Major General Robert T. Frederick - (ARSOF) History

MG FREDERICK: Well, Marshall went to England in March of 1942. Sir Winston Churchill and Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s Scientific Advisor, suggested that a unit be formed to go into Norway and destroy the hydroelectric stations, go into the Transylvanian Ops in Italy and destroy the hydroelectric station, go into Romania and destroy the Ploiești oil field. So, he wrote a memorandum to that effect, which came to the operation division, and it came down to me, the chief of the current section, which handled more than one theater of operation. I spent 12 days investigating the project, and then wrote a 14-page single space report with maps appended to it, for General Eisenhower to sign to go back to General Marshall. Well, it was approved all the way up to General Eisenhower by the superiors of me in the operation division, and when General Eisenhower came back from England on April 3rd, he called me and then said, “Frederick, I can’t sign that.” I said, “Well, why, General?” He said, “Because I just told them in London we would go ahead full-speed with the project.” So, that’s how it got started.

MG FREDERICK: Well, the qualities were that they had to be loggers, trappers, woodsmen, miners, forest guides and that sort of stuff. They all had to be outdoorsmen. And I kept nearly all of the Canadians, because the Canadians, many of them had been overseas at Dunkirk. But I only kept one out of every four American enlisted volunteers.

MG FREDERICK: Well, it never happened. None of those operations actually happened, because, although we developed a snow vehicle, the Weasel, for the operations in Norway and the Transylvanian Alps, we never went to either of those places.

MG FREDERICK: Well, the first operation we had was at Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. And then from Kiska, we came back to the United States and went to Italy, and the first operation in Italy was Monte la Difensa. Monte la Difensa had held up the 5th United States Army for several weeks. They used two infantry divisions to try to get up there, but neither one was able to make it.

MG FREDERICK: Well, when I told General Clark that we could take Monte la Difensa, we were given orders to go up there. So, the first night, I moved them out of the Santa Maria di Capua, where we were in barracks, by truck, to Mignano, and had the 2nd Regiment climb up to the tree line. And then, during daylight the following day, they had to stay under the trees, not smoke or cook or talk loud. And then at night, we went up and scaled the rest of the way to the top of Monte la Difensa. And that was where the trouble started, because I noticed that the Germans were not observing the north side of the mountain, because it was such a steep cliff, they didn’t expect anyone to come up there. They were looking east and south.

MG FREDERICK: I know that the Germans at Monte la Difensa were very fine soldiers. They were part of the grenadier divisions. And at Anzio, they were very fine soldiers. Of course, at Anzio, we sometimes ran into some conscripted Poles.

MG FREDERICK: Oh, a couple hundred prisoners. We sent them down --

MG FREDERICK: Well, particularly at Anzio, we were there for four months, and when they went out at night on patrols, they blackened their faces. And that’s when the dead German officer, when we went through his personal effects, we found a diary in which he had written “The black Devils are all around us, and we never hear them come.”

QUESTION: What psychological effect do you think this had, or were you able to determine that it had on the German soldiers?

MG FREDERICK: Well, it must have had, because I know that after we were at Anzio about three weeks, the Germans pulled so far back that we couldn’t get out to them and back in the course of a night. So it must have had effect on them.

MG FREDERICK: I’m not the great General. (laughs) And there were many. General Bradley, General Eisenhower, and boy, there were so many of them.