CHAPTER I

Introduction

The same events and pressures that shaped directly or indirectly the major part of American foreign policy during the last twenty years led to the formation and activation of the U.S. Army Special Forces.

In February of 1950 the United States recognized a quasi-independent Vietnam within the French Union and first began to consider granting aid to the French forces fighting against Communist insurgency in Indochina. In May of the same year the United States agreed to grant military and economic aid. American involvement in post-World War II Southeast Asia had begun. Four years later, in May 1954, the French Army was defeated by the Viet Minh—the Communist-supported Vietnam Independence League— at Dien Bien Phu, and under the Geneva armistice agreement Vietnam was divided into North and South Vietnam. In the course of those four years the policy-makers of the United States had an opportunity to observe the struggle of France with the insurgents and to become familiar with the political and military situation in Vietnam. It was also during those years that the U.S. Army Special Forces came into existence.

Origin of the Special Forces

The 1st Special Service Force of World War II is considered the antecedent of the present U.S. Army Special Forces. In the spring of 1942 the British Chief of Combined Operations, Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, introduced to U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall a project conceived by an English civilian, Geoffrey N. Pike, for the development of special equipment to be used in snow-covered mountain terrain. This plan, named PLOUGH, was designed for attack on such critical points as the hydroelectric plants in Norway upon which the Germans depended for mining valuable ores. American manufacturers working on equipment for the project developed a tracked vehicle known as the Weasel and eventually standardized as the M29.

General Marshall concluded that an elite force recruited in