The Daring Dozen

by Gavin Mortimer

  With Mount Austen cleared of Japanese troops, Carlson led his men down the northern face and on to Henderson Field. After a month-long patrol he had led his Raiders back to base after a 120-mile march through some of the toughest and most unforgiving terrain on earth. Of the original 266 men whom Carlson had taken into the jungle on 6 November, 209 Raiders had been killed, wounded or evacuated suffering from disease.* The 57 that had made it through to the bitter end, however, were shadows of the men that had marched into the interior of Guadalcanal a month earlier. Some had shed more than two stone in weight.

  Carlson and his 2nd Raider Battalion left Guadalcanal on 15 December and celebrated Christmas Day at their old camp at Espiritu Santo. Two weeks later Newsweek ran an article trumpeting the achievements of the Raiders on Guadalcanal: ‘Carlson’s boys – officially known as a Marine Raider Battalion – were something new in America warfare. They were America’s first trained guerrillas, whose boast was that they “know how to do anything” and who could prove it.’

  And prove it they had, claimed Newsweek, just one of several publications to pick up on the exploits of the Raiders.

  On 28 December, the same day that the Newsweek article appeared in America, General Hajime Sugiyama and Admiral Osami Nagano informed Emperor Hirohito that their position on Guadalcanal had become untenable and a withdrawal was recommended. On 31 December the Emperor accepted the recommendation and an evacuation plan was immediately formulated, to begin in January 1943. By 7 February the Japanese Navy had successfully evacuated more than 10,000 soldiers from Guadalcanal without alerting the Americans to the operation. Nonetheless, on 9 February the Americans were able to declare that the island was free of Japanese.

  A week before the declaration Carlson and his men had celebrated the first birthday of the 2nd Raider Battalion, and there had been much to celebrate. Carlson had been awarded his third Navy Cross for his conduct on Guadalcanal, while a host of other men had been decorated for their gallantry during the arduous patrol. The most cherished honour, however, was the unit citation for the Battalion, which stated:

  For a period of thirty days this battalion, moving through difficult terrain, pursued, harried and by repeated attacks, destroyed an enemy force of equal or greater size and drove the remnants from the area of operations. During this period, the battalion, as a whole or by detachments, attacked the enemy whenever and wherever he could be found in a series of carefully planned and well executed surprise attacks. In the latter phase of these operations, the battalion destroyed the remnants of enemy forces and bases on the Upper Lunga River and secured valuable information of the terrain and enemy line of operations.

  But in March 1943 Carlson’s 2nd Raider Battalion was incorporated into the new First Marine Raider Regiment under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Alan Shapley. Carlson was sent back to the States to recover from the effects of Guadalcanal, but in a letter to a friend the same month he disclosed that he knew what was really behind the move: ‘I have been kicked upstairs to the No2 job in the regiment. It means that I lost my command.’

  The cartel of senior officers in the Marine Corps who had distrusted and disliked Carlson since his days spent in the company of Chinese communists, an antipathy fostered by his cosy relationship with President Roosevelt and his popular image with the press, had exacted their revenge by stripping Carlson of the one job he loved above all others – leading the Raiders. One of the few senior Marine officers who didn’t bear a grudge towards Carlson was Lieutenant Colonel Merrill Twining, Chief of Staff of the First Marine Division. In his memoirs he reflected: ‘If this Byzantine manoeuvre was conducted to relieve Carlson of command, it gives a momentary glimpse of the dark side of the upper levels of the Marine Corps showing its inflexibility of thought and a compulsive suspicion of all things new and untried. Evans Carlson was worthy of more generous treatment than he received.’10

  Though Carlson’s enemies ensured he never again commanded Marines in battle, he nonetheless saw further action in the Pacific, participating in the battle for Saipan in June 1944. Wounds sustained in the battle ended Carlson’s active service career and he was invalided home to California, where a month later he received a visit from President Roosevelt and his wife. In December 1946 Carlson suffered a heart attack, and the following May he died, aged 51, in Portland, Oregon. The Marine Corps refused to pay the costs of transporting his coffin from Oregon to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC – much to the fury of James Roosevelt, who covered the expense.

