The Force : The Legendary Special Ops Unit and WWII's Mission Impossible

Well written with good detail and personal stories, including interesting aftermath. The Force was a unique outfit that fathered modern-day spec ops. The description of their difficult training, specialized skill set and the capriciousness of the brass in trying to find somewhere to use them was especially interesting. Their success in their first combat role surprised everyone but themselves.

Great book

Wanted to read this book for a while having enjoyed the related film the Devil’s Brigade starring William Holden. The level of research is good and it is an enjoyable read.

In summary this is a 150 page preamble to an excellent account of a very short battle. I found myself skim reading so much of the background information on the soldiers involved. Some background is our course highly desirable but it just goes on and on about pretty boring personal stuff for all this he could research. I bought this as I loved his book on the Entebbe raid but was pretty bored by this one.

This is a gritty history about an extraordinary special forces unit made up of Canadian and American volunteers during WWII who went through Herculean high altitude training outside Helena, Montana, rugged men, hyper competitive. The Force’s story, and especially many of the individual men’s story are captured to make this by and large an engaging and entertaining book. This is a story about men who were trained to parachute, ski, climb rock faces by rope, and march long miles with heavy packs, to fight hand to hand with knives and with their bodies, and become expert in shooting multiple machine gun, hand gun, and rifle. And all of these skills in snow and rain, daylight and dark. These were men who came from all parts of North America and became a close fighting brothers. This is another story of men accomplishing brave tasks in the face of almost impossible goals.