“Canucks Help Retake Kiska,” declared The Globe and Mail “U.S.-Canadian Forces Take Kiska,” headlined The New York Times. Though covered by the Canadian and American press, accounts of the Kiska landings had made no mention of their singular nature. No one beyond those with an immediate need to know had any idea that this was the first fully integrated, highly trained binational special forces unit in the Allied armies.

Their first operation in August 1943 had been somewhat anticlimactic, taking the Aleutian island of Kiska off Alaska after its 5,400 Japanese occupiers had already left. Now they were about to open the route to Rome-and Allied victory. It had been 17 months since the ragtag collection of prospectors, miners, steel workers and other improbable Canadians and Americans first set foot in Helena, Mont., for some of the most intensive military training ever undertaken. The First Special Service Force was still pretty much a secret when its commandos boarded a cruise liner, then First World War-era rail cars known as “forty and eights” (each held 40 men and eight horses) and finally trucks before they made the precarious climb up a Nazi-infested Italian mountain in the late fall of 1943.

Company of heroes 2 - us forces