The OSS SOcieTy JOurnal

Transcription

Summer/fall 2010
The OSS Society Journal
OSS In Manchuria
Saul Steinberg
“It’s a tribute to General Donovan
that his OSS had the intelligence
and imagination to employ artists who served around the world
and produced outstanding art. Saul
Steinberg, who served in China,
Italy, and North Africa, drew 1,200
cartoons and 90 covers for The New
Yorker. Henry Koerner created propaganda posters for the OWI and
was the OSS chief illustrator at the
Nuremberg Trials, photographed
post-World War II Austria and Germany, and created many covers for
Time. Dong Kingman served in the
OSS along with other notable artists
and designers such as Georg Olden,
who designed the CBS logo, and
Donal McLaughlin, the designer of
the United Nations logo.”
From Dan Pinck’s review of Dr. Seuss &
Co. Go to War: The World War II Editorial
Cartoons of America’s Leading Comic Artists by Andre Schiffrin on page 44.
Table of Contents
OSS News
3 Ross Perot to Receive the William J. Donovan Award®
4 MG Eldon Bargewell Receives Bull Simons Award
5 With Modesty, A Hero Gets His Due in
New York Ceremony
6 Joint Special Operations University: Irregular Warfare
6
12
and the OSS Model Studied for Future Strategy
Joint Special Operations
University Holds OSS
Symposium
The 48-Star American Flag
Waves Once More in France
8 New Members Elected to Board of Directors
9 Glorious Amateurs Needed in War with Terrorists
12 The 48-Star American Flag Waves Once More in France
14 Lt. Joseph Gould Receives Bronze Star Posthumously
16
Features
20
World War II Treasures in
Kenneth Rendell’s Museum
22
OSS in Manchuria:
Operation Cardinal
28
The OSS’s Eighth Army
Detachment in Italy: A Few
Men and Their Radio
16 Long Overdue Premiere for Nuremberg in Canada
19 United States Army Special Operations Command Event
20 World War II Treasures Kenneth Rendell’s
Massachusetts Museum Portray Realities of War
22 OSS in Manchuria: Operation Cardinal
26 Former CIA Museum Curator Brings Tools of the
Trade to Life
27 CIA Museum Opens Its Doors to The OSS Society’s
Members and Families
History
28 The OSS’s Eighth Army Detachment in Italy: A Few
Men and Their Radio
33 An OSS Courier in Wartime Washington
34 Robert E. Moyers: OSS Dentist with the Greek Resistance
37 Remembering Her OSS Father:
Lt. Col. Hamner Freeman
38 Kunming, China: Setting for Daring
Wartime Operations
41 OSS Artist Henry Koerner Celebrated
42 Attention Please
38
Long Overdue Premiere for
Nuremberg in Canada
Kunming, China: Setting for
Daring Wartime Operations
Departments
44 Book Reviews
58 Remembering OSS Veterans
67 In Memoriam
74 Help Wanted
Cover photo: OSS Majors Robert Lamar (l) and James Hennessey (r)
with two Russian soldiers in Manchuria during August 1945 as part
of Operation Cardinal. For more information about this mission, please
turn to page 22. Photo courtesy of Dr. Maochun Yu, Professor of East
Asia and Military History, United States Naval Academy.
This photo of the Duke of Windsor with members of the
Operational Swimmer Group II was taken in the Bahamas in
1945. For more information, please see page 74.
Letter From the President
THe OSS Society Journal
HONORARY CHAIRMEN
T
he mission of The OSS Society is to celebrate the historic accomplishments of the Office of Strategic Services and to educate the American
public about the continuing importance of strategic intelligence to the
preservation of freedom. This issue of The OSS Society Journal fully reflects
this dual and complementary purpose.
There are articles about a daring OSS mission in Manchuria in August
1945 known as Operation Cardinal, one of the OSS “mercy” missions
intended to save the lives of Allied POWs at the end of the war; about
the remarkable and largely unknown story of the OSS’s Eighth Army Detachment in Italy; and an essay about Dr. Robert E. Moyers that pays a
long overdue tribute to OSS medical personnel. According to its author,
Dr. Jonathan Clemente, OSS legend has it that “General Donovan was
in Cairo in late 1943 ... and happened upon the young U.S. Army dental
officer standing astride two horses in a makeshift rodeo ... OSS needed a
doctor who was good with horses.”
OSS veteran Bruce Anderson tells the story of working as courier for
OSS in Washington as a 17-year-old: “Arriving at Union Station ... I
couldn’t find the building where I was to report ... then a passerby, seeing my distress, said to me: ‘Son, if you’re looking for OSS, it’s there,
in the roller rink.’” Kunming, China, comes to life in Bob Bergin’s
essay about OSS operations there. The work of OSS artists——geniuses,
really——Saul Steinberg and Henry Koerner is reproduced in this issue.
Jack Wheat’s memory of his brief encounter with General Donovan is
a touching tribute to the visionary founder of OSS. Dan Pinck, Fisher
Howe, and Betty Lussier have generously contributed insightful book
reviews. We also pay respect to OSS veterans who have left us recently
and honor their OSS service.
While looking back, we also look forward and explore the lessons learned
from OSS and their applicability to current conflicts. Last fall, The OSS
Society and the Joint Special Operations University held a symposium
at the U.S. Special Operations Command that examined this issue (“Irregular Warfare and the OSS Model”) by bringing together OSS veterans
and U.S. Special Operations Forces personnel to share their experiences.
A Special Forces officer said that he pretended to call in airstrikes in Afghanistan from B-52s circling overhead to impress his Northern Alliance
fighters. This reminded me about a story my father told regarding his service with OSS behind enemy lines in China. When he was sending reports
back to OSS headquarters using a hand-cranked radio, he told his Chinese
Nationalist fighters that he was in direct communication with President
Roosevelt. Although much has changed since World War II, some principles of unconventional warfare practiced by OSS remain unchanged.
Gen. Bryan D. Brown, USA (Ret.)
President George H.W. Bush
Porter J. Goss
Admiral Eric T. Olson
Ross Perot
James R. Schlesinger
The Viscount Slim
Amb. William J. vanden Heuvel
William H. Webster
R. James Woolsey
OFFICERS
Chairman
Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, USA (Ret.)
Vice Chairman
Col. Alger Ellis, USA (Ret.)
President
Charles T. Pinck
Executive Vice President
Amb. Hugh Montgomery
Senior Vice Presidents
Maj. Gen. Victor J. Hugo, USA (Ret.)
Walter Mess
Col. William H. Pietsch Jr., USA (Ret.)
Secretary
Aloysia Pietsch Hamalainen
Treasurer
Arthur Reinhardt
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Col. Andy Anderson, USA (Ret.)
Carl Colby
Col. Alger C. Ellis, USA (Ret.)
Capt. Jeffrey D. Georgia, USN (Ret.)
Aloysia Pietsch Hamalainen
MG Donald C. Hilbert, USA (Ret.)
Amb. Charles Hostler
Maj. Gen. Victor Hugo, USA (Ret.)
Elizabeth P. McIntosh
Walter Mess
John McLaughlin
Amb. Hugh Montgomery
Col. William H. Pietsch Jr., USA (Ret.)
Charles T. Pinck
Mark F. Pretzat
Arthur Reinhardt
Michael J. Shaheen
Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, USA (Ret.)
Bernadette Casey Smith
The OSS Society Journal is published by:
Charles Pinck, President
The OSS Society
2
The OSS Society, Inc.
6723 Whittier Ave., 200
McLean, VA 22101
703-356-6667
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.osssociety.org
Editor: Elizabeth P. McIntosh
© 2010 The OSS Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
William J. Donovan Award, The OSS Society, and the
OSS logo are registered trademarks of The OSS Society, Inc.
News
ROSS PEROT TO RECEIVE the WILLIAM J. DONOVAN AWARD®
R
oss Perot, an honorary
(Author Ken Follett, in his
chairman of The OSS
book On Wings of Eagles,
Society, has been selected
told the story of this darto receive The OSS Sociing rescue.)
ety’s William J. Donovan
He has provided mediAward on October 2, 2010,
cal treatment for severely
in Washington, D.C.
wounded soldiers since
Ross Perot was born June
Vietnam; funded college
27, 1930, in Texarkana, Texas.
scholarships for the chilAt age 19, he entered the
dren of soldiers killed in
U.S. Naval Academy where
action; given financial
he served as class president,
support to the families of
chairman of the Honor ComPOWs; worked with Chimittee and Battalion Comna for the release of an
mander. He was chosen as
American flight crew that
one of the outstanding leadwas detained on Hainan
ers at the Naval Academy and
Island; supported veterreceived the National College
ans of Desert Storm who
Award for Leadership. After
had been harmed by
graduating in 1953, he served
chemical agents; rescued
four years at sea on a destroy125 Vietnamese refugees
er and on an aircraft carrier.
from High Island near
In 1962, with a $1,000
Hong Kong who were
loan from his wife, Mr. Perot
going to be sent back
started Electronic Data Systo Vietnam; and helped
Ross Perot
tems (EDS). Over the next 22
disabled veterans.
years he built EDS into one
Perot has also provided
of the world’s largest technology services firms. In 1984, he
funding for numerous museums and statues throughout the
sold EDS to General Motors for $2.5 billion. In 1988, he
United States, including the Marine Corps Museum and
founded a new technology services company, Perot Systems
the Airborne and Special Operations Museum. He has reCorporation. He served as chief executive officer until 1992
ceived numerous awards, including the Winston Churchill
and again from 1997 until 2000, helping to take the comAward, the Eisenhower Award, and the Sylvanus Thayer
pany public in 1999. Mr. Perot served as chairman of the
Award from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He
board until 2004, when he was elected chairman emeritus.
was made an honorary Green Beret in 2008.
In addition to his successful business career, Mr. Perot
In announcing Perot’s selection, Major General John
has been devoted to public service. In 1969, at the request
Singlaub, chairman of The OSS Society, said, “Ross Perof the U.S. government, he spearheaded a three-and-a-halfot’s lifelong support for members of the U.S. military and
year campaign to end the brutal treatment U.S. POWs reU.S. Special Operations Forces and their families is unceived from their Southeast Asian captors. In recognition
matched in our nation’s history. Like General Donovan,
of his efforts, Mr. Perot was awarded the Medal for DisRoss Perot’s remarkable achievements are a direct result
tinguished Public Service, the highest civilian award preof his vision, intellect, determination, and leadership. He
sented by the Department of Defense.
and General Donovan gave as much, if not more, to their
When two EDS employees were taken hostage by the Iracountry than it gave them.”
nian government in 1979, Mr. Perot organized and directed a
successful rescue mission, composed of EDS employees and
The invitation to the Donovan Award Dinner is available online at
osssociety.org.
led by retired Special Forces Colonel Arthur “Bull” Simons.
Summer/Fall 2010
3
MG Eldon BARGEWELL SELECTED FOR U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS
COMMAND’S HIGHEST HONOR: The Bull Simons Award
T
Bargewell was selected for a Special Mission Unit in the
ampa, Florida —— Retired U.S. Army Major General Elearly 1980s. While assigned to this unit, he participated in
don Bargewell, an OSS Society member, received the
Operations Just Cause and Desert Storm.
U.S. Special Operations Command’s highest honor when
In 1998, he became the commanding general of the Spehe was awarded the 2010 Bull Simons Award in Tampa,
cial Operations Command (EuFlorida, on June 16, 2010.
rope) in Stuttgart, Germany.
This lifetime achievement
During this time his primary
award, named for U.S. Army Colfocus was in Bosnia and Koonel Arthur “Bull” Simons, honsovo. During Operation Allied
ors the spirit, values, and skills of
Force in the Balkans, Bargewell
the unconventional warrior.
was the commander of the Joint
Bargewell’s extensive career
Special Operations Task Force
in special operations and his
Noble Anvil, tasked with procommitment to ensuring solviding combat search and resdiers were properly trained pricue forces during the conflict in
or to combat were instrumental
Serbia. His JSOTF was successin his selection for this award.
ful in rescuing two USAF pilots
“Major General Eldon A.
shot down and for conducting
Bargewell’s career of service is
other special operations.
an amazing example of how
From 2000 to 2001, he served
one person, always learning and
as the Assistant Chief of Staff
always leading, can profoundly Admiral Eric T. Olson (second from left), Commander,
for Operations, Stabilization
impact both mission success U.S. Special Operations Command, presents the 2010
Force Headquarters, Sarajevo,
and the people who are privi- Bull Simons Award to retired U.S. Army Major General
Bosnia. From 2001 to 2003,
leged to work with him,” said Eldon Bargewell. The award recognizes those who
U.S. Navy Admiral Eric Olson, embody the true spirit, values, and skills of the Special Bargewell was the Director
Operations Forces warrior, and is named after Colonel
of the Center for Special OpCommander, USSOCOM.
erations, Plans, and Policy,
“He is the man you want Arthur “Bull” Simons.
planning the mission, the one Photo by Mike Bottoms, U.S. Special Operations Command U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill AFB, Florida.
you want close by, on your
From 2003 to 2005, he was
right or left during a firefight,
the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations at Allied Joint
and the one you can trust to tell the truth when it’s over.”
Force Command in Brunssum, Netherlands. His final as Bargewell, a Tacoma, Washington, native, enlisted in the
signment on active duty was as the Director of Strategic
U.S. Army in 1967 and was assigned to the Studies and ObOperations at Headquarters Multi-National Force-Iraq
servation Group in Vietnam. During his two tours in SOG
in Baghdad, Iraq.
as a noncommissioned officer team leader, Bargewell con “If you look at lifetime achievement awards, it’s not about
ducted more than 25 reconnaissance, direct action, and team
the person who receives the award, it’s about the people
recovery missions into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam
that got him to that level of success and I can honestly say
where he ultimately earned the Distinguished Service Cross,
that about my career,” said Bargewell. “I had the fortune
the nation’s second highest award for valor.
in the majority of my assignments to work around really
Shortly after returning from Vietnam in 1972, Bargewell
wonderful and brilliant, dedicated, and loyal people.”
attended Infantry Officers’ Candidate School, graduating
Bargewell retired on January 1, 2007, after serving more
as the Leadership Honor Graduate, and was commisthan 39 years in the U.S. Army with more than 29 years in
sioned in the infantry in April 1973. His first assignment
Special Operations. He and his family currently reside in
as a commissioned officer was with the 2nd Battalion,
Eufaula, Alabama.
75th Infantry (Ranger), Fort Lewis, Washington.
4
News
With Modesty, a Hero Gets His Due in New York Ceremony
By Carol DeMare
Reprinted from the Times Union
C
olonie, New York —— When you’ve hid out for 77
days in a jungle with 2,000 Japanese soldiers and 45
dogs searching for you, being awarded a surprise medal for
bravery more than six decades later is not overwhelming.
On Wednesday, November 11, 2009, Cornelius “Neil”
Gray was rather nonchalant as he listened to Army National Guard Brigadier General Michael Swezey read from
a commendation that told of Gray’s heroism after he parachuted behind enemy lines in Burma in 1945.
The 85-year-old Gray was certainly appreciative, and he
said so as more than 100 veterans and their families, along
with public officials, gave him a standing ovation. But the
veteran of three wars——after World War II, he served in Korea and Vietnam——took in stride the honor of having former Rep. Michael McNulty pin a Bronze Star on him at the
Joseph E. Zaloga VFW Post No. 1520 on Everett Road.
As the ceremony was about to start, Swezey went to
Gray’s table and accompanied him to the front of the
room without telling him why.
The Bronze Star was a long time coming for the Brunswick resident, and he has his brother, the late attorney Bill
Gray, to thank for it. Working with McNulty, Bill Gray
gathered the information the Pentagon required to get his
brother the recognition.
A popular lawyer and familiar face on the streets of Albany, Bill Gray, who served in private practice and the
public defender’s office, died in late August at age 78.
Neil Gray was 21 years old and a sergeant when he
made a parachute jump behind Japanese lines in Burma in
June 1945. He then carried out his mission “in a superior
manner,” with “selflessness and dedication to duty,” the
commendation reads.
“He trained 650 Korean and Burmese guerrillas who
joined our forces,” Swezey told the audience. “In dealing
with difficult native guerrillas and guides, he showed tact
and leadership. For 77 days he was behind enemy lines
with Japanese patrols hunting him in numbers from 100
to 1,900, using 45 dogs
and many Burmese informers. At one time,
the jungle was covered
by a barrage of 37mm
guns and machine guns
about 500 yards from
his camp. Sergeant Gray,
under fire, kept his nerve
and gave confidence and
courage to his native runners and guerrillas.” His
mission ended in September 1945.
What the commendation doesn’t say is that Gray
jumped into Burma——now known as Myanmar——on a
mission for the Office of Strategic Services——OSS——the
wartime intelligence agency and forerunner of the Central
Intelligence Agency and U.S. Army Special Forces.
He had undergone a couple of months of “intensive training by the OSS on the island of Ceylon,” Gray said, apparently plucked from the forces for the intelligence work.
“At that time I was a sergeant, but I stayed in for Korea
and I stayed in for Vietnam,” Gray said. He retired as a
major after 27 and one-half years of service.
Gray, who was a close friend of the late Assemblyman
Richard Conners, got a degree from Siena College after
World War II and was working on a Master’s at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service when he was “called
back” to fight in Korea, he said. Later, in Vietnam, he was
with the 11th Armored Calvary. During his military career, he spent three years as an army reservist. His photo
is hanging in the Air Commando Hall of Fame in Fort
Walton Beach, Florida.
“I was with the OSS between tours of duty,” he said, serving with army intelligence. Upon retiring from the army in
1968, “I got an honest job,” Gray said with a chuckle.
For 77 days he was behind enemy lines with Japanese patrols
hunting him in numbers from 100 to 1,900, using 45 dogs and
many Burmese informers.
Summer/Fall 2010
5
Present Meets Past
Joint Special Operations University: Irregular Warfare
and the OSS Model Studied for Future Strategy
V
eterans of the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) recently joined nearly 70 attendees in
Tampa at a symposium hosted by the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) and The OSS Society. The
purpose was to learn about the OSS and discuss whether
and how elements of the OSS model might be applied
to future irregular warfare challenges. Four panels featuring OSS veterans, prominent historians, strategists, and
Afghanistan veterans tackled the issue of the relevancy of
the OSS model.
What was striking was the similarity in the conditions
and challenges faced by both the OSS and the contemporary veterans of Afghanistan. Technology has changed dramatically, yet the decisive role of the individual persisted
as the central theme for the entire symposium. As one of
the army officers said about the OSS veterans: “We must
understand who they are, not just what they did.”
Dr. Bruce Reynolds of San Jose State University recalled
that the OSS displayed an “organizational determination
to do great things.” The OSS mentality of “let’s try it and
see if it works” was very helpful in developing innovative
and effective ways of operating. Will Irwin, a retired Special Forces officer, remarked that the OSS “produced creative and unfettered minds.”
In his opening remarks, Dr. Brian Maher, President of
JSOU, proposed that we regard “intellectual capacity as
our strongest weapon” and stressed the need to “connect
to the past to build visions for the future.”
