Mission Accomplished : South County Team of Veteran and Novelist Picks Up the ‘Get Hitler’ Story Where History Left Off

In December of 1944, OSS Capt. Aaron Bank received the most extraordinary assignment of his career: to recruit and train nearly 200 anti-Nazi German POWs who would jump with him and four other Americans into the Austrian Tirol, where they would pose as a German mountain infantry company.

Their top-secret mission? To kidnap high-ranking Nazi leaders who were expected to seek refuge in the Inn Valley, including their most coveted potential prize: Der Fuehrer himself.

The Office of Strategic Services--the covert U.S. agency specializing in unconventional warfare and intelligence gathering--considered the operation its biggest and most important of the war.

But in April, 1945--after three months of training--the mission was canceled.

“I never cried in my life,” Bank says, “but I damn near cried when they told me it was aborted.”

The gung-ho Army captain from New York City went on to other OSS operations searching for Japanese POW camps in the jungles of Indochina, and after the war he organized and served as commander of the First Special Forces Regiment, rising to the rank of colonel before retiring to San Clemente in 1958.

But for the past five decades, the man known as the founding father of the Green Berets has been hounded by one nagging question: What if the top-secret mission to kidnap Hitler had been given the green light?

The old soldier, now 90, finally has an answer.

Teamed with E.M. Nathanson of Laguna Niguel, the best-selling author of “The Dirty Dozen,” he has co-written “Knight’s Cross” (Birch Lane Press; $19.95).

The novel tells the compelling tale of Bank’s fictional alter ego, OSS Capt. Dan Brooks, who is given the same order that Bank was given nearly 50 years ago: “Get Hitler!”

This time, however, the mission is not aborted.

But that’s just the jumping off point for the novel, which opens with an SS officer spiriting a mysterious man wrapped like a mummy in layers of white gauze around his head through the fire and rubble of war-ravaged Berlin.

Before reaching an emergency landing strip for their secret flight out of Germany, this bizarre unidentified character who has assumed a new identity after weeks of careful planning is severely burned by phosphorous from a Russian artillery barrage that makes him unrecognizable.

Suppose, the novel asks, Adolf Hitler didn’t really commit suicide in his command bunker in the Chancellery building in Berlin?

“Knight’s Cross,” which has been selected as a main selection of the Military Book Club and is an alternate selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club, ultimately evolves from combat novel to psychological thriller as the authors deftly show the subtle beginnings of the United States’ move into Cold War espionage in the days after Germany surrenders.

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The teaming of Bank and Nathanson was an ideal match: Nathanson, the experienced World War II novelist; and Bank, the savvy military veteran whose courage and OSS exploits during the war are similar to that of the fictional Dan Brooks--up to a point, at least.

Nathanson says that for someone who has lived “the brutal military life he did during the war,” Bank is “extraordinarily gracious,” with a keen intellect and an enviable constitution.

Wiry and fit due to a lifelong diet and exercise regimen, Bank swam around the San Clemente pier every day until he was 74 and worked full time as chief of security at a private oceanfront community in Capistrano Beach until he was 85.

He still manages “a good swift walk up and down hills every day,” and about four times a week he does strength exercises.

As honorary colonel of the U.S. Army Special Forces Regiment, he frequently travels to bases around the country to talk to the troops. Considered a living legend as the founding father of the Green Berets, he is often sought out by current and former members of Special Forces.

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Seated at a table in the wood-paneled, memorabilia-filled den of his home, Bank and Nathanson discussed the novel and their relationship, which began in 1984.

At the time, Nathanson was working on “A Dirty Distant War,” the sequel to “The Dirty Dozen.” After hearing about Bank through several South County residents and learning that he had spent time in French Indochina--the setting for “A Dirty Distant War”--Nathanson called Bank and spent several hours in Bank’s home tape-recording his wartime memories.

The two men got together a few more times over the next several years, during which Bank wrote his memoir “From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces.” The 1986 book includes an account of the aborted mission to kidnap Hitler, and writing about it, Bank said, provided the impetus to begin writing a novel based on his experience.

Within a year, Bank had completed a rough first draft and asked Nathanson to critique it. He did, returning with a page full of suggestions. At that point, Bank asked him to collaborate with him on rewriting the novel.

On the basis of an outline, Bank and Nathanson signed a contract with Birch Lane Press in early 1989 and spent the next three years writing and editing in what they describe as a 50-50 collaboration.

Said Bank: “The basic plot and story and characters are intact, but Mick fleshed it out. From wooden characters, he made them alive. And he put in a couple of counterplots and gave it additional intrigue.

“In other words, he made a true novel out of it.”

Added Nathanson: “The basic story, the lead character, the thrust of the plot remains Aaron’s as it was, but it was written differently. I think Aaron wrote it more as a historian, rather than a novelist.”

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At the time Bank was given the top-secret mission, he had just returned from southern France where he was involved in the OSS’ large-scale Jedburgh Mission, an operation in which dozens of three-man teams parachuted into occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands prior to D-Day and organized local civilian forces in conducting guerrilla attacks against the Germans.

In recruiting German prisoners from POW camps in France, the OSS had one prerequisite:

“They had to be anti-Nazi,” said Bank. “Some of them were Commies, some of them were Commie-inclined, and others just hated the Nazis because they had done terrible things to their families--or hated them on principle that (Hitler) was nothing but a dictator and they wanted to get rid of the bastard.”

Although one of the German POW characters in the novel turns out to be a loyal Nazi, Bank said that he never uncovered any Nazis in his unit and that none of the German prisoners tried to escape. “I had no MPs around my base at all,” he said. “I figured if they didn’t want to go (on the mission), sure, let them take off.”

Bank said that when he was given the mission, “they didn’t tell me that I was going to get Hitler right off the bat. They told me I would go after top Nazis. Mick plays that up heavily, the idea that they’re going to get Hitler is kind of hidden away (at first). They kind of hint at it, but he (Brooks) catches wise.”

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Bank couldn’t have been happier about the prospect of kidnaping Hitler.

“It made me feel up in the clouds,” he said. “I figured five Americans could stop a world war! And I think three of them were Jewish, which was ironic.”

Bank said he heard two versions of why the mission was scrubbed. “One, was that the American 7th Army was ready to crack into the Inn Valley. And it was a short time later that they did. The other was that the State Department didn’t want to drop a big team of party Communists into Austria toward the latter part of the war.”

Bank said the feeling of American military leaders was that if Hitler were captured alive, “we’d get him to convince the German armies to surrender. The German general staff was all set to surrender at that time, but he kept them going. They said if you’ve got the key guy, we can get him to tell the others what we want them to do. So that was really the reason that they wanted him, but we twisted that (in the novel) and turned it into a Machiavellian ending.”

After the mission was aborted, the German prisoners were returned to their POW camps. Bank said they had been kept uninformed as to the actual goal of the top-secret mission. “They would never have known until we dropped in,” he said.

But Bank knew. And for nearly 50 years he couldn’t forget.

“A thing like that could never escape your mind,” he said. “That was one of the great peaks in my life--and never to be hit again--and had it gone through, then it would have been something.”