Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  “The next person who entered the area was an old Italian grandmother, who knew not a single word of English, bringing back a basket of clean laundry. The challenge was made, she ran, he fired. The bullet passed diagonally between MacCloskey’s open knees, shattering a pine knot, so that a goodly number of splinters were imbedded in the colonel’s right inner thigh. The medic happily reported that blood had been drawn although there was some regret that the barrel of the .45 had not been a trifling to the right in its aim.”

  From the latter part of 1944 on, the Americans, including the special operations bombers, provided increasing amounts of aid to the Italian partisans harassing the Germans in northern Italy. The first drop to the Italians by the Americans, flying out of North Africa, did not occur until the night of 9-10 September. But in the next two weeks, they completed thirty-six sorties into Italy’s Po Valley.

  From November 1944 until the end of the war, Americans, flying both heavy bombers and C-47s, delivered virtually all the supplies reaching the Italian partisans by air. In the final months of the war in 1945, the C-47s dropped more than 1,800 tons of supplies to the Italians, and the bombers dropped another 1,260 tons.

  With the Germans in retreat and with their defenses deteriorating, most of these missions were flown in the daytime. The supply planes normally picked up an escort of four American P-47 or British Spitfire fighters, but they encountered little or no opposition except for occasional bursts of flak.

  Remarkably, considering that many missions were flown at night and in bad weather through rugged, poorly marked terrain, the Americans lost only ten C-47s and two B-24s in their operations out of North Africa and Italy.

  While, in the early months of 1945, the Americans flying out of Italy put much of their effort into aiding the partisans in northern Italy, the Carpetbaggers flying out of England and new bases in France spent the last few months of the war flying daring missions into Germany itself.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Final Days

  Early in 1945, with the arena of the war rapidly shrinking down to Germany itself, the Carpetbaggers were called upon for renewed missions over the Continent to insert agents into the enemy’s homeland. Colonel Hudson H. Upham, a nonflier newly named as commander of the 492d Bombardment Group, objected. It was too dangerous, he argued, to send his B-24s, alone at night, on such perilous missions.

  But the Office of Strategic Services was desperate to place as many agents as possible into Germany to scope out the extent and disposition of the Nazi forces as they drew back for a last-ditch defense of the homeland.

  Particularly urgent was the answer to one question: was it true, as rumored, that the enemy was concentrating in an Alpine redoubt in southern Germany? If that were the case, Patton would have to swing south instead of moving on toward Berlin. The Americans could expect another ferocious battle, perhaps rivaling in intensity the bloody Battle of the Bulge they had just experienced.

  Upham was overruled. The Carpetbaggers were ordered to penetrate into the heart of Germany, flying both from the Harrington air base in England and from new bases near Dijon and Lyon in central France.

  Upham’s fears of heavy losses were not borne out, for several reasons. A major reason was the decision by the Swiss, referred to in Chapter Nine, to permit the Carpetbaggers to fly over their territory. This allowed the B-24s to drop agents in Bavaria, where the redoubt, if it existed, would be located. They were thus spared exposure to the flak and night fighters they would have encountered on the longer route over Germany.

  Flying from bases in France, the B-24s carried out the important mission of dropping agents into Bavaria. If the Germans were preparing to fight to the last man in that mountainous terrain, it would have been obvious by the movement of thousands of soldiers and long lines of equipment on the roads. The agents flashed back the word: the rumor about the enemy gathering in the redoubt was false. There would be no final bloody battle in the Alps.

  A second major reason the Carpetbaggers were able to operate over Germany with relative impunity was that they were issued two new types of aircraft which could outrun and outmaneuver German fighters: the new American A-26 and the British Mosquito.

  The assignment of the A-26 Invader was the beginning of a long and close association between the special operators and this sleek, high-speed twin-engine light bomber. Built by Douglas Aircraft, the plane was just coming into service at the end of World War II when the Carpetbaggers were assigned several of the planes for their special missions.

  (The Douglas A-26 Invader is sometimes confused with the Martin B-26 Marauder, which also saw service during World War II. The confusion is compounded by the fact that the Invader was known as the B-26 for a long period after the war until the designation was changed back to A-26 during the Vietnam War.)

  Carpetbagger crews completed their training to fly the A-26 in April of 1945 and were delighted with its performance: close to four hundred miles an hour, twice as fast as a lumbering B-24. Ross D. White, one of the A-26 pilots, recalled an incident when he stopped at an American night-fighter base:

  “I had a mission to go and drop two agents in northern Germany near Kiel but had to pick them up at a United States night-fighter base in Germany. Some of the fighter pilots there saw this black A-26 parked on the ramp and became curious. They waited around operations until I came to take off. They asked me where I was going, but I could not tell them where I was going or what I was doing. They said they were going on a night mission and would escort me. I told them, ‘No.’ They said that since they were flying the radar-equipped P-61 Black Widow night fighter, I didn’t have a choice. That airplane was fast, but the A-26 I was using, all stripped down, was faster. I said they would never be able to keep up. They all thought that was nonsense.