  Yet despite the treatment of Carlson and the fact that the 2nd Raider Battalion was not deployed as a guerrilla force following their amalgamation into the 1st Marine Raider Regiment in March 1943, their legacy lived on in the Marine Corps. In his 1995 memoirs Oscar Peatross, the young lieutenant who had performed so creditably on Makin Island and rose to become a major general in the Marine Corps, wrote: ‘In spite of the fact that practically all other units hated and were jealous of the raiders, all Marine infantry squads were organized on the … fire team concept by the middle of WWII, and, as you know, are still organized that way today.’11

  * The 1st Battalion, under the command of Merritt Edson, was raised and trained on the east coast of America and later fought with distinction at Guadalcanal.

  ** A similar situation briefly arose in the SAS in 1942 when David Stirling accepted Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, into the unit even though he was overweight, unfit and a heavy drinker. Fortunately for the SAS Churchill soon acknowledged that he was out of his depth.

  * ‘Gung’ in Chinese meant ‘work’ and ‘Ho’ was ‘harmony’, so the 2nd Raider Battalion would ‘work in harmony’.

  * In his report on the patrol, Carlson stated that his battalion had killed approximately 488 Japanese soldiers and suffered 16 dead and 18 wounded in returning harmony.

  ROBERT FREDERICK

  1ST SPECIAL SERVICE FORCE

  There was nothing exceptional in the early military career of Robert Frederick to suggest that he would become the leader of one of the United States’ most renowned Special Forces units of World War II. A second lieutenant in the Coast Artillery throughout much of the 1930s, Frederick was on a staff officers’ course when Germany invaded Poland. But within four years he was the commander of the 1st Special Service Force, a unit so feared by the Germans that Frederick and his men were nicknamed ‘the Black Devils’, a sobriquet in which they revelled. Intended as a US-Canadian special winter warfare unit, the 1st Special Service Force fought in the bitter Italian campaign of the winter 1943/44, and Frederick’s ‘devils’ played a vital role in the landings at Anzio. An unassuming but fearless Special Forces brigadier who often commanded his troops from positions of exceptional danger, it was Frederick’s fighting record that earned him his place in military history, with Winston Churchill calling him ‘the greatest fighting general of all time’.

  The inventor Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke was an opinionated, argumentative, dogmatic English eccentric who rarely washed or shaved. Having read law at Cambridge, the physically fragile Pyke found work as a war correspondent during World War I, later working as a financier and educator before turning his first-class mind to invention.

  The Times of London would describe him in his obituary as ‘one of the most original, if unrecognized figures of the present century’ and certainly Pyke was one of the first men in the 1930s to realise the extent of the dangers posed by Nazi Germany. He was also able to grasp quicker than most what would happen to British cities if the German Luftwaffe launched the same intensity of bombing raids that they had on Spain during the Civil War. It was Pyke’s suggestion (which was ignored) that the chalk deposits in Wiltshire and Devon should be hollowed out and used as shelters for Londoners.

  Pyke was 45 when war broke out in 1939, a middle-aged man bitter and disappointed that none of his ideas had received the acclaim he believed they deserved. But still he persevered and in 1940 produced a paper in which he outlined how a force of highly trained soldiers could wage
a guerrilla war behind German lines with the aid of his mechanical innovation.

  The paper was timely, coming shortly after Winston Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister and instructed the War Office to raise a commando force. Yet despite this the paper received a muted response from the military and Pyke was left once more to fume against those who failed to recognize his genius. Then, in October 1941, Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed Chief of Combined Operations, and among his tasks was the initiation of British commando attacks against German targets in Europe.

