Osama Bin Laden and the Devil’s Brigade

Osama Bin Laden and the Devil’s Brigade

            The Dutch Maid on Rodney Street in Helena, Montana was owned and operated by Jerry Karasik from 1955 until sometime in the 70’s or 80’s.  Jerry was the son of “Bohemian Jews” (part of the current Czech Republic) and was born in Canada.  He came to Helena in WWII to train as a paratrooper, part of the Devil's Brigade, 1st Special Service Force, the Canadian-American commando unit organized in 1942.  The Devil’s Brigade, in some sense, is the lineal ancestor of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the unit that dispatched Osama Bin Laden. The memorial in Helena’s Memorial Park is dedicated to the unit. Interstate I-15 is also designated as a memorial in the U.S. as well as its extension into Alberta to Lethbridge. A couple of films, notably "The Devil's Brigade" (1968), have been made about it, but with very little sense of historical accuracy or the grim reality of the training and mission. 

 

            See, for example, www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1awwAgU_t8  a scene from the movie that supposedly depicts the first encounter of the Canadians and Americans who eventually bond in this formulaic buddy movie, clearly in the same mold as “The Dirty Dozen”, “The A-Team” and others of the genre.

            The Devil’s Brigade, no doubt because of the name, also inspired the creation of various comic book characters as noted at www.wolverinefiles.com/009-world-war-ii/

Steve Dillon, Wolverine: Origins #17.

Wolverine: Origins #17 (Nov 2007) – “Our War, Part 2”
Writer: Daniel Way; Artist: Steve Dillon
            “In referencing the U.S. declaration of war on Japan and Germany after the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, Logan mentions that Canada had already           been at war with Germany for two years. Logan further explains, “Even though I        was marchin’ under the Canadian flag, I wasn’t exactly a Canadian soldier. My             orders, though they came through the Canadian military, originated from    somewhere else. We were called the Devil’s Brigade… an’ just like in the First           World War, we did the Devil’s work. Also like in WWI, Cyber was my            commanding officer.”
            There are two major problems with the assertion that Logan fought against the                   Germans as early as 1939. First, Canadian troops did not see any action until the        Dieppe Raid in August 1942, and for most Canadian troops, not until the summer           of 1943. Second, there was a historical Devil’s Brigade that fought in World War      II, a joint American-Canadian commando unit. The1800 strong First Special          Service Force was founded on July 9, 1942 and trained in parachute, ski,          mountain and amphibious mountain techniques near Helena, Montana. The             Devil’s Brigade spearheaded the 1943 invasion of Kiska in the Aleutian Islands     and led the breakout in Anzio during the first half of 1944. In order to accommodate the assertions made in this issue, we need to treat this ‘Devil’s Brigade’ as a different top secret force, running missions clandestinely before the rest of the Canadian military engaged in combat.”
            The hard reality is actually much more interesting, disturbing and foreboding than the glamorization in movies and comic books.  Kathryn Bigelow, the academy award winning director of The Hurt Locker may be able to bring cinematic sensitivity to bear on the psychology and consequences, individual and national, in her coming film on the black ops hunt for Bin Laden.  If so, maybe we will find out how relatively mild mannered and ordinary people can be turned into the killers and assassins to do the bidding of their handlers and military and political controllers.  After all, the Bin Laden killing was authorized and monitored at the highest levels of our government.  The success of the operation was announced by the President from the White House.  The operations was personally commanded by the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, soon to be the head of the Department of Defense.  The killing was wildly and simultaneously celebrated on the streets in front of the White House, at ground zero in New York City and on college campuses throughout the country.  Crowds of college students and baseball fans bellowed the triumphalist refrain of  “USA! USA! USA!” with deafening ferocity. 
            This takes me back to the ordinary life of Jerry. We do not know much about Jerry before he volunteered.   Most likely he responded to a recruiting poster.  The U.S. based volunteers for the force consisted initially of officers from Fort Belvoir and Benning, enlisted men recruited by advertising at Army posts.  Those recruiter posters targeted men previously employed as lumberjacks, forest rangers, hunters, game wardens and the like.
            Force members received rigorous and intensive training in stealth tactics, hand-to-hand combat, the use of explosives for demolition, parachuting, rock climbing, and amphibious warfare.  It was set up as a light infantry unit destined for alpine or winter combat. Troops were issued non-standard clothing, equipment, and rations, including skis, parkas, haversdacks and the Mountain ration.  The 1st Special Service Force was armed with a variety of non-standard or limited-issue weapons, such as the M9141.  The Johnson LMG greatly increased the firepower of the unit and proved very effective in combat. A fighting knife, the V-42 combat knife, was made exclusively for the Force, a derivative of the Fairbaim-Sykes fighting knife.
            Much feared for their fighting prowess, the nickname "The Black Devils" was supposedly adopted after the discovery of the personal diary of a German officer referring to "die schwarzen Teufel (the Black Devils).  With blackened faces, small units would often overwhelm German defenders without firing a shot and then disappear into the night. 
            With all of that training, Jerry was a cook, among other things, in his unit of the Devil’s Brigade.  Nevertheless, he shipped with his unit and saw some ferocious combat in 1943 and 1944.  How could he be the same person who ran a small coffee shop?
            Gentle, post-war Jerry liked Helena and came back after the war.  Jerry and my father got to know each other in the late fifties when my father was frequently in Helena bidding on highway contracts.  At that time, Jerry was one of only a few Jews who lived in Helena.  My father was a big consumer of alcohol and coffee so I suspect that the location of the Dutch Maid across from Jesters and just down the street from the Red Meadow had a lot to do with the initial acquaintance.  Also Dad's low/middle German was remarkably similar to Yiddish, so they probably had that in common as well.  For some reason, Jerry either never learned to drive a car or at least never owned one, so Dad got in the habit of driving him back and forth to grocery stores and other places. Later on, when Dad's company went under, Jerry reciprocated by providing a relatively unlimited supply of "Jewish road oil" (Dad's term for Jerry's coffee and his notion of friendly harassment) and odd jobs around the Malt Shop.
            It is very hard to imagine gentle Jerry as a model for the Brad Pitt character in Quintan Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds.   Perhaps we can grasp, even a half century later, the call to duty felt by Jews in particular to face the incarnate evil of Hitler’s Germany.  Is al Qaeda in the person of Osama Bin Laden an equivalent face of evil requiring similar or even greater demands and compromises with our conventional sense of ethics and morality?