The “Dirty Twelve” has everything anyone could hope for in a war movie. Criminals trained as commandos and played by the best tough guys in Hollywood at the time are airdropped to Normandy on a suicide mission. Their goal was to kill the Nazi officers responsible for coordinating Germany’s defense of France in the upcoming large-scale Allied amphibious invasion, which came to be known as the “D-Day.” If the commandos survive, they will receive a complete pardon.
“We weren’t murderers or anything,” Jack Agnew, a filthy thirteen-year-old veteran, once recalled. “We just didn’t do all the things we were supposed to do in some areas and a lot more than they wanted us to do in others. We’re always in trouble.
Originally known as the 1st Demolition Section of the Regimental Headquarters Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, these men earned their moniker while stationed in England. Instead of bathing and shaving with their daily ration of water, they use it to cook game poached from the estate next to the training area. It doesn’t help that they were also “the most difficult, disobedient, and undisciplined people in the U.S. Army during their time in the U.S. Army,” as described in a 2022 article in the U.S. military’s Noncommissioned Officer Magazine.
”We never took care of our barracks or any other thing, or sanitation, and we were always restricted to camp,” recalled the unit’s leader, Jake “McNasty” McNiece. “But we went AWOL every weekend that we wanted to and we stayed as long as we wanted till we returned back, because we knew they needed us badly for combat. And it would just be a few days in the brig. We stole jeeps. We stole trains. We blew up barracks. We blew down trees. We stole the colonel’s whiskey and things like that.”
On June 6, 1944, the Dirty Thirteen were airdropped into Normandy with the mission of destroying bridges over the Duff River to protect assault forces moving inland from Utah Beach. When the day came, they fell along with the 3rd Battalion 506th PIR, but half of the 13 were killed, captured or wounded in the parachute jump, including their officer, Lieutenant Charles Mellen. The rest was led by McNeese, who at the time was a private, and his American Indian ancestry inspired the men to cut off their hair as a “mohawk” tribute before the parachute jump.
Relevant articles:
– The Real-Life D-Day Commandos Who Inspired Hollywood’s ‘Dirty Dozen’, Military.com
– ‘The Dirty Dozen’: Meet D-Day’s Real Rogue Commandos, Coffee or Die Magazine
– ‘The Cold Blue’ Gives a Legendary Filmmaker’s Never-Before-Seen World War II Footage a New Life, Military.com
– E.M. Nathanson, ‘The Dirty Dozen’ Author, Dies at 87, The Hollywood Reporter