Staff Sergeant Les Kness, 23, glanced at his buddy as their U.S. Army troop truck lurched and banged over the rugged terrain from the dusty airfield. Sergeant Les Cook, a fellow Iowan, was fully engaged with packing his pipe full of Prince Albert tobacco as he jostled back and forth against his fellow Rangers.
Cook, 21, seemed as content as usual. While most smokers in his company preferred cigarettes, Cook found being in the minority paid dividends: he always had a barracks bag full of red-tin smoking tobacco for his pipe. Kness’s thoughts turned to the mission at hand. It was February 7, 1943, and his unit had just landed on the Allied airfield of Youks-les-Bains in northern Algeria. Located just 17 miles from the army’s II Corps headquarters in Tébessa, the airstrip had seen dozens of C-47 troop transport planes touch down, carrying thousands of tons of special equipment and nearly 500 elite warriors.
It had been three months since Allied forces had successfully landed in Vichyheld French North Africa as part of Operation Torch, a three-pronged attack on The 500-some soldiers of the 1st the cities of Casablanca in Morocco and Oran and Algiers in Algeria. While British forces pushed west from Egypt, American ground forces drove south from the coast against territories aligned with Nazi Germany. Since then, the Germans and Italians focused on building up their forces in Tunisia; an upcoming Allied thrust into that country was to include special operations work conducted by Kness, Cook, and their comrades.
They were handpicked members of the army’s 1st Ranger Battalion, under the command of William Orlando Darby, 32, from Fort Smith, Arkansas. A 1933 West Point graduate, he had been more than pleased to leave his staff position to take command of a new, bare-boned irregular unit that would certainly see combat. The so-called “Darby’s Rangers” were a commando outfit whose name referenced a similar force under Major Robert Rogers that had fought on the French and Indian War frontiers in the 18th century. Rogers’s Rangers had been popularized in American literature and, most recently, in the 1940 film Northwest Passage, starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Young.
Now Darby’s Rangers were about to embark on their own film-worthy exploits in North Africa, complete with triumphs and tragedies. Their adventures would include a
