Meet the legendary ‘father of Special Forces’ who helped establish the Green Berets
Nicholas Slayton - Yesterday 4:21 PM
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.”
Col. Aaron Bank. (photo courtesy U.S. Army)
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.
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