Oppose Any Foe
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“What are you shaking for?” Darby asked. “Are you scared?”
“No, sir,” Contrera replied. “I’m just shaking with patriotism.”
Darby led the assault force into the schoolhouse. Fighting the Italians from one room to the next, the Rangers began by tossing in grenades and then bolted in with submachine guns, spraying in all directions to finish off the survivors. At the end, a triumphant Darby emerged with a group of Italian prisoners in tow, the remaining members of what had been an Italian headquarters with fifty-two officers.
In midmorning, the Italian Army counterattacked at Gela with Renault tanks. The Rangers had no armor of their own, but they had come prepared with an array of light antitank weapons, including the recently developed “bazooka.” A shoulder-fired rocket launcher with a muzzle velocity of two hundred miles per hour, the bazooka could penetrate three inches of armor plating at seven hundred yards. Lieutenant Stan Zaslaw was getting ready to fire his bazooka at one of the Italian tanks when he saw Lieutenant Colonel Darby riding on top of the vehicle, trying to open the hatch so as to throw a grenade inside. On another occasion, Darby was seen taking charge of a 37mm antitank gun and using it to knock out a Renault.
The Rangers had a tougher time against the German Tiger tanks that descended on Gela at noon. Incapable of piercing the Tiger’s thick armor with the bazookas or any of the other weaponry they had carried ashore, the Rangers radioed the tank locations to US cruisers and destroyers. Drawing in close to the coast, the ships unloaded salvo after salvo of four-inch and six-inch shells, which turned the heavy tanks into burning hulks and hurled their supporting infantry into the air. Americans could hear the screams of burning Tiger crewmen from half a mile away. At 2 p.m., the German command called off the counterattack and the surviving German forces withdrew northward.
By this time, the skill and size of the Ranger force had convinced most of the Italian defenders of Gela to surrender. Ranger logs recorded nearly 1,000 Italian prisoners taken on July 10. Darby’s staff tallied up the day’s results in one of Gela’s restaurants, which had been commandeered as the Ranger command post. A staff officer from higher headquarters arrived in the evening to declare that his commander would be making the restaurant into his headquarters, so the Rangers obligingly packed up their maps and papers and took them away, along with the cases of cognac and champagne they had found in the restaurant’s cellar.
DARBY’S RANGERS HAD been in existence barely a year when they landed on the southern coast of Sicily, infants in comparison with the US, British, and Canadian battalions on their flanks, some of which could trace their lineage back to Napoleon’s Peninsular War. They had something of an American precedent in Rogers’ Rangers, a light infantry unit that had habitually trounced French and Indian antagonists during the Seven Years’ War of 1756 to 1763, though the Americanness of the lineage was suspect, since that force had served under the British Empire and its leader had sided with the British when the American colonies declared their independence in 1776. The principal role model for Darby’s Rangers was a much newer outfit, and one fully British. Like their role model, the new American Rangers were intended for a different type of warfare than the one they were fated to wage, ensuring that the US Army’s first incarnation of special operations forces would be fraught with controversy.
The idea of forming US Army Ranger battalions had been born in the dark gloom of April 1942, when the Germans were running circles around the Soviet Red Army on the Russian steppes and the Japanese were expunging the remnants of American resistance in the Philippines at Bataan and Corregidor. It was conceived in the head of General George Marshall, the US Army chief of staff, during a visit to the British Commando Training Centre in the Scottish highlands. Forged in response to the unprecedented traumas of World War I, the British Commandos were the special operations force that would become the archetype for most of the special operations forces of the Western world.
Following Adolf Hitler’s lightning-quick destruction of France in May 1940 and the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, Winston Churchill had decided that Britain needed to devise ways to fight Nazi Germany without sending a whole generation of young men to their deaths on the continent as it had done in World War I. He would have to find ways that did not require much heavy equipment, since the British Army had, in its haste to escape at Dunkirk, left most of its equipment in France. Churchill decided to focus on ground raids on the Axis periphery while at the same time maintaining air and naval superiority, letting the Soviets do most of the fighting against the Germans, and convincing the United States to join the anti-Axis coalition. The Commandos became the primary raiding weapon in Churchill’s arsenal.
