2 years 9 months ago - 2 years 9 months ago #2
by Doc
Lauri Alan Törni / Larry Thorne
28 May 1919 – 18 October 1965
Lauri Alan Törni was born on 28th May, 1919, in Viipuri, Finland, near the border with the Soviet Union. Even at an early age, Lauri was fascinated by the military... "he was born to be a soldier", his father told a Finish author writing the biography of his son. As tensions began to escalate between the Finns and the Soviets, Lauri ended being drafted into the Finnish army in 1938. He was part of the 4th Independent Jäger Infantry Battalion. This unit had the important role of supporting the other troops in key moments during battle.
When the
Winter War
sparked between the Soviet Union and Finland, Lauri was a mess sergeant and quickly volunteered to lead patrols against the enemy, as his battalion's ranks were becoming thin. On 8th Jan 1940, Lauri led a successful assault through deep snow against a soviet bunker, while taking out several enemy foxholes with grenades and submachine guns, without a single Finnish casualty. Törni’s bravery and daring leadership was noticed by his superiors and thus invited to officers training school.
The Winter War ended on 13th March 1940, with Finland giving the Soviets substantial chunks of land. It is important to note that during the Winter War, the only important military power supporting the Finns against the Soviets was... Nazi Germany. Therefore it is no surprise that the Nazi's asked for veteran volunteers as they were planning for Operation Barbarossa. 1.400 Finnish volunteers signed up for German training under the Waffen SS. Törni was one of them. He joined the SS to fight the communists when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Finland's part in this offensive was to retake its previous lost territories and nothing more.
Lauri received 7 weeks of SS instruction before returning to Finland.
Lauri excelled in commanding a Finnish guerrilla force known as "Detachment Törni". He was so successful that the Soviets placed a 3 million Finnish marks reward on his head, dead or alive. Nobody even attempted to cash in the offer, as Törni has become a legend and was awarded the Mannerheim Cross of Liberty (Finnish equivalent of the Medal of Honor) for his exceptional valor. He was named a Knight of the Mannerheim Cross, one of the 191 men to receive this distinction. He was also rewarded Germany's Iron Cross, for his bravery, "cold-blooded" tactics and "natural leadership talent" citing several pages of his accomplishments in the two wars.
By the end of 1944, as Finland was ready to stop fighting, Lauri was not. He ended up joining the Sonderkommando Nord, a paramilitary unit of Finnish nationals operated by the Gestapo. As of 1945, it was becoming clear the Nazis would lose the war, Lauri told his fellow countrymen they were deceived by the Germans and they decided to desert to Finland. After World War II, a pro-Soviet government was installed in Finland so Lauri was charged for treason and sentenced to 6 years in prison. He escaped and was recaptured several times until he was pardoned in 1948.
Working for the Finnish community in Venezuela in 1950, he got the job on a freighter, carrying ore to the U.S. ports on the Gulf Coast. On one day, when his ship was close enough to Mobile Bay, Alabaman, Lauri literally jumped over board, diving into the water and swimming to America. He didn't understand English, had no money and no future, but a past that reached the ears of William "Wild Bill" Donovan, founding director of the OSS, now known as the CIA.
Lauri's past fighting for the SS was a big problem, so he used a knife to cut out the piece of his left arm that bore a Waffen SS tattoo. As the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service started the deportation process, Donovan's law firm lobbied Congress to pass a bill that would grant legal status to Finns present in the US illegally. Lauri Törni now as U.S resident, changed his name to Larry Thorne. He joined the Army on 1st Feb 1954, at 34 years old, starting his new military career as a private in the 77th Special Forces Group(Airborne). Larry's abilities were again quickly noticed and after attending Officer Candidate School, he was commissioned as first lieutenant in January 1947. He was then promoted to Captain and assigned to the
10th Special Forces Group
(Airborne) in Germany.
A little detour to a film made in Germany by the Army Signal Corps, "Phantom Fighters" is a movingly meaningful television documentary about American soldiers trained to organize guerrilla resistance in enemy occupied territories. In a field training exercise, the many and varied skills of the Tenth are put to the test. They include a parachute jump, a mountain climb on skis, destruction of a bridge on the River Ammer, and a race to outdistance the enemy. It's a rugged, exciting life as evidenced on film and no soldier with Tenth Special Forces would have it any other way. Every man is a volunteer qualified to carry out hazardous and adventurous assignments. In no other branch of the United States military services is the standard of physical fitness higher than in Special Forces.
