March 1943—Fort Meade, Maryland

“From here over, this is Dog Company, 2nd Ranger Battalion,” the captain ordered, parting the group of volunteers with a wave of his hand. Unbeknownst to the men, that moment marked the birth of one of the greatest Ranger companies in American history. However, before earning the honor of being called a Ranger, they would have to engage in grueling training that would test the limits of human endurance.

The men stood at attention, stomachs pulled in, heels together, and eyes fixed forward on the Ranger officer who had just addressed them. With his uncanny resemblance to Lee Marvin, Captain Harold K. “The Duke” Slater made a dashing figure. The Duke possessed an undying spirit to win—at all costs. He was the quintessential Ranger officer. On that clear, sunny day in March, an eclectic group of volunteers had clambered off a 6x6 GMC truck and spilled out into an open field. After meeting their new commander, the men watched as the captain ducked back in the building and returned with another Ranger. The Duke announced, “This is my first sergeant, Leonard Lomell.” Cut from the same competitive cloth as Slater, Leonard G. Lomell led by example. The brilliant first sergeant also had a gift for being incredibly lucky.

Slater turned to Lomell. “Find out when we can feed this bunch.”

Lomell nodded his head and sent the men over to Fort Meade’s chow hall. Fort Meade, named after the famous Union commander and hero of Gettysburg, served as the training center for the U.S. Army. It housed the 76th Division, otherwise known as the “Liberty Bell Division,” which served as a training cadre for other Army units. Three and a half million men filtered through the camp. In addition to its combat training facilities, it housed a school for cooks and a special service unit, which trained entertainers and musicians, including the famous swing-band leader Glenn Miller. But during March 1943, the camp gave birth to another legendary band of men.

Slater’s volunteers were an eclectic group of desperados drawn from the ranks of the 76th Division. As a newly minted D Company member, Bill Hoffman made his way through the chow line with the other raw recruits. His mind drifted back across the events of that whirlwind, life-changing day. The morning announcements posted on the bulletin board had included a small sentence about the Rangers: “Anybody interested in volunteering for the Rangers should come down to the orderly room.” Several of Hoffman’s comrades had asked, “What’s the Rangers?” One joked, “Hey, maybe we can get a horse!”

Hoffman wasn’t completely sure what a Ranger was either, but he knew they were something special. He fought tooth and nail to get into the outfit so that he could escape his old unit. Bill Hoffman knew he was going to war, and he wanted to go into battle with the best.

That March morning after reading the announcements, Hoffman reported to the orderly room. The first sergeant on duty promptly tossed him back out and barked, “Get back to work.”

Not easily rebuffed, Hoffman decided to stand outside the orderly room and wait for the company commander. When the commanding officer arrived, he asked Hoffman, “What are you doing standing out here?”

For Hoffman, it was the moment of truth. He explained that he had come down to sign up for the Rangers, but the first sergeant hadn’t let him stay.

“Go on inside,” the commander instructed, entering with Hoffman.

After looking over some paperwork, the commander told the irritable first sergeant, “I don’t see a problem here. Process Sergeant Hoffman.”

When the first sergeant chased Bill Hoffman out of the orderly room for the second time that day, it was different: he knew he would return to become a Ranger. “Get your butt out of here. Get back here at 1 P.M. and turn in your gear.”

The term “Ranger” goes back hundreds of years. Rangers were first commissioned as an American unit in 1676 during King Philip’s War. Vulnerable to hostile Indian attacks and finding European battle tactics unsuited to the wild American frontier, colonists acted as scouts or “ranged,” and then struck back at the Indians using stealth hit-and-run tactics. The Americans honed these unique fighting techniques a century later in the French and Indian War. During that war, the colonists implemented numerous concepts that still apply to modern conflicts: irregular warfare, use of proxies, and special operations.

Perhaps the most famous American Ranger was a New Hampshire backwoodsman named Robert Rogers. A debtor implicated in a counterfeiting scheme, Rogers had a checkered past. But he received a British Army commission in what later became known as His Majesty’s Independent Company of American Rangers. A forefather of American special operations, Rogers developed something known as the twenty-eight Rules of Ranging, a manual of practices that today’s Rangers still learn. During the French and Indian War, Rogers and his men conducted deep raids into French and Indian territory. They hit French forts and ruthlessly annihilated an entire Abenaki Indian village. For his lightning raids, stealth, and ruthlessness, the Indians dubbed Rogers the Wobomagonda or “White Devil.”