  “I took off, turned on course, finished my mission, and returned to land at the fighter base for fuel, where I again met some of the pilots. They said they had lost me after my first turn out of traffic and were amazed at the speed of the A-26. Because they took off with some of them ahead of me and some behind me, they were sure they could keep in touch, with their radar. A couple of them said they saw me once on their radar but could not keep up.

  “Incidentally, the two agents were Germans who had surrendered in North Africa. I saw one of them after the war in Paris, and he said that when I pulled the trap door on him, he thought he had bought the farm.”

  White was referring to the unique system used for dropping Joes from the A-26. Because the plane was so small, it had little room for passengers and no space for a Joe hole like that installed in the B-24. Instead, plywood platforms were placed in the bomb bay, and two Joes lay on the plywood. When the time came for them to drop, the pilot gave them a brief warning and then simply pulled the salvo switch. They were dropped like two bombs. The drop was usually made from an altitude of two to four hundred feet—just enough room for the static line to open their chutes before they landed. The Joes hated it.

  Despite his reluctance to send the B-24s into Germany, Colonel Upham acceded to the request of the OSS to speed up the introduction of the A-26, and that may have contributed to the tragic outcome of the first flight.

  Fish and others in the unit felt that the crews had not had enough time to familiarize themselves with this quite different aircraft before they were sent into combat.

  “I think Colonel Upham knew we were not fully trained for that mission. He tried to compensate by using highly trained staff officers as some of the crew members,” Fish later wrote. “Had I been at Harrington, I feel that I could have reasoned with Colonel Upham and have convinced him that we should not attempt that mission until we were fully qualified with a regular crew. On other occasions, he had respected my Carpetbagger experience and had listened to me on operational matters. This time, I was not there.”

  The first flight, in mid-March of 1945, was manned by a four-man crew of volunteers, all of them highly experienced Carpetbaggers. They were Lt. Oliver H. Emmel, pilot; Maj.
John W. Walsh, navigator; Major Tresemer, bombardier; and SSgt. Frederick J. Brunner, gunner. Their assignment was to deliver their Joe to the Dümmer Lake area, north of Osnabrück, in western Germany.

  The plane crashed that night not far from its destination, killing the crew members and the agent they were to drop. Exactly what happened will never be known. But Fish has a theory:

  “In my opinion, they probably flew too near the ground, something or somebody malfunctioned, and they had no chance to recover before they struck the ground.…

  “Tresemer had been my navigator on my crew from the time he graduated from navigation school. I trained him to be a crew member, and he was one of the best. I knew him well. He crosstrained as a bombardier after we arrived in England.… On the night of this A-26 mission, he did not function as a professional bombardier even though he was carried on the crew roster as a bombardier. On this flight, he functioned as a pilotage navigator. [Pilotage is the most basic form of navigation: looking at the ground as it passes below and comparing what is seen to a map.]

  “On low level flights, when he functioned as a pilotage navigator, he liked to have the aircraft right down in the treetops, where he could clearly see positive details of the earth’s surface. On such missions, he repeatedly called for his pilot to fly lower so he could see better.

  “When I piloted for him at night, I ignored his requests to fly lower whenever we were within three hundred feet of the ground. Oliver H. Emmel, who was the pilot on that fatal flight, was highly qualified as a pilot, but he had not previously flown combat with Tresemer. He had no way of knowing Tresemer’s idiosyncrasy about altitude. There is a distinct possibility that he allowed Tresemer to induce him to fly too low.”

  The missions the Carpetbagger crews flew with their other new plane—the Mosquito—were at the opposite extreme from the low-level A-26 missions. The British-made Mosquito was a very light twin-engine plane made of plywood. Because it was so light, it could fly both very high and very fast. The Mosquitos were a key link in a unique system used by spies inside Germany to transmit reports back to their handlers. They used what was called the Joan-Eleanor system.

  The agent broadcast his message from a device that directed it upward in a very narrow cone. In one instance, a spy continued transmitting from a church steeple while a German direction-finding van rolled by down below, oblivious to his presence.

  The other end of the system was a receiver in the Mosquito, flying at forty thousand feet. At that altitude, the signal spread out into a circle with a diameter of about sixty miles, so the pilot could simply circle in the proper area while the message was recorded on a wire recorder. Upon the plane’s return to Harrington, the recording wire was rushed to London by motorcycle for analysis by intelligence experts.

  During the period in the spring of 1945 when these missions were conducted over Berlin and other German cities, it was daylight around the clock at the extreme altitudes flown by the Mosquitos. That meant they did not have the protection of darkness. But they were above the range of antiaircraft fire. Fighter planes that tried to reach them stalled out and began to spin toward earth until they reached thicker air.

  Even down low, the Mosquitos were more than a match for fighters because of their high speed.

  On one occasion, a Mosquito pilot on his way home from Germany deliberately refrained from turning on the signal that would identify him to Allied air defenses. He listened on his radio as the American Black Widow night fighters were scrambled. He heard their radar intercept operator tell the fighters: “The bogy is pulling away from you. He is very fast. He is getting away!” As the Mosquito pilot pulled away, he radioed: “Call your dogs off. This is a ‘friendly’ en route to England.”

