THE ORIGINAL SPECIAL OPS
War Museum honours Devil’s Brigade
Tears come easily to Ralph Mayville these days, nearly 75 years after he went into combat in Italy at the Anzio beach head alongside his fellow Devil’s Brigade soldiers.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said the 97-year-old Second World War veteran from Windsor, Ont. “We were on patrol at night. That was our job. We’d go on patrol, slit a couple of throats, and that was it.
“If I start talking about it I’ll start crying. We had good times. We had bad times. I loved the good times we had. The good times you remember. The other ones, you try to forget.”
Mayville, Jack Callowhill, 95, and Jim “Red” Summersides, 94, were the guests of honour Wednesday when the Canadian War Museum unveiled a Congressional Gold Medal awarded to the First Special Service Force.
Formed in 1943 as a joint U.S.-Canadian unit, the FSSF was nicknamed the Devil’s Brigade, or the Black Devils by Germans, for their ferocious fighting ability and the shoe polish they used to darken their faces at night.
Summersides, of Stoney Point, Ont., landed at Anzio at the same time as Mayville.
“The good memories that you try to remember seem to get pushed aside by the bad memories that you try to forget,” he said. “That’s the way it goes.”
Summersides recalled burrowing into a foxhole to rest with his friend Paul before the pair were to head out on a scouting mission.
“It was just big enough for the two of us. The Germans started lobbing shells over. And he said to me, ‘Red, it’s time to get down.’ I never heard another word from him, but screams.
“The shell hit the lip of the foxhole and buried us both. When I came to, I thought, ‘Where’s Paul? He’s got to be in the same hole.’ I dug myself out and then I went to dig him out. I hit an open spot in his body. I’ll never forget the screams.”
Devil’s Brigade soldiers were all volunteers and trained as specialists in winter and mountain warfare, and in brutal hand-to-hand combat. The original plan was to send the unit to fight in the mountains and glaciers in Norway, but they ended up deployed to Italy, where their rock-climbing skills allowed them to surprise Germans dug in on ridges and mountain tops.
The unit fought through Italy to Rome, then landed on the south coast of France before being disbanded in December 1944. In the course of 22 battles, the unit suffered 576 killed and a staggering 134 per cent casualty rate — many soldiers were wounded more than once.
The unit is the forerunner of the U.S. Green Berets and the Canadian Special Operations Regiment based at CFB Petawawa.
In 2015, the U.S. government awarded the unit its highest honour, the Congressional Gold Medal, the only Canadian military unit to ever receive one. The original medal is kept at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but authorized bronze duplicates were given to each of the 16 surviving Canadian Devil’s Brigade veterans. The First Special Service Force Association presented a gold-plated duplicate to the war museum.
The medal is an important symbol of the co-operation between Canada and its allies, said Gen. Walt Natynczyk, a former chief of defence staff.
“It’s so gratifying to see one of the symbols of the First Special Service Force coming here to our war museum so that all Canadians and visitors, and especially our youth, may bear witness to the achievements of these extraordinary soldiers into the future,” Natynczyk said.
Margaret States, whose father Lloyd States fought with the Devil’s Brigade and was one of only two black soldiers in the unit, said she was proud to see the brigade’s exploits honoured.
“He never talked about it. For him, the war was hell,” she said. “These young men sacrificed part of their youth. The understood that Hitler had to be stopped. They did what had to be done.”
He never talked about it. For him, the war was hell. These young men sacrificed part of their youth. They understood that Hitler had to be stopped. They did what had to be done.