Other units called Rangers followed Rogers’, including Captain Daniel Morgan’s Ranger Battalion during the Revolutionary War, and later in the Civil War, the infamous Mosby’s Rangers. Known as the “Gray Ghost,” John S. Mosby terrorized the Union Army with his guerrilla tactics, blowing up rail lines and sabotaging Yankee camps.

During World War II, Lucian K. Truscott, then a colonel, encouraged General George Marshall to create a training program patterned along the lines of the British Commandos. Begrudgingly, General Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the plan, but they advised Truscott, “I hope you will find some other name than ‘Commando,’ for the glamour of that name will always remain—and properly so—British.” Truscott found his inspiration in Rogers and the colonial Rangers. He wrote in his memoirs, “I selected ‘Rangers’ because few words have a more glamorous connotation in American military history. In colonial days, men so designated had mastered the art of Indian warfare and were guardians of the frontier.”

The man selected to lead the first American Ranger unit was Major William O. Darby, who formed the 1st Ranger Battalion out of two thousand recruits. Through rigorous training, he winnowed the group down to just 520 men. The Rangers then trained at the British Commando Training Depot in Achnacarry Castle, Scotland. The exploits of Darby’s Rangers became legendary. They spearheaded the assaults in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy.

Although the unit was new, the men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion had to measure up to a prestigious legacy formed over hundreds of years.

The mainspring of Dog Company was Leonard G. Lomell, the twenty-three-year-old first sergeant. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Lomell was adopted by immigrant parents and grew up in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. After graduating from high school, he hoped to enter West Point; however, because of his adoption, issues arose regarding his birth certificate. Instead of West Point, Lomell entered Tennessee Wesleyan College and graduated in 1941. Over the summers, he worked at the Post Office and did manual labor for the Pennsylvania Railroad, for construction companies, and for a dredge company. After entering the military on June 13, 1942, Lomell became a rising star. His superiors quickly promoted him to platoon sergeant of a regimental intelligence and reconnaissance platoon within the 76th Infantry Division. Acknowledging his keen mind and leadership potential, the division soon sent Lomell through Ranger training. Built like a middleweight boxer, the good-looking young man with a generous soul made for an ideal first sergeant.

Hailing from Indiana, Lomell’s commander, Harold K. “Duke” Slater, was only a year older. The Duke loved to win. With an amazing intensity, Dog’s commanding officer always focused on the mission at hand. Good-looking and charismatic, The Duke had a softer side that he rarely showed: he had “a beautiful spirit and cherished every moment of life.” His dry sense of humor often poked through his stern role as a commander. Like Lomell, Slater enjoyed a meteoric rise within the military and obtained the rank of captain in 1943.

Within several days, Lomell, Slater, and the core of D Company boarded a troop train and headed south to Nashville, Tennessee. Southeast of the city near the town of Tullahoma, the men arrived at Camp Nathan Bedford Forrest, named for the southern cavalry general. During World War II, Camp Forrest was largely a tent city nestled in the sandy hills and lush pines of southern Tennessee. Shoved in one corner of the facility, Dog Company had its own street of pyramidal U.S. government-issued tents. But the weather of April 1943 wasn’t kind to the young volunteers. It rained nearly every day. Tents flooded, and the men trudged through oozy red mud to perform a regimented routine. Making matters even worse, the muggy spring weather brought with it swarms of biting horseflies. The nearest shower was a half a mile away in wooden barracks that housed another unit, so most men bathed in washbasins.

As they formed up in the sticky Tennessee clime, the 2nd Ranger Infantry Battalion ¹ included six assault companies, designated A through F, or Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, and Fox. Only the core group of Dog Company arrived at Camp Forrest as a ready-made unit; the rest were assembled in Tennessee. Headquarters Company completed the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Each company consisted of sixty-five enlisted men and three officers. In all, the battalion totaled approximately five hundred officers and enlisted men. That brought the 2nd Rangers up to a little more than half the strength of the typical, nine-hundred-man infantry battalion.

Dog Company was divided into two rifle platoons, each commanded by a first lieutenant. The company headquarters section included the company commander, first sergeant, company clerk, and messenger. Each rifle platoon contained two Assault Sections and a Special Weapons Section with a 60 mm mortar. Each Assault Section contained an assault squad and a light machine gun squad.

The original core of Dog Company hailed from the Northeast. But on April 1, 1943, volunteers from all across the United States augmented the original men from Fort Meade. The new recruits came from all walks of life and had been recruited from units throughout the military, including cavalry, artillery, armor, and infantry—even a few castoffs from other units.

