U.S. Army Special
Forces
THE GREEN
BERETS
Special Forces History
and Origins
A Detailed History of Special Forces
The Origin of Special Forces
Special operations are nothing new
to the American soldier. Before Green Berets were
teaching counterinsurgency to foreign armies, there
were grim-faced men stalking the enemy in woods and
swamps during the French and Indian War. Known as
Rogers' Rangers after their commander Major Robert
Rogers, they were the first of America's unconventional
forces.
Though the era they lived in was
simpler than the present age, the skills necessary
to become an elite soldier were the same. Rogers'
Rangers fought in terrain that normal men shunned.
They crept up on an enemy with the stealth of a slithering
snake, and delivered blows with the lethality of a
Cobra bite. "Move fast and hit hard," Rogers
told his men, and they obeyed, thereby setting the
standard for generations to follow. The tradition
continued during the American Revolution with Francis
Marion, the Swamp Fox who led daring guerrilla raids
on British forces in South Carolina and Georgia. His
troops harassed the enemy with a success out of all
proportion to their small numbers because Marion used
the element of surprise to its greatest potential.
In the Civil War, Colonel John Singleton
Mosby of Virginia formed a band of Confederate raiders
that became the terror of Union generals. Operating
from the outskirts of his enemy's capital, Mosby and
300 select volunteers cut off communications and supplies,
wrecked railroads and raided headquarters behind enemy
lines. Because of his stealth and uncanny ability
to avoid capture, Mosby came to be known as the Gray
Ghost.
Well-trained and well-disciplined,
Mosby and his men set a model for guerrilla warfare:
weaken the enemy's front line, weaken the enemy's
infrastructure and win the support of the people.
Mosby accomplished the latter by protecting the local
population from plundering Union soldiers and by sharing
their captured wealth with those in need.
However, it was not until World War
II that special operations troops finally left their
unstoried peripheries and came into their own. In
quick succession the public soon would come to know
the names of such units as the Devil's Brigade, Darby's
Rangers, Merrill's Marauders and the Alamo Scouts.
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Elite Units of World War II
Known more formally as the 1st Special
Service Force, the Devil's Brigade was a joint Canadian-American
venture that began July 9, 1942, at Fort William Henry
Harrison, Montana. Airborne-trained and honed to the
sharpness of a cold steel blade, the Devil's Brigade
saw most of its action in Italy, but also fought in
France, where it was inactivated in 1944. Its forte
was close-quarter combat against numerically-superior
forces, a task which it accomplished with a raw power
that gave the brigade its nickname.
Darby's Rangers was the moniker given
to the 1st Ranger Battalion in honor of its commander,
Maj. William 0. Darby. The unit was activated June
19, 1942, in Carrickfergus, Ireland. It fought throughout
Western Europe, but achieved its greatest fame when
it scaled the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc as part of the
D-Day invasion of Normandy.
Merrill's Marauders was the title
given to Col. Frank D. Merrill's 5307th Composite
Unit (Provisional), a 3,000-man force that staked
out a piece of Burmese jungle and dared the Japanese
to challenge it. They did, and wound up losing to
the Marauders in five major battles and 17 skirmishes.
The Marauders' greatest feat, and the one that made
them an inspiration 20 years later to American soldiers
once again slogging through Asian jungles, was their
march of miles through thick Burmese foliage en route
to the capture of an airfield at Myitkyina.
In the Pacific, Lieutenant General
Walter Krueger established a small elite force and
called them the Alamo Scouts, probably after his native
San Antonio. In perhaps their greatest feat, the Scouts
led U.S. Rangers and Filipino guerrillas in an attack
on a Japanese prison camp at Cabantuan, freeing all
511 allied prisoners there. Never numbering more than
70 volunteers, the Alamo Scouts earned 44 Silver Stars,
33 Bronze Stars and four Soldier's Medals by the end
of the war. In nearly 80 hazardous missions, they
never lost a man in action.
Besides these organized special operations
efforts, a number of U.S. Army officers conducted
guerrilla operations behind Japanese lines in the
Philippines. Colonel Russell Volckman, who later would
play an important role in the birth of Special Forces,
escaped from the enemy and formed a Filipino guerrilla
band in northern Luzon, which by 1945 consisted of
five regiments. Major Windell Fertig, a reservist,
raised his own guerrilla force that ultimately totaled
some 20,000 fighters.