Central to that connection is the dominating figure of
Major General William J. Donovan, appointed as Coordinator of Information in July 1941 and later, the Director
of the OSS. Charles Pinck, OSS Society President, noted
that Donovan was “dedicated to intellectual pursuits” and
“encouraged independent thinking.”
While Donovan encouraged a persona of “brains,
brawn, and bravado” in his personnel, he also developed
in them an “an ability to think and act independently ...
an eagerness to try things not tried before.”
Admiral Eric Olson, USSOCOM Commander, spoke
of the “spirit and élan” of the OSS and that linkages to the
OSS help “re-energize those elements of our DNA such as
tactics, intelligence, and outlook.”
6
Admiral Eric T. Olson, USSOCOM Commander, speaking at
the JSOU symposium.
As with the OSS, the list of what USSOCOM does
“expands all the time.” By doing so, the SOF community
learns about itself. For instance, SOF is “far more resilient
than we thought we could be ... and our retention rates are
higher than ever.”
A recurring topic of interest during the symposium involved the selection and assessment of individuals for the
OSS. Quite simply, the OSS knew the kinds of exceptional people it wanted. The OSS identified the innate skills it
News
needed, such as language and cultural awareness, and the
other skills it could train to prepare for specific missions.
Dr. John Chambers of Rutgers University noted
that the goal of the OSS comprehensive and intensive
psychological assessments was to develop a “secure, capable, and intelligent person to deal with uncertainty and
stress with great self-confidence.” Part of that process included a complex battery of compatibility tests and peer
reviews that were “hugely important” in developing and
sustaining the human resources. One OSS veteran reported that the matching of individuals was so successful
that many remained close friends and associates for the
rest of their lives.
Today’s SOF share with the OSS the requirement to
field individuals and teams who are bold, daring, innovative, and capable of independent judgment, thought,
and action. Equally relevant are the OSS requirements for
regional expertise, cultural awareness, and language proficiency that remain essential for SOF.
Two distinct perspectives emerged on the central question of the future relevance of the OSS model. One view
argued that the circumstances of World War II were so vast
and so unique that the experiences and lessons of the OSS
cannot apply either to the present or the future.
Others argued that contemporary challenges remain
familiar, requiring the kind of ingenuity and “unfettered
mind” that Donovan and the OSS employed. Flexibility
and adaptability remain essential because what works in
one place is not likely to work in another without creativity and cleverness.
In addressing the challenges of irregular warfare, Major
General John Singlaub, OSS Society Chairman, emphasized
the principle to “let people liberate themselves!” To do so, it
is important not to “remove the motivation to participate in
one’s own security” by doing too much for them.
The comments of various OSS veterans spoke to the essence of their experiences and their individual character:
The OSS Society dedicated these plaques at the U.S.
Special Operations Memorial in Tampa, Florida, during
the JSOU symposium. The plaque below, donated by OSS
veteran Walter Mess, lists the names of Detachment 101
personnel killed in Burma.
“I expect the primitive conditions I found in China were
similar to what I think was found in Afghanistan.”
“After the war, I vowed to learn something new every
year—things like bridge, chess, golf ... stuff like that.”
“As a second-generation Italian fighting alongside Italian
partisans, it was almost like being at home ... we liked the
same food and music.”
“I didn’t have the foggiest notion what I planned to do!”
To read the report produced by JSOU from this symposium, please
visit www.osssociety.org.
(l to r) OSS veterans Arthur Reinhardt, Hugh Tovar, and
Major Caesar Civitella, USA (Ret.)
Summer/Fall 2010
7
OSS ARTIFACTS
It has come to our attention
that private collectors of OSS artifacts may be identifying themselves as “official” OSS historians.
The OSS Society does not have
an official historian. If anyone
identifies themselves as such to
you or has done so previously,
please contact us immediately.
The same collectors may be inducing OSS veterans and others
to part with their OSS memorabilia by promising not to
sell items donated to them or
promising to return them and
not doing so. It is also our understanding that collectors have
not been properly documenting
these gifts. Without such documentation, anyone to whom
you donate OSS items is free to
do with them as they choose, including selling them.
If you have OSS artifacts in your
possession, The OSS Society
would be honored to receive
them. We respectfully ask that
you consider donating them to
The OSS Society and not to private collectors so that your donations can be properly documented and preserved. You can
also rest assured that your donated items will never be sold or
donated to a third party by The
OSS Society.
If you have items that you
wish to donate, please contact The OSS Society at
[email protected], at our office address, or by telephone at
703-356-6667.
8
Caesar Civitella and Rob Townley
Elected to The OSS Society’s Board
T
he OSS Society elected two new members to its Board of Directors at its
annual meeting on May 23, 2010, at Congressional Country Club (Area F)
in Bethesda, Maryland, the former home the primary OSS training facility.
Major Caesar Civitella, USA (Ret.), has devoted nearly seven decades to
special operations. In 1943, Sergeant Civitella, an airborne engineer, began his
military career in special operations by volunteering for an OSS Operational
Group (OG). He served with the 2671st Special Reconnaissance Battalion, Separate (Provisional), jumping behind enemy lines in France and Italy, and was
personally decorated by OSS commander General William J. Donovan.
After the war, Major Civitella served in the U.S. Army in various capacities,
first in the 82nd Airborne Division and later the 508th, PIR at Fort Benning,
then as an instructor at Fort Bragg in the newly created Special Forces, and
subsequently as a training adviser with the Military Advisory and Assistance
Group in South Vietnam, forming the first regional forces. His last assignment
for the U.S. Army was as Chief, G-3 Training Division, U.S. Army Special
Warfare Center, before retiring as a major in 1964. Immediately following his
retirement, he joined the CIA, serving in Southeast Asia. His final assignment
for the CIA was as the agency’s representative to the U.S. Rapid Deployment
Command and U.S. Readiness Command at McDill Air Force Base from 19811983. The CIA awarded him the Intelligence Medal of Merit for his 19 years of
service to the agency.
Since his retirement from the CIA, Major Civitella has continued to work to
promote the legacy of the OSS OGs. He is one of the few living OSS veterans
who pioneered U.S. Army Special Forces and served in the CIA overseas. In May
2008, Major Civitella was awarded the Bull Simons Award by the U.S. Special
Forces Command and the Distinguished Service Award by The OSS Society.
Rob Townley joined the Society as a lineal descendant in 2008. His grandfather, Nick Kukich, served with the OSS in Albania as a U.S. Marine. Mr. Townley
currently works for an advanced research and development office within the
Department of Defense. In that capacity, he is routinely called upon to provide
assistance and insight on national security issues to senior intelligence officials,
policymakers, Fortune 500 companies, and combat commanders alike. In his
military service with the Marine Corps, he served in a variety of positions involving signals or human intelligence collection and analysis, interrogation, counterintelligence, and surveillance, including tours with all three major national
intelligence agencies, as well as numerous combat assignments supporting special
operations units and interagency or international task forces.
Recently, Mr. Townley managed a strategy development project aimed at understanding the core of innovative thought, intellectual discipline, and visionary leadership that formed the cultural foundation of the OSS, based on intensive archival research activities, operational analysis, and historical surveys. It is
intended as a means to infuse today’s defense and intelligence establishments
with the spirit and character of the OSS and to provide a consolidated knowledge source for those seeking to learn from the OSS legacy.
News
Glorious Amateurs Needed in War with Terrorists
By Charles Pinck
Published in Sphere
A
s Congress prepares to start hearings on the Christintelligence community discourages the type of people
mas Day attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253,
who served so valiantly in the OSS from serving today. Let
there will be an inevitable focus on how to use the latme cite one example to prove this point. I was contacted
several years ago by someone wishing to
est technology——better databases, fulljoin our nation’s intelligence services.
body scanners and the like——to detect
This person’s record was nothing less
and prevent future attacks. But the fact
than remarkable. After graduating from
is that despite remarkable advances in
high school, he backpacked alone for 18
technology, intelligence remains a dismonths across five continents. Along
tinctly human endeavor. There is no
the way he discovered a latent talent for
machine that can substitute for a human
languages and achieved conversational
being’s intellect, judgment, instinct, or
proficiency in three. He went on to get
courage. And if lawmakers truly want
an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastto reform our intelligence community,
ern history from a top university with a
they would be wise to look backward
3.9 grade point average. Later, he taught
instead of forward——all the way back
himself Farsi by moving to an Iranian exto World War II’s Office of Strategic
patriate community, spending thousands
Services (OSS), the predecessor to the
of hours learning the language fluently
CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forcand the culture. Despite these impressive
es. This “unusual experiment,” as its
qualifications, he was unable to elicit any
General Donovan’s official
visionary founder, General William J.
CIA portrait.
interest from our intelligence commu“Wild Bill” Donovan, described it in his
nity. The only position offered to him
1945 farewell address, succeeded princiwas an alternate spot for an intelligencepally because of its diverse and brilliant
related summer internship. Had he been alive in World War
personnel, many of whom probably would never get adII, the OSS would have grabbed him in a second. Donovan
mitted into today’s intelligence services.
said he would “rather have a young lieutenant with enough
They included Virginia Hall (the only civilian woman
guts to disobey a direct order than a colonel too regimentto receive the Distinguished Service Cross in World War
ed to think and act for himself” and constantly reminded
II), Sterling Hayden (who received a Silver Star for his acOSS personnel that they “could not succeed without taking
tions behind enemy lines), Moe Berg (who undertook a
chances.” The OSS was designed to do great things. William
mission to learn about German efforts to create an atomic
Casey said of the OSS that “you didn’t wait six months for
bomb), and Ralph Bunche (who would become the first
a feasibility study to prove that an idea could work. You
African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize). Its ranks
gambled that it might work. You didn’t tie up the organizaalso included two master forgers released from prison to
tion with red tape designed mostly to cover somebody’s
work for the OSS. Donovan described them as his “gloriass. You took the initiative and the responsibility. You went
ous amateurs.”
around end; you went over somebody’s head if you had
William Fairbairn, the legendary expert in hand-to-handto. But you acted. That’s what drove the regular military
combat and martial arts, was close to 60 years old when
and the State Department chair-warmers crazy about the
he joined the OSS–and was still able to defeat men less
OSS.” These are the same qualities our intelligence services
than half his age. Current personnel rules would prevent
so badly need today to win our war with terrorists.
Fairbairn from applying for a similar position today. Our
There is no machine that can substitute for a human being’s
intellect, judgment, instinct, or courage.
Summer/Fall 2010
9
Annual Carpetbagger
Reunion Held in
Nation’s Capital
T
he 19th annual OSS Carpetbagger reunion was held
in September 2009 in Washington D.C. The Carpetbaggers, code name for OSS air operations in occupied
countries in Europe, were assigned to the 801st/492nd
Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force.
Approximately 100 Carpetbaggers and guests attended
the festivities, which included tours of the Air Force Memorial, the Pentagon, Iwo Jima Memorial, World War
II Memorial, National Air and Space Museum, International Spy Museum, National Congressional Library,
and the U.S. Capitol.
The highlight of the tour was a wreath-laying ceremony
at the Air Force Memorial. The reunion concluded with
a banquet on Saturday evening. The featured guest and
speaker was General Norman A. Schwartz, Chief of Staff,
U.S. Air Force. His address focused on the importance
Carpetbagger President Sebastian Corriere at the Air
Force Memorial.
and efficiency of the missions conducted by the Carpetbagger crews. General Schwartz was introduced by Charles
Pinck, President of the OSS Society.
Winnipeg Names Street in
Honor of Legendary Sir
William Stephenson
W
innipeg, Canada, named a street after a local man
who became a legendary World War II spy known as
Intrepid——an inspiration for fictional spy James Bond.
A city hall committee agreed to recommend that Water
Avenue, which links Main Street to the Provencher Bridge,
be renamed William Stephenson Way.
Sir William Samuel Stephenson was born in Winnipeg
on January 23, 1896. As a Canadian soldier, airman, and
spymaster, Stephenson became the senior representative
of British intelligence for the Western Hemisphere during
World War II. Stephenson used the code name “Intrepid”
and was an inspiration behind author Ian Flemming’s fictional spy, James Bond.
According to an interview in 1962, Ian Fleming said,
“James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true
spy. The real thing is ... William Stephenson.” Stephenson
was also a radio pioneer who helped develop a method of
transmitting photographs around the world. But it was his
10 The OSS Society Journal
espionage work that garnered the most fame. Some suggest his covert operations in World War II were a decisive
factor in the Allied victory.
As Winston Churchill’s personal representative to U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stephenson became a
close adviser to FDR and suggested he put General William Donovan in charge of all U.S. intelligence services.
For his wartime work, Stephenson was knighted in 1945.
In his homeland, Stephenson was made a Companion of
the Order of Canada in 1979 and invested in the Order in
1980. He received the William J. Donovan Award in 1983.
He died on January 31, 1989, in Paget, Bermuda.
News
U.S. Embassy Marks 65th Anniversary
of Operation Halyard in SerBia
C
harge d’Affaires Jennifer Brush visited Pranjani on August 15, 2009, to
mark the 65th anniversary of Operation Halyard and to honor Serbian
families who assisted in saving the lives of hundreds of U.S. airmen shot down
by Nazi forces during World War II.
She laid wreaths in commemoration of the 65th Anniversary of the beginning of Operation Halyard. During the summer of 1944 approximately 1,000
U.S. airmen bailed out over German-occupied Yugoslavia, a significant number
of them landing in Serbia. In a series of daylight and night airlifts that occurred over the course of four months, a team made up of troops of General
Mihailovic’s Royal Yugoslav Army in the Homeland and the Office of Strategic
Services evacuated over 500 U.S. airmen from the village of Ranjini. The rescue
of the U.S. airmen involved small unit actions against German troops and put
at risk entire Serb villages that sheltered the U.S. personnel. U.S. airmen bear
testimony to the significant sacrifices of local Serb villagers who fed, cared for
and protected them, in some cases for up to six months. The Halyard Mission
is considered one of the greatest rescues of American airmen from behind enemy lines in the history of warfare.
OSSer Heads Veterans Day Parade
By Sean Allocca
Reprinted from the Hudson Reporter
A
solemn Veterans Day ceremony was held at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on
Boulevard East in Weehawken,
N.Y., overlooking the newly commissioned USS New York, a battleship made with steel recovered
from Ground Zero.
The ceremony, held every year
on the 11th hour of the 11th day
of the 11th month, commemorates
the exact time that the armistice Veterans Sergio Martinelli (l) and
treaty was signed ending WWI.
Joe Fredericks (r) led the Veterans Day
Lifelong Weehawken resident ceremony that was held at the Soldiers
and veteran Joe Fredericks has led and Sailors Monument.
the ceremony for more years than
he can remember. A member of
the Foreign Wars Post 1923, he served in WWII with the Office of Strategic
Services, supplying the resistance movement with munitions and provisions
in France and Germany.
Huge Bequest
by Literary
Agent
By Jason Edward Kaufman
Reprinted from the Art Newspaper
Around 2,200 old masters, 19thand 20th-century drawings, and
more than 100 paintings and
decorative art objects from the
collection of the late Joseph McCrindle have been distributed to
more than 30 museums in the
United States.
McCrindle, 85, a literary agent and
lifelong collector, died in New York
in 2009, leaving a huge quantity
of art to museums and his estate.
Christie’s is completing an appraisal that may exceed $20 million.
McCrindle also left amounts ranging from $100,000 to $1 million
to more than a dozen museums,
universities, libraries, and orchestras ($10 million in total) and another $10 million to the McCrindle
Foundation, which supports museums and other charities.
Most of the works went to the
Morgan Library & Museum, New
York (365 pieces), National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C. (300), Yale
Center for British Art (200—McCrindle went to Yale Law School),
and the Museum of Fine Arts
(MFA), Boston(100).
McCrindle was raised by his
wealthy grandparents, who lived
on Fifth Avenue. He kept a flat in
London after his World War II service in the Office of Strategic Services. He began collecting avidly
in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily
in London, Paris, and Rome, from
dealers such as Agnew’s, Colnaghi,
and Carlo Sestieri. The bulk of his
collection was old master drawings, mainly Italian with French,
Dutch, and British works.
Summer/Fall 2010
11
The 48-star American Flag Waves Once More in France
by Serge Boulbes
Reprinted from La Depeche du Midi
Translated by David Brown
T
here were a total of 15. Two were killed in the Tarn,
five others in fighting that followed in France and
Germany. Section PAT, composed of American commandos, parachuted into the Sibobre region in August
1944. They participated in the liberation of Castres, their
flag at the head of the column. The flag at that time had
48 stars (Alaska and Hawaii being added later). The flag,
“the oldest American resident of the Tarn and last remaining American witness to the liberation of Castres,”
took part in a ceremony at the War Memorial commemorating the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Castres.
In attendance, for the first time, was the Consul of the
United States of America in Toulouse, at the invitation
of Deputy Prefect Jacques Troncy. “The section was commanded by Conrad Lagueux, 21 years old,” explained
David Brown, the consul. “The flag-bearer had been
chosen because of his height: 2 meters. His name was
George Maddock and he was 23.”
The American consul noted “a dozen of these commando teams parachuted, two or three months after D-Day,
to support the actions of the Resistance. Two were in the
Midi-Pyrenees region: PAT, near the commune of Le Rialet, and EMILY, in the Lot.”
George Maddock leading the Liberation Day parade in Castres (Tarn) in August 1944.
George Maddock Carried the Flag
The presence of this small team of American soldiers also
had a psychological effect on the German troops, undoubtedly contributing to decisions that at times led them, as at
Castres, to surrender.
It should be remembered that the liberation of Castres
was particularly notable for having been accomplished
without a single shot being fired.
The U.S. flag carried by George Maddock remained in
private hands for many years. It has since found a home at
Le Militarial War Memorial Museum in Boissezon, which
placed it in the hands of Meredith Wheeler, a longtime
American resident of Lautrec and volunteer flag-bearer.
“During a conversation with Meredith Wheeler, we talked about how the existence of this American detachment
and of a monument honoring our countrymen who fell
at Le Rialet was so little-known,” said the consul. “The
Lieutenant Conrad LaGueux shaking the hand of the SousPréfet. George Maddock is carrying the American flag.
News
section eventually left for Grenoble
and was more or less forgotten; there
were other priorities at the end of
the war. It is an amazing story. Even
members of the American community know nothing about this story
of commandos in the Lot and the
Tarn. It seems to me important to
remember this cooperation between
French and Americans, this tie, this
heritage we share.”
David Brown, American Consul in Toulouse, France (standing to the left of the
marker) and Meredith Wheeler (standing to the right of the marker) with other
Americans at a ceremony in Le Rialet honoring the two fallen men of OG PAT.
The U.S. flag carried
by George Maddock
remained in private
hands for many
years.
Summer/Fall 2010
13
Lieutenant Joseph Gould Receives Bronze Star Posthumously
O
n January 25, 2010, Congressman Charles Rangel of
New York presented the Bronze Star to Jonathan S.
Gould, son of the late Joseph Gould, who served in the
London office of the OSS from June 1944 through V-E
Day. This medal presentation ceremony marked the end
of a long quest by his family to obtain this award, which
had been approved by the War Department Decorations
Board in February 1946 but after army Lieutenant Joseph
Gould received his honorary discharge from military service and returned to New York to rejoin his wife, Betty.