While in Germany, Thorne was selected to lead his team on a mission to recover bodies and classified equipment from an army transport that went down in January 1962, in the Zagros mountains of Iran, near the Soviet borders. Several missions have already failed and the U.S. Army wanted to prevent the soviets from obtaining the classified equipment. Thorne and his men climbed the dangerous mountain terrain, through 6 meters of snow sometimes, found the bodies and retrieved the equipment.
In 1964, Larry switched the snow and ice with the jungle, high humidity and mosquitos. Applying the same unconventional tactics that commended his style, he led a variety of counterinsurgency missions, search and destroy and base defense. He succeeded in everything and his men trusted his instincts, abilities for meticulous planning, skillfully analyzing the battlefield and always ready with a backup plan in case the mission ran into trouble: "He didn't go into an operation thinking everything would go well. He spent weeks planning every single detail."
On his first tour, Thorne and his covert operations team had their camp at Tinh Bien, in the Mekong Delta, along South Vietnam's border with Cambodia. The camp was still under construction and vulnerable to attack. To buy more time for the construction to be finished, Thorne was able to stage a diversion for the Viet Cong that would cross the river into Cambodia, right into the area where Khmer Krom, a Cambodian bandit unit, was operating.
Soon the Viet Cong and Khmer Krom started fighting each other, while Larry's team and 100 allied fighters attacked from the rear crushing both Viet Cong and Khmer Krom. A few days later, after the Ting Bien camp was completed, the enemy was infiltrating the area to attack it. There was very little Larry could do to prevent it, but he secretly positioned mines at his own MG positions, so that detonations would kill infiltrators but not destroy the guns. As soon as the Viet Cong was on top of the MG positions, Larry set off the explosives and his troops ran to the machine guns, starting to fire back at the enemy. Despite the great effort, Ting Bien was almost overwhelmed and Larry was forced to call in an airstrike, which dropped napalm and strafed the VC with .50 caliber machine guns. The base held.
On his second tour in 1965, Thorne organized and coordinated multiple missions for five reconnassance teams. Working closely with operatives on the ground to monitor enemy movements, Thorne again anticipated the enemy’s intentions—an attack on Nha Trang air base on the coast in central South Vietnam. Col. J. M. Spears, commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, lauded Thorne’s intelligence work: “Thus far in Vietnam, there has been only one Viet Cong attack on a major U.S. installation in which the enemy did not achieve surprise. This one instance was the attack of Nha Trang airbase on 25 June in which damage was minimized because the prompt response of defense elements disrupted the Viet Cong effort. It was Captain Thorne’s work that made this action possible.”
Thorne was later transferred to MACV-SOG, a classified, highly secret organization of elite troops that included Green Berets, Navy SEALs and Air Force special operation teams. Larry's last mission was on 18th October 1965, during Operation Shining Brass in Laos. The mission was to locate enemy supply dumps that could later be destroyed by the South Vietnamese air force. He was commanding the recon team from one of the two CH-34 Sikorsky helicopters that would return to base once the insertion zone was secured. Just as the unit landed, heavy rain started to fall and dense clouds enveloped Thorne's helicopter.
He fought to keep his helicopter safe at zero visibility. Larry radioed the base several times, but then there was silence from his helicopter. Larry was reported missing and more than 50 search-and-rescue missions were flown. He couldn't be found. Thorne was declared killed in action a year later and posthumously promoted to Major. His men refused to believe he was dead. In summer 1999, a Defense Department task force, with the help of the Vietnamese government, carried out a search mission and found the chopper crashed on a steep slope of the jungle-covered mountain.
Larry Thorne
was 46 when he died. Thorne received the Distinguished Flying Cross, Two Purple Hearts, Bronze Star Medal and was nominated for the Silver Star.
Last edit: 2 years 9 months ago by Doc.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Juanma66, Maki, WANGER
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