Why Germans feared the Canadian Black Devils at Anzio — but not American or British commandos

In the spring of 1944, a captured German order warned Wehrmacht troops dug in along the Mussolini Canal at Anzio that they were now facing an elite Canadian and American force described as treacherous, unmerciful, and clever, with a ten day furlough offered to any soldier who could capture one alive. The men they were warning about were the First Special Service Force, the joint US-Canadian commando brigade the Germans called die schwarzen Teufel, the Black Devils. This documentary tells the verified history of how roughly fourteen hundred volunteers from two countries, trained at Fort William Henry Harrison in Helena Montana under Colonel Robert T. Frederick, climbed the impossible cliff at Monte la Difensa in December 1943, then held the right flank of the Anzio beachhead for ninety nine consecutive days, pushing an entrenched German division back fifteen hundred yards in a single week through silent night patrolling, blackened faces, and the V-42 stiletto. We trace the unit from Geoffrey Pyke's cancelled Project Plough mission to Norway, through the snowbound training camps of Montana, into the freezing rain of the Italian mountains, across the flooded plain of Anzio against the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, and up to the gates of Rome on June 4, 1944. We compare the Force directly with Darby's Rangers at Cisterna and the British Commandos in the Anzio wadis to answer one specific question: why did this brigade earn a fearsome reputation that the other Allied special units, for all their courage, simply did not. The story includes the Military Medal action of Sergeant Tommy Prince of the Brokenhead Ojibway Nation, the documented German pullback recorded by the United States Army Center of Military History, the Das dicke Ende kommt noch calling cards left on enemy positions, and the full lineage that runs from the Force through to the modern Canadian Special Operations Regiment, which received its first Regimental Standard from Governor General Mary Simon on the eightieth anniversary of the unit's disbandment in December 2024. A history of binational courage, verified casualty figures, and one of the most distinctive small units of the entire Second World War.