However, because of the extended period of time that
OSS personnel files remained classified, Joseph Gould
was never able to claim his award before his death in 1993.
Now, because of the release
of these personnel files to
the National Archives in
August 2008, the long wait
endured by his family has
finally ended. With the support of Congressman Rangel’s office, the Army Decorations Board reviewed
documents obtained from
Joseph Gould’s personnel
file showing that he had
been recommended and approved for the Bronze Star
after the war. As a result, the Board formally approved
the release of the medal to Congressman Rangel and requested that he present it to Jonathan Gould on behalf of
Joseph Gould’s family. Within months after the United
States entered World War II following the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Joseph Gould enlisted
in the U.S. Army. Because of training he received from the
Officer Reserve Corps while attending Columbia Journalism School, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant
and ordered to report for basic infantry training at Camp
Croft in South Carolina in July 1942.
Shortly thereafter, Joseph Gould’s background as a
union official in New York for the Screen Publicists Guild
attracted the attention of the Office of Strategic Services.
The OSS had just begun cultivating exiled anti-Nazi trade
unionists to lead intelligence-gathering missions behind
enemy lines. There was a need for military officers with
labor union experience to recruit and train these men.
As a result, Joseph Gould was recruited into the OSS in
1943 and ordered to report to its top-secret training facility at the newly converted Congressional Country Club in
Bethesda, Maryland. In the spring of 1944, army Lieutenant Joseph Gould received his orders to ship out and report to the Labor Desk of the London office of the OSS.
Joseph Gould would soon become a key player in the
German penetration campaign launched by the OSS following the Allied invasion of France. In August 1944,
the London office of the OSS Secret Intelligence Branch
prepared the blueprint for this campaign and presented it to Allied military commanders. That document
was called the Faust Plan and it outlined how the OSS
would penetrate Nazi Germany. The plan’s objective:
the collection of secret intelligence by means of espionage to be carried out
by agents recruited from
within dissident anti-Nazi
groups now living in exile
in England and Sweden. It
provided a roadmap for the
planning and execution of
over 50 missions that were
dispatched into Germany
under the leadership of
William J. Casey, chief of
OSS Special Intelligence,
during the final months of the war against Hitler.
Joseph Gould was appointed the recruitment and training officer for a group of five missions collectively called
the TOOL missions. He successfully recruited seven antiNazi German exiles then living in London during the fall
of 1944 to lead these missions. According to the Bronze
Star medal recommendation prepared in June 1945 by
U.S. Army Colonel James R. Forgan, the successful recruitment of the Free Germany Committee exiles was
“entirely due to Joseph Gould’s exceptional tact and diplomacy in skillfully handling these contacts.” Ultimately, Joseph Gould was charged with the responsibility of
training the German exiles for their missions and “displayed rare ingenuity and imagination in his briefing and
preparation of these men.” In concluding his recommendation for the award of the Bronze Star to Joseph Gould,
Colonel Forgan lauded his “great devotion to duty” and
stated that he had “played an essential part in preparing
and activating important missions from which valuable
Joseph Gould was appointed
the recruitment and training
officer for a group of five
missions collectively called
the TOOL missions.
News
results were obtained.” Of the five TOOL missions, two
were later considered by OSS historians as being very successful. The HAMMER mission into Berlin, led by two
natives of that city——Paul Lindner and Anton Ruh——was
dispatched in early March 1945. According to Colonel
Forgan, “vital information was obtained as to conditions
in Berlin, the disposition of troops in the Berlin area and
remaining targets for bombing by the U.S. Air Force.” In
2004, the U.S. Army Decorations Board posthumously
awarded the Silver Star to the men of the HAMMER mission. In addition, the work of the team of agents that
led the PICKAXE mission into the southern German city
of Landshut was later praised by William J. Casey, who
wrote in his memoir that “the agents funneled massive
amounts of information about rail and road traffic, communications centers and troop movements.”
Ultimately, Joseph Gould was charged with the responsibility
of training the German exiles for their missions and “displayed
rare ingenuity and imagination in his briefing and preparation
of these men.”
Charles Faddis, a retired CIA operations officer and the
author of Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA,
spoke to The OSS Society at its annual meeting at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, on May
23, 2010. Congressional Country Club served as the
primary OSS training facility and was known as Area F.
Col. Sully de Fontaine, USA (Ret.) was inducted into
the Special Forces Regimental Hall of Fame at Fort
Bragg, N.C. in August 2009, joining OSS veterans MG
John Singlaub and Col. Aaron Bank.
Summer/Fall 2010
15
Features
Long overdue premiere for Nuremberg in Canada
by Peter Howell
Reprinted from the Toronto Star
N
uremberg: Its Lesson for Today has been called “one of
the most historic films never seen,” even though it
concerns something that can never be forgotten: the Nazi
brutality of World War II.
The 1948 documentary revealed in the starkest of
terms the extent of Nazi complicity in the war and Hitler’s genocidal policy against the Jews and others. The
film is framed by footage of the postwar Nuremberg
Trial, in which many of Hitler’s most dedicated disciples
were brought to justice.
Yet Nuremberg is only now receiving its North American
premiere, which happened on April 17, 2010, at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.
The film was viewed widely in Germany, but it is almost
unknown on this side of the Atlantic. U.S. authorities
sought to keep it out of North American theaters, fearful
that it would provoke a taxpayers’ revolt against the European rebuilding policy known as the Marshall Plan, which
included funds for reconstruction of Germany.
The suppression of the film occurred even though
Nuremberg was made under the authority of the U.S. War
Department and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
the precursor of the CIA. The director was Stuart Schulberg, the youngest member of the field photo/war crimes
unit of the OSS. He was the brother of Budd Schulberg,
the Oscar-winning screenwriter of On the Waterfront who
also worked for the OSS during the war. (Budd Schulberg’s obituary appears on page 65.) Nuremberg makes extensive use of evidentiary footage of Nazi atrocities gathered by Budd Schulberg’s team, which was presented at
the Nuremberg trial.
Hollywood producer Sandra Schulberg, the daughter of
Stuart and niece of Budd, has spent the past five years restoring Nuremberg and preparing it for the wide audience
it never previously had.
“I’d like to think that our world——as it gets smaller and
as communication barriers break down——is slowly but
surely making progress toward the day when it is unthinkable that we commit crimes against the peace, war crimes
and crimes against humanity,” she wrote via email.
“And I hope that, by making Nuremberg accessible at
last, I can play a tiny role in hastening that day.”
Interview with Sandra Schulberg
Q. What made you want to take on the immense project
of restoring Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today?
A. Berlin Film Festival director Dieter Kosslick invited me
to curate a series of 40 Marshall Plan/ERP films for the
2004 Berlinale, and he proposed that we launch the series
with a screening of Nuremberg. He wanted contemporary
German audiences to understand how remarkable it was
that Germany had been included in the Marshall Plan at
all, and felt that the film would convey the immense psychological barrier that stood between Germany and her
former enemies in the immediate postwar period.
To the best of my recollection, it was the first time I
had seen my father’s Nuremberg film, which was made before I was born. And I then became interested in what
had become of the English version. If I were not a professional film producer, it might never have occurred to me
to restore the film and try to get it released in the U.S.
But faced with the facts——the fascinating mystery of what
had happened to Nuremberg after its German release——this
seemed to be my “schicksal,” my fate. “If not I, then who?”
I thought. “If not now, when?”
Q. What shape was the film in when you and Josh Waletzky began working on it? How much work and time did it
take to restore it?
A. The original negative and sound
elements had been lost or destroyed,
so we were faced with the question of
which positive print to use. We had
planned to use a 35mm print at NARA
(U.S. National Archives & Records
Administration), kept in cold storage
in Kansas. On close inspection, however, the image was too degraded and
the contrast too high. Another NARA
print and two duplicate negatives were
worse candidates. They also varied in
length, which meant film frames or
whole shots had been cut.
The German Bundesarchiv (Germany’s National Archive, headquartered in Berlin) then fortunately
agreed to ship one reel of its best 35m
“lavender” print——a fine grain master
positive. Once we saw that first reel,
we breathed a deep sigh of relief, and
requested the other seven reels on
loan. They were also in good condition, with minimal shrinkage.
did this decision go? Were Canadian
politicians or bureaucrats involved
in this, and Canada included in the
ban, to your knowledge?
A. I wish I knew the answer to this
question. None of the documents
unearthed so far attributes specific
names or titles in the chain of command. And by the way, I’m not sure
I could go so far as to use the word
“ban.” It makes for good publicity
now——“Banned in the USA!”——but I
think it was more complex than that.
I think the War and State Department
officials faced a real and complex dilemma, and there may not have been
unanimity. Last summer, for instance,
we
found a remarkable letter from
USMC Sergeant Stuart Schulberg,
Universal
Pictures saying that the
the youngest member of the OSS
film was much too gruesome to show
Field Photo/War Crimes unit, was
to an “entertainment-seeking” public,
later hired by the War Department
so I now think there were people in
to write and direct Nuremberg: Its
Lesson for Today.
the administration who were making
a bona fide effort to have the film
distributed by a major studio. We’ve
Q. You seem to have taken the decision not to change
found nothing to suggest that Canadian authorities were
anything. For example, the German headlines in newsconsulted about the decision.
papers don’t have English subtitles. Was there much debate about this, and why did you choose to go the “no
Q. The film is described as “controversial” in terms of
tampering” route?
U.S. attitudes in 1948, but was there in fact a debate
A. It is true that I made a decision early on not to alter
about it in North America at the time? Or did bureauthe original picture in any way——a decision that was reincrats simply block it from this side of the Atlantic, judgforced by all my archival consultants.
ing it to be potentially controversial?
Since the German version was the only version released
A. I’ve described the decision as “controversial” because the
to theaters, we all agreed that this should be considered the
three investigative news stories (by reporter John Norris)
original, uncut version of the film. They also counselled
published in the Washington Post in September 1949 quote
not to “clean up” the picture, which could have been done
well-known writers and journalists (e.g., William Shirer, John
digitally (though it would have been an extremely expenGunther, Walter Winchell) who declare themselves to be outsive process). That means that the new negative and the
raged that the government is sitting on the film. Winchell
subsequent release prints show the original wear and tear
went on to write a column in The Daily Mirror that he titled
on the film——printed-in dirt, scratches, splices, wandering
“Hall of Shame,” in which he excoriated the unnamed govframe lines, etc.
ernment officials. At that time, no one would go on record for
the Washington Post story about the decision. We also found
Q. Who made the decision in 1948 to ban the film from
letters sent by Pare Lorentz (actually by his attorney), who
U.S. theaters? How far up the political chain of command
offered to buy the film from the War Department so that he
The film was viewed widely in Germany, but it is almost
unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
Summer/Fall 2010
17
could release it on his own. But his offer was refused. Many
years later, he discussed his frustration in an interview.
And Justice Robert H. Jackson commented on his frustration with the situation. Jackson had played a key role——perhaps a first for a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court——in
approving the Schulberg script, and later approving the
version completed for German release. Later, he apparently
requested a print to show at a meeting of the N.Y. Bar Association, but wound up having to show the Soviet film
about the trial, Sud Narodov (Judgment of the People), instead.
Q. There seems to have been serious concern that the
film’s revelations of Nazi atrocities would hamper the
rebuilding efforts of the Marshall Plan. Do you think
people would have rebelled against rebuilding Germany
if the film had been widely seen?
A. I think it is possible that if Nuremberg had been widely released in U.S. theaters during 1949 it could have soured segments of the American public on the notion of rebuilding
Germany, which was a major plank of the European Recovery
Program——known more colloquially as the “Marshall Plan.”
Q. I was surprised to learn from the film that not all
of the high-ranking Nazis tried at Nuremberg received
death sentences. Albert Speer and Rudolph Hess, for example, were given life imprisonment. Do you know why
there was such disparity in the sentencing?
A. Because the English-language version of Nuremberg was
never properly completed or officially released, people
have never really had a chance to see how the Nuremberg trial was actually conducted. Even people involved as
prosecutors at the trial were never given the opportunity
to see it. And of course, today, more than 60 years later,
there are many people alive who really don’t know anything about the trial.
I am not an expert on the Nuremberg Trial, but on the
surface the verdicts seem to indicate that punishment, let
alone execution, was not simply rammed through. The
trial continues to be analyzed and critiqued by modern
jurists and historians to this day (as it should be), but I
think there is nonetheless a consensus that it was conducted judiciously. It certainly represented——and continues to
represent——a milestone for society.
NUREMBERG Coming to U.S. Theaters
The U.S. theatrical premiere of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, completed for the U.S. Department
of War in 1948, will take place at the New York Film Festival on September 28, 2010, followed by a
week-long run at the Film Forum cinema in Manhattan that starts on September 29. Bookings in
other U.S. cities will follow. Commissioned by Pare Lorentz (head of Film/Theater in the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division), Nuremberg was written and directed by OSS Field Photographic Branch
veteran Stuart Schulberg. For political reasons, it was never released to U.S. theaters although it was
widely shown throughout Germany as part of the Allies’ denazification campaign.
Nuremberg was painstakingly restored and the soundtrack reconstructed by Stuart Schulberg’s
daughter, Sandra Schulberg, with the help of Josh Waletzky. Both are noted independent filmmakers. The Schulberg/Waletzky restoration uses original audio from the International Military Tribunal thus permitting audiences to hear the courtroom participants—prosecutors, defendants and
defense attorneys—speaking in their own voices. Nuremberg shows how the international prosecutors built their case against the top Nazi war criminals. The Nuremberg Trial established the
“Nuremberg Principles,” and laid the groundwork for all subsequent trials for crimes against the
peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. For more information: www.nurembergfilm.org.
Features
United States Army Special Operations Command Event
T
he United States Army Special Operations Command
(USASOC) held a capabilities exercise (CAPEX) on
April 26, 2010, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and invited
an OSS Society representative to attend this special event
that displayed the professionalism and expertise of the
world’s most elite special operations forces that trace their
lineage to OSS. Their skill and dedication are a living tribute to General Donovan.
The demonstration included a command briefing by
USASOC Commander Lieutenant General John Mulholland, range and assault demonstrations, air mobile operations, a Black Dagger military free-fall demonstration, and
a noncombatant evacuation operation on Chinook helicopters. Guests were also permitted to fire sniper rifles and
automatic and semiautomatic weapons under the close supervision of USASOC personnel. The pictures shown are a
sample of the various demonstrations that were conducted
as part of CAPEX.
Lieutenant General John Mulholland, Commander, USASOC
Photo by Joe Epley
Photos courtesy of USASOC Public Affairs
Summer/Fall 2010
19
World War II Treasures in Kenneth Rendell’s
Massachusetts Museum Portray Realities of War
By Brian C. Mooney
Reprinted from The Boston Globe
W
orld War II ended 64 years ago, but it comes to
life every time Kenneth Rendell turns on the lights
inside a squat, nondescript building in Natick, Massachusetts. Amid the glitz of nearby shopping centers, the exterior is purposely plain to protect the anonymity of the
place and its treasure——an evocative and jaw-dropping collection of more than 6,000 wartime artifacts Rendell has
gathered over four decades.
For eight years, the Museum of World War II has been
a preserve open only to a circle of Rendell acquaintances,
historians, and military veterans or enthusiasts.
Within its walls, the museum houses a section of the
sofa that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide
on, silicon likenesses of the period’s major figures outfitted in their actual uniforms, a Sherman tank, and a trove
of historically significant letters and documents, including
the complete plans for the invasion of Normandy and a
draft of the 1938 Munich Agreement, with Hitler’s handwritten changes.
Philip Reed, a former curator at Britain’s Imperial War
Museum, has said it “simply has no equal.”
Admission is free but by invitation or appointment
only. The museum may be the capstone of a career that
has earned Rendell international renown as a collector,
dealer, and authenticator.
With the publication of his new book, World War II:
Saving the Reality, a boxed volume that re-creates many of
the museum’s most precious items, Rendell is loosening
up and expanding the hours of operation.
“This is literally the first time I’ve done anything about
having more people coming here. I mean, we’ve kept this
hidden; there’s no name on it even,” he said.
The museum still won’t admit walk-ups or anyone under age 18, however, and appointments must be scheduled
by telephone or through the museum’s website.
Contemplating his legacy, Rendell, now 66, is also in
the conceptual stage of plans to build a larger facility that
he would open to the general public.
In a career that has taken him around the world, Rendell
has bought, sold, and built fabulous collections of letters,
literary and musical manuscripts, memorabilia, and precious artifacts. His wife, former Boston television reporter
Shirley McNerney Rendell, is also his partner in a business
that has served wealthy clients ranging from Bill Gates,
Queen Elizabeth, Malcolm Forbes, Armand Hammer, the
Kennedy family, and numerous universities and museums.
The Natick museum is very much an extension of its
creator and his passion for the subject, which he calls “the
biggest psychological drama of the 20th century.”
Rendell said his intent is to describe the unvarnished
reality of the war.
“History is not how you wish it had been, it’s the way it
actually was,” Rendell said during a long interview in his
museum office, where his desk sits amid a library-size collection of World War II documents, books, and artifacts,
including the suitcase Hermann Göring brought to Spandau prison and a portrait of Winston Churchill by Dwight
D. Eisenhower.
“You had really good people and actions, and you had
really bad,” he said. “You had everything, and it involved
everybody. It was just an incredible event.”
The items in the collection are not the sort bought on
eBay, but the acquisitions of a collector-dealer who exposed fakes (the bogus Hitler and Jack the Ripper diaries)
and wrote the standard book on forgery detection. Verifying the chain of custody, known in the trade as provenance, is essential.
For example, Rendell said he purchased the draft of the
Munich Agreement from the son of Nevile Henderson,
the British ambassador who attended the proceedings and
saved the document, which had been left on the table after the final version was typed up. Henderson wrote his
son a letter explaining how he came to possess it, Rendell
said. He said he bought the piece of the Hitler suicide
sofa from the son of an American soldier pictured in Life
magazine next to the sofa with other GIs before they cut
it up for souvenirs.