These special operations units of
the second World War were known as the Army's elite.
Their philosophy was simple: shock the enemy with
quick strikes and deep thrusts, leaving him paralyzed
and confused. It was the 20th-century application
of principles first formulated by Rogers' Rangers,
and it became the basis of the modern-day Ranger force.
But at the same time, in areas that
even the Devil's Brigade and Darby's Rangers never
ventured, there was a whole different ball game being
played by a whole different team. It consisted of
small parachuting units operating behind enemy lines,
developing a network of contacts, giving instructions
to local fighters, and waging guerrilla warfare on
a helpless enemy. It was a new kind of special operations,
taking a bit of the Swamp Fox and a bit of Mosby,
and combining it with new techniques of airborne and
guerrilla fighting. There wasn't a name for it yet,
but the agency that developed it was called the Office
of Strategic Services.
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Shadow Warriors: The OSS
The Office of Strategic Services
was the product of William Donovan, an imposing man-mountain
of a visionary whose propensity for freewheeling activity
earned him the nickname of "Wild Bill."
Donovan was tough and smart, a veteran of World War
I who received the Medal of Honor for heroism on the
Western Front in October 1918, and who made a fortune
as a Wall Street lawyer during the Twenties and Thirties.
When World War II finally erupted in Europe and threatened
to engulf the United States, Donovan was able to convince
President Franklin D. Roosevelt that a new type of
organization would have to be formed, one that would
collect intelligence and wage secret operations behind
enemy lines.
In 1941, President Roosevelt directed
Donovan to form this agency, called the Coordinator
of Intelligence (COI), and Donovan, who had been a
civilian since World War I, was made a colonel. COI
blossomed quickly, forming operational sites in England,
North Africa, India, Burma and China. In 1942, the
agency was renamed the OSS and Donovan became a major
general. The primary operation of the OSS in Europe
was called the Jedburgh mission. It consisted of dropping
three-man teams into France, Belgium and Holland,
where they trained partisan resistance movements and
conducted guerrilla operations against the Germans
in preparation for the D-Day invasion. Other OSS operations
took place in Asia, most spectacularly in Burma, where
OSS Detachment 101 organized 11,000 Kachin tribesmen
into a force that eventually killed 10,000 Japanese
at a loss of only 206 of its own.
After the war, President Harry S.
Truman disbanded the OSS, but not before it had left
a legacy still felt today. From its intelligence operations
came the nucleus of men and techniques that would
give birth to the Central
Intelligence Agency on September 18, 1947. (Indeed,
the first directors of the CIA were veterans of the
OSS.) From its guerrilla operations came the nucleus
of men and techniques that would give birth to the
Special Forces in June 1952.
Colonel Aaron Bank and Colonel Russell
Volckmann, two OSS operatives who remained in the
military after the war, worked tirelessly to convince
the Army to adopt its own unconventional guerrilla-style
force. They had an ally in Brigadier General Robert
McClure, who headed the Army's psychological warfare
staff in the Pentagon. Bank and Volckmann convinced
the Army chiefs that there were areas in the world
not susceptible to conventional warfare - Soviet-dominated
Eastern Europe especially - but that would make ideal
targets for unconventional harassment and guerrilla
fighting. Special operations as envisioned by the
two men, and by Bank in particular, were a force multiplier:
a small number of soldiers who could sow a disproportionately
large amount of trouble for the enemy. Confusion would
reign among enemy ranks and objectives would be accomplished
with an extreme economy of manpower. It was a bold
idea, one that went against the grain of traditional
concepts, but by 1952 the Army was finally ready to
embark on a new era of unconventional warfare.
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Special Forces: The Early Years
The new organization was dubbed Special
Forces, a designation derived from the OSS whose operational
teams in the field were given the same name in 1944.
The Army allocated 2,300 personnel slots for the unit
and assigned it to Fort
Bragg, North Carolina. In the spring of 1952,
Bank went to Fort Bragg to choose a suitable location
for a Psychological Warfare/Special Forces center.
