Distinctly Montana Magazine

18 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S P R I N G 2 0 2 4 * * * The 1st Special Service Force, the brainchild of Britishers Lord Mountbatten and Geoffrey Pike, was conceived as a rugged and elite force that would travel through the mountains of occupied Norway, disrupting Nazi war efforts through sabotage and guerilla warfare. Their targets were to be the hydro- electric dams that supplied the majority of the coun- try's power—and the secondary objective was to terrorize the occupiers via stealth and hand-to-hand combat. Helena was selected as the training site for the bri- gade because it offered rugged conditions that mir- rored Norway's countryside. The nearby Fort Henry Harrison offered ideal staging grounds to train in skills like skiing, mountaineering, parachute jump- ing and the use of explosions in sabotage. The men were also outfitted with their fearsome knife and shown how to use it. And while an excellent combat knife, the men reported it inadequate to non-combat tasks such as prying open a can of rations. The brigade was roughly half Canadians, the result of Win- ston Churchill's insistence on using men from the British Com- monwealth. The Canadians were largely culled from existing Canadian fighting forces such as the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, while the United States soldiers hailed from every walk of life. They had signed up, knowing only that they were joining a force that would draw upon wilderness survival skills, and they could expect to be trained into the best of the best. Indeed, some of the Americans were troubled soldiers plucked from the brig, but the 1968 Williams Holden film adaptation of the book by Robert Adleman and Col. George Walton, which as- serts that most of the Americans were criminals à la The Dirty Dozen, was inaccurate. There were school teachers, farmers, outdoorsmen—in short, anyone crazy enough to volunteer. One young man told Frederick sheepishly that he had desert- ed the American Army after enlisting, secreted himself across the border, and re-enlisted in the Canadian Army instead. He wondered whether his actions might follow him here and whether he could expect a dishonorable discharge or worse. Lt. Col. Frederick looked him over and asked why he went AWOL only to sign up in a different country. Well, the soldier told him, he had joined the Canadian Army in the hope of getting to see some action against the Germans earlier that way. Fred- erick, satisfied, told the man he wouldn't have to worry on ei- ther count: he'd be killing Nazis soon enough, and in exchange for his enthusiastic service in that regard, the U.S. government would absolve his guilt. A soldier named William Story, previously a member of a Canadian choir before joining up, painted a vivid picture of Fort Henry Harrison being prepared for training. "It was a hot and tired crew that finally pulled into the siding at Fort Harrison that August day... the camp was a cloud of dust. Bulldozers were hard at work leveling the area where the huts would go. Gangs of workmen were laying down pyramidal tent bottoms; oth- ers were erecting tents in streets. The big para- chute drying towers were under construction; the mockup area, with the harness rigs, were not yet finished. Actually, nothing was finished; and much had barely begun." But before long, the men were jumping out of planes and learning the ins and outs of wielding their new V-42 stilettos, among other things. While there were tensions initially, the Canadians and the Americans eventually became a group united by common pur- pose and even friendship. They took to swapping uniforms with each other. The Canadians preferred their American cousins', which didn't require polishing and somewhat resembled their of- ficers' uniforms. The Americans dressed as Canadians as a lark, to the confusion of base security. The town of Helena was initially wary of the soldiers training outside their gates, especially when rumors reached them that the soldiers were miscreants gathered from the worst of the Ar- my's irredeemables—men so bloodthirsty they were expected to sate themselves on the villages of Axis Europe like pillaging Vikings. What the town got instead were boys and men who re- sembled, for all their occasional machismo, their own brothers, sweethearts, and sons. Helena's bars were early to adopt the boys. At joints like "the Gold Bar, the Corner, or the Log Cabin Night Club," according to The Devil's Brigade, forcemen could use their paratrooper's wings as collateral for a small loan of $5, which was probably

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