October 31, 2024
Yesterday I sent the wrong link for the closing paragraph to my Webmaster. After I caught my mistake, Diana quickly fixed it. Meet the legendary “father” of the Green Berets Posted on June 19, 2022:
More than seven decades ago, Aaron Bank had an idea. He decided that after years killing Nazis, almost leading a manhunt for Hitler, and then working alongside Ho Chi Min to liberate Vietnam from imperial Japan, the United States Army needed some special fighters. A force versed in irregular warfare, who could mess up an enemy from behind their lines, working with local resistance. A special forces, if you will. Seventy years ago Aaron Bank got his wish.
June 19 is celebrated as Juneteenth, now a federally recognized holiday. June 19 is also the 70th anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Army Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets. And since Father’s Day also falls today, it feels apt to honor Col. Aaron Bank, who’s known as the “father of special forces.”
Bank was born in 1902 in New York City. He grew up working as a life guard, where work took him from New York to France and the Bahamas. At 39 he joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, with his level of fitness helping him overcome doubts about his age. He joined the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, immediately going into work on sabotage, guerilla warfare and recruiting partisans to help fight the Nazis in Europe. His work peaked when he was a part of Operation Iron Cross, a plan for the OSS and Bank to, using a cadre of German Jews, communists and defectors, parachute into the German-Austrian border and capture or kill Adolf Hitler if he fled Berlin. Hitler hid in a bunker and never left the city, leading to the cancellation of the operation and denying Bank of what surely would have been a movie-inspiring military action. After the war in Europe ended, he found himself in southeast Asia and supported Ho Chi Minh as the head of a future coalition government. American policy went against Bank’s recommendations. Still in the service, he pushed for a formal Army force dedicated to the kind of irregular warfare Bank had made his trade.
This month, Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) introduced a motion in the House of Representatives to honor both the Special Forces and Aaron Bank himself, who retired as a colonel. Rep. Hudson’s resolution notes that the Green Berets “encouraged the incorporation of principles of force multiplication into the military doctrine of the United States and paved the way for the revitalization of special operations forces in the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps” and “helped revolutionize the conduct of modern warfare.” It’s hard not to see how.
Since the creation of the Army Special Forces in 1952, the force has been an instrumental tool in the Army. Originally just one group, the 10th Special Forces Group, it expanded into several units. They were deployed to South Vietnam as advisors for that country’s army and were a part of U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, an unconventional warfare group fighting against the forces of Bank’s former compatriot Ho Chi Minh. Missions also included covert actions in Laos and Cambodia. Other deployments included several conflicts in Latin America and the Persian Gulf War. Special Forces were part of the initial U.S. assault on the Taliban in fall 2001 in Afghanistan.
As the premiere special operations forces in the public for years, the Green Berets got a lot of attention. In the world of fiction, there was a less than stellar film about them starring John Wayne. Col. Kurtz and Capt. Willard both counted themselves among the ranks in Apocalypse Now.
In the 21st century they’ve been somewhat eclipsed in the public eye by various “tier one” special operations forces such as Delta Force and Navy SEALs, but they remain a key part of the military, deployed in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere doing the irregular warfare they have been doing for the last seven decades.
Rep Hudson’s resolution is, as of press time, in the hands of the House’s Armed Services Committee.
As for Bank himself, he had another major contribution after leaving the Army in 1958. Relocating to California, he became concerned with what he saw as poor security at nuclear power plants. Working with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists he shed light on the concerns and helped spur plants to overhaul how they protected nuclear installations. He died in 2004 at the age of 101. Not bad for a guy who was robbed of the chance to kill Hitler.
Those in their 60s and older may remember a song released in 1966 by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler called The Ballard of The Green Berets.
The fall of Saigon in April 1975 ended the war for most Americans, I graduated high school in 75 and some of the evacuation footage shown in those days was heart-rendering, as many of the South Vietnamese left behind – knew they were dead Folks walking.
Like many impressionable youngsters, I watched Mr. John “Duke” Wayne play the lead in Hollywood’s propaganda The Breen Berets. Also, Sadler’s Ballard struck a chord within me, if I was going to Nam, I planned to be one of the best, wear a green beret.
