Finnish officer, Nazi SS soldier and U.S. Special Forces.. one man's story..

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Lauri Allan Törni, later known as Larry Thorne, was a Finnish Army captain who led an infantry company in the Finnish Winter and Continuation Wars and moved to the United States after World War II. He fought under three flags: Finnish, German (when he fought the Soviets in World War II), and American (where he was known as Larry Thorne) when he served in U.S. Army Special Forces in the Vietnam War.

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Larry was a Finn who entered the Finnish Army in 1938 at the age of 19. War broke out between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939 and for the next six years he fought the Russian Army, first as an officer in the Finnish Army; then as an officer in the German SS after Finland surrendered to the Soviets in 1944. While in the Finnish Army he became famous in the period of 1941-1944 when a unit was created under him to penetrate and fight deep behind enemy lines. His unit became so good and so famous the Russians put an unheard of $650,000 bounty on his head. Leading his unit, he received the highest Finnish medal, their Medal of Honor, for his activities behind enemy lines.



When the Finns and the Russians signed their peace treaty, Thorne was dissatisfied with the terms so he went to Germany where he joined the German SS to continue his fight against the Russians. In the last stages of the war he surrendered to the British and eventually returned to Finland after escaping a British POW camp. When he returned, he was then arrested by the Finns, even though he had received their Medal of Honor, and was sentenced to 6 years in prison for treason. He was then pardoned by the Finnish president in December of 1948.

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In 1954 he joined the US Army as a Private under the provisions of the Lodge Act. And as you would expect, he soon ended up in the US Special Forces organization. Going to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he became an instructor at the Special Warfare School where he taught survival, skiing, mountaineering, and guerrilla tactics. He also learned parachuting and was soon an expert in this area.

Rising through the ranks quickly, he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1957 and then promoted to Captain in 1960. From 1958-1962 he was in the 10th Special Forces Group and this is where I got to know him.

In 1962, as a Captain, he led his Special Forces team onto the highest mountain in Iran to recover the bodies from an American C-130 airplane that had crashed and also to recover classified material on the plane. While others had failed before, Thorne and his men did what they had set out to do.

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