He chose a remote area of the post known as Smoke
Bomb Hill, not knowing that within ten years it would
become one of the busiest places in the Army.
He then went about assembling a cadre
of officers and NCOs who would serve as the hard-core
foundation of the new unit, and who would act as a
training staff to perpetuate and flesh out the fledgling
organization. Bank didn't want raw recruits. He wanted
the best troops in the Army, and he got them: former
OSS officers, airborne troops, ex-Ranger troops and
combat veterans of World War II and Korea. They were
an unusual lot, a motivated bunch, men who were looking
for new challenges to conquer - the more arduous the
better. Virtually all spoke at least two languages,
had at least a sergeant's rank, and were trained in
infantry and parachute skills. They were all volunteers
willing to work behind enemy lines, in civilian clothes
if necessary.
That last item was no small matter.
If caught operating in civilian clothes, a soldier
was no longer protected by the Geneva Convention and
would more than likely be shot on sight if captured.
But these first volunteers didn't worry about the
risks: they were long accustomed to living with anger.
Many of them had come from Eastern Europe where they
had fled the tyranny of communist rule at the end
of World War II.
After months of intense preparation,
Bank's unit was finally activated June 19, 1952, at
Fort Bragg. It was designated the 10th Special Forces
Group, with Bank as commander. On the day of activation,
the total strength of the group was ten soldiers -
Bank, one warrant officer, and eight enlisted men.
That was soon to change.
Within months, the first volunteers
reported to the 10th Group by the hundreds as they
completed the initial phase of their Special Forces
training. As soon as the 10th Group became large enough,
Bank began training his troops in the most advanced
techniques of unconventional warfare. As defined by
the Army, the main mission of Bank's unit was "to
infiltrate by land, sea or air, deep into enemy-occupied
territory and organize the resistance/guerrilla potential
to conduct Special Forces operations, with emphasis
on guerrilla warfare." But there were secondary
missions as well.
They included deep-penetration raids,
intelligence missions and counterinsurgency operations.
It was a tall order, one which demanded a commitment
to professionalism and excellence perhaps unparalleled
in American military history. But Bank's men were
up to the challenge.
They had been through tough training
before; their airborne and Ranger tabs were proof
of that. But working for Special Forces was not going
to be simply a rehash of Ranger techniques. If the
volunteers didn't appreciate the difference between
Rangers and Special Forces when they first signed
up, they did when they went through Bank's training.
As Bank put it, "Our training included many more
complex subjects and was geared to entirely different,
more difficult, comprehensive missions and complex
operations."
The Rangers of World War II and Korea
had been designed as light-infantry shock troops;
their mission was to hit hard, hit fast, then get
out so larger and more heavily armed units could follow
through, much the same as the modern Ranger force.
Special Forces, however, were designed to spend months,
even years, deep within hostile territory. They would
have to be self-sustaining. They would have to speak
the language of their target area. They would have
to know how to survive on their own without extensive
resupply from the outside.
After less than a year and a half
together as a full Special Forces group, Bank's men
proved to the Army's satisfaction that they had mastered
the skills of their new trade. So on November 11,
1953, in the aftermath of an aborted uprising in East
Germany, half of the 10th Special Forces Group was
permanently deployed to Bad To1z, West Germany. The
other half remained at Fort Bragg, where they were
redesignated as the 77th Special Forces Group.
The split of the 10th and the 77th
was the first sign that Special Forces had established
themselves as an essential part of the Army's basic
structure. For the rest of the 1950s, Special Forces
would grow slowly but consistently into a formidable
organization. On April 1, 1956, 16 soldiers from the
77th were activated as the 14th Special Forces Operational
Detachment; in June they were sent to Hawaii, and
shortly thereafter to Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Special Forces were now casting their glance to the
Far East, departing from their previously heavy European
orientation.
(This was not the Special Forces'
first involvement in the Far East. By the end of 1952
the first Special Forces troops to operate behind
enemy lines had been deployed to Korea on missions
that remained classified for nearly 30 years. Anti-communist
guerrillas with homes in North Korea and historical
ties to Seoul had joined the United Nations Partisan
Forces-Korea.