Rendell designed the 10,000-square-foot museum, meticulously laid out the chronological display, and narrates the
three and one-half hour audio tour. Walls divide the floor-
Features
space into 30 subject arThere’s a mannequin of
eas, such as the rise of Naa French woman in the
zism, Winston Churchill,
summer of 1944 outfitted
Resistance, the Holocaust,
in a wedding dress made
Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the
from the reserve paraatomic bomb, and the
chute of an American
war trials. Especially valuparatrooper on D-Day.
able pieces are in museum
A postwar letter from
cases, but most are on the
Miep Gies, who prowalls and floor. Rendell’s
vided food to Anne
spare written captions
Frank and her family
describe the exhibits disas they hid in Amsterpassionately, without the
dam, closes by saying:
spin of politics or politi“The diary and Anne’s
cal correctness.
father survived. And
Kenneth Rendell
“You try to be sensiI can tell you I am so
tive,” he said. “We have a
grateful, that after the
lot of people who come here who are veterans who glorify
war I could give the diary to her father and he gave it to
what they did, and that’s just fine because it’s not up to
the world and that was right.”
me to have an opinion of how they dealt with or how they
The letter is among about 80 pullout reproductions of
deal with what happened. But I don’t glorify war here, and
the museum’s collection of original correspondence, teleI don’t personally see it that way at all.”
grams, propaganda posters, and postcards. All were rec Rendell said he has met many veterans who, late in
reated by the publisher, Whitman Publishing, on paper
their lives, struggled with the memories and the trauma
stock almost identical to Rendell’s originals.
of war. One was Danny Thomas of Arlington, Texas,
The book’s removable items include:
whom Rendell met on a trip to Iwo Jima. “We were at the
• The first message from Pearl Harbor on December 7,
top of [Mount] Suriabachi when I heard this guy talk1941: “AIRRAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS
ing,” Rendell said. “He said he had to come back hoping
NO DRILL.”
that he could get a few nights sleep without nightmares
• The page-long original order, carried by a radar specialbefore he died.”
ist on the mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshi Thomas was one of the 13 medics who survived the
ma. It appears unremarkable except for the munitions
full month-long battle on Iwo Jima. Rendell later invited
order: “Bombs: Special.”
him to speak at one of the many lectures he hosts at the
• Hitler’s sketch of the eagle monument in Nuremburg, with
Natick museum. The invitation-only events always draw
an authenticating note by Albert Speer, his architect.
a full house of 100 or so veterans and aficionados on the
• Letters from Eisenhower and Erwin Rommel, the opmuseum’s mailing list.
posing commanders, to their wives on the same day af “Most museums are dead because the person creating
ter the Normandy landings.
them just doesn’t see the human story, and the human
• A mannequin of Hitler in his original brownshirt unistory exists in everything,” Rendell said.
form.
The museum and the book, Rendell’s fourth, are filled
The museum has a vast collection of wartime propaganda
with items that tell those stories.
from several nations. There is also an extensive display of
A telegram informing Ruth Kasai that her husband,
uniforms and weaponry ranging from the enormous tank,
Tom, had been wounded in France was sent to her address
which had to be situated before the museum walls could be
at an Arizona internment camp for Japanese Americans.
built, to tiny lethal gadgets carried by spies.
The Natick museum is very much an extension of its creator
and his passion for the subject, which he calls “the biggest
psychological drama of the 20th century.”
Summer/Fall 2010
21
OSS in Manchuria: Operation Cardinal
By Bill Streifer
“…in the flush of victory over Japan, the OSS men foretold the problems the United States was already having
in Asia with a resurgent Soviet Union whose ambitions
were far different from those of America.”
Peter Clemens
Author of Operation Cardinal
O
n the evening of August 9, 1945, after atomic bombs
fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the President of the
United States addressed the nation. “The military arrangements made at [Potsdam] were of course secret,” the President said. “One of those secrets was revealed yesterday
when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.” Three days
later, the London Sunday Observer reported that the Soviet
invasion of Manchuria and northern Korea was part of a
five-point secret agreement between President Roosevelt
and Premier Stalin prior to the Yalta Conference. The plan
called for Manchuria to become an independent republic
within the Soviet zone of occupation, and the Portsmouth
Treaty of 1905 would be annulled, ending Japan’s 40-year
domination of Korea. American historians refer to the Soviet invasion of Manchuria as August Storm while Russian
historians refer to it simply as the Manchurian Strategic
Offensive.
In anticipation of a sudden collapse or surrender, General George C. Marshall, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, issued a basic outline plan, designated “Blacklist,”
for the “progressive and orderly” U.S. occupation of Japan
and Korea, as well as the “care and evacuation of Allied
prisoners of war and civilian internees.” Shortly after Japan surrendered, General Wedemeyer requested that the
Office of Strategic Services organize POW rescue missions
behind Japanese lines. Each OSS team was assigned an
area, and each intelligence operation was named after a
bird: Duck (Weihsien), Magpie (Peking), Flamingo (Harbin), Sparrow (Shanghai), Pigeon (Hainan), Seagull (Hankow), Albatross (Canton), Quail (Hanoi), Raven (Vientiane, Laos), Eagle (Keijo), and Cardinal (Mukden).
Operation Cardinal’s area of operation included the
Hoten POW camp and two smaller camps in the area:
the Hoten North Camp and Mukden Club, which, by
Hal Leith sitting between two Russian soldiers.
late August, were squarely in the Soviet Army’s zone of
operation. Operation Cardinal drew OSS personnel from
Special Operations and Special Intelligence with skills in
“clandestine operations, communications, medicine and
language training in Japanese, Chinese and Russian.” The
team comprised Major James T. Hennessy (Special Ops
team leader), Major Robert F. Lamar (physician), Technician Edward A. Starz (radio operator), Staff Sergeant Harold “Hal” B. Leith (Russian and Chinese linguist), and Sergeant Fumio Kido (a nisei——second-generation——Japanese
interpreter). Cheng Shih-wu, a Chinese national, accompanied the OSS team as an interpreter.
On August 15th at 0430 hours, a B-24 with extra fuel
tanks departed Hsian, China, for Mukden, the former
capital of Manchuria. At 1030 hours, with Soviet troops
120 miles away and Japanese aircraft in the area, six men
and 17 cargo parachutes were deployed including 1,300
pounds of rations and a half-ton of equipment: weapons,
ammunition, two radios, and batteries. Despite a 20 mph
wind, the decision was made to jump. “Our first priority
was to rescue the POWs,” Leith said. As the B-24 left the
area, a kamikaze pilot headed his Zero straight for it. Fortunately, Lieutenant Paul Hallberg, the B-24 pilot, pulled
back on the controls and the Zero passed underneath,
avoiding a collision.
Hundreds of Chinese descended on the drop zone; one
offered to lead four members of the Cardinal team down
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a dirt road toward the Hoten POW camp. After walking a
half mile, the team was confronted by a platoon of Japanese troops. When the Chinese guide saw the Japanese approaching, he ran away, and Major Hennessy waved a white
handkerchief to signal their peaceful intentions. A Japanese
sergeant ordered the team to “halt and squat down” while
Japanese soldiers “aimed their rifles at us and clicked their
bolts,” Hennessy said. While in the squatting position, the
team was ordered to throw their weapons on the ground
while Hennessy attempted to explain that the war was
over and they were only there to establish contact with the
POWs. The Japanese sergeant, who remained “suspicious
and unconvinced,” responded that he had heard that the
war with the United States was over, but that the Japanese
were still fighting the Soviet Union. The Japanese were officially notified of armistice 45 minutes after the Cardinal
team set foot on Mukden. And it was only by “sheer tact
and presence of mind,” and utilizing the services of a Japanese interpreter, that Major Hennessy was able to convince
the Japanese commander that the war was indeed over.
The following morning, the Cardinal team was driven to
Japanese secret police (Kempeitai) headquarters where they
met a Kempeitai colonel who bowed deeply and informed
the Americans that he was surrendering. With hand gestures, he declared his intention to commit hara-kiri in full
view of the Cardinal team. They declined the offer.
Accompanied by an escort of Japanese soldiers, members of the Cardinal team were taken to the Hoten POW
camp where 1,600 British, Australian, Dutch, and Americans prisoners——malnourished and emaciated——survived
nearly three and a half years of internment. When it was
discovered that General Wainwright, the commander
of Allied forces in the Philippines who had been taken
prisoner following the surrender to the Japanese, was not
among the prisoners, an attempt was made to contact OSS
headquarters in China. When that failed, Major General
George M. Parker, the highest ranking American POW,
and Colonel Matsuda, the commandant of the camp,
informed the Cardinal team that General Wainwright
and other high-ranking officers were in Sian, about 100
miles northwest of the Hoten camp. The next morning,
Leith and Lamar, accompanied by a Lieutenant Hijikata,
a guard, and an interpreter boarded a train for Sian. After long delays and a change of trains, they arrived at the
camp the following morning at 0300. After a brief rest, the
OSS team met Generals King and Moore, Governor Tjarda Von Starkenbergh, General Wainwright, and Arthur E.
Percival, Governor General during the fall of Singapore—
—a defeat that Winston Churchill described as the “biggest
humiliation in British military history.” Leith recalls that
Wainwright looked thin and his hearing was failing. “He
had experienced a brutal captivity,” Leith wrote in his diary. In his autobiography, Reminiscences, General MacArthur described seeing Wainwright for the first time:
I rose and started for the lobby, but before I could reach
it, the door swung open and there was Wainwright. He was
haggard and aged .... He walked with difficulty and with
the help of a cane. His eyes were sunken and there were pits
in his cheeks. His hair was snow white and his skin looked
like old shoe leather. He made a brave effort to smile as I
took him in my arms, but his voice wouldn’t come. For
three years he had imagined himself in disgrace for having
surrendered Corregidor. He believed he would never again
be given an active command. This shocked me. “Why, Jim,“
I said, “your old corps is yours when you want it.”
The Russians Are Coming
When the Soviet Army began occupying Mukden, they
issued passes to the Operation Cardinal team that allowed
them to move freely about. However, since vehicles were
in short supply, none were supplied to the Americans.
That evening, a Soviet Army mission of four officers and
an interpreter arrived at Hoten. They took control of the
camp from the Japanese and announced that the POWs
were liberated. The prisoners, now armed with Japanese
weapons, patrolled the camp. According to Colonel Victor Gavrilov, Institute of War History at the Russian Defense Ministry, the POWs had been “starved and tortured
OSS Majors Robert Lamar (l) and James Hennessey (r) with
two Russian soldiers in Manchuria during August 1945 as
part of Operation Cardinal.
Summer/Fall 2010
23
by the Japanese guards; they could have hardly made
good warriors.” After a brevet promotion to major, Leith
accompanied Wainwright and the other VIPs to Pei-ling
airport, north of the city, where a C-47 and B-24 awaited
their arrival. Days later, the 19-man POW Recovery Team
No. 1 under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James
F. Donovan arrived in Mukden to “reinforce and assist”
the initial OSS contact team. Although the Cardinal team
was relieved, Hal Leith, who spoke Russian and Chinese
fluently, remained behind to “keep an eye on the Russians
and the Communist Chinese 8th Route Army.” However,
the problem of repatriating the officers and men from the
Hoten POW camp remained.
POW Supply Missions
On August 27th, over one thousand B-29s began flying
POW supply missions to 157 camps throughout the Far
East. Each plane carried 10,000 pounds of much-needed
food and medical supplies. However, the planned altitude
of 500 to 1,000 feet for parachute drops proved too low
for efficient operation of the cargo parachutes, and reports
began to pour in of barrels plummeting to earth, resulting in damage, injury, and, in some instances, the death
of civilians and military personnel. As Leith noted in his
diary, “The B-29 air drops have improved the food situation 200%. I am really glad,” although OSS headquarters
received a message from “Cardinal” which read, “Unless
dropping can be improved, recommend it cease as it has
done more harm than good.” For instance, a Korean women in Seoul was killed; in Inchon, barrels crashed through
the roof of a hospital, broke the leg of a prisoner, killed a
Korean, and injured eight Japanese.
In Konan, Korea (now Hungnam, North Korea), an aberrant parachute drop caused an international incident and
nearly resulted in the death of a B-29 crew. On the morning of August 29, 1945, a pair of B-29s dropped supplies in
the vicinity of the Konan POW camp. Unfortunately, the
parachutes failed to open properly and some of the barrels
crashed to the ground and were retrieved by Japanese and
Korean villagers; a British POW noted in his diary, “Some
came away from the parachutes and fell into swamps and
were buried.” Later that day, as a third B-29, nicknamed
the Hog Wild, began circling the Konan POW camp suspiciously. Soviet Major Savchenko, the commander of the
14th Fighter Bomber Regiment, convened a “war council”
to determine how best to respond. According to Ivan Tsapov, Savchenko’s vice commander, “Being in charge of the
zone, we demanded that our rules be obeyed. Even Russian transport and bomber plane pilots kept order. They
General Wainwright (second from left) with Colonel Gustav
Krause, OSS station chief in Xian, China.
gave notice on flights in our zone a day earlier. Americans
did not want to do so.”
Two pairs of Russian Yak fighters were sent up, “boxed
in” the American bomber, and demanded that Lieutenant
Joseph W. Queen, the Hog Wild’s airplane commander,
immediately land the B-29 on a small airdrome. When he
refused, and the B-29 instead was flown out to sea, one of
the Yaks fired on the Superfortress, setting an engine on
fire. When Queen realized that the number 1 engine was
“about to explode,” he ordered the crew to bail out; six
parachuted into the turbulent and cold Sea of Japan, and
the remaining crew braced for a crash-landing on the Soviet airdrome. When the bomber came to rest, the crew of
the Hog Wild jumped out and Russians threw dirt on the
engine to extinguish the fire. Staff Sergeant Arthur Strilky,
the Hog Wild’s radio operator, later said, “The chances of
living through that crash are so remote that I still feel that
Joe saved all of us.”
After the crew was interrogated, the Russians apologized for downing a B-29 in “error.” Soviet Lieutenant
General of Aviation Preobrazhenskii informed Queen
that “two B-29s had been over the camp earlier in the
morning and dropped supplies. Some of the drums came
loose from the parachutes and crashed through buildings, almost hitting a Russian colonel.” When General
MacArthur learned of the incident, he fired off a cable
to General Antonov of the Soviet Supreme High Command that read, “The American plane was plainly marked
Features
and its mission could not fail to have been identified as
purely benevolent.” In response, Antonov sent a cable
to MacArthur that read, “I feel, Dear General, that you
will agree that in the action of the Soviet fliers in this
incident, there were manifested only measures of selfdefense against an unknown plane, and that there were
no other intended acts.”
According to Gavrilov, “Without informing the Soviet side, the U.S. command started sending one plane
after another to Mukden in order to transfer its men,
and supply them with essentials.” At first, the Soviet
command detained the crews of these planes to “clarify the situation.” Later, however, the headquarters of
the Baikal Front ordered its forces to assist U.S. aviation in the delivery of goods to the POWs at Hoten.
Meanwhile, the Soviet front received an order from
General Antonov to arrange transportation of the prisoners from Mukden to Dalian by rail, instead of by
air. “Apparently, this was done to rule out unauthorized landings,” Gavrilov said, and to prevent another
“willful act,” like that which had been committed by
the commander of the Hog Wild. “Besides, by rail was
also safer.” On September 10, 750 POWs left by train
for Dalian, and the remaining prisoners departed the
following day. “The camp is deserted,“ Leith said, and
Operation Cardinal’s primary mission was accomplished. Camp Hoten once again assumed its role as a
prison, this time for 5,000 Japanese soldiers who had
been captured by the Russians.
Operation Cardinal turned out to be the “most challenging and difficult” of the OSS “mercy missions” due
to “the large number of POWs to contend with” and the
distance from home base. Although some members of
the Cardinal team survived the encounter “relatively unscathed,” others were forced to suffer various forms of indignity including being stripped naked and having their
face slapped. At some point, increasing Soviet hostilities
prompted General Donovan to request that American
personnel withdraw from the area immediately, and on
October 5, Major General Kovtun Stankevich, the Soviet
commander, accused Leith of spying. “You are fluent in
Russian but you don’t have a Russian name so you must
be a spy,” Stankevich said. Leith and the others were offered two choices: “Leave immediately or get a free trip
to Siberia.” After denying the accusation “to no avail,”
Leith’s party, along with Charles Renner, the French
Consul General, and his family, departed Mukden for
Beijing on a C-46 the next day. “At the airport, we put
sugar in the tank of our Jeep,” Leith said. “We didn’t
want to leave anything useful for the Russians, any more
than we already had.” Months later, after Soviet forces
left Manchuria, Leith returned to Mukden.
The information in “Operation Cardinal” is based on conversations
with Ivan Tsapov, Arthur Strilky, Hal Leith, and John Brunner. The
Flight of the Hog Wild by Bill Streifer and Irek Sabitov, a Russian journalist, contains a discussion of Operation Cardinal and Operation
Eagle. Bill Streifer may be contacted at [email protected].
SUGGESTED READING
• Rescued: POWs of Japanese by Hal Leith
• OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War by Maochun Yu
• Operation Cardinal: the OSS in Manchuria, August 1945
by Peter Clemens
• 1992-1996 Findings of the WWII Working Group, U.S.Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs
• Saving General Wainwright by Colonel Viktor Gavrilov
Dear General Singlaub:
I served our great nation as a parachute infantryman in the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. As
an avid student of intelligence and military history, I
have tremendous respect for the veterans of the Office of Strategic Services for blazing the trail that current intelligence professionals follow today.
I recently discovered that I have another reason
to appreciate the OSS. My great uncle, SSG Paul H.
Bruce, was a member of the 792nd Tank Battalion
stationed in the Philippines in 1941. He fought the
withdrawal to Bataan and was ordered to surrender.
My great uncle survived the Bataan Death March,
Camp O’Donnell, the Hell Ships to Korea, and imprisonment in Manchuria. He was finally liberated from
Mukden, Manchuria, in 1945 by an OSS team that
parachuted to their aid. Unfortunately, I never knew
my great uncle. He died the year that I was born.
While visiting my grandmother, she gave me some
information regarding him. After some investigation,
I discovered what the OSS had done for him.
On behalf of my family and myself, please accept
my deepest gratitude for what you proud veterans of
the OSS did for my great uncle and many other POWs
in World War II.
With Deepest Regards,
Carl R. Bruce Jr.
Woodbridge, VA
Summer/Fall 2010
25
Former CIA Museum Curator Brings Tools of the Trade to Life
By Donna Manz
F
ormer CIA Museum curator Linda McCarthy spoke
to a Patrick Henry Library audience about the history
of spycraft. She accompanied her slide presentation with
authentic tools of the trade.
“There’s a subcurrent of spying in American history,” McCarthy said. “Spying has always been there. George Washington counted on intelligence to thwart British forces.”
From a “burial” tube used to hide documents and maps
to preserved dog-doo, McCarthy displayed representative
spycraft tools.
The OSS operated at least nine secret training grounds
in the country during World War II. In what is now Prince
William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia, the OSS ran two
centers: Area A was dedicated to operations, what McCarthy referred to as the “black arts,” and Area C, the communications training grounds.
Spies learned to create listening devices in the dark,
and pigeons became a vital part of the World War II communications effort. The pigeons had a 98 percent success
rate getting messages to their recipients. Pigeons have
magnetite in their beaks, which allows them to follow
magnetic fields. The Maidenform Brassiere Company
made specially designed curved pouches for paratroopers to carry their pigeons.
Among McCarthy’s exhibits were cameras. Aerial reconnaissance cameras were used to create and update field
maps. “A lot of film from the Korean War is preserved in
underground vaults,” McCarthy said. The camera lenses
were frequently so big that using them required two operators. McCarthy showed photos of flyers taking photographs
from their aircraft. Many times, she said, they were being
shot at while they photographed. Polaroid Land developed
the first self-developing camera for “real-time intelligence”
during the Vietnam War, a significant spycraft step.
Two of McCarthy’s favorite human topics are Julia
Child, who became famous later as the French chef, and
star baseball player Moe Berg, both of whom worked for
OSS during World War II. Child’s recipe for shark repellent has only recently been declassified.
Escape and evasion maps were created on durable silk,
cameras were built the size of a matchbox. And transmitters were hidden in fake dog droppings. Much of deception and camouflage comes from nature, said McCarthy.
