"Nobody Told Us Americans Fought Like That" — British Commandos on Darby's Rangers
O'Connor WW2
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"The men lying on either side of Koons are not Americans. They belong to Number 4 Commando of the British Army."
On the morning of August 19, 1942, a corporal from Iowa named Franklin Koons lay in a stone barn above the French coast at Varengeville, firing into a German coastal battery alongside British commandos who were not his countrymen. That battery was the one clean success of the Dieppe Raid — an operation that killed and captured thousands of Canadians a few miles down the coast. Koons was later decorated with a British Military Medal, pinned on by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. This is the story of the 1st Ranger Battalion, activated on June 19, 1942, at Sunnylands Camp in Northern Ireland, built from soldiers of the 34th Infantry Division and the 1st Armored Division under Captain William Orlando Darby, a field artilleryman with no raiding experience. In July 1942 the battalion went to Scotland for training at Achnacarry under British commando staff, where men covered seven miles from Spean Bridge station in under sixty hours with thirty-six pounds of kit, trained under live fire, and were walked past mock graves listing exactly how each man had died. At Dieppe, roughly fifty Rangers landed in ones and twos with British and Canadian units. Second Lieutenant Edwin Loustalot was killed assaulting a German gun position at Berneval — generally recorded as the first American soldier killed by German ground fire in the European theater. This video lays out the paper record: the volunteer numbers, the training syllabus side by side with its American counterpart at Camp Edwards, and the structural difference between a British system built to cut volunteers to a hard line and an American system built to raise a floor under an entire army.
If you care about the version of this history that holds up against the paperwork rather than the legend, a like and a subscribe genuinely help this reach people who want the same thing.
📚 Further context / historical background: This account draws on U.S. Army special operations history, unit and veterans' association records, after-action reports, and published accounts of the Dieppe Raid and the Achnacarry Commando Basic Training Centre. Casualty and volunteer figures vary by source, as noted in the narration itself.
#WW2History #DardersRangers #DieppeRaid
"Nobody Told Us Americans Fought Like That" — British Commandos on Darby's Rangers
O'Connor WW2
339 views
"The men lying on either side of Koons are not Americans. They belong to Number 4 Commando of the British Army."
On the morning of August 19, 1942, a corporal from Iowa named Franklin Koons lay in a stone barn above the French coast at Varengeville, firing into a German coastal battery alongside British commandos who were not his countrymen. That battery was the one clean success of the Dieppe Raid — an operation that killed and captured thousands of Canadians a few miles down the coast. Koons was later decorated with a British Military Medal, pinned on by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. This is the story of the 1st Ranger Battalion, activated on June 19, 1942, at Sunnylands Camp in Northern Ireland, built from soldiers of the 34th Infantry Division and the 1st Armored Division under Captain William Orlando Darby, a field artilleryman with no raiding experience. In July 1942 the battalion went to Scotland for training at Achnacarry under British commando staff, where men covered seven miles from Spean Bridge station in under sixty hours with thirty-six pounds of kit, trained under live fire, and were walked past mock graves listing exactly how each man had died. At Dieppe, roughly fifty Rangers landed in ones and twos with British and Canadian units. Second Lieutenant Edwin Loustalot was killed assaulting a German gun position at Berneval — generally recorded as the first American soldier killed by German ground fire in the European theater. This video lays out the paper record: the volunteer numbers, the training syllabus side by side with its American counterpart at Camp Edwards, and the structural difference between a British system built to cut volunteers to a hard line and an American system built to raise a floor under an entire army.
If you care about the version of this history that holds up against the paperwork rather than the legend, a like and a subscribe genuinely help this reach people who want the same thing.
📚 Further context / historical background: This account draws on U.S. Army special operations history, unit and veterans' association records, after-action reports, and published accounts of the Dieppe Raid and the Achnacarry Commando Basic Training Centre. Casualty and volunteer figures vary by source, as noted in the narration itself.
#WW2History #DardersRangers #DieppeRaid