the truth, the pair were soon on their way north to discuss the project with the Canadian Army, the outcome of which was an agreement that Canada would second some of its finest soldiers to the force, as well as provide land on which to train and snow specialists to advise on technical matters.
The only impediment to the raising of the force as far as Frederick was concerned was the continued interference of Pyke. At the end of June 1942, in a memo to Harry Hopkins, Frederick described the Englishman as being in possession of an imaginative and intellectual mind. However, he added, ‘he has no knowledge of the methods or requirements for training personnel. He does not appreciate the ramifications and administrative details of creating a special organisation. He appears to have an aversion to organisation and orderliness.’ 3
In early July Hopkins took Frederick’s complaint, along with many others concerning Pyke, to Mountbatten who terminated Pyke’s involvement with Project Plough. With Pyke back in England, Frederick was at last able to focus all his energies on raising his brigade. One of his first discoveries, as David Stirling and Junio Valerio Borghese could have told him, was that there was an innate distrust among many senior officers for any irregular force that might exist outside the parameters of normal military procedure.
Though he was able to use his influence to procure several officers to serve on his staff – notable among them being Major Orval Baldwin and Major Kenneth Wickham – Frederick was less successful in finding the men to fill his ranks. With the US Army preparing for deployment across the globe, commanding officers were not about to allow some of their most able soldiers to join a Special Forces unit. Instead Frederick organized notices to be pinned to Army bulletin boards in which he asked for volunteers to join a new unit, priority being given to ‘lumberjacks, forest rangers, hunters, northwoodsmen, game wardens, prospectors and explorers’.
What Frederick got instead was commanding officers emptying their baskets of rotten apples. Soldiers with poor disciplinary records were encouraged to volunteer while men up on charges were reputed to have been given the choice of a prison sentence or volunteering for Frederick’s outfit. Even the officers who stepped forward had a touch of wildness about them; the unit’s Operations and Training officer was a Virginian major called John Shinberger, who kept a box of live rattlesnakes under his bed in the hope that having the reptiles in such close proximity would cure him of his phobia.
The men who did volunteer – and many had exemplary military records and simply sought adventure – were sent to the Force’s training camp at Fort Harrison in Helena, Montana. By now Frederick had been made a full colonel and the unit was officially designated the 1st Special Service Force with a red spearhead as their formation patch, on which ‘USA’ was written horizontally and ‘Canada’ vertically.
On 19 July 1942 Frederick and his HQ staff were installed in Helena and men were arriving every day by road and rail. They came from all over the United States and from Canada, too, though the latter, paid by their own government and subject to their code of discipline, received lower wages than their southern comrades. The Canadians and Americans eyed each other warily at first, and there was the odd brawl with the Canadians obliged to show that they ‘didn’t take kindly to jokes about the King and Queen’. It was in training, however, that a mutual bond of respect was forged between the two nations.
Having divided the 1st Special Service Force into three regiments, Frederick put them through a brutal training regime; having expected a high drop-out rate, he had recruited 30 per cent more men than he needed. Each day followed a similar routine: rise at 0445hrs, then cleaning duties and breakfast by 0630hrs. At 0700hrs the men were put through
The only impediment to the raising of the force as far as Frederick was concerned was the continued interference of Pyke. At the end of June 1942, in a memo to Harry Hopkins, Frederick described the Englishman as being in possession of an imaginative and intellectual mind. However, he added, ‘he has no knowledge of the methods or requirements for training personnel. He does not appreciate the ramifications and administrative details of creating a special organisation. He appears to have an aversion to organisation and orderliness.’ 3
In early July Hopkins took Frederick’s complaint, along with many others concerning Pyke, to Mountbatten who terminated Pyke’s involvement with Project Plough. With Pyke back in England, Frederick was at last able to focus all his energies on raising his brigade. One of his first discoveries, as David Stirling and Junio Valerio Borghese could have told him, was that there was an innate distrust among many senior officers for any irregular force that might exist outside the parameters of normal military procedure.
Though he was able to use his influence to procure several officers to serve on his staff – notable among them being Major Orval Baldwin and Major Kenneth Wickham – Frederick was less successful in finding the men to fill his ranks. With the US Army preparing for deployment across the globe, commanding officers were not about to allow some of their most able soldiers to join a Special Forces unit. Instead Frederick organized notices to be pinned to Army bulletin boards in which he asked for volunteers to join a new unit, priority being given to ‘lumberjacks, forest rangers, hunters, northwoodsmen, game wardens, prospectors and explorers’.
What Frederick got instead was commanding officers emptying their baskets of rotten apples. Soldiers with poor disciplinary records were encouraged to volunteer while men up on charges were reputed to have been given the choice of a prison sentence or volunteering for Frederick’s outfit. Even the officers who stepped forward had a touch of wildness about them; the unit’s Operations and Training officer was a Virginian major called John Shinberger, who kept a box of live rattlesnakes under his bed in the hope that having the reptiles in such close proximity would cure him of his phobia.
The men who did volunteer – and many had exemplary military records and simply sought adventure – were sent to the Force’s training camp at Fort Harrison in Helena, Montana. By now Frederick had been made a full colonel and the unit was officially designated the 1st Special Service Force with a red spearhead as their formation patch, on which ‘USA’ was written horizontally and ‘Canada’ vertically.
On 19 July 1942 Frederick and his HQ staff were installed in Helena and men were arriving every day by road and rail. They came from all over the United States and from Canada, too, though the latter, paid by their own government and subject to their code of discipline, received lower wages than their southern comrades. The Canadians and Americans eyed each other warily at first, and there was the odd brawl with the Canadians obliged to show that they ‘didn’t take kindly to jokes about the King and Queen’. It was in training, however, that a mutual bond of respect was forged between the two nations.
Having divided the 1st Special Service Force into three regiments, Frederick put them through a brutal training regime; having expected a high drop-out rate, he had recruited 30 per cent more men than he needed. Each day followed a similar routine: rise at 0445hrs, then cleaning duties and breakfast by 0630hrs. At 0700hrs the men were put through
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