Caltrops, a hoof/tire puncture apparatus going back to
the Crusades, remains a favorite antiterrorism tool, McCarthy said. “During the Crusades, forces used spikes to
slow down advancing horses. Now they demobilize Jeeps,
trucks, and other military modes of transportation.”
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CIA MUSEUM OPENS ITS DOORS TO THE
OSS SOCIETY’s Members and Families
Have you ever wanted to see General Donovan’s wartime desk? His Medal of Honor? What
about the “devilish” devices created by Stanley Lovell’s Research and Development Branch?
This fall, the CIA will coordinate visits for members of The OSS Society. Because the museum
is located at CIA Headquarters and is not open to the public, special arrangements will be
made for members of The OSS Society to visit the OSS gallery at the museum. Part of the CIA
Museum’s mission is to ensure that the OSS legacy remains accessible to current and future
generations of intelligence officers.
Just as the OSS laid the foundation for the creation of the CIA, the museum’s OSS artifacts
constitute the underpinnings of the CIA Museum collection. The CIA Museum was created
in 1972—the Agency’s 25th anniversary—at the request of OSS veteran William Colby, then serving as
Executive Director of the CIA, who became Director of Central Intelligence in 1973. Colby tapped another CIA
colleague and OSS veteran, Walter Pforzheimer, to help identify items of historical significance and create a
“modest little museum.” In 1986, David Donovan, General Donovan’s son, donated a great deal of his father’s
World War I and World War II memorabilia. In 1998, the Agency received General Donovan’s medals. In 2002,
OSS veterans visited the museum to commemorate the OSS 60th anniversary.
Visiting days for members of The OSS Society are set for October 8, 2010, and October 15, 2010, at 2 PM.
Each tour will be limited to 25 visitors. To make a reservations, please contact the CIA Museum at caroler1@ucia.
gov or by telephone at 703-482-8916.
General Donovan’s Desk
Summer/Fall 2010
27
History
THE OSS’s EIGHTH ARMY DETACHMENT in Italy:
A FEW MEN AND THEIR RADIO
By Dr. Robert Young
This is dedicated to Frank Monteleone, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Service’s Eighth Army Detachment. He is
the living embodiment of the hero who has served our nation in its most trying times.
T
here is a statement frequently heard in military circles
organizing, training, and equipping local civilians into
that battles are won or lost before they are ever fought.
guerilla/partisan detachments. These groups would proHow about the battles that become unnecessary because of
vide valuable intelligence, harass enemy units and logistisomething that happens beforehand? Intelligence is crucial
cal operations, and draw forces away from major engagein war. Getting precise and timely information on the enments to deal with them. The Eighth Army Detachment
emy’s strength, location, state of mind, and intentions can
was one such group.
be the difference between victory and defeat. It can also
Italy was one of the so-called “secondary” theaters of
save countless lives. Sometimes the information is so valuWorld War II. It wasn’t thought of as such by the men
able that it allows actions that make a battle unnecessary,
who fought there. Italy was a maze of mountains and rivwhile still securing victory and saving lives. Such an event
ers with some of the most miserable weather imaginable.
occurred in World War II during the autumn
Rain and mud were the norm. It was also
of 1944 in Italy. The British Eighth Army was
the defenders’ dream with its east-west runtargeting the ancient city of Ravenna, along
ning rivers and endless high ground. Field
Italy’s western coast. A key point on the
Marshall Albert Kesselring would conduct
vast series of objectives that ran along Italy’s
the defense of Italy throughout the camAdriatic coastline, it would be a tough nut to
paign. He would allow Germany to bloody
crack and the Eighth Army was more than
Allied efforts repeatedly with elaborate dewilling to take any help it could get. That
fensive barriers. From Salerno to Anzio, he
help would come in the form of America’s
would frustrate Allied efforts to outflank his
Office of Strategic Services and its Eighth
positions or break out for speedy advances.
Army Detachment.
Many think the war in Italy ended or faded
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
into insignificance with the fall of Rome on
was formed in the early days of America’s
June 4, 1944. Not so. Kesselring created a
involvement in World War II. Created at
new defensive maze called the Gothic Line,
the behest of President Franklin Roosevelt Frank Monteleone’s OSS
which was anchored on the Adriatic Sea in
by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, it was identification card.
the east. Once north of Rome, Italy is essenquickly realized how far behind America
tially divided down the middle by mounwas in the realm of military intelligence. The OSS was
tains. To ensure command integrity and for practicality,
designed to aid America and its allies in prosecuting the
two Allied armies would drive through northern Italy, the
war by operating behind enemy lines. The global nature of
British Eighth Army in the east and the American Fifth
World War II was not a disadvantage for the United States
Army in the west. The OSS would be utilized far better by
in conducting clandestine operations. As the great melting
America’s allies than its own military. The reason for this
pot of the world, America was ripe with those who spoke
is simple: senior commanders didn’t think the OSS could
other languages, had traveled or lived in foreign lands,
be relied upon. They were wrong.
and/or possessed the skills required for this type of war The American military has traditionally been skeptical
fare. OSS detachments would operate effectively and with
of intelligence organizations like the OSS. Mark Clark,
distinction in several theaters of the war including France,
the Fifth Army commander, didn’t even mention the OSS
Italy, and Southeast Asia. They were particularly adept at
or its Fifth Army Detachment in his book, Calculated Risk.
Even in the months prior to
Thiele, Lieutenant Pasquali,
the capture of Rome, when
and Boston’s Joe Sarteano,
a member of the OSS gave
they would help win the
his Army information that
Battle of Ravenna.
could have led them to
Operation BlONDA beRome quicker and with less
gan on September 17, 1944.
opposition, it was ignored.
It had a dual mission: “…
Louis Michelini, later a
to secure data on German
member of the Eighth Army
fuel and supply dumps
Detachment, found an unin the Ravenna and Porto
guarded route to Rome.
Corsini area for the Desert
Yet Clark, ever the tradiAir Force and they were to
tionalist, would have none
initiate sabotage measures
Members of the OSS’s Eighth Army Detachment.
of it. Only after the fall of
against the German shipRome did Clark accept that
ping in the Ravenna-Porto
OSS information was first rate and began utilizing it. Of
Corsini Canal.…” Both the shipping and the dumps were
course, he still forwarded them no credit whatsoever. The
critical enemy targets. Since the Allied forces had no relifamed British Eighth Army operated with no such pretenable ground intelligence sources in the area, and the pinesions. By the autumn of 1944, Great Britain stood on the
covered coastal area made accurate air reconnaissance difverge of physical exhaustion. Faced with too many comficult, the mission was considered a vital one.
mitments and not enough resources, it sought any rem All information to the Eighth Army was sent via radio.
edy to long, protracted battles. When the OSS offered its
The radio team was in close proximity to the Germans at
services they were quickly and enthusiastically accepted.
all times. The detachment could not secure all vital inforThus, Operation BIONDA was born.
mation on their own so they also went to work setting up
Who were the men of the Eighth Army Detachment?
a partisan network from scratch. The OSS quickly realized
Led by Captain Thiele and Lieutenant Pasquali, they were
how anti-fascist and anti-German this area truly was. What
from all over America. Their common thread was they
it needed was organization, weapons, and support. The
all spoke Italian. (Much of the information comes from
Italians of this region did not lack courage because any
Frank Monteleone of Staten Island, New York. He was the
clandestine activities were met viciously by the Germans.
detachment’s radio operator.) It is through several extenHitler’s Partisan Order, dated October 18, 1942, stated:
sive interviews and examination of the OSS operational
“… If the German conduct of war is not to suffer grievreports that this story is now able to be told. Frank Monous damage through these incidents [partisan attacks], it
teleone was a navy radio man who spoke Italian, volunmust be made clear to the adversary that all sabotage units
teered for the OSS, attended a variety of military schools,
will be exterminated without exception to the last man …
and was sent to Italy. He went on the same boat as General
I, therefore, expect the commanding officers not only to
Donovan to Anzio and accompanied OSS operative Moe
realize the necessity of taking such measures, but also to
Berg (Princeton and Columbia Law School graduate and
carry out this order with all energy.... If it should become
former pro baseball player) on a secret mission to Rome to
necessary, for reasons of interrogation, to spare one or two
find information on jet propulsion and atomic research.
men temporarily, then they are to be shot immediately
All OSS missions were fraught with danger because capafter interrogation.”�
There have been many accounts asserting that individture meant certain death, undoubtedly under the most
ual German commanders ignored this order, particularly
gruesome of circumstances. I asked Frank Monteleone
in the campaigns of Western Europe. Kesselring despised
what compelled him and the others to volunteer for the
the Italian partisans and stated, “In view of the brutal,
OSS and its myriad special missions. His answer was, “We
indeed very often inhuman behavior of the bands, for
did what had to be done.” He also said it was the answer
one critical period I had to order drastic use of weapons
of all those in his detachment: New York City’s Joe Marto curtail the extraordinary casualties we were incurring
cola and Bob Procop, Tony Monti from New Mexico, Jim
from a certain nonchalance and out of place mildness on
McMullen from Chicago, the Midwest’s Nick Prioletti,
the part of our soldiers.”�
Sam Mirasole from Ohio, New Jersey’s Louis Michelini,
Kesselring’s change in attitude to a more aggressive
and Joe Nardi of Pittsburgh. Along with Frank, Captain
Summer/Fall 2010
29
approach coincided with increased partisan activity, orairpower and artillery. As time progressed (the operation
ganized and facilitated by the OSS. Kesselring noted:
lasted three months), the partisans would do much of
“In the autumn and winter of 1943 isolated and not parthe fighting themselves. Frequent trips to Porto Corsini
uncovered an Italian naval guard more than willing to
ticularly dangerous bands, mostly composed of escaped
prisoners of war, made their appearreport all German use of the port, the
ance in the rear of the Tenth Army, as a
key to their supply efforts.� However,
rule trying to fight their way across the
as the Eighth Army prepared to attack
front.… After the fall of Rome in June
Ravenna, pinpointing the locations of
1944, they became more aggressive, far
German military units was the most
more in fact than I had reckoned with,
pressing task. Satellites could not have
and this date may be called the birth
done better.
day of the all out guerrilla war. Their
Beginning on September 19, 1944,
accretion was particularly noticeable
and ending on December 2, 1944, when
between the front and the Apennines,
the British occupied Ravenna, a steady
and at this period it may be estimated
stream of messages flowed to Eighth
that their strength rose from a few thouArmy Headquarters from the OSS Desands to a hundred thousand or so....
tachment. The only common denomiFrom then on the Partisan war was an
nators were enemy locations and calls
actual menace to our military operafor supplies so the partisans, which
�
tions and it was vital to remove it.”
would grow to a well-armed force of
The results were due to a remarkable
over 600 men from the motley group
of 20 first encountered, could wreak
effort by the OSS. In the Ravenna area
prior to the BIONDA mission there was
havoc. The first two cables on Septem“Little
Gino”
(l)
with
a
member
of
ber 19 gave the location of fuel and
no organized partisan network. Starting
ammunition dumps and houses with
on September 17, 1944, a small group of the Eighth Army Detachment.
German troops. Initially, it took conthe OSS Maritime Unit, led by Lieutensiderable time, often a few days, before an artillery barant Angelo Garrone, met with a few vital Ravenna resirage or air strike hit a reported target. As Eighth Army
dents about eight miles north of the city and began galvaverified and became more confident in the information
nizing the energetic local populace.
received, responses could be measured in hours or even
When they found what was called the “partisan hideminutes, rather than days. Major Archie Colquhoun,
out,” they saw 20 ill-equipped, haggard-looking men that
the man at Eighth Army headquarters responsible for
no one would think could take part in guerrilla operapartisan developments, quickly realized he had a valutions. They noticed one common trait among this motley
group: a hatred of the Germans.
able asset that might avoid a bloody battle. �
Numbers would grow as aerial resupply arrived, always
The messages would continue flowing, becoming more
dependent on the unpredictable Italian weather. It was
detailed as the days passed. Miraculously, the Germans
a textbook example of working with a local populace
never realized their movements and dispositions were
against a common enemy. The OSS Eighth Army Debeing reported or simply could not tell friend from foe
tachment was but a dozen men. However, their radio and
among the local population. Their harsh methods and
its link to Eighth Army Headquarters were essential. The
embedded dislike for the Italian people certainly did not
partisans they organized provided the information.
help them. On October 5 the exact locations of three
The locals used to enhance the mission were from every
149mm guns and four camouflaged coastal guns as well
social level of Ravenna. Due to personnel shortages, the
as that of a German headquarters were reported, though
Germans were forced to hire local Italians, mostly boys
it would be October 7 before an airstrike was launched.
between the ages of 10 and 16, to man checkpoints with
The message of October 7 acknowledges the airstrike and
German soldiers and serve as interpreters. “Little Gino,”
its missing the HQ by 50 yards. The partisans and the
a 10-year-old boy, was one such hire and he and many of
Eighth Army Detachment were obviously right in the
his friends kept a steady stream of information flowing
middle of the action.�
through the detachment radio. All vehicular and troop
On October 10 the first message on German water acmovement was reported and then dealt with by British
tivities arrived. Reports of canal boats loaded with fuel
History
and ammunition and the fact they were unloaded at
garnered from a captured German officer that a raft loadnight raised many eyebrows at Eighth Army HQ. Oced with cannons and ammunition was leaving Ravenna
tober 12’s message had the location of a wharf north of
and heading to Venezia. Also included were the results
Porto Corsini loaded with ammunition and ended with
of a strafing run that left 100 Germans dead and many
“BOMB!” October 15 gave the location of three more
more wounded. There were also calls for more arms and
barges and seven mined and guarded bridges. October
supplies as partisan numbers had increased to over 700 as
18 informed headquarters that the partisans were hiding
optimism continued to spread. The location of the Gera pilot shot down over a month earlier and, on October
man HQ for the entire area was also located by a 12-year20, three more camouflaged guns were located. October
old Italian boy who was not discovered despite circling
21 reported a loaded ammunition barge and canal workthe stone house and counting 17 telephone wires.
ers unloading other boats with both ammunition and
While this tidal wave of information flowed into
new artillery. October 21’s message ended with a fervent
Eighth Army HQ, their operational staff continued to
plea of “BOMB IMMEDIATELY!”
revise their plans. The OSS’s information was allowing
British air and artillery had already begun making
artillery and air power to do what the British didn’t want
their presence felt as the Germans tried to rapidly retheir dwindling manpower to do: secure Ravenna. On
inforce their Ravenna garrison. October 22’s cable reOctober 25 the location of four ready to depart barges
ported the arrival of 1,000 German paratroopers and
and three wagonloads of material were reported along
the concrete bridge they crossed.
with the message: “Urgently request
Later cables that day pinpointed the
bombing Canal of Porto Corsini. This
houses these paratroopers moved into
area is full of barges and rafts docked
and the location of the supply dumps
along both sides of the canal where they
intended to support them. Also inare being loaded with war material.”
cluded by midday was the location of
October 26 reported the arrival and dean SS headquarters. Additional Octoparture of 300 more German soldiers.
ber 22 cables specified exact German
October 28 presented the exact location
loading and unloading points, a camof a 400 meter by 50 meter minefield,
ouflaged pontoon bridge, and the
1,000 German troops, and nine heavy
exact whereabouts of seven 105mm
guns, six tanks, and the location of the
and two 20mm guns. The very busy
main German heavy vehicle workshop.
day of October 22 would continue
The days between October 29 and
with the reporting of the arrival of an
31 were vital in this saga. Prone to inentire antiaircraft battalion with 20
cessant bombing and shelling, the Gerguns as well as 1,000 “antipartisan”
mans began to dig in for what they felt
volunteers from Eastern Europe. The
must be the coming battle for Ravenna.
final and perhaps most vital cable of
The following report was provided to
the day reported the arrival and lo- Frank Monteleone (l) with a
Eighth Army:
cation of an entire panzer battalion member of the Eighth Army
• Six 37mm and six 90mm guns
Detachment
of 30 Tiger tanks (the most power• Billets for 2,000 German soldiers
ful tank of the war) as well as their
• Only remaining German pontoon bridge
accompanying infantry support and the only bridge
• Camouflaged battery of five 105mm guns
capable of supporting the 70-ton behemoths at Ponte
• 1,000 German infantry with mortars and antitank guns
Samona. The OSS on this day alerted Eighth Army
• Ammunition dumps in the Colonia Marina
HQ of the arrival of half a division’s worth of men
• Three 75 mm guns and 30 men
and heavy equipment. British artillery and airpower
• Four 105mm guns and 40 men
were very busy that vital night.
• Three field guns
October 24 was another busy day. Effective bombing
Additionally, it was reported that all roads to Ravenna
of the aforementioned bridges resulted in the Germans
were now mined and the Germans were dismounting candepending even more on water resupply. Cables of that
nons at Gil Staggi. The night of October 31 would see the
day reported the exact locations of four 105mm guns
Eighth Army’s heaviest artillery bombardment and a perdefending the loading point. They received information
manent change in the campaign. The Germans would still
Summer/Fall 2010
31
Any daytime movement seemed to invite an immediate
artillery attack, all thanks to the OSS and their radio.
send men in but more would leave as resupply became
virtually impossible. Any daytime movement seemed to
invite an immediate artillery attack, all thanks to the OSS
and their radio. November would also see the involvement of partisans in military operations.
With their ranks swelling to nearly 1,000 strong, the partisans became actively involved. They ambushed patrols,
sabotaged supply and fuel dumps, and made the Germans
in Ravenna actively try to engage them. They diverted attention, which is exactly what behind-the-lines forces are
supposed to do. On November 24 they attacked an entire
regular battalion of German infantry, something only two
months earlier no one on either side would have believed
possible. Messages throughout November urgently called
for supplies to continue the effort and ward off German
reprisals, which were becoming more brutal. As the end of
November approached, the Germans made the decision
to evacuate. They prepared to destroy all the city’s bridges
in addition to all its major structures. Relentless partisan
activity prevented this.
By December 1 the last German had left. Approximately 40,000 men, hundreds of guns, and more than
50 tanks abandoned the key defense point of the eastern
anchor of the Gothic Line. They did this without ever
seeing the British Army. It was the partisans, organized
and facilitated by the OSS, who won a battle that was
never fought.
The British Eighth Army was certainly pleased with
the OSS and its efforts. Lieutenant Harry Bland, a British liaison officer with the OSS at Eighth Army HQ,
said: “We certainly wanted the help of the OSS and it
was invaluable.”�
It was the British who took care of these men. Their
exploits are so unknown because traditionalists in America (both military and political) have never appreciated or
wanted to document their efforts, feeling it would take
credit from others. Lieutenant Bland was happy that I
sought to tell this story, stating: “I am curious as to why
you chose the Eighth Army Detachment, as I have never
come across anyone before who was interested in us. They
all seem to be focused on the Jeds in Britain and Italy, with
the west side and the 5th Army.”�
All heroes should be acknowledged. What makes
these heroes of the OSS so compelling is how modest
and nondescript they remain. My interest in this subject
came from the Eighth Army Detachment’s radio operator, Frank Monteleone. He and the men who performed
this mission, saving countless British lives, are the embodiment of what makes America and those who have
served her great. I have spoken with and interviewed
Frank many times and he refuses to acknowledge his
own role. What he will do is praise the partisans, the
other members of his detachment, and the Italian Navy,
which was a means of both transport and support. To
these men, the gratitude of the British Eighth Army was
obvious. In each of the members of the Eighth Army
Detachment’s service records were placed the following
commendation from British General Harold Alexander:
“This Army has for the last six months had a detachment of your organization under command. The unit
has proved itself most efficient throughout this period.
