From Oss to Green Beret [Paperback]

Aaron Bank (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1987

Recounting his own experiences of warfare and shared dedication, the founder of the Green Berets describes the operations with the French Resistance, the secret plot to capture Hitler, and his meeting with Ho Chi Minh in Indochina. Reissue.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Green Beret founder Col. Bank recounts his warfare experiences as a member of the military's special forces.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pocket (December 1, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671639234
• ISBN-13: 978-0671639235
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #572,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, January 19, 2012

By 

Paige Becker (HOPE MILLS, NC, US) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: From Oss to Green Beret (Paperback)

This was an awesome deal for this book. Excited to start this good read! I was told to check this out by one of my supervisors. Interesting facts brought me to buy this.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A true American original, September 11, 2009

By 

Far Lefkas (Balto.-WDC metro area) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: From Oss to Green Beret (Paperback)

Memoirs & bios by career military people are not among my nonfiction favorites, & when I have read them, they're by people that have bucked tradition & the system: in general, I like tales of underdogs & rebels. So it's interesting to read on the Internet gushing praise for the granddaddy of U.S. Special Forces, Aaron Bank, when he helped create those U.S. Army forces, later called the Green Berets, thru dogged determination & steadfast bucking of tradition & the system, thereby eliciting the chagrin & ire of his superiors.

After the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed by Executive Order in 1942 & under the direction of WWI hero Col. "Wild Bill" Donovan, mainly as an intelligence-gathering agency, the call went out for people, civilian & military, with European language skills. After a career as a world traveler & multi-lingual lifeguard & PT aide @the upscale Biarritz vacation resort on France's Bay of Biscay, American Bank is suddenly at Camp Polk, LA, in the (& his) early 40s (he enlisted in his late 30s) & deemed "too old" for combat. When recruiting ads for language skills appeared on the barracks bulletin boards, Bank ignored the old Army adage, "never volunteer."

Volunteers were indoctrinated into hand-to-hand combat, map-reading, sabotage, intelligence gathering, & recruitment of guerilla forces, in Scotland & later at Petersborough, north London, by soldiers of the British OSS equivalent, the Special Operations Executive (SOE: another American, Virginia Hall, also trained with & worked for the SOE; her story & that of her codenamed prosthetic leg are told in the book, Wolves at the Door, by Judith Pearson). Eventually, Bank's operation---to parachute into France & recruit & train dissidents & anti-Nazis---was named the Jedburgh Mission, after the 12th-century Scottish guerilla fighters that punished British invaders.

It was, as Bank tells it, a dicey game; moreover, as he states several times, trained cadres in civilian clothing or in the uniforms of the enemy were not subject to the edicts of the Geneva Convention: prisoners could be shot immediately. After the liberation of France, Bank was eager to take on a new mission & he soon received it; to conduct the fabled Operation Iron Cross: capturing, if possible, but killing, if necessary, Nazi brass that were expected to retreat to the Alpine Redoubt in Austria. This was the ultimate test of his unconventional warfare (UW) & guerilla tactics skills: to cull teams of saboteurs & shooters from German POWs. Some were German army soldiers; some were communists & other anti-Nazi types taken from German POW camps when France was liberated. Some will dress in civvies; some will dress in German army uniforms. They will carry German weapons & use German explosives. Bank, who spoke German but less fluently than he spoke French, would pass himself off as a collaborating Frenchman from Martinique & hope that Nazis had no clue what a Martiniquan accent sounded like.

When Gen. Donovan was briefed on the mission & told that the guerillas will include an uncomfortable number of communists, he asked, "Will Bank's commies kill Nazis?" Once again, Bank cautioned his cadres that it'd be very unpleasant for them if they're caught.

On the eve of the proposed insertion, the mission was scrapped: Nazis were not fleeing Germany & the U.S. Seventh Army had overrun the area of operation. Bank even suggested that the U.S. State Dept. was uncomfortable with unleashing known communists into a region that would likely be Allied occupied after the war. Bank apologized to his troops & returned them to their camps.

Always eager for a new mission, Bank & compatriots were parachuted into what was then called French Indochina, soon to be Viet Nam, to search for Japanese POW camps. This was after the Japanese surrender, & the Japanese that had occupied nearly all of eastern Asia were to be repatriated; during their occupation, tho, the Japanese had permitted Vichy-friendly French to still run Indochina, much to the chagrin of the popular nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, who had doggedly battled the French & then the Japanese with his own guerilla army, the Viet Minh.

Altho suspicious of Ho's communist leanings (he had studied in Moscow), Bank admired the popular & charismatic leader, who had nothing but good things to say about the US of A &, ironically nowadays, nothing but suspicion for the Russians. Anticipating 1) setting up his own popular govt. & 2) aid from the US of A, Ho asked Bank if he could obtain copies of the Declaration of Independence & the U.S. Constitution for him. Ho concluded that if the French returned as customers, they would be welcomed; if they returned as soldiers, he would fight them. We all know what transpired.

Later, in Korea, Bank was recruited by another trend-bucker, BGen. Robert McClure, the head of the Army's Psychological Warfare (Psy War) staff. McClure had first-hand experience working with the OSS Psy War branch in Europe & learned of the activity of OSS special operations. (For the uninitiated, OSS, which by the time of the Korean War had been dissolved & replaced eventually by the CIA, had 2 main branches: one for intelligence gathering [to include propaganda] & one for special operations; which was the recruiting & training of indigenous guerilla forces.) Since the end of WWII, McClure had been soft-peddling the idea of a special operations force for the Army.

The primary obstacle for McClure, Bank, & Col. Russ Volckmann (former guerilla trainer in the Philippines) was that the Army brass mistrusted any idea of an operational force that was not under the aegis of Army intelligence or the logistics branch. Moreover, another hurdle to overcome was the distinction betw. Army Rangers (commandos), which indeed conducted UW behind enemy lines, & an agency that would train indigenous personnel to do the fighting. In fact, during this period, the Army Rangers were disbanded, testament to the desire of the Army brass to proceed with conventional warfare only.

Altho Bank & his comrades prepared meticulous reports on intelligence, logistics requirements, training, & force constitution, all specifically oriented toward operations in Soviet satellite (Eastern European) nations, they continued to meet resistance among the traditionalists, until June 17, 1953 (Bank mistakenly cited Autumn, 1953), when a workers uprising in East Berlin was met with a harsh counteroffensive from Soviet tanks. With the sudden recognition that Eastern Bloc citizens were willing to take up arms against their Soviet oppressors, Bank et al. were finally granted in 1953 their 10th (to convince the Soviets that their were 9 other such groups) Special Forces Group, to be stationed @Ft. Bragg, NC. Recruits arrived in the form of not only former OSS operatives but former Army Rangers (who were, according to Bank, initially counseled by superiors not to volunteer for this loose-cannon outfit).

Bank's account is something of an anomaly among books on military careers: it's strictly business, & there're no tear-jerking appeals to religious faith or patriotism, weak-wristed handwringing over media betrayals, or other such diversionary tactics. Bank retired from the Army in 1958; this memoir was first published in 1986, when Bank was 84 years old: quite unlike the NYT best-sellers that seem to appear 10 minutes after the author, so-called, has become a public figure. & Bank & his compatriots are anomalies among military figures: they took risks where the traditionalists took a powder & succeeded where the Army hierarchy insisted there was no success. In fact, a case could be made that there's a vast difference betw. what were risk & success in Bank's time & what they are now.