of me. I had graduated Annapolis in the middle of my 1949 class because I refused to
sit and study more than the minimum I required to pass. Although I was an avid reader of history, especially military history, I didn’t do much better in the Line Course.

  Elinor naturally liked our being there. It was real shore duty and I was home every night.

  My old roommate Warren Parr stopped by Monterrey for a visit on his way to another WestPac tour. He was up for promotion to full commander, two jumps ahead of me. His old man and mine had both made it to admiral rank. It appeared Parr Jr. was on his way there as well.

  “Bone, you big lug,” he chided. “When are you going to wise up and get out of this pond playing with frogs? You’ve been in the water so long your brain has shrunk.”

  “I’m not taking a desk job.”

  Red Dog Fane would have understood.

  Stubbornly, I selected my own course through the shoals as I volunteered and applied for duty that advanced me toward the goal I had designed for myself out of the Naval Academy and which by now had become hardwired into my being. I was determined to become versed in every aspect of the undersea world—diving and swimming, EOD, amphibious vessels.

  Elinor seemed ready to accept that she could never be a real Navy wife. Settling in one place barely long enough to memorize the street address, then uprooting the family to trek to the opposite coast. Then back again.

  I was pulling sea duty aboard the USS PCE off the East Coast when Linda Jean was born a few months before the Korean War ended. The little girl was barely walking when I attended UDTR School at Coronado, followed by another Korean tour and then a year or so with Fane bouncing around with the teams everywhere from the Arctic to South America to China. I was even gone on a mission when Elinor gave birth to our son William Henry Jr. on June 8, 1956. She glared at me when I finally showed up.