In spite of great difficulties, particularly shortage of
equipment, transport, and personnel, it has undertaken a
number of well planned operations for this headquarters.
Their reports reflect the accuracy and attention to detail
which are essential in this type of work and are seldom
met. I should like to put on record my appreciation of
the work put in by the detachment.”�
Battles are usually won or lost before the first shot is
fired. That shot was not necessary because of the OSS’s
Eighth Army Detachment.
Dr. Robert Young, a U.S. Army veteran, is an adjunct professor at
the College of Staten Island and the American Military University. He has a Ph.D. in Military and Modern European History from
the City University of New York.
All heroes should be acknowledged. What makes these
heroes of the OSS so compelling is how modest and
nondescript they remain.
History
AN OSS COURIER IN WARTIME WASHINGTON
BY BRUCE I. ANDERSON
W
hen the war broke out, our family was living in an
old farmhouse in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. My father was called to Washington and my
brother enlisted in the Army Air Corps. I moved in with
a neighboring farm family. I was 16 years old. A few days
from my 17th birthday I received a letter from my father
with fabulous news:
I have one big thing for you that I have been trying to bring
about in time to offer on your 17th birthday. It is simply a
promise and you will have to qualify to fulfill it. I have been
speaking to friends at the Office of Strategic Services——and
they have promised that if you are as good as I say, you may
have a job with them when school ends. It will be a job as a
courier——in my mind one of the finest appointments for a boy
of your age in all America because it will bring you in contact
with the most notable men who administer the government of
the United States and great admirals and generals who are
directing the war. You will have important responsibilities and
they must have absolute confidence in your intelligence, loyalty, and ability to keep absolute secrecy. In a couple of days I
will send you an application form. It will look formidable. You
will even be investigated by the FBI. The chief purpose of these
forms is to establish your character and loyalty.
I was accepted. Arriving at Union Station, I walked the
length of Constitution Avenue to Foggy Bottom in a state
of utter euphoria. Wartime Washington! Euphoria suddenly turned to panic. I couldn’t find the building where
I was to report. No signs. Indoctrinated by my father, I
feared breeching security by asking. Then a passerby, seeing my distress, said to me: “Son, if you’re looking for
OSS, it’s there, the roller rink.”
Assigned to the SI/Registry in Q Building, Mr. Waddell
introduced me to the staff. I remember him as a kindly
man with a stammer caused by being gassed in the Great
War during the Somme Offensive. He had served under
“Wild Bill” Donovan, then commander of the Fighting
69th. Mr. Waddell treated me fatherly, especially when he
gave me the news shortly after I arrived that my brother
had died in a mission over France. And others along the
hallways of Q Building where I delivered cables comforted me at that sad moment. Among them were Richard
Helms and Peter Karlow. From that moment forward, I
The East Building at OSS headquarters on Navy Hill in
Washington, D.C., where General Donovan’s office was
located.
The Central Building at OSS headquarters on Navy Hill.
developed a hero worship of Richard Helms, who would
become Director of Central Intelligence.
My ensuing 17 years in SSU, CIG, and CIA, less time for
military and education, were not particularly notable. Yet I
remained throughout in the clandestine services under the
leadership of Richard Helms. By chance, we sailed together
in 1948, he traveling as chief FBM/DDP to oversee the establishment of the first CIA overseas mission and I to be
posted on permanent assignment to Cold War Germany.
Following these callow days in Q Building, years with the
Agency passed quickly. Then marriage and a growing family
beckoned me back to the placid mountains. As I look back,
my father was right. He could not have given me a greater
birthday gift.
Summer/Fall 2010
33
Code Name “Ioway”
Robert E. Moyers: OSS Dentist with the Greek Resistance
By Jonathan D. Clemente, MD
L
ike many young boys his age growing up in central
Iowa in the 1920s, Robert Edison Moyers idolized the
cowboys who came through town with the traveling rodeo. He was a precocious young man with a gift for gab
and unabashed self-promotion. During his college years,
he could raise hell on a Saturday night and wake up early
the next Sunday morning to perform his duties as a student pastor in the small towns near the University of Iowa.
Moyers was a man of small stature who had big ideas and
a desire to see the world beyond Sidney, Iowa. What he
lacked in physical height he made up for in pure force of
will, personality, and grit. As one contemporary war correspondent later put it, “Young Dr. Moyers looks like he
is made of equal parts spectacles and guts.” Little did he
know that only several months after graduating from the
University of Iowa Dental School in 1943——at the ripe age
of 23——the circumstances of global conflict would quite
literally drop him into the middle of the OSS secret war
against the Nazis in occupied Greece.
Moyers was also a prolific writer and poet, whose threevolume “operational diary” found in Record Group 226,
Entry 154, at the United States National Archives provides one of the only firsthand accounts of life in occupied Greece written by an American observer.
Bob Moyers was called into active military service in the
spring of 1943. He sailed with his unit halfway around the
world from San Francisco, California, to Wellington, New
Zealand, to Kandy, Ceylon, to Camp Russell B. Huckstep,
Heliopolis, Egypt.
He was not content to finish the war out as a “Cairo
Commando” performing root canals on those unfortunate enough to require such service. He longed to see
some action, the peril of combat, and savored the romantic notions of life behind enemy lines. Legend has it that
while General Donovan was in Cairo in late 1943 en route
to the Teheran Conference, he happened upon the young
U.S. Army dental officer standing astride two horses in a
makeshift rodeo. By chance, Cairo SO branch was putting together a team to form the American component of
the Allied Military Mission to Greece and they needed a
doctor to send into occupied territory. The lack of paved
roads in the rugged Greek interior kept German armor
from advancing on the headquarters of the Greek Resistance. But at the same time, transport of material for the
resistance could only be accomplished over the mountains
by horseback and pack animals. OSS needed a doctor who
was good with horses. Who else would be better suited for
duty inside Greece than Bob Moyers?
The fact that he was a dentist with very little postgraduate training didn’t seem to matter much to OSS. Doctors were scarce. Army dentists were a dime a dozen. They
would take him. After training at the British parachute
school in Ramat David, Palestine, and basic spy tradecraft
at the SOE School, Moyers physically and mentally prepared himself to make the jump into Greece. He was given
the code name “Ioway” in honor of the home state he
shared with Cairo SO Acting Chief Percy S. Wood.
After several attempts, the four-man team lead by Major
Jerry Wines was dropped into the rugged Pindus Mountain region in Evrytania, central Greece. Moyers thought
the date was fitting. It was the second anniversary of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Bob Moyers quickly set up shop close to mission headquarters in the small town of Domianoi. A motley crew of
former Russian and Italian POWs, Cypriots, Greek medical students, and two British medical officers assigned to
SOE Force 133 soon joined Moyers. His mission was simple: He was to provide medical care to the American and
British members of the mission, and if he had capacity, he
could treat civilians and members of the communist, inspired Greek Resistance movement——better known by the
acronym ELAS. The official War Report of the OSS portrays
Moyers’s medical facility as a “clandestine hospital” but
it is perhaps more aptly——or humbly——described as a dispensary or medical treatment room. Major surgical cases
had to be airlifted to Italy for definitive treatment. His
team was at the mercy of a haphazard schedule of resupply by covert airdrops. Many precious medical items were
smashed to bits on impact because they had been improperly packed in Bari, Italy. Other goods were lost after Al-
History
lied pilots completely missed the drop zone. The salvaged
Greek factions, ELAS and EDES. Fortunately, Moyers’s
items were invariably retrieved by locals who sold them
outburst did not have any lasting political repercussions;
on the Athens black market.
but the legend of the brave young American doctor who
Nevertheless, Moyers did his best with the little medistood up to Aris——and lived to tell about it——spread like
cal equipment and practical experience that he possessed.
wildfire among the local villagers.
The Allied mission commander, Colonel Chris Wood Throughout the spring and summer of 1944, Moyers
house, appreciated his efforts and sheer determination to
performed his medical duties despite suffering from paraget the job done. On one occasion, a British member of
typhoid fever, which left him debilitated and, at times,
the mission came down with what sounded like acute apbedridden for days.
pendicitis. As Moyers was preparing for the 11-hour long
On September 9, 1944, Moyers received an urgent
overland journey to see the patient, one of his assistants
call from the base near Lamia that one of the Operational
came upon him reading a surgical textGroup (OG) Group II officers named
book. The medic asked Moyers what he
Lieutenant John Giannaris was critically
was doing and he replied, “I’m teaching
wounded during an attack on a railroad
myself how to perform an appendecline after detonating a land mine. Moytomy.” Fortunately for both patient and
ers and his medics raced to the scene
and found Giannaris in shock. They
doctor——as it turned out——surgery was
stabilized him and arranged to evacuate
not indicated in the case.
Moyers was not afraid to speak his
him overland to a secret landing strip
at Nereida so that he could eventually
mind and occasionally this would rebe flown back to Brindisi, Italy. Severe
sult in a minor brouhaha. In early
weather delayed Giannaris’s evacuation
January 1944, Moyers happened upon
for two days as no plane could safely
a very excited crowd of villagers. The
land. All the while, Giannaris continued
ruckus was caused by the arrival of the
to deteriorate until finally Moyers radifamous——or infamous——military leader
oed Cairo to tell them that the lieutenant
of ELAS named “Aris” Velouchiotis. The
had less than 12 hours to live. An inportly, shaggy-bearded partisan, who
trepid young RAF pilot volunteered to
wore a bandolier across his chest and a
fly into Greece to pick up Giannaris no
scarab at his side, was the very model
matter how stormy it was. On Septemof a Greek Resistance fighter. Moyers
ber 17, 1944, OSS medic Bob DeWeese
was determined to meet the man who
Dr. Robert E. Moyers
squeezed into the back of the Lysander
was at once feared by the locals and reto monitor Giannaris during the flight
garded as a scoundrel by the Allies for
to Italy. They arrived safely in Brindisi, and Giannaris
murdering his rivals, for allegedly stealing supplies, and
survived, wrote a memoir about his OSS experience, and
for incessantly berating the Allies for their “lack of suptoday lives in Chicago.
port” for the Greek cause. He pushed his way through
In October 1944, the Germans began their long-awaited
the crowd and “introduced” himself to Aris. The ELAS
withdrawal from Greece. In the process, they laid waste to
leader launched into a diatribe mainly directed at the
the central portion of Greece between Lamia, Karpenisi, and
allegedly duplicitous British policy toward Greece and
Agrinion. This area had been the heartland of the Greek ReELAS, in particular. Moyers would not stand for what
sistance movement. Moyers was given the responsibility of
he felt was a backhanded slap at the Americans and
touring the area to assess medical and other relief needs in
told Aris through an interpreter in no uncertain terms
the war-torn region, and also to collect information on pos“where he should go and what he should do when he
sible war crimes. He set up a clinic, arranged for eight tons
got there.” Moyers practically had to be restrained by
of medical supplies to be distributed through the Swedish
one of the British doctors. Aris was taken aback, but in
Red Cross, and organized building construction teams. The
the end was impressed by Moyers’s courage, and agreed
retreating Germans had destroyed nearly all of the dwellto have his photo taken with the young American. Word
ings in the valley.
of the event got back to OSS Cairo. The confrontation
With the Germans gone, ELAS sought to wrest control
happened at a diplomatically sensitive time as the Allies
of the government from its rival factions. The British resistwere negotiating an armistice between the two main rival
Summer/Fall 2010
35
ed this development and the political situation worsened
over the next several months, culminating in the outbreak
of civil war during early December 1944. More than 900
British soldiers were taken prisoner by ELAS during the
fighting and held at a camp near Lamia in east central
Greece. During Bob Moyers 18 months in country he had
developed good working relationships with many of the
political leaders of ELAS as well as their medical officers.
His relief work following the German withdrawal engendered goodwill with the Greeks. Consequently, Moyers
was one of the few Allied personnel who could relatively
freely cross ELAS lines.
Moyers was able to personally negotiate the exchange
of the British prisoners with ELAS. Along with another
recently arrived OSS medical officer, Captain Harvey J.
Dain, Moyers traveled between ELAS and British territory and made sure that the prisoners were safeguarded
while the negotiations were under way. For his efforts,
Moyers was awarded the Legion of Merit and the Order
of the British Empire.
Moyers returned to the United States in February 1945,
was discharged from the OSS, and set about resuming his
dental career. During his time in Greece, he made personal observations on the effects of malnutrition on facial
growth and development and decided to make it his area
of clinical expertise. He earned a doctorate in physiology
and would become the Chairman of Orthodontics at the
University of Toronto at the age of 28. He would go on to
establish the Department of Orthodontics at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, where he served as
chairman for many years. He conducted important basic
and clinical research into facial growth and development,
and today the university hosts an annual “Moyers Symposium” to provide a forum for advances in the field.
Bob Moyers also sponsored three of the Greek medical
students who worked with him so they could immigrate
to the United States. One became a respected internist at
the Cleveland Clinic, one became an orthopedic surgeon
in Florida, and the third retired as an emeritus professor
of biochemistry at UCLA. Moyers returned to Greece in
1964 on a Fulbright Scholarship and was able to visit many
of his old stomping grounds in the mountains of Evrytania. For all of Bob Moyers’s contributions to the OSS effort in Greece, and his tremendous clinical advances in
orthodontics, one lifelong dream eluded him. During the
Reagan administration, he had vigorously, but unsuccessfully, lobbied to be appointed United States Ambassador
to Greece. Dr. Moyers passed away on January 8, 1996,
following a complication from coronary angioplasty. He
was 76 years old.
Dr. Jonathan Clemente is a physician in practice in Charlotte, North
Carolina. He is writing a scholarly history of the OSS Medical Services Branch and the CIA Office of Medical Services.
REMEMBERING 109
BY JACK WHEAT
While stationed in Kunming, I was told to find a certain book of
the Encyclopedia Britannica and take it to General Donovan who
was there for a meeting. When I arrived——it was fairly late at night
——General Donovan came out of the Officers’ House to receive the
book from me. He shook my hand and made courteous small talk
with me. I was overwhelmed by his friendliness——I was a T/5. He
left a small autographed picture of himself for me and I treasure it
as the most valuable reminder of my service.
History
Remembering Her OSS Father: Lt. Col. Hamner Freeman
by Cameron Freeman Napier
M
y father, Lieutenant Colonel Hamner Garland Freeman, Jr., AC, AUS, served in OSS China from
November 1944 to October 1945. He was awarded the
Legion of Merit for “the development of an intelligence
net in South East China which produced most of the intelligence emanating from those vitally important areas ...
without which it is doubtful the American intelligence efforts would have become possible.” He was also decorated
with the Chinese Order of the Cloud and Banner.
“Ham” Freeman was born on June 28, 1900, in Lawrenceville, Virginia. After working in the family insurance
business, he went to the Orient in 1925 to establish the Far
East Branch of the Tobacco Trading Corporation in Shanghai.
On July 25, 1930, he married Cameron Middleton Brame of
Montgomery, Alabama, in Yokohama and they had two children, myself and Hamner Garland Freeman III. Our family
lived in Shanghai until November 1940, when my father sent
us home. He followed us on April 8, 1941.
After Pearl Harbor, he received a commission as an Air
Corps captain, completed officer training school classes in
Miami, 3rd Special Class Intelligence Officer School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and shipped out to the South Pacific
in September 1942. At Noumea, New Caledonia, he was on
the staff of what became the Thirteenth Air Force. He saw
action briefly on Guadalcanal. Because of his experience
in China, he eventually got an intertheater transfer to the
Fourteenth Air Force in China in October 1944.
Soon after his arrival in Kunming, Major General Claire
L. Chennault assigned his intelligence staff to OSS China.
Freeman was assigned to OSS SI to the 5329th Air ground
Field Resources Technical Survey (AGFRTS). OSS/China
was under the command of Colonel Richard P. Heppner.
Freeman headed an OSS field intelligence unit that operated behind Japanese lines, first at Kukong (Shiukwan),
northeast of Canton, and successively at Suichuen, Kanchow, Changting, and Hsingning north of Swatow. My
father never discussed his miliary career, and it would be
years before I would learn anything. With the help of my
husband, Major John Hawkins Napier III, USAF (Ret.), we
unearthed some of my father’s field intelligence reports in
the USAF Archives at Maxwell AFB, Alabama.
After V-J Day my father was transferred briefly to Shanghai before rotating Stateside. At that time, General of the
Army George C. Marshall had asked his old friend, Pulitzer
prize-winning historian Dr. Douglas
Southall Freeman, Freeman’s uncle,
to make a round-the-world trip and
report to him on the status of the
U.S. forces overseas.
On October 18, 1945, Dr. Freeman wrote his wife from Shanghai
that he was reunited with his nephew,
Hamner. He had passed up visits to
Admiral Thomas Kincaid and dinner
with T.V. Soong, Chiang Kai-Shek’s brother-in-law, to visit
with his favorite nephew long into the night. He learned
that Ham had run 200 agents for eight months behind
enemy lines, a network of 20 radio stations that stretched
from Hangkow to Hainan Island. An attempt was made to
assassinate him. He found two double spies in his outfit
and had them shot. Two junks manned by his OSS agents
covered the critical section of coast south of Hong Kong.
His crowning achievement was planting one of his agents as
a servant in the headquarters of the Japanese commander of
the district.
My father returned Stateside October 22, 1945, and was
assigned to the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) in Washington, D.C. He planned to return to Shanghai to revive his
Tobacco Trading Corporation’s business. Evidently he retained intelligence connections because on December 20,
1945, he wrote SSU Commander Colonel Paul. E. Helliwell: “You will recall that during my recent visit to your
headquarters that we discussed a certain confidential matter in some detail, and that it would be reopened before
my return to the Orient.” He was awarded a Legion of
Merit in China in the spring of 1946.
He returned to Shanghai on March 17, 1946, to revive
his business. My father’s business partner (and my godfather) told me that he was doing something besides the
leaf tobacco business. After two more years in Shanghai,
my father, who foresaw the impending communist victory
in the Chinese Civil War, returned to San Francisco. He
joined his family in Montgomery, Alabama, where he died
unexpectedly on December 3, 1949.
If any reader knew Ham Freeman, please telephone me at 1 (334)
281-0505 or write me at Kilmahew, 158 Mount Zion Rd., Ramer,
Alabama 36069-6505.
Summer/Fall 2010
37
Kunming, China: Setting For Daring Wartime Operations
By Bob Bergin
Author’s note: Much has been written about the military activity that centered on Kunming in Southwest China during World
War II. Writing by OSS personnel who served there gives a good
sense of the times and of what the city was like. Perhaps the best
view comes from “Undercover Girl,” written in 1947 by Elizabeth P. MacDonald——now Betty McIntosh——who worked in
Morale Operations (MO) in India before going on to China.
Where not otherwise noted, quoted material below is taken from
MacDonald’s book.