Silver wings upon their chest
These are men, America’s best
One hundred men will test today
But only three win the Green Beret
These are men, America’s best
One hundred men will test today
But only three win the Green Beret
I don’t fault Duke Wayne for starring in The Green Berets, (released in 1968), but I have no use for how hollywood tries to glamorize war. Am sure we all agree there’s nothing glamorous in the screams of the wounded and dying. General (Marine) Smedley Butler makes that Clear Enough in Butler’s War Is A Racket.
Ladies and Gentlemen, what follows has, for the most part, been kept out of our “history” books.
APPENDIX I: HOW A MILITARY HERO BLEW THE WHISTLE ON WAR PROFITEERS by Adam Parfrey
The U.S. government thanked the efforts of World War I soldiers with a “war bonus” of approximately $1,000 to be paid late as 1945. But as Great Depression and the Dust Bowl misery touched the continental states, unemployed veterans desired to have their bonus paid sooner. In May 1932 out-of-work vets arrived in Washington D.C. to impress their bonus pleas to Congress. A pro-bonus bill sponsored by Wright Patman was threatened veto by President Hoover and overturned House passage by a Republican Senate. As tens of thousands of Hooverville-occupying vets demonstrated their discontent in a “death march,” Generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur moved in on the veterans with a fresher contingent of the U.S. Army. Two died, including an infant, and hundreds of veterans were injured, in MacArthur’s successful attempt to “gain control” of D.C.
The Bonus Marchers’ primary upper-ranked supporter? Smedley D. Butler, the Brigadier General who was twice awarded the Medal of Honor and once the so called “Brevet medal,” when the Medal of Honor was not given officers. Known for his fair play to soldiers regardless of rank, Butler’s support of the “Bonus Marchers” helped boost the desperate foot-soldiers’ movement. The Brigadier General’s disparaging of the mass media and “big business” was particularly popular in the Depression. But those same big business interests, buoyed by the ability of Italian Fascist “Corporatism” to turn back labor demands in the restructuring of its economy, took special note of Butler’s support from a half-million veterans, which would have made an intimidating force against FDR and his hated New Deal, and his elimination of the gold standard. But as far as Smedley Butler was concerned, “I believe in making Wall Street pay for it [the bonuses]—taking Wall Street by the throat and shaking it up.”
As a Marine officer, Butler oversaw American forays into China, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti, and this is where he picked up his frequently expressed opinion that he was no more than a bully boy for American corporations. Butler’s skepticism about the U.S. government may have been partly the result of his Quaker background. During the Prohibition, Butler was made Police Chief of the mob plagued city of Philadelphia in 1924 and 1925 where in a non-war interlude he effectively moved against open saloons, bars and speakeasies. Mass magazines, like the early diet and fitness periodical Strength (March 1924 issue) featured Butler’s military-type run against the Philly “gangsters.” General Butler’s Iron Grip “Courage is Strength, Ditto Unswerving Purpose—That is Why Philadelphia’s Crooks and Bootleggers Flee From the Mailed Fist of “Old Hell’s Devil Butler”….
I won’t un-pack the info about the founding of “special forces”, other than the aid Gen. Chang-Kai-Shek in China was receiving from the pentagon until Japan surrendered was stopped and sent to Ho Chi Minh. If you track long and hard enough, bits and pieces of the rest of that story are out there.
Chang Kai Shek shipped most of the gold in China in Nov. 1948 and fought on until 1949 when he left mainland China and settled on the island Taiwan with the gold.
Something to reflect on – who was the u.s. ambassador to the united nations in Oct. 1971 when island Taiwan was kicked out and Mao’s China admitted? That was George skull & bones, class of 1948 Bush sr.
Who was the second U.S. trade liaison/representative to mainland China? That was George skull, trilateral Bush sr., the first was David bilderberg, trilateral Bruce and both bastards were cfr/council on foreign relations rat members.
The current U.S. ambassador to the united nations is Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Linda is a cfr rat as well. The name above hers, (Dr.) Lydia Waters Thomas, was appointed by George skull jr. in 2002 to his homeland security advisory council. Lydia W. Thomas – SourceWatch
https://treaties.un.org/doc/
CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life time has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, AND FOR THESE ENDS to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.
Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations. End quote.
More to follow real soon, until then.