During World War II, the First Special Service Force was known by what nickname?

Initially designed as shock troops to invade Norway in WWII, the 1st Special Service Force, the Devil's Brigade was a joint American-Canadian commando unit trained at Fort Harrison near Helena, Montana in the United States.

Although Project Plough, for which it was created for was cancelled, the FSSF initially fought in Alaska and then was sent to Italy in late 1943 as a mountaineering fighting force. In their initial combat with the Germans, they scaled Monte La Difensa in darkness under the cover of an allied artillery barrage. The final 1,000 feet of the climb was up a vertical cliff face with the men using ropes in total silence. In two hours of brutal fighting, they forced the Germans to retreat to the other peak. Their legend was growing.

It was at Anzio that the Germans accidently dubbed the unit as the "Devil's Brigade." The diary of a dead German soldier contained a passage that said, "The black devils (Die schwarzen Teufel) are all around us every time we come into the line." The soldier was referring to them as "black" because the brigade's members smeared their faces with black boot polish for their covert operations in the dark of the night.

Note: Freddie's Freighters was the term they gave to themselves because of their ability to haul their own supplies up into the mountains where they did the most of their fighting. This was because Col Frederick's initial idea of using mules to haul equipment failed miserably.