Known in Korean as "fighters
of liberty," the UNPFK soon became known as "donkeys"
by Americans who derived the nickname from the Korean
word for liberty, dong-il. From tiny islands off the
Korean coast, the Donkeys conducted raids, rescued
downed airmen and maintained electronic facilities.
Under the guidance of the Special Forces and other
U.S. cadre, they eventually numbered 22,000 and claimed
69,000 enemy casualties.)
The activation of the 14th SFOD was
shortly followed by three other operational detachments,
each designated for Asia and the Pacific - the 12th,
13th and 16th. These were soon combined into the 8231st
Army Special Operational Detachment. On June 17, 1957,
the 14th and 823 1st joined to form the 1st Special
Forces Group, stationed in Okinawa and responsible
for the Far Eastern theater of operation.
By 1958, the basic operational unit
of Special Forces had emerged as a 12-man team known
as the A-detachment or A-team. Each member of the
A-detachment - two officers, two operations and intelligence
sergeants, two weapons sergeants, two communications
sergeants, two medics and two engineers - were trained
in unconventional warfare, were cross-trained in each
others' specialties, and spoke at least one foreign
language. This composition allowed each detachment
to operate if necessary in two six-man teams, or split-A
teams.
By the time John F. Kennedy was inaugurated
as president in January 1961, the three Special Forces
groups - the 10th, the 7th (redesignated from the
77th on June 6, 1960) and the 1st - had firmly entrenched
themselves as the Army's elite. With the ascension
of President Kennedy, word of their prowess spread
worldwide. But even more importantly, Special Forces
grew at a speed unthinkable to Bank and other SF proponents
of the early 1950s.
In 1961, President Kennedy visited
Fort Bragg. He inspected the 82nd Airborne Division
and other conventional troops of the XVIII Airborne
Corps and liked what he saw. But what he liked even
more were the Special Forces. As a student of military
affairs, President Kennedy had developed an interest
in counterinsurgency - the art and method of defeating
guerrilla movements. As he gazed at the ranks of Special
Forces troops, he realized he had the ideal vehicle
for carrying out such missions. With President Kennedy
firmly behind them, new Special Forces groups sprang
up with rapidity. On September 21, 1961, the 5th Group
was activated followed in 1963 by the 8th Group on
April 1, the 6th on May 1, and the 3rd on December
5.
President Kennedy's interest in the
Special Forces also lead to the September 21, 1961,
adoption of the green beret as the official headgear
of all Special Forces troops. Until then, the beret
had faced an uphill fight in its struggle to achieve
official Army recognition. After his visit to Fort
Bragg, the president told the Pentagon that he considered
the green beret to be "symbolic of one of the
highest levels of courage and achievement of the United
States military." Soon, the green beret became
synonymous with Special Forces, so much so that the
two terms became interchangeable.
And, indeed, it was fitting that
the men of the Special Forces finally had the right
to wear their own headgear because they were now on
the brink of proving just how courageous and committed
they were. Vietnam was beckoning.
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Special Forces in Vietnam
Nam Dong, Lang Vei, Dak To, A Shau,
Plei Mei - these were just some of the places Special
Forces troops fought and died for during their 14-year
stay in South Vietnam. It was a stay that began in
June 1956 when the original 16 members of the 14th
Special Forces Operational Detachment entered Vietnam
to train a cadre of indigenous Vietnamese Special
Forces teams. In that same year, on October 21, the
first American soldier died in Vietnam - Captain Harry
G. Cramer Jr. of the 14th SFOD.
Throughout the remainder of the 1950s
and early 1960s, the number of Special Forces military
advisors in Vietnam increased steadily. Their responsibility
was to train South Vietnamese soldiers in the art
of counterinsurgency and to mold various native tribes
into a credible, anti-communist threat. During the
early years, elements from the different Special Forces
groups were involved in advising the South Vietnamese.
But in September 1964, the first step was taken in
making Vietnam the exclusive operational province
of 5th Group when it set up its provisional headquarters
in Nha Trang. Six months later in February, Nha Trang
became the 5th's permanent headquarters. From that
point, Vietnam was mainly the 5th's show until 1971
when it returned to Fort Bragg.
