Were (or are) suicide squads, like the Dirty Dozen, ever really used by Allied forces?
Forget Hollywood, its just a story. St Naziaare was a raid by the Commando’s, an elite unit by the way… The British army/navy used to give first time offenders the chance to mature with military service instead of a prison sentence in war time. Many however, fell foul of the discipline system, and no units in the second world war would have recruited volunteers for a hazardous task from such unreliable troops. Since the concept of the death penalty was quiet alien to most of the allied services, except the US – we did have it in the UK for treason and murder, but it was not so widely used – we did not have a huge supply of ‘death row’ convicts to man such a mission. The film was based on a book, E.M. Nathanson’s novel “The Dirty Dozen” which reflect the anti war and establishment ideals of the the 1960’s, not the 1940’s. The character of Reisman (Lee Marvin) was based on John Miara of Malden, Massachusetts, who was a close personal friend of Marvin’s while both were serving in the Ma
Not specifically. The raid upon St Nazaire was in no way supposed to be a suicide mission. The intention was that all troops used would ideally escape although they did certainly allow for a certain percentage of casualties. In fact it was just very poorly set up and doomed to failure. The Germans made mince-meat out of them. The Russians did not specifically have suicide troops although Stalin ordered that his officers and NCO’s had to shoot anyone who attempted to run from the enemy. In the opening months of the German advance into Russia you could say that just to be a Russian soldier pretty much amounted to suicide. The nearest thing I can think of to a true suicide mission was the American planes at the battle of Midway. The Japanese fleet was far enough away that even if the American pilots survived the attack (which most did not) they knew they did not have enough fuel to make it back to their ships.
Not in the sense of the Dirty Dozen, although there were some exceptionally dangerous operations conducted by volunteers who were fully aware that they might not return. You might want to look up some of the following: Operation Source: The attack on the battleshipTirpitz using X-Craft submarines; Operation Jaywick and Operation Rimau – Missions carried out by Lt Col. Ivan Lyon and his team against the Japanese; Operation Daybreak, where a team of Czech patriots assassinated Reinhardt Heydrich, the Nazi governor of Bohemia-Moravia. On two out of three of these operations, all involved died. There were survivors from Operation Source, but two crews died.