  Mountbatten learned of Pyke’s memo from the previous year and invited him to his headquarters to hear more. Within minutes Mountbatten was convinced that Pyke was on to something; having first explained to Mountbatten that 70 per cent of Europe was covered in snow for five months of the year, Pyke unveiled the mechanical innovation that would enable the British to exploit the continent’s weather to their advantage: a motorized snow plough capable of travelling across the icy terrain at great speeds. Pyke’s plan was for a small force of highly trained soldiers to parachute into Norway, Denmark and the Alps, along with several of the snow ploughs, and then attack key German targets such as bridges, tunnels and hydroelectric plants that the British feared would be used in the production of atomic weapons. With the Germans possessing no comparable form of winter transport they would have to counter the saboteurs by drafting in large numbers of troops, thereby causing them maximum inconvenience.

  Pyke was thrilled that his intellect had at last been recognized. Within a short space of time he had his own office at Combined Operations HQ and answered to the title ‘Director of Programmes’ as he began work on ‘Project Plough’.

  On 11 April 1942 Mountbatten briefed Churchill on Project Plough at a meeting in which President Franklin Roosevelt was represented by Harry Hopkins, his unofficial emissary in London, and General George Marshall the US Army Chief of Staff. It was agreed that with America’s greater resources, both in manpower and manufacturing, Project Plough would be a US responsibility, although with input from the Norwegians and Canadians, as well as the technical advice of Geoffrey Pyke.

  One of the Americans’ first moves was to appoint an officer to recruit volunteers for the project. The man eventually chosen was Lieutenant Colonel Robert Frederick, a 35-year-old native of San Francisco with a doctor for a father and a domineering woman for a mother. Kept on a tight leash by his mother as a boy, Frederick rebelled against her authority aged only 13 by enlisting in the California National Guard. Three years later he was commissioned in the Cavalry Reserve as a second lieutenant and, at 17, he was accepted into West Point, the United States Military Academy for officers. When he graduated from West Point in 1928 it was as a popular but unremarkable young officer who seemed to have a knack for administration and organizing. Placed 124th out of 150 in his class, Frederick was described thus by his class book:

  He has a natural and modest personality that is bound to please. Both officers and cadets ask his advice on affairs of the Corps, knowing that they will get a practical and workable judgement … he has given invaluable aid to the Dialectic Society in all of its many activities. Whether it be managing a year book, providing the Corps with Christmas cards, decorating a ball room, arranging exhibits from outside firms, or convincing the Tactical Department that a change should be made, Fred has been asked to do it and has always done it well.1

  In the decade after graduating, Frederick showed no signs of disabusing the notion that he was anything but a solid if unspectacular officer. He served in the Coast Artillery, the Harbor Defense Command and commanded an anti-aircraft artillery unit in California. In 1938 Frederick was sent to the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on a course preparatory to becoming a staff officer.

  He graduated from the school in the same year that Germany and Britain went to war, and while Europe tore itself apart Frederick took up an appointment at the Pentagon with the Operations Division of the War Department General Staff. One of his responsibilities was to make feasibility studies on reports sent to the Pentagon, and in May 1942 Frederick received a copy of Geoffrey Pyke’s Project Plough.

  Frederick pored over it for 12 days and then sent his report to Major General Dwight Eisenhower, chief of Operations Division. In his conclusions Frederick advised that the ‘snow vehicle is not well adapted to the type of operation contemplated. It is believed that the same effect on the German war effort can be achieved by other means, the most promising of which is by subversive acts.’2 In short, it was Frederick’s recommendation that the American military establish a brigade-sized Special Forces unit to attack German targets, but not by means of snow ploughs. Eisenhower, however, rode roughshod over Frederick’s recommendations, telling him that he was not going to shelve a plan that had the enthusiastic support of Winston Churchill.

  The American officer initially chosen to lead Project Plough was Lieutenant Colonel H.R. Johnson. While work began on the snow plough,* Johnson met Pyke to discuss the organization of the force. Within days Johnson was ousted from command after it was decided he was ‘unattuned’ for the role; in reality, he and Pyke hated the sight of each other from the first moment and one of them had to go. According to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Burhans, an intelligence officer who later served in the brigade under Frederick, Eisenhower told Frederick: ‘You take this Project Plough. You’ve been over the whole thing. You’re in charge now. Let me know what you need.’

