First Special Service Force

The 1st Special Service Force (FSSF) was an elite joint American–Canadian commando unit in World War II, formed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert T. Frederick of the Operations Division of the U.S. General Staff. During the Italian campaign of World War II, it was commanded by Frederick and attached to the United States Fifth Army. In August 1944, the Force was attached to 1st Airborne Task Force (commanded by then Major General Frederick) for the campaign in southern France.

The unit was organized in 1942 and trained at Fort William Henry Harrison near Helena, Montana, in the United States. The Force served in the Aleutian Islands, fought in Italy and southern France, and was disbanded in December 1944.

The modern American and Canadian special operations forces trace their heritage to this unit. In 2013, the United States Congress passed a bill to award the 1st Special Service Force the Congressional Gold Medal.

Geoffrey Pyke was an English journalist, educationalist, and later an inventor whose clever, but unorthodox, ideas could be difficult to implement. In lifestyle and appearance, he fit the common stereotype of a scientist-engineer-inventor: in British slang, a "boffin". This was part of the British approach to encouraging innovative warfare methods and weapons during World War II, which was personally backed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Hobart's Funnies are another example.

While working for the British Combined Operations Command, Pyke devised a plan for the creation of a small, elite force capable of fighting behind enemy lines in winter conditions. This was to have been a commando unit that could be landed, by sea or air, in occupied Norway, Romania, or the Italian Alps for sabotage missions against hydroelectric plants and oil fields.

In Norway, the chief industrial threat was the production of the heavy water used in the German atomic weapon research at Rjukan. Furthermore, attacks on 14 designated Norwegian hydroelectrical power stations, those which would be vulnerable to special force snow vehicles, which supplied the country with 49% of its total power, might drive the Axis powers out of the country and give the Allies a direct link to the USSR. In Romania, there were the strategically important Ploiești oil fields that met one quarter of German consumption, and Italian hydroelectric plants powered most of south German industry. Pyke requested that a tracked vehicle be developed especially for the Norwegian operations, capable of carrying men and their equipment at high speed across snow-covered terrain.

In March 1942 Pyke proposed Project Plough to Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations Headquarters. Pyke suggested that Allied commandos be parachuted into the Norwegian mountains to establish a covert base on the Jostedalsbreen, a large glacier plateau in German-occupied Norway, for guerrilla actions against the German army of occupation. Equipped with Pyke's proposed snow vehicle, they would attack strategic targets, such as 14 important hydroelectric power plants. Pyke persuaded Mountbatten that such a force would be virtually invulnerable in its glacier strongholds and would tie down large numbers of German troops trying to dislodge it.

However, given the demands upon both Combined Operations and British industry, Britain instead offered Plough to the United States at the Chequers Conference of March 1942. General George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, accepted Plough. In April 1942, since no suitable vehicle existed, the US government asked automobile manufacturers to look into such a design. With input from an international team that included Canadian inventor George J. Klein, Studebaker subsequently created the T-15 cargo carrier, which later became the M29 Weasel.