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Tales passed over by decades, forgotten by history. Stories like that of Orrin McNally, a Winonan and member of the legendary First Special Service Force, an elite World War II combat unit and forefather of today’s Green Berets.
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Ann Peterson of Winona holds a photograph of her brother, Orrin McNally, who was killed in Italy on Jan. 9, 1944 during World War II, while serving as a member of the First Special Service Forces.
(Photo by Melissa Carlo/Winona Daily News) |
Nazis called the force the “black devils,” for the stealthy nighttime raids and psychological warfare the unit inflicted on German soldiers.
The unit was often the first into battle, especially when the odds were slim, the terrain rugged and the enemy defenses heavily fortified. The force fought bloody battles in the Italian mountains. It earned a reputation for ferocious raids at Anzio, Italy. They were the first Allied troops to march into Rome.
But McNally, known to his fellow soldiers as “Mac,” never saw the Eternal City. He didn’t return to Minnesota, to his parents and nine siblings, to his wife and a child he never knew.
For decades after the war, the family learned few details surrounding Mac’s service. One of his last letters, a note mailed from North Africa in October 1943, let them know he was safe. Beyond that, they had little to cling to but a few old black-and-white photographs, a War Department telegram and the memory of a young man who grew up fishing on the Mississippi River.
A secret mission
Mac was born Jan. 9, 1919, on Prairie Island, a popular camping spot of which his father was caretaker. A middle child in a family with nine, Mac was the family jokester, especially to the youngest, Ann.
“He was always a clown,” she remembers. “And popular with the girls.”
Ann also recalls the silver dollars her brother gave to the family’s youngest children.
After a handful of labor-related jobs, Mac entered the service in August 1941, just more than three months before the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. He was trained at Fort Riley, Kan., and later transferred to the cavalry at Fort Bliss, Texas.
In Louisiana, Mac was asked by military officials to consider volunteering for a special, secret hazardous-duty mission. The Army needed men with backgrounds in outdoor lifestyles — lumberjacks, hunters, cowboys — who could thrive in rugged, snowy conditions.
“Vigorous training. Hazardous duty. For those who measure up, get into the war quick,” promised the force’s recruiting slogan.
Little did they know. Mac and perhaps 1,800 other American and Canadian soldiers in the joint-nation force told their families in July 1942 that they were learning to parachute at Fort William Henry Harrison in Helena, Mont. In reality, the men learned much more: stealth combat, mountain fighting tactics, special-weapons techniques.
The training was dangerous. Mac broke his leg on his first parachute attempt.
It was in the infirmary he met Beverly Rich, his young nurse. They quickly fell in love and married in September. Beverly was pregnant when Mac left for the Aleutian Islands in July.
A legendary reputation
The force’s first mission, codenamed Project Plough, was canceled. The Army had planned for the forces to knock out hydroelectric power plants in German-occupied Norway, then fight its way to a neutral border, but Norwegian officials had urged against the mission after having spent decades building the plants.
The second mission was a disappointment: The Japanese had abandoned the island of Kiska 10 days before the forces landed. The unit arrived at Fort Ethan Allen in Arlington, Va., that fall.
In October 1943, the unit was placed under the command of the Fifth Army and sent to Casablanca, Algeria, with plans to assist in the invasion of Italy. By November, the unit was on the front lines near Naples. It was there they began to earn their now legendary reputation as a top-notch fighting force.
The force quickly captured previously impenetrable enemy strongholds atop mountain cliffs, where other American and British forces had been repelled. In the German ranks, the “Devil’s Brigade” became infamous for its ability to surprise Axis forces — and for mind games.
According to the force’s surviving members, they once came upon the diary of a German soldier, who had written: “The black devils are all around us every time we come into line, and we never hear them.”
And at each captured stronghold, the force left a calling card: a black sketch of an American Indian warhead beside thick letters that read “DAS DICKE ENDE KOMMT NOCH!” The worst is yet to come.
War in Winona
Meanwhile in Winona, the war was hitting home at the McNally house. Mac’s father was a civil defense warden, and like other American families, the McNallys practiced air raid drills, rationed their food and prayed for their son.