General Marshall arrived at the British Commando Training Centre believing that Western Europe had to be invaded with overwhelming force, rather than merely poked at the edges as Churchill preferred. The visit did not disabuse him of that conviction. It did, however, spark his interest in the Commando program. Since the Commandos were the most active of British forces at the time, American collaboration would provide a vehicle for putting Americans into combat and gaining badly needed experience. Marshall promptly ordered Colonel Lucian Truscott, the US Army’s liaison to the British Combined Operations Headquarters, to find a way to involve Americans in Commando training and operations.
Truscott in turn instructed General Russell P. Hartle, commander of the 34th Infantry Division, to form an American battalion that would train and operate with the Commandos. It would be called the 1st Ranger Battalion, and its men the Rangers. “Few words have a more glamorous connotation in American military history,” Truscott said in explaining his choice of name. Contributing to that glamor was the 1940 film Northwest Passage, in which the swashbuckling Robert Rogers, played by Spencer Tracy, led his Rangers to victory against all odds.
In appointing a commander for the Ranger battalion, Truscott and Hartle might have been expected to search for a lieutenant colonel in his early forties, the typical profile of a US Army battalion commander at the time. Instead, they chose a man two ranks lower and a decade younger, thirty-one-year-old Captain William Orlando Darby. The fact that Darby was serving as Hartle’s aide gave reason to wonder whether Truscott and Hartle had simply grabbed the closest officer they could find. Time, however, would show Darby to be a superb pick.
Raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas, William Darby was the son of Percy Darby, who owned a printing business and, on the side, a thirty-piece orchestra that performed accompaniments to silent films. As a teenager, William played the clarinet and saxophone in the orchestra. He was often absorbed in reading, devouring books of high adventure, such as those in the Horatio Alger, Rover Boys, and Tom Swift series, and frequently paging through a multivolume encyclopedia called the Book of Knowledge. His high forehead and blue eyes made the girls in his high school swoon. Martha Knapp, a neighbor who had a crush on young Darby, believed that he had “the most beautiful complexion you’ve ever seen.”
After reading a series of articles in Mentor magazine on the virtues of West Point, Darby applied for entrance into the academy. His congressman ranked him the second alternate in the district, but the recommended candidate and first alternate dropped out, allowing Darby to enroll in 1929. William H. Baumer, a West Point classmate, recalled that Darby “was known as a charming, persuasive, extremely likeable person. He had lots of energy and was always willing to jump in and do a job.” As a cadet, Darby demonstrated natural leadership talents, good manners, a love for fun, and meticulous attention to personal appearance. One peer observed that Darby wore a uniform “like it had been poured on.” In terms of academic work and military skill, however, Darby did not stand out, finishing with a class rank of 177 out of 346.
Upon commissioning as a second lieutenant, Darby was assigned to the 82nd Field Artillery of the 1st Cavalry Division, the only horse artillery unit left in the US military. He spent the next eight years in the threadbare peacetime army, marrying Natalie Shaw of El Paso in 19
35 while serving at Fort Bliss and divorcing four years later. In November 1941, he received orders to Hawaii, but Pearl Harbor was attacked before he departed, resulting in his redirection to Hartle’s 34th Division.
Truscott saw in Darby many of the qualities for which the Rangers would later extol their commander. In Truscott’s estimation, Darby was “outstanding in appearance, possessed of a most attractive personality,” and “keen, intelligent, and filled with enthusiasm.” Confident in Darby’s capabilities for independent action, Truscott vested in him full responsibility for filling the 1st Ranger Battalion with volunteers. Truscott and Hartle did impose some minimum requirements, though. Ranger candidates had to possess 20/20 vision, good hearing, and normal blood pressure. Men were automatically disqualified for heart defects, night blindness, inferior reaction time, and dentures. Restrictions were waived in some cases, such as that of Corporal Gerrit Rensink, who convinced the medical staff that his dental bridgework would not rattle during operations whose success depended upon complete silence.
