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coast allowing the British Eighth Army to break out through the Argenta Gap shortly afterwards. 28

EDSON RAFF
82 ND AIRBORNE
    To his men Edson Duncan Raff was known as ‘Little Caesar’ and to the rest of the US Army his men were known as ‘Raff’s Ruffians’. Both monikers were uttered with respect, and not a little affection, for in World War II Colonel Edson Raff proved himself an outstanding leader of men, and the soldiers who served under him fought with courage from North Africa to Normandy and on into Germany. As the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, Raff led the first American airborne operation of the war as part of Operation Torch in November 1942. Later he saw action in North-West Europe where he combined great personal courage with astute military thinking, and in the years after World War II Raff was at the forefront of the development of American Special Forces.

    Edson Raff was born in New York City in November 1907 to Edson and Abell Raff, one of four children. Little is known of his formative years, other than that he attended a small preparatory school in Winchester, Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley Academy, where he excelled at sport and was captain of the cadet force. The academy’s superintendent was a reserve colonel. ‘From that tough old guy I learned three things,’ recalled Raff years later. ‘One, I don’t give a damn for any man who doesn’t give a damn for me; two, be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell; three, Stonewall Jackson’s battles in the Shenandoah Valley [during the American Civil War], which I remembered in Tunisia later on.’ 1
    In 1928 Raff enrolled in the Military Academy at West Point and five years later he graduated, one of 347 graduates whose passing-out parade was attended by Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff of the US Army. For the next few years Raff’s military career meandered slowly along, and when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the act that triggered the outbreak of World War II, he was a junior infantry officer and stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii.
    Raff subsequently claimed in his wartime memoirs, We Jumped to Fight , that in August the following year he noticed an article in the New York Times about the raising of a test platoon of American parachutists at Fort Benning, Georgia. The one officer and 48 men had been assigned to the Infantry Board from the 29th Infantry Regiment following the War Department’s decision the previous January to explore the possibility of American airborne troops.
    ‘Not being sure if a first lieutenant of infantry having a C.A.A [Civil Aviation Authority] commercial pilot’s license and a yen for adventure possessed the necessary qualifications I nevertheless decided then and there to be a parachutist,’ wrote Raff in his memoirs. 2
    Raff fired off letters, the first to the Adjutant General in Washington requesting his ‘six month extension in the Hawaiian Department be curtailed immediately’, the second to the Chief of Infantry asking for permission to join any putative paratroop unit. The Adjutant General denied his request and the Chief of Infantry, Major General Stephen Odgen Fuqua, prevaricated and said he’d be in touch.
    Six months later Raff did receive a new posting, but it was to the 23rd Infantry at Fort Sam Houston in Texas and not to the airborne unit he so craved. For two miserable months Raff undertook ‘field manoeuvres in the Texas rattlesnake country’ until one day an order arrived, stating simply: ‘Detailed to report not later than June 1st [1941] to the 501st Parachute Battalion at Fort Benning, Georgia.’
    Raff arrived in Georgia in a state of high excitement and was cordially welcomed by his commanding officers, Lieutenant Colonel William Miley, and Lieutenant Colonel William Lee, head of the Provisional Parachute Group, who had taught Raff tank tactics at the Infantry School in 1937.
    On 4 June Raff began training to