  By the end of World War II, the Army Air Forces had built a formidable special operations capability—not only in specialized equipment like the night-flying B-24, the A-26, and the Mosquito but also in the knowledge of thousands of aircrew members with wartime experience in secret operations in the enemy’s backyard. Like the rest of the United States military, much of this capability simply vanished in the rush to demobilize in the months immediately after the war ended.

  PART 3

  Korea and Beyond

  CHAPTER 12

  Drawdown and Rebuilding

  Within weeks after the Japanese surrender on 14 August 1945 ended World War II, millions of American servicemen began streaming home, having fulfilled their obligation to serve for “the duration plus six months.”

  The result was a drastic shrinkage of the American military, from a wartime peak of nearly 12 million men under arms. Within five years, what was left was an under-strength, poorly equipped force of 1.5 million.

  For most of the military, the shrinkage was just that—shrinkage. The basic structure remained—Army divisions, Air Force wings, Navy carrier battle groups. It was all just very much smaller.

  But the formidable special operations capability the Army Air Forces had created during World War II did not shrink. It simply disappeared. Gone were most of the Carpetbaggers and Air Commandos along with their specialized equipment and their institutional memory of how to use air power to support those operating on the ground behind enemy lines—whether resistance fighters, saboteurs, or intelligence agents.

  Thus, when North Korea launched its surprise attack across the line that had partitioned Korea into a northern area associated with the Soviet Union and China and a southern area associated with the United States and the West, the South Koreans and their American allies were sent reeling. The attack occurred on 25 June 1950. Three days later, Seoul, the capital of South Korea, fell. The defenders were quickly driven back into a tiny perimeter near the southern port of Pusan.

  The United States frantically fed in poorly trained garrison troops from Japan to maintain a foothold on the Korean peninsula until reinforcements arrived from the United States and other members of the United Nations.

  As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the Pentagon had foreseen the need for an operation similar to the Carpetbaggers and had begun to put it together. But it was not even formally created until months after the North Korean invasion. This force, which later played a part in the Korean War, was the innocuously named Air Resupply and Communications Service. Its operations are described in Chapter Thirteen.

  As far as the Air Force, which had become a separate service after World War II, was concerned, special operations in Korea was a total vacuum.

  Into this vacuum stepped a young Air Force captain named Henry “Heinie” Aderholt. He arrived in South Korea on the first of August 1950 as commander of Detachment 2 of the 21st Troop Carrier Squadron, which was part of the 315th Air Division.

  Aderholt set up shop at Taegu, a city in southern Korea. The enemy was just the other side of the hills to the north. Aderholt’s pilots and planes came on temporary duty from the troop carrier squadron, based at first in southern Japan and then at a field near Tokyo. Some days, they flew their C-47s over from Japan, performed their missions, and flew back. On other nights, they remained in Korea and slept in their planes or on the ground. Their assignments ranged from flying ammunition to hard-pressed frontline units to dropping agents far behind enemy lines.

  “I was taking all comers,” Aderholt recalls. “If they wanted to do something, we did it.”

  Sitting in his office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, where he operates a shop dealing in oriental goods, Aderholt brings out a bound ledger of the type used by bookkeepers. Opening the aging pages, he shows the simple record-keeping system used by Det 2 to keep track of its operations. Whether consciously or not, Aderholt was carrying on the tradition from the original air commandos in Burma of doing their job with little or no paperwork.

  “We had the aircraft number, the scheduled takeoff time, the actual takeoff time, and the arrival time back at base. Later, we showed the pilots who flew the missions and who we flew them for,” he explains. “We flew mostly at night, every night. This is the only rec
ord. When a book got through, we threw it away. There is no record of this anywhere in the world but right here. I just happened to bring these home with me. This is the only record. That’s how operations can run very well if you don’t have too much bureaucracy. That’s what kills special operations.”

  On 15 September, the Allies landed behind the enemy lines at Inch’on and quickly retook Seoul. Aderholt moved his operation to Seoul. From there, they flew a variety of special operations missions, even venturing into neighboring China. One of their major tasks was to make up for the lack of preparation before the war began. Military planning normally provides for “stay-behind assets” to be available in the event of an invasion. Their job is to remain in enemy-occupied territory to carry out sabotage and, most important, report on the location and strength of enemy forces.

  In Korea, there were few if any stay-behind assets.

  The solution to this problem was Operation Aviary, in which agents—code-named Rabbits—landed by parachute behind enemy lines. Some of them were young women, including a group of actresses and performers recruited by Madam Rhee, wife of Syngman Rhee, the South Korean president.

  “The agents were furnished by the Koreans,” Aderholt recalls. “We had hundreds of them. Madam Rhee furnished all the women. They had all their movie stars and everybody, the best looking girls. We put them out over enemy territory in the winter of ’50–’51 when the outside air temperature was forty to fifty degrees below zero. They would go out in cotton-padded suit and shoes. They didn’t weigh enough to get to the ground, you would think.”