To solicit volunteers, Darby posted flyers on US Army bulletin boards in Northern Ireland, where the 34th Division and other newly arrived US units were based. He delivered speeches and set up recruitment booths in areas heavily trafficked by US soldiers. Two thousand young men volunteered in short order. Darby interviewed all of the officer volunteers and many of the others, which allowed him to size up each man’s character as well as his physical shape. He looked for officers and noncommissioned officers who, in his words, possessed “leadership qualities of a high order with particular emphasis on initiative and common sense.” For the junior enlisted ranks, Darby targeted men between eighteen and twenty years of age who appeared physically and mentally capable of performing the most arduous of military tasks.
Aware that some Army commanders were encouraging their problem children to volunteer for the Rangers, Darby made a point of “weeding out the braggart and the volunteer looking for excitement but who, in return, expected to be a swashbuckling hero who could live as he pleased if only he exhibited courage and daring in battle.” Darby could not, however, reject every man who did not conform to Army norms, for the toughness, independent thinking, and ability to improvise that Darby prized were often accompanied by a penchant for barroom altercations, curfew violations, and general disdain for the regimentation of Army life. Darby’s interest in rough-hewn and unorthodox men was reflected in the diverse backgrounds of those who made it through the screening. The first group of selectees included coal miners, cowboys, railroaders, farmhands, steelworkers, truck drivers, morticians, boxers, and stockbrokers. There was a lion tamer, a bullfighter, a church deacon, and the treasurer of a burlesque theater.
In July 1942, Darby and his Rangers commenced training at the British Commando Training Centre. Located between Loch Lochy and Loch Arkaig in the western Scottish highlands, the center lay on the grounds of the Achnacarry castle, which had been rebuilt in 1802 after arsonists of the Jacobite Rising torched the original structure. All trainees were required to undergo tests of courage, and those who failed were sent back into the regular Army. Among the scariest was the so-called “death slide,” a cable tied at one end to the top of a forty-foot tree and at the other to the ground on the far side of the frigid Arkaig River. Trainees were required to climb the tree, throw a toggle rope over the cable, and hope that their grip would not slip before they crossed the froth of the rushing Arkaig.
Ranger trainees also had to prove their mettle in a grueling regimen that included speed marches over rugged hills, log-lifting, obstacle courses, weapons training, patrolling, night operations, and small-boat handling. Sixteen-mile hikes thickened the callouses on the men’s feet, so that after a time they were immune to blistering. Rangers learned how to sneak up on sentries and kill them silently, and how to destroy enemy pillboxes from the front, rear, and side. They practiced bayoneting dummies and shooting targets at close distances.
Rangers who passed the basic Commando training course moved to Argyle, on Scotland’s western coast, for training in amphibious landings. Riding small craft onto beaches at all times of day and in all weather conditions, they conducted mock assaults on coastal fortifications and towns. Scottish townsfolk played French or Italian citizens in the exercises, and served cakes and sandwiches to the famished Rangers afterward.
On August 19, 1942, fifty of Darby’s Rangers took part in the raid on Dieppe, a coastal port in German-occupied France that Churchill had designated the latest target of his raiding campaign. The Rangers were parceled out between the 2nd Canadian Division, which would land at the central beach, and two British Commando battalions, which were responsible for destroying German weapons on the beach’s flanks. Among the Rangers chosen for the mission, the elation of participation in so bold a raid did not survive first contact. German torpedo boats intercepted the boats carrying one of the Commando battalions, preventing most of its men from making landfall. Canadian tanks that were supposed to charge into the town of Dieppe found the beach’s exits blocked by German obstacles, leaving the Canadian division exposed to a vortex of German artillery and automatic weapons fire. Of the division’s 5,000 men, nearly 3,400 became casualties in the one-day operation. The Commandos lost 247 of 1,000 men, and the Rangers 11 of 50.