The nascent nature of the 2nd Ranger Battalion made it a dumping ground for undesirable men. “What did I get into?” one Ranger volunteer wondered. “When we had to retreat at night, each company would give their report, which included a lot of AWOLs. We had the dregs of the Army, actually. Division commanders sent their eight balls to the 2nd Rangers in order to get rid of those men. The Rangers were new then, and the Army really didn’t know what to do with us.”

In the early days of America’s entry into World War II, special operations forces were in their infancy. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Marine Corps Raiders, and the U.S. Army Rangers were developing some of the precursors to today’s modern special operations units. The regular military brass disparagingly viewed the special units as “bleeding off” good men from regular combat units. As a result, the Rangers often faced internal challenges to their very existence. On the upside, these challenges gave the 2nd Battalion a bit of a Dirty Dozen feel, which filled the unit with tough men willing to do what was thought to be impossible, while the rigorous training eliminated the men who shouldn’t have been there.

But the volunteer recruits of April 1943 weren’t Rangers yet. Before they could earn that honor, they had to endure training meant to break most men. At Camp Forrest, the training exercises created for the men were even more difficult than combat itself. “What they really tried to do was destroy us. They wanted to see what the human body and the human mind [could handle. We were] psychologically young men, chosen young men, volunteers. All Ranger training was the toughest the armchair generals could make it. I felt that combat was a piece of cake as compared to the training,” recalled Dog Company’s first sergeant.

Vigorous competition allowed only the fittest to survive. Lomell remembered, “In those days, I saw all-American football players, the most magnificent specimens of men you ever saw, I saw them thrown right out of the Rangers, DQ’d, physically unqualified or psychologically unqualified. [And then] you’d find a little old farm boy that weighed one hundred to one hundred and ten pounds from Iowa that had it all, psychologically and otherwise. It was fascinating to me to see the process.”

Lomell and Slater imbued in the men a gritty sense of competition that hardened like steel those who survived the training. It was about winning, being the best. Ranger officers like Slater led by example and weren’t afraid to challenge their own men. Captain Slater’s competitive streak even affected First Sergeant Lomell when Slater challenged his subordinate to a boxing match.

“You think you’re pretty tough, huh?” asked Slater.

Lomell quickly realized the problems that would be created by fighting his company commander. He thought to himself, “Jesus Christ, he’s the company commander. I’m the first sergeant. I don’t mind boxing an exhibition out here. One of us has got to go one of these times, and it isn’t going to be me. It certainly isn’t going to be me knocking him out.”

Slater was “one of those guys you couldn’t box with because he was trying to knock you out with every blow,” noted Lomell. “You couldn’t have any fun boxing with somebody who was trying to kill you with every blow.”

Lomell tried to kid his way around the issue, offering, “You know, Captain, maybe you ought to box with the officers, and us enlisted guys, we’re a little reluctant to get too tough with you guys.”

Slater’s ultimate objective seemed obvious to the first sergeant “He’s never going to quit until he knocks me cold, and I don’t want that in front of my whole company!”

Slater persisted in his challenge, and eventually Lomell climbed in the ring with him. Surprisingly, Slater went down, not Lomell, “and that damn near killed him. Oh, he was quiet!”

Lomell later remarked, “Duke Slater was the roughest, toughest, bravest, most courageous officer we had.” He added, “I loved the son of a bitch, but I hated him at times.”

A typical day for a Ranger recruit in Dog Company went as follows:

0645 First Call
0700 Reveille
0715 Breakfast
0830 Drill Call
1130 Recall
1200 Lunch
1300 Drill Call
1530 Recall
1715 Retreat

Drill Call included calisthenics followed by the command “Assume position.” Half a dozen Rangers would approach a giant twelve- or fourteen-foot-long telephone pole lying on the ground. Next, the commander barked, “Ready. Exercise!” The men lifted the log to their waists. The sergeant then hollered orders to place the log over their heads, on their shoulders, and in a variety of other positions. Muscles ached and throbbed as this torture went on for more than thirty minutes. “It made a man out of you,” recalled Morris Webb, then a round-faced, prematurely balding recruit from Kentucky. Webb, who spoke with a characteristic Southern drawl, had a mind for numbers. He was pals with a northerner, Bud Potratz, who arrived at Camp Forrest at nearly the same time.

Throughout training, the men worked in pairs, and formed unbreakable bonds through this buddy system. They lived together, trained together, ate together, and shit together. They each had the other’s back, and covered one another when negotiating certain training exercises. The Ranger training built friendships that lasted a lifetime. In battle, it reinforced a sense of brotherhood and, from a practical standpoint, allowed the mission to carry on despite casualties: if one buddy was hit, the other could carry on.

After training every day, the men were bone tired. Once they had dinner, they settled in for a tiny bit of downtime before the next day. One evening after training, a large crowd gathered around the tents. An ambulance arrived. The driver was furious. He was muttering something unintelligible while waving his hands. Webb, noticing the crowd of Rangers standing in a circle next to an OD tent, asked his buddy Potratz, “What’s up?”

“Pat McCrone and Larry Johnson are at it again,” Potratz chuckled. McCrone and Johnson were best friends who were well known for their practical jokes; but Potratz finished the sentence saying, “McCrone is dead.”

It began when Johnson confronted McCrone for stealing his girlfriend. “You son of a bitch! If there’s anything I hate, it’s a double-crossing rat!”

Johnson pulled out a .45 and pointed it at McCrone, who promptly took off for the exit of the barracks and ran outside. Johnson fired several shots from the pistol, and McCrone fell to the ground. With the men in a panic, someone called an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived at the scene, McCrone was lying motionless on the ground. Suddenly, McCrone rose up and started laughing. McCrone and Johnson put their arms around each other, laughing their asses off. The ambulance driver wasn’t laughing, however. The two best friends had played another joke—but nobody else thought it was funny. Luckily, Slater never found out about the incident; otherwise, both men likely would have been busted to private. A stern disciplinarian, The Duke didn’t put up with bullshit.

In between the workouts—and the hijinks—the men got lessons in teambuilding. Drill call also included time in the “pit.” The waist-deep sawdust pit measured eighteen-feet square with logs lining each side. Bill Hoffman explained, “They’d put a whole platoon in there with no shirts on. The other platoon was on the outside. The object was the guys on the outside needed to throw the guys on the inside out of the pit. On the side it was maybe two logs high, not very high. It was just high enough to keep the sawdust in.”

“Go get ‘em! Grab ‘em by the neck,” the bystanders would shout. “Throw ‘em out! Throw ‘em out!”

After a few times in the pit, Hoffman’s group learned that the secret to surviving in the pit was to send two guys after each of the soldiers lining the pit. “Guys got hurt doing that,” he recounted. “All our fatigues would start getting ripped up. We’d have torn fatigues. You’d turn it in to supply and get a new pair. The quartermaster got smart to it and then started to just sew up the uniforms rather than issue new ones.” One of the smallest Rangers in the unit tried a different strategy, “I played it smart. I got in the corner. That would help the other guys throw people out.” As soon as a platoon removed the opposing force from the pit, they had three minutes to prepare to defend against another assault.

D Company earned a formidable reputation when word leaked out that one of the company’s platoons had cleaned out the pit in two minutes flat. “It was about competition. It was one platoon against the other,” explained Hoffman. “It was just to see how much you could take.”

To give the men a taste of combat, the commanders subjected Dog Company to a harrowing obstacle course. Machine guns fired over their heads as the Rangers slithered under barbed wire, swung on ropes, and crawled through mock shell holes. At the same time, the training officers detonated explosives to simulate shells and mortar rounds.

Near the end of the afternoon, the men sat and listened to demolitions experts who taught them the finer points of blowing up stuff. As the men of Dog watched intently during one session, Ranger Joe Camelo held on too long to a block of TNT. To everyone’s horror, the blast nearly killed him as it vaporized his arm. Another Ranger had a block of TNT detonate between his legs. Fortunately, he survived the blast—but his family jewels did not.

One of the Ranger demolition instructors was prankster Larry Johnson, the one man who shouldn’t have been allowed to play with explosives. Johnson lit a stick of dynamite during one demonstration. As the men watched, Johnson threw it into a crowd of seated Ranger recruits. “Terrified, everyone ran in opposite directions,” recalled one Ranger. The “charge” was actually just an empty tube of cardboard.

Johnson achieved his greatest coup when he threw a real stick of lighted dynamite down the latrine and got away with it. Once again, everyone scattered. “Shit was flying everywhere,” recalled one Ranger. Remarkably, even after a full investigation under the strict scrutiny of Duke Slater, Johnson managed to evade punishment.

Cocky tomfoolery aside, the training imbued the men with a winning spirit, a sense that they were better than any other combat soldiers in the world. The men were taught not only to be the best but also to fight dirty and outsmart their German and Japanese counterparts. Throughout the training, the men learned “Rangerism,” which, an official training manual characterized as “the doctrine of a personal fight, a brain-and-brawn fight, a genius American fight, and a carefully thought out, dirtier fight that will top the instinctive, and naturally dirty fight of a blond, square-headed, self-appointed superman and the undersized, slant-eyed, yellow ‘Nips’ who wage war against us on two fronts today.”