J
ulia McWilliams Child climbed down from the airplane
that had just brought her and Betty MacDonald across
the Himalayas to Kunming. She looked over the low hills
and the curling rooftop of a small, nearby temple——just as
a group of red-cheeked children romped by, greeting her
with a cheery “T’ing hao.”
“It looks just like China!” Julia exclaimed in her
trilly voice.
It was early 1945: Kunming airport was one of the busiest in the world, the terminus of the “Hump Flights” from
India that kept China supplied and in the war. Kunming
city was a Jeep ride away, “down a rough mud road lined
with straight-shafted cedars,” through rice paddies and
fields of millet.
Paul Frillmann, a former missionary and field intelligence officer who later became the OSS chief in Peking,
first saw Kunming early in the war, a “lovely old city by
a beautiful lake ... on a 6,000-foot plateau on the edge of
the tropics.”
In his memoir, China——The Remembered Life, Frillmann
wrote: “In its isolation it was the most picturesque Chinese
provincial capital I ever visited. Its main streets were still
cobbled with glistening irregular stones and many shop
fronts were carved and painted in peacock colors like those
of old imperial Peking. Medieval gateways arched over the
streets and on the north side a crenelated city wall separated the crowded streets from empty grave-lands where little
grass-covered knolls marked the dead of centuries.”
Kunming was the end of the line for the one-track railway that came from French Indochina. Before the Japanese
shut it down, it had brought French merchandise of all
kinds. “Most of the French had left, but a big compound
full of French offices and residences surrounded the railhead south of the city. Elaborate homes in Mediterranean
colors, the summer villas of merchants and officials from
Indo-China stood in lush gardens on the reedy shores of
the big lake. Good loaves of crusty French bread were still
sold in some Chinese bakeries ... excellent French brandy
and champagne could be found in a few groceries or at the
small French Hotel de Commerce.”
The war brought an enormous influx of Chinese refugees and the city spread well beyond its ancient walls. By
mid-1942, the Americans were arriving in great numbers
and soon were everywhere. When the OSS women got
there in 1944 the city was “a wide-open boom town ...
at the end of the Burma Road and the pipeline from India,” a labyrinth of alleys that “twisted through lanes lined
with acrid smelling opium parlors ... through ‘thieves row’
where all things stolen from the Americans were resold.”
Many of the Americans were housed in barracks constructed with Chinese mud bricks and tile. Some fared better: “up a well paved street in a newly opened subdivision
where ... the OSS women lived ... behind massive wooden
gates——a modernistic stone house with tile roof and encircling balconies overlooking formal Chinese gardens.”
It was called Mei Yuan——beautiful garden. But the toilets
didn’t work, the roof leaked, and there were not enough
rooms. Working facilities were usually not quite so grand.
“Our first MO production office was a large tent pitched
next to a crude mud-brick print shop abutting the OSS
compound wall.”
Kunming was China’s Wild West. Many Americans
stayed in their compounds, behind their tall mud walls.
The adventuresome found amusements. “I soon learned
to my regret that the real piquancy of Chinese cooking
was found in the out of bound restaurants, where fine flavor and dysentery went hand in hand.”
When OSS Major Nicol Smith got bored, he dropped
by the Nam Ping, “a cheap looking, frightfully expensive
restaurant specializing in contraband stores of American
canned soup and orange champagne that didn’t have a
bubble to a bottle.” But there were steaks to be had, and
real whiskey——at fabulously high prices. The expense did
not deter the regulars, Kunmings’s newly rich: Americans
involved in the black market and Chinese who were smugglers or bandits or both.
There was a semi-Westernized restaurant where American fighter pilots went to celebrate victories, to drink
History
champagne, and
The OSS comeat hundreds of
pound, MacDonfried chicken livald wrote, “surers, the only item
rounded by a well
on the menu
constructed wall
they could recogwith no drainage
nize. In the hills
facilities became
outside the city,
a three-foot deepBetty MacDonald
lake … the MO
shared a Chinese
tent floated away
gentleman’s after… Sergeant Bill
noon snack from
Smith and I left
a small porcelain
the print shop just
box, “River bugs.
as it disintegrated
Fried in a special
into the mud
sauce.” Not too
from which it had
bad, she reported,
been built.”
“if you didn’t look
OSS Captain
at them ... someJohn Singlaub was
OSS Headquarters in Kunming
thing like bits of
working down near
fried liver.”
the Indochina bor There were dipder when he was
lomatic events. The first OSS chief in China, Milton “Mary”
called to Kunming to undertake an urgent mission. He arMiles, attended a dinner party at the old French Consulrived at the OSS compound in a heavy monsoon downate, “a sparkling affair, gay with joie de vivre.” The interval
pour. “I went to sleep on an upper bunk,” he recalled, “and
between the soup and the fish was punctuated by “two
awoke to find a stream of water flowing through the barbursts of machine-gun clatter from the courtyard just outracks. My foot locker was afloat. The walls, made of clay
side.” Guests restrained themselves from jumping under
bricks, started to dissolve. By that afternoon, every wall of
the table while the host went to check. “Nothing much,”
the BOQ (Bachelors Office Quarters) had fallen in, leaving
he said. “My cook and my quartermaster had a Tommyjust the wooden frame holding up the roof.”
gun duel over a Portuguese girl. No harm done ... the cook
“The rains ceased as suddenly as they started, and the
will finish cooking dinner.”
water seeped away from the city, leaving debris and casu There was intrigue; there were spies. The Chinese
alties——long lines of coffins in the streets awaiting a propi“were quite brazen about selling state secrets, quite overt
tious burial day.” General Donovan arrived, and on the
about trading with the Japs. Newspapers often carried
first sunny day after the flood inspected the detachment
interviews with ‘travelers’ who described in detail the latand passed out awards. OSS guerrillas “had been … the
est smuggling routes and tariffs fixed on goods by both
only American ground force in active combat against the
sides.” Mixed in with this trade was espionage. A U.S.
Japs in China.” Detachment commander Colonel Richard
Navy technical intelligence unit at Kunming airport lisHeppner “had a special right to look proud.” His China
tened to complicated radio conversations about shoes
OSS detachment was awarded the theater unit citation
and boxes. They found that “sales” matched the move“for outstanding performance of duty.”
ment of American aircraft, and rooted out a Japanese
The war was suddenly over. Firecrackers exploded;
spy net. There were French refugees from Indochina that
Americans yelled “Yippee!” For those remaining in KunOSS wanted to use in operations, while Ho Chi Minh’s
ming, there were still interesting times to come. OSS was
agents worked to unite Vietnamese against the French,
given one last job, the “mercy missions,” liberating Allied
the Japanese and the Chinese.
POWs from Japanese camps in China and Indochina.
Then the atom bomb was dropped on Japan, and Kun It was a delicate and dangerous undertaking that needed
ming was “visited in rapid succession by a flood, a revoto be done quickly. Many Japanese units did not know
lution, and General Donovan.” The rain came first, and
the war was over. Intercepts indicated that Japanese com“Kunming was deluged … with the worst flood in 25 years.”
manders had been told to kill all Allied POWs. In some
Summer/Fall 2010
39
areas Japanese, Nationalist, and Communist troops were
entangled, and the arrival of the Russians, who had just invaded Manchuria, complicated matters. OSS teams went
out and, after anxious days of waiting, rescued POWs
started to arrive at Kunming Airport, among them General Wainwright, taken when Corregidor fell, and the Marines who survived Wake Island. Thousands of Americans,
Chinese, and allied POWs were rescued by OSS teams.
“After so much destruction, the POW rescue mission was
a satisfying thing,” John Singlaub remembered.
There was still one chapter to come. It was very quiet
in the early morning of October 3, 1945, at the house
where the OSS women lived. Many OSS personnel had
already returned to the United States; a few hardcore
remained. Betty MacDonald was half dozing in bed
when “three Chinese soldiers wearing bandoleers and
helmets tiptoed through my room carrying an unassembled machine gun without so much as an eyes-right
as they passed my bed.”
On the balcony, where the three set up their machine
gun, an OSS paratrooper explained: There was a revolution. The governor of Yunman province had grown so
powerful that the Generalissimo had to share the take from
lend lease. With the war’s end, there had to be a rebalance
of power. The word was there was an opium harvest at
stake, great numbers of Jeep tires, and a fortune in gold
and rare wines. The governor and the Generalissimo were
having their showdown, and OSS was caught—literally—
—in the middle.
Chinese fought Chinese all over town and at the airport. During a lull in the shooting at the OSS house, Betty
MacDonald noted the absence of “Sammy,” Colonel Heppner’s golden cocker spaniel, who had taken to hanging
out with the MO crowd. He had been last seen ambling
down the street, and Betty took after him. As she spotted him ahead, she found herself the target of hostile rifle
fire——from a police kiosk. She remembered that “in the
movies people ‘hit the dirt’,” but was spared the indignity
by a tank that just then “rumbled past ... slowed down by
the kiosk, opened fire on the unseen occupants, and then
bumped on down the road.” She and Sammy got safely
back, and a profitable peace was negotiated between the
warring factions.
Soon after that, the OSS was gone, the exciting days
in Kunming were over. Today Kunming is a bustling city
of four million souls, with modern apartment blocks
and office towers, wide avenues, and first-class shopping
malls. The old airport has a beautiful new terminal. Ancient temples remain, but little else. Among Kunming’s
residents, however, memories linger, and have been passed
down through a couple of generations. There are plans for
several museums in Kunming that will commemorate the
time when Americans and Chinese worked side by side to
achieve a necessary goal.
Bob Bergin is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer who writes on the
history of aviation in Southeast Asia and China, and on OSS and military operations in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II.
History
OSS Artist Henry Koerner Celebrated
F
rom the Holocaust to JFK, artist Henry Koerner experienced and captured major milestones of the 20th century. The von Liebig Art
Center, in conjunction with the Holocaust Museum of Southwest Florida, in Naples, presented
Koerner’s work in the first major U.S. retrospective of his art since 1984.
“This exhibition opened people’s eyes to
the work of a true master,” says Frank Russen,
gallery director at the Englishman Gallery of
Naples. Russen met Koerner while a college
student in 1986, when Russen modeled for the
artist and served as his assistant and driver for
painting excursions.
Not only a painter, Koerner
designed World War II
posters for the U.S. War
Department and served the
Office of Strategic Services
as the chief illustrator at the
Nuremberg Trials.
Koerner was killed while bicycling in Vienna
in 1991.
“Henry’s style of painting cannot be defined.
It evolved during his career, from almost photo
realism to wide brushstrokes of color like impressionism,” says Russen.
Not only a painter, Koerner designed World
War II posters for the U.S. War Department and
served the Office of Strategic Services as a chief
illustrator at the Nuremberg Trials. He lost his
parents and brother in the Holocaust and served
in Europe as an OSS photographer to document
the destruction of Germany and Austria.
Later in his career, Koerner painted 64 covers for Time magazine, a process that involved
portrait sittings for several days with the likes
of John Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, and
Barbra Streisand.
Posters provided courtesy of the Northwestern University Library.
Summer/Fall 2010
41
Attention Please
Attention Please was a newspaper produced by the OSS Presentation Branch at Area F (Congressional
Country Club). The first issue was published on February 19, 1944.
Summer/Fall 2010
43
Book Reviews
CITIZENS OF LONDON: The
Americans Who Stood With
Britain In Its Darkest and
Finest Hour
By Lynne Olson
Random House
Reviewed by
Fisher Howe
For readers interested in
World War II as it was
fought out in heroic, war-torn London, this is the book for them. Detailed, well-researched, it is a splendidly written historical narrative by
former Baltimore Sun correspondent,
Lynne Olson, and an absorbing tale.
The story is told principally
through three central characters who,
it can be reliably claimed, were largely responsible for getting America
into the war: the CBS correspondent, Edward R. Murrow, famous for
his nightly dramatic broadcasts from
London during the Blitz; Averill Harriman, the wealthy, ambitious Presidential Lend-Lease representative to
Britain; and Gilbert Winant, the wellloved U.S. Ambassador. But Winston
Churchill and his family and FDR
also come very much alive in the
story——their historic friendship and
unhappy rivalry. In addition, a multitude of hardly subordinate characters
are part of this wide-ranging, authoritative chronicle; most especially, Harry Hopkins, FDR’s eminence grise; the
little known but apparently critically
important aviation expert, the poloplaying socialite, Tommy Hitchcock;
and the star-studded, sometime fractious American and British military
leaders. Only the war in Europe is involved in this fine tale; there is hardly
a reference to Japan and the Pacific.
MacArthur doesn’t come into it.
One important insight emerges in
this chronicle: the critical historical significance of the years 1940 and 194l.
The war itself was a colossal event but
those two years saw a major turning
point in world affairs: the survival of
the desperately stricken, courageous
British nation, and the massive shift
in the American posture from its isolationism to overwhelming world involvement. The winning U.S.-British
partnership that emerged saved Britain
in its dire need, remade the American
world outlook, and won the war.
The book, however, is not limited
to those two crucial years; the narrative covers the whole of the European war in great detail——the terrifying
London Blitz in the Battle of Britain;
the Torch invasion of North Africa;
the massive “Overlord” cross-Channel operation; the difficult dealings
with the irrepressible, controversial,
and generally disliked deGaulle; the
friendly cooperation with the other
European exile governments and
people; the dramatic and disputatious dealings with Stalin in the several summit conferences; the fluctuating leadership of Eisenhower; the
back-biting struggles of the American
and British military. And withal, the
human stories, including the love affairs of the three protagonists with
members of the Churchill family.
It is a long, detailed, heroic tale. One
of its attractive features is the many
quotations from letters and diaries of
the actors in the drama.
OSSers, however, should not look
for significant recognition in this
book. For instance, the name William Donovan gets only one meager
mention. That may be understandable in the light of so many other
prominent personalities, but it is
unfortunate. Donovan, through his
prewar trips to Europe, especially his
visits to England, and his opening of
the COI office in London——before
Pearl Harbor——under the close guidance of British Intelligence leaders,
especially William Stephenson——
who gets no mention at all——should
probably count as a not-unimportant
part of the 1940-1941 beginnings of
the close U.S.-U.K. relationship that
led to the wartime partnership. Donovan and Stephenson were important figures in the British-American
wartime establishment.
The OSS London office is mentioned only a few times, not altogether
accurately. One reference toward the
middle of the book: “When the OSS
set up operations in London in 1942
… ” No, we set up the Coordinator of
Information Office (COI) in October
of 1941 and it became OSS in June
1942. Those were critical months in the
story the book seeks to tell.
At another point the narrative reports: “Among the new agencies whose
work Winant oversaw were … [the]
Office of Strategic Services, America’s first official intelligence agency.”
Winant did not oversee London’s OSS;
he once tried to, half-heartedly, but,
beloved and wise as he was, he did not
get into the intelligence business.
But never mind. It is a fascinating
and revealing story of those dramatic
and critical years at the epicenter of
World War II.
Fisher Howe served as a special assistant
to General William Donovan with COI and
OSS, opened the OSS office in London, and
served in the Maritime Unit in Ceylon.
Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War:
The World War II Editorial
Cartoons of America’s Leading
Comic Artists
By Andre Schiffrin
New Press
Reviewed by Dan Pinck
This book was published as a sequel
and companion to Richard Minnear’s
Dr. Seuss Goes to War, which introduced
contemporary readers to Theodor Gei-
sel’s forgotten career as a political cartoonist. Most people know Geisel as
the author of children’s books. However, Geisel had a previous career as a
cartoonist for the politically progressive New York tabloid PM from 1940
to 1943. He published about 400 cartoons in PM before joining the army
in 1943.
Andre Schiffrin is an editor, publisher, and a historian. He has written
a garland of serious books. His book,
Embracing Defeat, received a Pulitzer
Prize. His new book, a first-rate history, illuminates the role of leading
editorial cartoonists in American
newspapers and magazines——including Geisel, Saul Steinberg, and Al
Hirschfeld, among others——in overriding the junk that dominated the
pages of a large number of monstrously prejudiced newspaper empires in our nation before and during
World War II. One of these empires
was on the verge of being indicted for
treason for revealing stolen secret information during our war against Japan. For Americans not old enough
to have memories of how awfully
stupid many American newspapers
were and that a large number of congressman were opposed to all efforts
to strengthen our nation before Pearl
Harbor——the Lend-Lease Act of 1941
barely passed——Mr. Schiffrin’s book
is a needed revelation.
Growing up in Washington, D.C.,
I had more than a schoolboy’s familiarity with some of the duds in Congress as well as some of the outstanding patriots who worked day and
night to prepare us for war. The bads
in Congress then were far worse than
the bads in Congress now. The sharp
and fair-minded editorial cartoonists before and during World War II
helped to mitigate the foul, syndicated hatred of many columnists, such
as the despicable Westbrook Pegler
and rightist editorial cartoonists.
Approximately 370 editorial cartoons are reproduced in this book.
Many of the PM cartoonists achieved
acclaim as national treasures before,
during, and after the war, including
James Thurber, Saul Steinberg, Leo
Hershfeld, Carl Rose, John Groth,
Mischa Richter, Arthur Scyk, Eric
Godal, and Reginald Marsh. The
founder and editor of PM, Ralph
Ingersoll, had been a writer and editor at The New Yorker during its early
years. He left when he could no longer stand its founder and editor, Harold Ross.
Concerning Saul Steinberg’s political cartoons in PM, Schiffrin writes: “Steinberg had been drafted into the
Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s
predecessor ... and he was asked to
draw cartoons for the newspaper that
the OSS sent into Germany.” The OSS played no part in Steinberg’s PM career. The Romanian-born
artist had fled Italy in June 1941 for
Santo Domingo. His first PM cartoon
appeared on January 11, 1942, six
months before he arrived in the U.S.
and before OSS was created. It was
Steinberg’s agent in New York, Cesar
Civita, who arranged the PM assignments, which continued until May
1943. Then, newly commissioned as
an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve,
Steinberg shipped out to China under
the auspices of Naval Intelligence and
the budding OSS. (Joel Smith discusses
these events and Steinberg’s later work
for the OSS Morale Operations division in Saul Steinberg: Illuminations.)
It’s a tribute to General Donovan
that his OSS had the intelligence and
imagination to employ artists who
served around the world and produced
outstanding art. Saul Steinberg, who
served in China, Italy, and North Africa, drew 1,200 cartoons and 90 covers
for The New Yorker. Henry Koerner created propaganda posters for the OWI,
was the OSS illustrator at the Nurem-
berg Trials, photographed post-World
War II Austria and Germany, and
created many covers for Time. Dong
Kingman served in the OSS graphics
divison along with other notable artists and designers such as Will Burtin;
Georg Olden, who designed the CBS
logo; and Donal McLaughlin, the
designer of the United Nations logo.
(Donal McLaughlin’s obituary appears
on page 61.) Taro Yashima, a political
refugee from Japan rather than a political prisoner like so many Japanese
Americans who were interred during
the war, served as an OSS translator
and became a noted painter in peacetime. Both Carl Rose and Chon Day
contributed to PM; after the war, they
became noted cartoonists at The New
Yorker. Gardner Rea was a PM contributor and afterward became a permanent and distinguished artist of The
New Yorker, contributing its first cover,
of Eustace Tilley, which appeared on
February 21, 1925, and hundreds of
drawings over the years. His first cover was repeated yearly on its anniversary for more than 65 years. (When I
worked for The New Yorker, I attended
weekly art meetings with Gardner Rea,
Harold Ross, and Jim Geraghty, the
art editor. I treasure a drawing given to
me by Chon Day in China.)
