ABSTRACT
Special Forces worked in the last war with partisans on a number of occasions. The British and Americans co-operated with partisans through various agencies. Prominent among them were the British Special Operations Executive (soe) and the American Office of Strategic Services (oss). One of the functions of both organizations was to raise and keep up the spirit of resistance. They supplied explosives, weapons and radios to the partisans, they built up radio communications, provided training facilities for resistance leaders and contact men, and dispatched leaders and agents as well as military missions to partisan groups. The Special Force, formed in the United States after the war, has some characteristics in common with the sas. Special Force parties, designed to command and staff a partisan detachment, are precluded from acting as advisers, observers or liaison officers or from merely providing an occasional stiffening to guerrilla forces, as the sas did in France and Italy.
