::It reminds me a bit of events surrounding the formation of the Special Air Service... It's a good read if you like those old yarns; Paddy Mayne saved from a court-marshall by founder David Stirling, hand-picked men, operational deniability.  But apart from those parallels it was more obviously people in whose countries the war was actually happening who fought in small groups.  There were many 'Dirty Dozens' (from partisans to commandos), but unhelpfully for the task of tracing an American lineage for this film (and similar films), they were Europeans rather than Americans. It strikes me as an example of one of those unwitting cultural translations (which is my interest); making movies about what one saw, rather than what one did.