Aaron Bank was born on November 23, 1902, in New York City. He was a U.S. Army officer famous for his exploits behind enemy lines while serving with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. He is regarded as the founder of the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets), and he was instrumental in shaping the U.S. military’s special operations warfare capability.
Bank was born to a Russian immigrant family and learned French and German from his mother. He traveled extensively throughout Europe in the 1930s, working as a physical fitness instructor and a lifeguard. He enlisted in the army in 1942 and was considered too old for active combat service. Bank was selected for Officer Candidate School. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned to a transportation unit. In 1943 he volunteered for the OSS after the army issued a call for personnel with language abilities. As part of his indoctrination into the OSS, Bank received training in unconventional warfare tactics and strategy, espionage, and parachute jumping.
He was selected to participate in the Jedburgh project, an Allied program that brought together American, Belgian, British, Dutch, and French special forces personnel to conduct small unit operations in occupied Europe. In July 1944, he dropped into occupied France as commander of a three-person Jedburgh team, along with a French officer and a radio operator. Working with the French Resistance, his team helped support the Allied landings in southern France. Early in 1945, he was selected for Operation Iron Cross, an audacious mission that put Bank in command of a company of anti-Nazi German prisoners of war. Bank and his team were to parachute into the Austrian Alps; an area believed by Allied planners to be the final redoubt of the Nazi leadership, with the intent of capturing Adolf Hitler and other senior German leaders. When Hitler failed to flee Berlin as had been anticipated, the mission was called off. Bank then traveled to China and French Indochina, where he was searching for Japanese prisoner of war camps and rescuing internees when the war ended.
After the war, Bank commanded the Army Regional Counter Intelligence Corps in Bavaria, and he served in the Korean War with the 187th Airborne Infantry Regimental Combat Team of the 11th Airborne Division. Returning to the U.S. in 1951, he was appointed chief of the Special Operations Branch of the army’s Psychological Warfare Staff. Working for Gen. Robert A. McClure, Bank and Col. Russell Volckmann, a veteran of the guerrilla campaign in the Philippines during World War II, gained approval to form a new Unconventional Warfare unit, the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne). Bank, now a colonel, was selected as the unit’s first commanding officer, and it was activated in June 1952 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a site that would become the center of U.S. special forces training and tactics. Volunteers were solicited, and veterans of various unconventional or special forces units such as the OSS, Merrill’s Marauders, and ranger companies soon arrived to fill the force. Bank made a particular effort to recruit personnel who had enlisted under the Lodge-Philbin Act, a 1950 law that offered U.S. citizenship to eastern European immigrants in exchange for military service.
In 1953, following a massive anti-Soviet uprising in East Berlin, Bank split the unit in two, leaving the newly formed 77th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg while he deployed with what remained of the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) to Bad Toelz, West Germany, in anticipation of a possible Soviet invasion of western Europe. Bank’s unit gave the United States an essential unconventional warfare capability, an already-deployed force that could work with potential resistance groups if the Cold War turned hot. After commanding the group for three years, Bank then served in Germany with the 7th U.S. Army before returning to the United States and duty at the Pentagon.
After retiring from the army in 1958, Bank remained active within the Special Forces community, often visiting, speaking, and writing of his experiences. He authored From OSS to Green Berets (1986), which functions both as a memoir and as an evolutionary history of the Special Forces, and he cowrote Knight’s Cross (1995), a fictionalized account of his aborted mission to capture Hitler and senior German leaders. His numerous awards include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Bronze Star, and the French Croix de Guerre. In 2005, one year after his death, the main academic building at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg was named in his honor.
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