“The war really overwhelmed my childhood,” said Ann, who was kindergarten-age at the time. “The ‘greatest generation,’ as Tom Brokaw calls it, wasn’t just the soldiers. Everyone gave up something to win that war. Some more than others.”
Now and then a letter would arrive, at first from the forts where Orrin trained, the last from North Africa. They never contained much detail — sometimes they were censored with black ink — never hinted at the danger.
“They were limited to ‘I miss you’ or ‘I’m looking forward to being a father,” Ann remembers. “He never dared write anything about what he was doing.”
On the front line
In the late 1940s, the War Department prepared a comprehensive history of troop movements, battles and narratives based on interviews with soldiers. According to those documents:
Alpine winter weather was hampering advancements of the Fifth Army in early January 1944. The Allies were frozen in place, while the Germans enjoyed superior positions behind a series of heavily guarded prominent hills, the last of which was Mount la Chiaia.
“Mount la Chiaia completed the row of hills and anchored it to the edge of the higher mountain mass,” according to the War Department. “Beyond la Chiaia, the German defenses extended into these mountains and included the dominating peaks around Mount Majo.”
The Army planned a full-on attack of those defenses, and once again, deployed the First Special Service Force in what was perhaps its most difficult mission at that point in the war. Its orders: Capture Mount Majo and its surrounding peaks.
“The 1st Special Service Force was trained for mountain fighting, and its abilities would be fully tested,” the War Department later wrote.
On Jan. 3 and 4, the force captured several of the smaller peaks under heavy machinegun and mortar fire, moving “with such speed that the artillery forward observers, packing heavy radios through snow-covered gullies and up rocky slopes, had difficulty keeping pace,” according to the documents.
By Jan. 5, two battalions and several divisions were placed under the force’s command and ordered to continue a flanking maneuver to capture Mount Majo. The Germans brought in wave after wave of reinforcements, sometimes attacking the Allies on three sides. Nearly 8,300 rounds were fired by one battalion between Jan. 7 and 10.
The force suffered heavy casualties, as high as 75 percent, according to one report.
Sgt. Orrin McNally died there, in the mountain wilderness, on his 25th birthday, shot by the enemy.
He perished not knowing that three days earlier, Beverly had given birth to their daughter, Sandra Ann.
A haunting memory
Mac’s sister Ann, who was then 7, remembers the phone ringing a few days later. Grace, who was 17, answered.
“She screamed,” Ann said. “We all knew. It was just devastating for my mother and father.”
Over the years, the family struggled to cope with Orrin’s death, knowing nothing except the date and place he died. He was buried in Florence, Italy. His father decided not to have the body sent to Minnesota.
“I think he just didn’t want to raise the issue with my mother,” Ann said. “My dad just decided he could remain there, with his family.”
Beverly eventually remarried, and the families remained close, sometimes vacationing together in summers.
None of Orrin’s survivors knew he’d served in the Special Service Force, even after a 1968 Hollywood movie called “The Devil’s Brigade” was made about the unit. Mac’s parents died in 1979, still with no answers. Siblings have died too; just five remain, three of whom are in area care centers.
“It was really painful for my parents to lose him,” Ann said. “I really wish they could have known he served in the Special Force.”
It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that Ann learned about her brother’s unusual role in the war, when Beverly ran into an old Army buddy of Mac’s, who shared the story. The force’s survivors held regular reunions — some of which drew nearly 1,000 soldiers and family members, Ann learned. A re-enactment group had been formed to honor the unit.
Ann attended a reunion in Helena, where soldiers told her Orrin’s nickname. Some of Mac’s combat-mates also called him Peewee, she found out. She learned about the force’s history, its training and missions.
After decades of a haunting mystery, Orrin McNally’s story was suddenly real again, brought to life by a handful of men who knew him best. Now Ann tells the story.
She’ll attend the next reunion in August in St. Paul.
“My bond to him has been close — even to his memory — by being so close to his family, to the reunions.
For Ann, the soldiers and their families, the meetings keep alive stories like Orrin McNally’s — stories perhaps not widely known but well-known and honored.
Sometimes, they realize, memories forge our tightest bonds.
smilingangel8 wrote on May 26, 2008 6:56 PM: