On a sunny but chilly June day in southern France in 2019, I watched parachute canopies blossom and descend as the special operators gently floated to a peaceful, verdant mountainside meadow in France’s Tarn region that belied a darker past. In the summer of 1944, the area crawled with German soldiers. The men in the parachutes re-created a scene from seventy-five years earlier in which the commandos from Operational Group PAT, the direct forerunners of the US Army Special Forces—Green Berets—landed on the same mountaintop, welcomed by a covert greeting party of the French Resistance. Hastily shedding their chutes, the World War II commandos—described by one contemporary as “Ph.D.s who could win a barfight”1—then surprised, killed, and vanished as they employed unconventional warfare to set that area of Nazi-occupied France ablaze. Adapting tried and true techniques developed decades earlier by their American predecessors during the Civil War, they would be hunted by determined bands of the SS within hours. Hiding in safe houses by day and attacking German supply lines and organizing the resistance by night, the team, led by twenty-two-year-old captain Conrad LaGueux,* derailed vital German reinforcements hurtling toward the invasion beaches in southern France on August 15, 1944. They echoed Mosby’s principles: “To destroy supply trains, to break up the means of conveying intelligence, and thus isolating an army from its base, as well as its different corps from each other, to confuse their plans by capturing dispatches are the objects of partisan war.”2 This small group of Americans would force thousands of Germans to surrender.
That day in 2019, elite commandos from the US Special Operations Command and the CIA’s Ground Branch commemorated the World War II parachute drop and Operational Group PAT’s extraordinary accomplishments. Each of the modern special operators had years of experience: capturing invaluable intelligence, conducting deep raids into enemy territory, and seizing high-value targets in the most hostile combat environments in recent history. The Americans following in the footsteps of their forebears may not have known the names of Henry Young, Richard Blazer, Arch Rowand, or the World War II OSS commandos, but they were carrying on their legacy. The United States has a tradition of unconventional warfare that uniquely imbues the American way of war. While the centuries may change, the shadow warriors behind these missions have not, often employing groundbreaking techniques pioneered and honed during America’s first modern war—the Civil War.
Throughout American history, small groups of individuals have altered the course of events. Civil War Scouts and Rangers who forged these tactics were largely forgotten; however, their legacy remains unvanquished.
* During the Cold War, LaGueux had an extraordinary career in special operations and was one of the last Americans out of Saigon during the Vietnam War and has been compared to Oscar Schindler for his valiant efforts to evacuate many South Vietnamese families.