By the time the 5th left Southeast
Asia, its soldiers had won 16 of the 17 Medals of
Honor awarded to the Special Forces in Vietnam, plus
one Distinguished Service Medal, 90 Distinguished
Service Crosses, 814 Silver Stars, 13,234 Bronze Stars,
235 Legions of Merit, 46 Distinguished Flying Crosses,
232 Soldier's Medals, 4,891 Air Medals, 6,908 Army
Commendation Medals and 2,658 Purple Hearts. It was
a brilliant record, one that was built solely on blood
and sacrifice.
Not to be overlooked, other Special
Forces training teams were operating in the 1960s
in Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Columbia and the
Dominican Republic. Counter-insurgency forces of the
8th Special Forces Group conducted clandestine operations
against guerrilla forces, carrying out some 450 missions
between 1965 and 1968. In 1968, Special Forces were
involved in tracking down and capturing the notorious
Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, in the wilds of
south-central Bolivia.
Southeast Asia, however, was to remain
the Special Forces' primary focus. Through their unstinting
labors, Special Forces troops eventually established
254 outposts throughout Vietnam, many of them defended
by a single A-team and hundreds of friendly natives.
The Special Forces earned their reputation
in places like Song Zoai and Plei Mei, where the Viet
Cong and North Vietnamese threw everything they had
at them but found out that wasn't enough. They won
their Medals of Honor in places like Nam Dong, where
Captain Roger H.C. Donlon claimed the war's first
Medal of Honor for his actions on July 5, 1964, when
he led Nam Dong's successful defense against a Viet
Cong attack, despite sustaining a mortar wound to
the stomach. "Pain, the sensation of pain, can
be masked by other emotions in a situation like that,"
Donlon recalled. "I was fighting mad right from
the start; I also felt fear from the start ... fear
anybody would feel. It got to the point where we were
throwing the enemy's grenades back at them. Just picking
them up and throwing those grenades back before they
could blow."
Back home in America, a confused
public searching for heroes in a strange and unfamiliar
war quickly latch onto the Special Forces. John Wayne
made a movie about them, Barry Sadler had a number-one
hit song, "The
Ballad of the Green Beret", and the Green
Beret took its place along side the coonskincap and
cowboy hat as one of America's Mythic pieces of apparel.
But fighting in remote areas of Vietnam
- publicity to the contrary - wasn't the only mission
of the Special Forces. They were also responsible
for training thousands of Vietnam's ethnic tribesmen
in the techniques of guerrilla warfare. They took
the Montagnards, the Nungs, the Cao Dei and others
and molded them into the 60,000-strong Civil Irregular
Defense Group (CIDG). CIDG troops became the Special
Forces' most valuable ally in battles fought in faraway
corners of Vietnam, out of reach of conventional back-up
forces. Other missions included civic-action projects,
in which Special Forces troops built schools, hospitals
and government buildings, provided medical care to
civilians and dredged canals. This was the flip side
of the vicious battles, the part of the war designed
to win the hear and minds of a distant and different
people. But although the Special Forces drew the allegiance
of civilians almost everywhere they went, the war
as a whole was not as successful.
President Lyndon Johnson had committed
the first big conventional units to the war in March
1965, when Marine battalions landed at Da Nang to
provide perimeter security to the air base there.
Then in June, the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade entered
the country, followed in July by the 1st Air Cavalry
Division. From then on, a continual stream of Army
and Marine units flowed into Vietnam until they numbered
over 500,000 by 1968. But although American conventional
forces scored successes in every major battle they
fought, there was still no clear end in sight to a
war many Americans back home regarded as a quagmire.
So in 1969, after President Richard
M. Nixon took office, the United States began its
withdrawal from Vietnam, a process known as Vietnamization.
Gradually the Special Forces turned over their camps
to the South Vietnamese. On March 5, 1971, 5th Group
returned to Fort Bragg, although some Special Forces
teams remained in Thailand from where they launched
secret missions into Vietnam. But by the end of 1972,
the Special Forces role in Vietnam was over.
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Special Forces: Since Vietnam
The years immediately following Vietnam
were lean ones for the Special Forces. The 3rd, 6th
and 8th Special Forces groups were inactivated, and
there was a general de-emphasis of special operations
as the Army concentrated once more on conventional
warfare, turning its gaze from the jungles of Asia
to the well-worn tank paths of Europe.