  Other sources claimed subsequently that the choice of Frederick was Mountbatten’s. Whatever the truth, the pair were soon on their way north to discuss the project with the Canadian Army, the outcome of which was an agreement that Canada would second some of its finest soldiers to the force, as well as provide land on which to train and snow specialists to advise on technical matters.

  The only impediment to the raising of the force as far as Frederick was concerned was the continued interference of Pyke. At the end of June 1942, in a memo to Harry Hopkins, Frederick described the Englishman as being in possession of an imaginative and intellectual mind. However, he added, ‘he has no knowledge of the methods or requirements for training personnel. He does not appreciate the ramifications and administrative details of creating a special organisation. He appears to have an aversion to organisation and orderliness.’3

  In early July Hopkins took Frederick’s complaint, along with many others concerning Pyke, to Mountbatten who terminated Pyke’s involvement with Project Plough. With Pyke back in England, Frederick was at last able to focus all his energies on raising his brigade. One of his first discoveries, as David Stirling and Junio Valerio Borghese could have told him, was that there was an innate distrust among many senior officers for any irregular force that might exist outside the parameters of normal military procedure.

  Though he was able to use his influence to procure several officers to serve on his staff – notable among them being Major Orval Baldwin and Major Kenneth Wickham – Frederick was less successful in finding the men to fill his ranks. With the US Army preparing for deployment across the globe, commanding officers were not about to allow some of their most able soldiers to join a Special Forces unit. Instead Frederick organized notices to be pinned to Army bulletin boards in which he asked for volunteers to join a new unit, priority being given to ‘lumberjacks, forest rangers, hunters, northwoodsmen, game wardens, prospectors and explorers’.

  What Frederick got instead was commanding officers emptying their baskets of rotten apples. Soldiers with poor disciplinary records were encouraged to volunteer while men up on charges were reputed to have been given the choice of a prison sentence or volunteering for Frederick’s outfit. Even the officers who stepped forward had a touch of wildness about them; the unit’s Operations and Training officer was a Virginian major called John Shinberger, who kept a box of live rattlesnakes under his bed in the hope that having the reptiles in such close proximity would cure him of his phobia.

  The men who did volunteer –
and many had exemplary military records and simply sought adventure – were sent to the Force’s training camp at Fort Harrison in Helena, Montana. By now Frederick had been made a full colonel and the unit was officially designated the 1st Special Service Force with a red spearhead as their formation patch, on which ‘USA’ was written horizontally and ‘Canada’ vertically.

  On 19 July 1942 Frederick and his HQ staff were installed in Helena and men were arriving every day by road and rail. They came from all over the United States and from Canada, too, though the latter, paid by their own government and subject to their code of discipline, received lower wages than their southern comrades. The Canadians and Americans eyed each other warily at first, and there was the odd brawl with the Canadians obliged to show that they ‘didn’t take kindly to jokes about the King and Queen’. It was in training, however, that a mutual bond of respect was forged between the two nations.

  Having divided the 1st Special Service Force into three regiments, Frederick put them through a brutal training regime; having expected a high drop-out rate, he had recruited 30 per cent more men than he needed. Each day followed a similar routine: rise at 0445hrs, then cleaning duties and breakfast by 0630hrs. At 0700hrs the men were put through a calisthenics programme and at 0800hrs they completed the 2,000m obstacle course. The rest of the day was spent on route marches, target practice, demolition courses, unarmed combat and parachute training. Two-hour lectures were held four nights a week on a broad range of subjects related to their training, and in any spare time the men went off into the hills on the ‘Weasel’ cargo carriers. To turn them into proficient Alpine troops, Frederick seconded a dozen Norwegian ski instructors to the force and, after six weeks’ training, the men were able to complete a 30-mile cross-country march on skis carrying a full pack and a loaded rifle.