It is a little-known fact that during the Cold War, two U.S. Army Special Forces detachments were stationed far behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. The existence and missions of the two detachments were highly classified secrets.The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the juggernaut they expected when and if a war began. The plan was Special Forces Berlin. The first 40 men who came to Berlin in mid-1956 were soon reinforced by 60 more and these 100 soldiers (and their successors) would stand ready to go to war at only two hours' notice, in a hostile area occupied by nearly one million Warsaw Pact forces, until 1990.

Their mission should hostilities commence was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines, and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each man was allocated a specific area. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, intelligence tradecraft and able to act if necessary as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move.Special Forces Berlin was a one of a kind unit that had no parallel. It left a legacy of a new type of soldier expert in unconventional warfare, one that was sought after for other deployments including the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. With the U.S.

government officially acknowledging their existence in 2014, their incredible story can now be told.REVIEWS ". a story that had to be told, and who better to tell it than Chief Warrant Officer James Stejskal who has established his credentials as a historian and researcher in various articles as well as his seminal work on the Swakop River Campaign and World War I in South West Africa The Horns of the Beast. In addition, his service in the US Army Special Forces in Berlin during the 1970s and 80s gives him the insight to comment cogently on that portion of US Army Special Forces history that impacted on the doctrine of both urban unconventional warfare and counter terror operations. a historical record without which the story of United States Army Special Forces would not be complete. Congratulations to Chief Stejskal on an excellent work of military history. CSM Jeffrey Raker, US Army Special Forces (Retired) , The Drop, the journal of the Special Forces Association, Summer 2016.