Col. Aaron Bank, known as 'father' of Green Berets
LOS ANGELES -- Retired Army Colonel Aaron Bank, who led a number of daring missions during World War II but was best known for his postwar role in organizing and serving as the first commander of the Army's elite Special Forces, died Thursday in Dana Point. He was 101.
Colonel Bank was known as "the father of the Green Berets." During World War II, he was a special operations officer for the Office of Strategic Services.
The OSS, forerunner of the CIA, was disbanded soon after the war. But Colonel Bank and others were convinced that the Army should have a permanent unit whose mission would be to conduct unconventional operations.
In 1951, the chief of the Army's Psychological Warfare staff instructed Colonel Bank to staff and obtain approval for the creation of an OSS-style operational group. In 1952, after Colonel Bank and other key staff members had made their case, the Army approved 2,300 spaces for men in the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, N.C.
"I wanted none but the best," Colonel Bank said in a 1968 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "We had to work up all the manuals and training procedures for demolition, sabotage, new and different ways of handling weapons."
But most important, Colonel Bank said, "We had to teach them the classic aim and purpose of their service: the organizing of civilian natives into guerrilla forces in enemy-held territory."
Colonel Bank later wrote a memorandum suggesting that Special Forces soldiers be allowed to wear berets as a mark of distinction. He listed three possible colors for the berets: purple, wine-red, or green.
It was not until 1962, four years after Colonel Bank retired from the military, that President John F. Kennedy authorized members of the Army Special Forces to wear berets. Kennedy, Colonel Bank later said, "picked the green because he was an Irishman."
Born in New York City, Colonel Bank began working summers in his teens as a lifeguard and swimming teacher. He liked the work so much, he later said, that by the late 1920s it had become something of a career. "I'd go to Nassau in the Bahamas to work during the winter and then to Biarritz in southern France during the summer," he recalled in the 1968 interview. "It was a plush life."
He was in and out of Europe over the next decade and learned to speak French and German fluently. In the late 1930s he returned home and joined the Army. By the time the United States entered the war, he had been commissioned a second lieutenant.
In 1943, at the age of 40, Colonel Bank was serving as a tactical training officer to a railroad battalion stationed at Camp Polk, La., when he saw a bulletin announcing that volunteers with foreign language capabilities would be interviewed for "special assignments."
Once in the OSS, he said, he began a long training course that taught him "to do all the things that regular branches of the service frowned on," guerrilla warfare, sabotage, espionage, and escape and evasion tactics.
In December 1944, Colonel Bank received what he considered his most extraordinary assignment: to recruit and train 170 anti-Nazi German prisoners of war and defectors who would parachute with him into the Austrian Alps, where they would pose as a German mountain-infantry company.
The primary goal of the top-secret mission, dubbed Iron Cross, was to capture high-ranking Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler. If the operation had gone through and they had been successful in capturing Hitler, Colonel Bank told the Times in 1987, "the war would have been over overnight." In 1972, at age 70, he began working full time as chief of security at a private oceanfront community in Capistrano Beach, a job he held until he was 85. Colonel Bank wrote two books: "From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces" (Presidio Press, 1987); and "Knights Cross" (Birch Lane Press, 1993), a novel co-written with E. M. Nathanson, author of "The Dirty Dozen."