To prevent a further emasculation
of their capabilities, Special Forces leaders adopted
a program called SPARTAN - Special Proficiency at
Rugged Training and Nation-building. SPARTAN was designed
to demonstrate the multiplicity of talents Special
Forces troops possessed, showing that they were not
outmoded simply because the war was over.
Under the aegis of SPARTAN, the 5th
and 7th groups worked with Indian tribes in Florida,
Arizona and Montana to build roads and medical facilities,
and provided free medical treatment to impoverished
citizens of Hoke and Anson counties in North Carolina.
But however noble SPARTAN was, it
was not entirely what Special Forces were designed
for. They were designed to train and fight unconventional
warfare, and as President Ronald W. Reagan took office
in 1981, they got that chance once again. With the
advent of the Reagan presidency, defense policy received
a renewed emphasis. Special Forces in particular were
among the beneficiaries of this new attention. The
need for Special Forces capabilities had become apparent
with the rise of insurgencies as far away as Africa
and Asia, and as close to home as Central America.
To meet the challenges of a changing world, the Army
injected a revitalized esprit into the Special Forces.
The Special Forces qualification
course was made longer and tougher to see that only
the highest-caliber soldiers joined ranks with the
Green Berets. In June 1983, the Army authorized a
uniform tab for wear on the left shoulder solely by
Special Forces troops. The Army established on October
1, 1984, a separate career field for Special Forces.
The warrant officer career field soon followed and,
on April 9, 1987, the Army Chief of Staff established
a separate branch of the Army for Special Forces officers.
But despite going through numerous
changes after Vietnam, the basic element of Special
Forces - the A-detachment - has remained largely unchanged.
The only detachment position to have changed fundamentally
is the team executive officer, which is no longer
filled by a lieutenant, but by a warrant officer with
several years of A-detachment experience.
During the 1980s, Special Forces
teams were deployed to dozens of countries around
the globe, facing the challenges of foreign internal
defense. Missions varied from training U.S.-allied
armies to defend themselves to offering humanitarian
aid, like medical care and building construction,
in remote villages of Third World countries on nearly
every continent. Special Forces proved particularly
successful in El Salvador and Honduras, preventing
civil war in neighboring Nicaragua from spreading
beyond its borders.
In December 1989, Special Forces
were called upon to serve alongside conventional Army
units in the Operation Just Cause invasion of Panama.
Designated Task Force Black, soldiers from the 7th
Special Forces Group, many of whom were already stationed
in Panama, supported the entire operation by conducting
surveillance and implementing blocking tactics.
Task Force Black at H-hour secured
a bridge at the Pacora River, engaged Panama Defense
Forces in an intense fire fight and, despite being
outnumbered, succeeded in preventing PDF reinforcements
from reaching U.S. Rangers. The Green Berets suffered
no casualty and set a standard of excellence for Special
Forces of the 1990s and beyond.
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Special Forces in the 21st Century
To meet the challenges of the future,
Special Forces are training harder than ever before.
They have to. As conflict continues to threaten dozens
of U.S. allies throughout the world, the Defense Department
looks for an answer more and more to the unique training
and experience of the Green Berets. Fort Bragg's John
F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School,
where prospective Special Forces soldiers are carefully
selected, is training more men than ever for Special
Forces qualification and dangerous tasks like freefall
parachuting, escape missions and maritime operations.
The June 1990 reactivation of Fort
Bragg's 3rd Special Forces Group has brought to five
the number of Special Forces groups on active-duty
status. Other Special Forces groups are the original
10th Group stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, with
its 1st Battalion still stationed at Stuggart, Germany;
the lst Group at Fort Lewis, Washington, with C Company,
1st Battalion, stationed in Okinawa; the 5th Group
at Fort Campbell, Kentucky; and the 7th Group at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina. National Guard units include
the 19th and 20th Groups.
These forces are not standing idly
by, waiting to be challenged. They are deployed where
the threat of conflict is real - in Latin America,
Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa - training
U.S. allies to defend themselves, countering the threat
of dangerous insurgents, serving as teachers and ambassadors
while developing important international relations.
They are following the admirable principles of the
Special Forces Creed.
