Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois


Phil Davis


"The Black Devil Bridgade, The True
 Story of the First Special Service Force".

Phil Davis
  SCRA meeting 10/1/07
November 2007 GunNews




Phil Davis holds up his author-signed copy of this book.


They started out for a mission that was basically a suicide mission.  They were going to go deep into Norway to blow up hydro electric plants that provided electricity to Hitler's war machine.  They were going to go into the French Alps and the Italian Alps and fight against the vaunted German Alpine divisions. 

Instead, as usually happens in wars, things don't go the way they are supposed to go.  Their mission in Norway got scrubbed so because they had this group of well trained men together, they sent them to the one place they were sure they needed them.  They believed the Japanese were an imminent threat in the Aleutian Islands.

They sent them to invade the Island of Kiska.  This is where they first saw action.  They stormed the beach and it was a milk run and they found supplies on the beach.

The first special service force was a volunteer organization.   They went out and activiely sought outdoorsman, skiers, not fighters, trappers, hunters, outdoorsman, people who could shoot, and people who could hunt.  They wanted hard rock miners because they knew explosives were going to be involved.  They wanted people who knew what they did.  They also wanted people who were all go and no quit.

They assembled these people at Helena, Montana and they trained them there for months.  To say that they left a lasting impression on the people of Helena, Montana was an understatement.

This is how they trained the troops.  They gave the troops their basic training, they gave them their basic weaponry skills and then they gave them the weapons and told them to go into the woods and play with them.  They were told they could practice demolition by knocking down an old road bridge.  They blew up the new one.  The old one was being replaced.  They used so many explosives they knocked all the windows out of the local school.

They were also encouraged to go home with the M1-Garand rifles and hunt deer with their Johnson light machine guns.  They had the Thompsons.  When they got done they had put together a force that was so united, and so unified, it didn't matter that half of them were Canadian and half of them were American.   They were all members of the force. They didn't call themselves the Special Forces and they never called themselves the Devil's Brigade, that's Hollywood.  What they did call themselves was the Force.

"The Black Devil Brigade, The True Story of the First Special Service Force".During World War II, at the beginning, a special services company was quite often thought to be something other than a military combat unit.  Quite often a band is called a Special Service Unit.  When they arrived at their next duty station which was Italy, they said, "What is your unit?"  "First Special Service Force".  "Where are your instruments?"  One guy held up an M1-Girand.

This was an elite group of men, they did what no one else would do.  At the Battle of Defensa which was the same area as Monte Cassino the British and Mark Clark's fifth army had tried to take Monte Defensa for weeks.  These guys did it in one week. 

They didn't want BAR's, they couldn't get enough of them so they found a bunch of Marine paratroopers who had a whole bunch of Johnson light machine guns.  They were sitting around and the Marines didn't like the Johnny guns.  So they traded them two tons of explosives for 125 light machine guns.  Merry Christmas, you've got your light machine guns and they used them all through the war.  It was nice because you could change the barrels out of them real quick just by pressing a button, something you couldn't do with the BAR.  They were lighter and they shot faster and it was the trademark of the First Special Service Force.

After Defensa and Remetanea they took part in the landing at Anzio.  Anzio is where they really got their reputation.  Where as other American troops were digging in along the Mussalini Canal, the First Special Service Force was going miles behind German lines carrying out raids that could only be considered suicidal.  After their first few months in combat they developed what can be considered a case of fatalism.  Many of them were convinced they were going to die so why what not go out live. 

They started doing things that we would consider crazy, crazy brave.  A man would pick up a German helmet, put it on and walk up to a German sentry with his Thompson under his raincoat with one bullet in the chamber so he didn't have the magazine sticking out and say, "cigarette?" and as the guy answered him in German, "pow".

Another guy who was the instructor for marshal arts for a major police department, either San Francisco or San Diego, would go out barehanded.  This was a lot more quiet to kill Germans by coming behind them, grabbing them by the throat pulling their heads back so fast it broke their necks.

They had little stickers that had this emblem on them.  They had a little peel off back just like a bumper sticke and in German underneath it said, "Das dicke Ende kommt noch," said to translate to "The Worst is yet to Come".  They would sneak into a German tent with three soldiers, slit the throat of the one in the middle, stick a sticker on his forehead and be gone without waking the others. They were horrified by these men.

Where they got the idea of the Devil's Brigade was battle hardened German regiments that had fought in Russia, North Africa, Italy, Greece, were terrified of these men.  They called them (Die schwarzen Teufel) the Black Devils because they would come in at night with their faces blacked up wearing stocking caps.  They would kill silently, miles behind the lines.  Most people think that safety in a combat zone is 100, 200 or 300 yards behind the front line.  These people were going four and five miles behind German lines every night and leaving strings of dead bodies with stickers.

Imagine the horror of waking up and seeing the guy who was sleeping right next to you and thinking, "Gosh, I'm glad I wasn't in the middle last night."

 They were improvisers and they did not give up.  After Anzio they were an instrumental part of  the invasion of southern France.  At one point all the other regiments around them had pulled back.  One company of the First Special Service Force held the ground so long and had fired so many rounds that literally the bullets from their Johnson machine guns were hitting the ground twenty-five and thirty yards apart because the barrels were melting.  They then picked up MG-42's, Schmizers, and fought with German rifles.

Joseph A. Springer is a local author, a former member of the 183rd tactical fighting squadron here in Springfield.  He was number one on the military book list for a year.  His uncle was a member of the force and did die at Anzio.
 
Springer's second book will be coming soon.  It is called "Inferno:  The Story of the USS Franklin".


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