In North Africa and Italy the Army ignored the role that commando-type units, such as the 1st Special Service Force, might have played in operations behind enemy lines, leaving the field to the Office of Strategic Services. Both OSS personnel and their British counterparts in the Special Operations Executive were supervised by the G-3 Division of the theater headquarters, but the Americans tended to be dominant in North Africa, while the British enjoyed greater influence in the eastern Mediterranean. Although OSS personnel initially lacked experience, resources, and the respect of skeptical staff officers in the theater, the agency soon proved its value. Prior to TORCH, agents established contact with Allied sympathizers in North Africa and gathered intelligence vital to the invasion. To guard against a possible Axis thrust through Spanish Morocco into the Allied rear, two civilian operatives even organized warrior tribesmen of the region into a guerrilla force. At Salerno an OSS detachment provided critical tactical intelligence to Darby's Rangers during their defense of the Sorrentino peninsula. Nevertheless, OSS personnel often complained that their operations were misunderstood by field commanders, citing one colonel who expected them to "sit in foxholes and toss petard grenades and Molotov cocktails at German heavy tanks as they rolled over us." Nevertheless, their activities earned the interest and approval of General Clark, who gave them vehicles, rations, and a free hand.
Rangers enter Comiso, Sicily.
As the Allied armies expanded their foothold on the Italian peninsula during the fall of 1943, the newly arrived operational groups began to establish bases on offshore islands for raids against the German-held northern coastline. In February 1943 Eisenhower agreed to allow the OSS's Special Operations staff at Algiers to employ four to eight of these commando cells to organize and otherwise assist guerrilla forces in Italy and southern France. Shortly after the Italian surrender in September, Donovan, who was visiting Algiers at the time, ordered an operational group to accompany a French expeditionary force to Corsica, where partisans had revolted against the German garrison. Since the Germans had already decided to withdraw their troops to the Italian mainland, the operational groups and their French allies merely harassed the departing enemy. Immediately following the German evacuation, the groups established an advance base there, as well as observation posts on the nearby islands of Gorgona and Capraia. At Corsica, they were only thirty-five miles from the Italian coast.
From their new bases, the operational groups conducted raids against German communications along the Italian coast in an attempt to divert enemy troops from the main front (Map 3). The narrow, rocky coastal plains of the Italian peninsula were crossed by numerous roads and railways, which the Germans used as lines of supply. Night after night, operational groups crawled ashore to attack the most vulnerable points and reconnoiter enemy installations. Observers at Gorgona directed air strikes against oil tanks in the harbor at Livorno before German raids finally forced evacuation of the island. But not all OG missions ended successfully. In March 1944 a fifteen-man force, code named GINNY, landed south of La Spezia with orders to dynamite a railway tunnel on the main supply line for the front south of Rome. Local inhabitants discovered the party's poorly concealed rubber boats and alerted the Germans, who found the party hiding in a barn. Although in uniform at the time, the captured OG members were summarily executed in accordance with Adolph Hitler's orders to liquidate all commandos.
Rangers securing Arzew habor, Algeria
After transferring its bases to the Italian mainland in the late summer of 1944, the Office of Strategic Services placed a greater emphasis on partisan warfare. Up to that time, the lack of airlift and other resources and the confused political situation resulting from the sudden collapse of Italy in the fall of 1943 had hindered OSS efforts to establish contact with the resistance in northern Italy. In mid-1944, however, the Americans began to drop supplies and operatives into the region on a much larger scale. At that time, nine operational groups parachuted into the area to discover an indigenous resistance movement already in place, but desperately in need of equipment and supplies. As supply drops and word of Allied successes swelled their strength, the partisans subsequently took the offensive, harassing German forces withdrawing to the Gothic Line during the summer and fall of 1944. With winter, the decline in air resupply due to poor flying weather enabled the Germans to strike back against the guerrillas, who faded into the mountains. Their retreat proved only temporary, for by the spring of 1945 seventy-five OSS teams were equipping and training the resistance bands in preparation for the final Allied effort in Italy.
When the Allied offensive crossed the Po River in late April 1945, partisans, supported by operational groups, rose in revolt throughout northern Italy. Assisted by these American operatives, partisans cut key routes from Lake Como to the Brenner Pass, while south of Piacenza and Parma OG teams organized successful roadblocks on key transport routes and harassed German columns and troop concentrations. Guerrilla roadblocks aided the 92d Infantry Division in its capture of Pontremoli, and in Genoa 15,000 partisans, directed by operational groups, prevented the destruction of the port facilities and took some 3,000 prisoners. In all, Italian partisans killed or wounded over 3,000 Axis troops, captured 81,000 others, and prevented the destruction of key facilities in the Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Modena areas.
Ranger fully loaded.
Although British SOE agents dominated operations in the eastern Mediterranean, the Office of Strategic Services still played an important role there. Seeking to pin down German forces far from the OVERLORD invasion, American operatives agreed to provide arms to Communist and socialist guerrillas in Greece as early as October 1943 in return for their subordination to the authority of the theater commander. While the partisans increased their activities, operational groups began to infiltrate into Greece early in 1944 to conduct a series of raids against German road and rail communications in Macedonia, Thessaly, and the Peloponnesus. With the aid of Communist guerrillas, an SO party in May demolished two bridges on the Orient Express line, temporarily interrupting the supply of Turkish chrome to Germany. Extensive OSS operations in Greece continued up to the German withdrawal, ending only in December with the outbreak of a local, but bitter, civil war between the various resistance groups. Off the coast of Yugoslavia, operational groups helped defend the island of Vis, a key base for the supply of Communist partisans under Josip Broz Tito, and joined British commandos in raids along the Dalmatian coast, remaining in the field up to the German departure from Yugoslavia in July 1944.
Brig. Gen. Robert T. Frederick (U.S. Army Photograph)
In the initial assault against Axis-dominated Europe, U.S. forces could thus claim many significant achievements in the field of special operations. At Arzew, El Guettar, Gela, Salerno, Monte La Difensa, Anzio, and the Iles d'Hyeres, the Ranger battalions and 1st Special Service Force had performed missions critical to the success of conventional forces, while in the interior OSS commandos had raided German communications and provided direct support to partisans in northern Italy and the Balkans. The ability of these forces to take advantage of the rough terrain and extended coastlines characteristic of the theater proved to be a major factor in their success. Nevertheless, for the most part, the conventional Allied campaign in the Mediterranean proceeded as if special operations never existed. The relative insignificance of such activities reflected both American inexperience and a chronic shortage of materiel and manpower resources. But the basic cause was the absence of any doctrine of special operations. Field commanders, uncertain about the proper employment of the Ranger battalions and the 1st Special Service Force, depleted their strength in line operations and eventually disbanded them rather than employ them in a systematic program of raids that would have used their special capabilities. Moreover, the partisan efforts in Italy and the Balkans had only a nuisance value and were rarely tied into the operations of conventional Allied combat units. Thus, despite some isolated successes, special operations made only a limited contribution to the hard-earned success of Allied arms in the Mediterranean.
Additional Sources:
www.thedropzone.org
www.grunts.net
www.rangerfamily.org
www.ranger.org
www.oldgloryprints.com