The Dieppe debacle did much to discredit the idea that coastal raids could inflict more than flesh wounds on the Nazi empire. Large raids were discontinued after Dieppe, and resources were redirected toward amphibious landings in North Africa and Italy that prefaced sustained invasions. The original purpose of Commandos and Rangers—coastal raiding in service of a strategy of peripheral jabbing—was thus rendered obsolete. As the planners of the North African and Italian invasions recognized, however, these units were well-suited for the new types of campaigns, as the amphibious invasions were certain to involve difficult offensive missions on the coast.
For Operation Torch, the code name for the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, the 1st Ranger Battalion was charged with taking the Algerian port of Arzew. Ranger training in stealth and night operations made the battalion a particularly attractive choice for this undertaking. If the Rangers could sneak ashore and seize the two Vichy French forts, they would spare Arzew from a massive shore bombardment, and hence preserve its much-needed port facilities. They would also minimize Vichy French casualties, an important consideration at a time when the United States was seeking to pry the Vichy French away from the Nazis.
Sailing aboard three British passenger ships that had originally been employed on the Glasgow-Belfast ferry line, the Rangers landed undetected at Arzew on November 8 shortly after midnight. They silently dispatched the few sentries they encountered en route to the town’s two forts, Fort de la Pointe, at the harbor’s edge, and Batterie du Nord, atop a nearby hillock. At Fort de la Pointe, they needed only a few minutes and a few gunshots to overwhelm the defenders. They took sixty prisoners, including the wife of the post’s adjutant. At the Batterie du Nord, Vichy French lookouts espied the Rangers using wire cutters to slice through the eight-foot-high barbed wire surrounding the fort. French machine guns opened fire, compelling Darby to pull his Rangers back and call in rounds from Ranger mortar tubes, which had been set up nearby for such an eventuality. Eighty mortar shells crashed into the fort, quieting the guns of the defenders. Most of the garrison took shelter in the fort’s magazine when the mortar barrage commenced, in the belief that Allied aircraft were bombing the fort.
Entering the fort against minimal opposition, the Rangers issued a surrender ultimatum in French to the men bunched inside the magazine. The Frenchmen rebuffed the ultimatum. When, however, the Rangers pushed grenades and a Bangalore torpedo into the ventilators, the garrison came out with hands held high. The Rangers took sixty prisoners here as well, including the battery commander, who had scampered to the magazine in such a hurry that he was still in his pajamas and bed slippers.
All told, the Rangers suffered a mere two dead and eight wounded at Arzew
. Darby took control of the town as interim mayor while thousands of soldiers from the US 1st Division arrived over the beach and longshoremen unloaded supplies from American ships at the harbor. Darby had to figure out how to keep water, electricity, and other public services going, though he had a much easier time of it than Americans in areas of the North African coast where shore bombardment had wrecked purification plants and power grids. Other matters that demanded his attention included the town’s brothel, whose prostitutes had wasted little time in advertising their wares to the invaders.
On February 1, 1943, the 1st Ranger Battalion flew to Tunisia in thirty-two C-47 transport planes, its mission to conduct raids against German and Italian forces retreating from Algeria and Libya. In the Tunisian countryside, the Rangers camouflaged themselves by day and marched by night, using colored flashlights and radios to stay organized. On February 13, the Rangers overran a position held by the 10th Bersaglieri Regiment, a light infantry formation of the Italian Royal Army. The Rangers killed seventy-five Italians and captured eleven while suffering one killed and twenty wounded. On March 20, the 1st Ranger Battalion marched six miles at night over mountainsides and gorges into the backside of the El Guettar Pass, which had been left unguarded by the Italian unit at the pass in the belief that no enemy could scale the steep slopes. The bewildered Italians surrendered without a fight, permitting the Rangers to net over 1,000 prisoners at the cost of a single American casualty.