I might add a toast to another form
of art commissioned by OSS. We all
know that Marlene Dietrich sang “Lilli
Marlene” to German troops. This was
recorded by an American orchestra selected by OSS. But do we know that
she also sang “Miss Otis Regrets” and
“Taking a Chance on Love” to the
Germans? Peggy Lee and Josephine
Baker also sang popular songs translated into German. And do we recall
that General Donovan commissioned
an underground German newspaper?
Dan Pinck served behind enemy lines in China with OSS. He is the author of Journey to
Peking: A Secret Agent in Wartime China.
Summer/Fall 2010
45
Papa Spy: Love, Faith, and
Betrayal in Wartime Spain
by James Burns
Bloomsbury Publishing
Reviewed by
Betty Lussier
Thomas Burns was a respected publisher and journalist
whose contact list included such
notables as Graham Green, Evelyn
Waugh, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc. Burns lived his entire
life with one foot in Britain and the
other foot in Spain. He loved both
countries dearly. He died in 1995
and one of his sons, James Burns,
also a well-known journalist in Spain
and Britain, realized that while his
father’s civilian life was well documented, very little was known to the
public about his extensive service to
his country in WWII. He decided to
delve into that subject and Papa Spy
is the result.
This tale is told from his father’s
point of view, but the author also
deals with his father’s relationship to
the Catholic faith. His father once
seriously prepared himself for the
priesthood and, while he never took
his final vows, he remained a devoted practicing Catholic throughout
his life. When he backed away from
becoming a priest, he immersed
himself successfully in the publishing world and this is when the British Ministry of Information recruited him when the civil war in Spain
was coming to an end with Franco’s
victory, and WWII was looming.
Burns had the unique qualities Britain needed to represent the country
in Spain; he was fiercely British, but
he knew Spain intimately and he
was sympathetic to Franco, a faithful Catholic like himself.
Burns went to Madrid as the press
attaché. Working out of the British
Embassy, he became much more
than an information officer. He
participated in several projects that
are famous today in the spy world.
Among them is an extraordinary deception project known as “The Man
Who Never Was,” the planning of
the last flight of British actor Leslie
Howard, and his contacts with Kim
Philby before Philby became a double agent. At the same time, Burns
was deeply involved in attempts to
keep Spain neutral in the war. His
work has been recognized as a positive contribution to Spain’s continued neutrality, in spite of intense
Nazi pressure to have Spain join
Germany and Italy.
In his book, Burns has given his
readers one of the best descriptions
as to how real spying is actually carried out. From the amount of information about his father’s wartime
spying that is still a mystery, can we
expect Papa Spy’s author to continue
his research and uncover further spy
secrets in the future?
Betty Lussier was an OSS agent in WWII
serving in Spain. She also was a pilot, flying fighter planes to England earlier in the
war. Her memoir, Intrepid Women: Betty
Lussier’s Secret War, 1942-1945, will be
published by the Naval Institute Press in
November 2010.
At her Majesty’s Secret
Service: The Chiefs of Britain’s
Intelligence Agency MI6
By Nigel West
Naval Institute Press
Reviewed by
Alice A. Booher
The U.K.’s “the firm,” “the
funnies,” and to the Foreign Office,
“the friends,” is officially the Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS) or MI6 (to
use its original wartime designation).
For the first 85 years after its found-
ing in 1909, even the identities of its
successive chiefs were undisclosed. So,
while some SIS exploits are the stuff
of legends, little was really known of
it or its chief, known as “C,” until the
Intelligence Services Bill of 1994.
It is no accident that the definitive book on the chiefs of SIS comes
from Nigel West, whose 30 other spyrelated books and handful of novels
equate to the finest in British intelligence research. The London Sunday
Times has said that West’s information
is often so precise that many people
believe he is the unofficial historian
of the secret services. His books are
peppered with deliberate clues to potential front-page stories.
The book comprises a series of biographies (each man gets a chapter),
intimately interwoven with solid documentary evidence of the problems
and associated exploits of an extraordinary agency, either of which often
defy categorization. Each of the “C”
men is unique if not enigmatic——as
are some of the other players like the
ubiquitous Kim Philby (whose impact, along with that of Oleg Penkovsky, may be the best documented
collateral stories).
Virtually every page contains
something interesting, legal, historic,
newsworthy, and awesomely comprehensive. The aggregate is overwhelming but most enlightening. The
erudite language may inadvertently
remind readers that the Brits do own
the language, no matter how convoluted their sentence structure with
mildly annoying absences of commas or semicolons. Many American
readers may remain confused by the
intricacies of The Falklands or Rhodesia, but this book clears up a lot of
the other questions. This is compelling stuff, and it can be used as an
ongoing credible reference for specific intelligence issues, or read for
just plain pleasure accompanied by
Book Reviews
a shaken-not-stirred martini akin to
James Bond, said by one “C” to have
been SIS’s best recruiting sergeant.
A Spy’s Diary of World War II:
Inside the OSS with an American
Agent in Europe
By Wayne Nelson
McFarland and Co.
The wartime diaries of
Wayne Nelson, an OSS
officer who served in
North Africa and Europe during
World War II, offer exciting reading.
A prewar colleague of Allen Dulles,
Nelson joined an infant OSS after
failing to enlist in the navy because
of a vision disability. He went on
to serve in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, Corsica, and mainland
France. Erudite and a skilled writer,
Nelson captured intriguing observations about some of the most important spy operations of the war, and
his diaries offer a thrilling, readable,
and informative glimpse into the life
of a spy during World War II.
The late Wayne Nelson, an actor and
playwright, earned a Bronze Star and
France’s La Croix de Guerre for his service with the OSS during World War
II. He also served the CIA in Washington, Turkey, Greece, South Korea, and
West Germany.
story is extremely well researched,
thoughtfully presented, and crafted
with laudable forthrightness, with
often painful insight and not a few
lingering questions.
Win Scott grew up in a converted
railroad boxcar in rural Alabama. He
was operationally groomed in OSS/
London, and was for a while the right
hand of CIA Director Allen Dulles, although he was never a member of the
“Georgetown Set,” coming from the
FBI, not Yale. At his request, Dulles
settled him in as CIA Chief of the
Mexico City station from 1956-1969,
an inordinately long and vast historic
period. He ran hundreds of both small
and huge covert operations while juggling a variety of folks on the payroll.
Some of the most intriguing chapters deal with the Bay of Pigs and the
surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald
and those with whom he purportedly
had or did not have contact with just
before the assassination of President
Kennedy. Win Scott’s personal life
is as worthy of a book as his professional one; his friendships with the
likes of James Angleton (who quickly
confiscated Win Scott’s writings at his
death); and family, including wives,
are sadly fascinating. Special nuggets
are contained in analyses and observations by knowledgeable, skilled operatives such as Anne Goodpasture, also
a former OSS veteran, one of many
Morley interviewed for this book.
Our Man in Mexico:
Winston Scott and the Hidden
History of the CIA
The Cloak and Dagger Cook:
A CIA Memoir
By Jefferson Morley
University Press of Kansas
By Kay Shaw Nelson
Pelican Publishing Co.
Jefferson Morley is technically the author, but the
story is the result of the
longtime search by Winston (Win)
Scott’s adopted son, Michael, who
wrote the forward to the book. The
Upon graduating from
college in 1948, Kay Shaw
Nelson, a bright young
woman with a yen for international
travel, joined the newly founded
Central Intelligence Agency. Within
months, she received her security
clearance, learned the difficulties associated with the life of a spy, fell in
love, and set about traveling the world
on assignment with her OSS husband,
Wayne Nelson. At times under cover
as a cookbook writer, Nelson sailed
from exotic locale to exotic locale, each
more incredible than the last. From
Washington to Turkey and Cyprus,
to Syria, Libya, France, Greece, and
the Netherlands, among many other
ports, the Nelsons traversed the globe
as Kay discovered her passion for food,
developed her journalistic abilities, and
honed her exceptional palate.
With humor and panache, Nelson
tells of her exploits gleaning intelligence
while gathering recipes and sampling
the local cuisine. Kebabs in Turkey,
kimchi in Korea, spargel in Germany,
eels in Spain, and Rumbledethumps
in Scotland were among the delightful gastronomic surprises she encountered. Dozens of unusual recipes with
memorable histories pepper this irresistible memoir of fascinating events,
extraordinary corners of the globe, and
clandestine culinary pursuits.
Resistance: A Woman’s Journal
of Struggle and Defiance in
Occupied France
By Agnes Humbert
Translated by
Barbara Mellor
Bloomsbury USA
Reviewed by
Alice A. Booher
Originally published in France in May
1946 as Notre Guerre: Souvenirs de Resistance, one of the first accounts of the
war years to enter the public domain,
it was then and is now remarkable for
its depth, wit, and candor. For decades
the book was out of print and unobtainable; 62 years later, this is the first
English translation.
Summer/Fall 2010
47
Watercolorist Agnes Humbert had
two young adult sons with fellow artist George Sabbagh, an Egyptian. By
war’s outbreak, she was a respected
art expert with the Musee des Arts et
Traditions Populaires in the Palais de
Chaillot and a close associate of its
first director, Georges-Henri Riviere.
A woman of strong political commitments with an agile mind and eager
pen, she reacted to the fall of France
by taking action.
The first segment of the book contains factual delineations of what she
and other activists (Pierre Brossolette, Jean Cassou, and Boris Vilde)
did before and during the German
invasion to organize and rescue their
fellow patriots and confound the Gestapo, from harboring targets to writing, publishing, and distributing the
newspaper Resistance, first published
on December 15, 1940.
The remainder of her book describes her in-France captivity and
deportation to German prison labor
sites——the ugly, brutal conditions
and deprivations. Humbert gives
candid witness but is not gratuitously heavy-handed with friend or foe.
With her release in June 1945, she
joined a few others designated by the
American military to facilitate movement of refugees, find collaborators,
and set up medical and comfort waystations. Humbert’s observations are
as grim and stark as they are credible,
often tinged with humor, some of it
cheery, some gallows. The afterword
by Julien Blanc brings together loose
ends about the author and her circumstances; there is a generous appendix
of documents on the Resistance.
Humbert was rendered physically
debilitated by her captivity, but maintained her mental vigor and acumen.
She returned to Paris and Cassou’s
new Musee National d’Art Moderne,
continued her involvement in politics, and became a broadly left-wing
activist leader. Awarded the Croix
de Guerre in 1949, she organized art
exhibits and published, spending the
final years prior to her death in 1963
in Valmondois with her son Pierre, a
prominent French TV personality.
A Spy at the Heart of the Third
Reich: The Extraordinary Story
of Fritz Kolbe, America’s Most
Important Spy in World War II
By Lucas Delattre
Tantor Media
Reviewed by Mitch Paioff
This must be one of the
most remarkable stories
to come out of World War II, and
Fritz Kolbe must be one of that war’s
most unique personalities. During
the last two years of the war, and
at the risk of his life, Fritz Kolbe
brought to the Allies over 2,600 secret documents from Hitler’s Foreign
Office in Berlin. As a result, at war’s
end he was regarded as “the prize intelligence source of the war.” For all
this, he asked nothing. Kolbe was a
minor official in the Foreign Office
who had managed to maintain his
position despite never having joined
the Nazi Party. He came to detest the
Nazi regime and, despite the inherent risks, resolved to do everything in
his power to help bring it down.
In early 1943, despite not being a
party member, he managed to wangle
a trip to Bern, Switzerland, as a diplomatic courier. Once there, he attempted to contact the British secret
service but they turned him away.
Kolbe then managed to contact the
Bern office of the Office of Strategic Services headed by Allen Dulles.
Kolbe brought with him about 200
top-secret documents. Dulles was
somewhat uncertain but decided to
take a chance on Kolbe and gave him
the cover name George Wood. From
that time on, Kolbe provided Dulles
with highly classified information regarding the Third Reich, its plans, its
weaponry, its manufacturing plants
and their locations, damage to factories, and other installations by Allied aircraft, Germany’s negotiations
with other countries, and strategic
information concerning the Japanese war machine.
In addition, Kolbe’s information
helped identify German spies and
their locations in Ireland, Ankara,
and Africa. But sadly, much of this
information was never acted upon by
the Allies. For some inexplicable reason, the OSS office in Washington
assigned his file to the counterespionage service which spent most of its
time trying to verify the authenticity of the source. Even more sadly,
shortly before his death President
Roosevelt mandated that no special
consideration should be given to
Germans who risked their lives to aid
the Allied cause. Germany’s surrender must be unconditional
Thus the ultimate irony: It has
been said that no good deed shall
go unpunished. So, if Fritz Kolbe’s
heroic efforts to help bring down
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany can
be considered a good deed by mankind, then Kolbe certainly received
his just reward. For at war’s end, and
with the newly established German
Foreign Office largely staffed with
ex-Nazi officials, Fritz Kolbe found
himself blacklisted as a traitor and
left out in the cold. He had many
friends in OSS, but despite the best
efforts of his friend, Allen Dulles,
Kolbe was never able to resume his
career. Instead, he went from one
low-paying job to another until his
death on February 16, 1971. This
was a sad end for a forgotten hero
who strangely enough might have
wanted it that way.
Book Reviews
TEARS IN THE DARKNESS: The
Story of the Bataan Death
March and its Aftermath
By Michael and
Elizabeth Norman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Reviewed by
Alice A. Booher
It is often difficult to
address residuals of war without
having some practical, factual, and
historical foundation. This premise may be particularly valid in understanding those who experience
the exigencies of being a prisoner
of war.
After the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, the first quarter of 1942
in the Pacific Theater was a bloody and
perfectly dreadful time to be in the
tiny Philippine peninsula of Bataan,
regardless of one’s country of origin
and allegiance. From the surrender of
some 76,000 Filipinos and Americans
until the Japanese surrender in August
1945, as battlegrounds go, Bataan was
more brutal than most. During their
41 months of captivity, the POWs
experienced unbelievable disease, torture, cruelty, starvation, and savagery.
Tears in the Darkness fully and articulately covers 1942-1945 Bataan with
a steadfast gaze, crisp confidence,
and linguistic elan. Both aggregate
and individual details are extraordinarily compelling. The writing is
even-handed but never dispassionate,
moderated by a remarkable thread
of cross-current, nondiscriminatory
empathy coupled with stark, often
shocking realism.
This is neither the first nor last
book on WWII Pacific Theater
POWs, but it must be counted
among the most professional, archivally all-encompassing, insightful
and skillfully written.
Tears in the Darkness is unique in
that it explains the idiosyncratic na-
ture of both warriors and nonwarriors involved in the Filipino fighting units. From a practical viewpoint
this explanation may be helpful in
understanding what went on, but is
downright pivotal to grasping seemingly inequitable or difficult postwar distinctions made by Congress
with regard to adjudication of payable VA benefits.
The authors also investigate the
unique cultural heritage of the involved parties; the integral use of
occasional Tagalog and/or original
Japanese phrases, always in context
and translated, enhances the overall impact. For instance, when faced
with untenable options for dealing
with the battle as ordered, Lieutenant
General Masaharu Homma’s countenance was observed by one of his
aides as filled with anrui, translated as
“hidden grief, tears in the darkness.”
Michael and Elizabeth Norman
have poured a decade of exhaustive
research into their book with interviews with more than 400 people, a
trip to Japan, three trips to the Philippines, forays across the country interviewing Bataan veterans, and utilizing more than 2,300 documents and
books, many previously undiscovered
in English, Japanese, and various Filipino dialects. They interviewed 100
of the men who made the Bataan
Death March, and include recollections from two of the 20 female army
nurse POWs in We Band of Angels.
The Japanese took some 20,000
Americans as POWs, and from day
one of capture used them as slaves.
The book contains all of the aspects
of the fall of Bataan, including incarceration at facilities like Bilibud
Prison and labor camps, work in the
mines and transportation of POWs
by the “Hell Ships” from the Philippines to Japan.
Tears in the Darkness is a vigorously
powerful book, a commanding and
valuable tool for historians. And
while Bataan POWs may be an older
subject in the annals of relatively recent history, this treatment is fresh
and persuasive and worth reading.
OSS Weapons II
Dr. John Brunner, Ph.D.
Phillips Publications
Reviewed by Jon Miller
“During WWII, America formed its first formal intelligence
agency, the Office of Strategic Services.
Part of the OSS was dedicated to the
development and use of a wide range
of clandestine and exotic weapons.
Borrowing, improving, and inventing
new devices, the finest minds from
the fields of science and technology
worked around the clock to produce
this vast array of devices ... (many)
would remain in use for decades to
follow. This is the definitive historical study of those weapons developed
and used by the OSS.”
This dust jacket entry modestly introduces an epicurean feast of information surrounding the covert OSS
weapons used in WWII.
The author, Dr. John Brunner, was
a member of the OSS. He became
familiar with many of the weapons
during his service behind Japanese
lines in China. Following the war
he accumulated a collection of these
clandestine weapons. Most of his collection now resides at the JFK Special Warfare School Museum at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina.
Through decades of research, Dr.
Brunner became an internationally
recognized authority and reliable
consultant on weapons developed
for or modified by the OSS. This
manuscript is the culmination of his
lifetime of research.
The scholarly second edition is
composed of almost 300 illustrated
pages of annotated research. HistoSummer/Fall 2010
49
rians, researchers, authors, and weapons aficionados will appreciate the
copious detailed references to original sources regarding each device.
Many of the references are newly
declassified material from the OSS’s
successor, the CIA.
The body of the book is divided
into four areas: personal weapons and
equipment (firearms, edged weapons,
and personal weapons); special equipment (sabotahe devices, incendiary
devices, demolition devices, contact
firing devices, and delayed action firing devices); communications equipment (radios and portable printers),
and marine equipment.
Of special interest are the sections
dedicated to the quieter weapons including crossbows, compressed air
devices, silenced pistols, rifles, and
submachine guns. The Liberator pistol, Marlin UD-42, M-3 grease gun
and STEN also receive attention.
This volume is profusely illustrated with 35 pages of modern color
photographs along with contemporary black and white photos of weapons and personnel. OSS Weapons II
is the most extensive and reliable
reference book of weapons created
for or adapted by the OSS in World
War II available.
Behind the Lines in Greece: The
Story of Operational Group II
By Robert E. Perdue Jr., Ph.D.
Reviewed by Jonathan D.
Clemente, MD
I met Bob Perdue at the
National Archives while
researching a book on the OSS
Medical Services. I overheard him
mention Robert Moyers, a young
U.S. Army Dental Officer who had
served with the OSS in Greece in
1943-1945. Since I was also researching Moyers’s service with OSS, I
enquired as to Perdue’s interest.
He was writing a book about OSS
Operational Group (OG) II, which
fought in German-occupied Greece
for several months in 1944. Since he
appeared to be about the right age to
be a World War II veteran, I asked,
“Did you serve in the OSS?” “No,”
he replied humbly, “I was with the
506th Parachute Infantry Regiment
of the 101st Airborne Division.”
Company E of this famous unit was
the subject of the HBO miniseries
Band of Brothers, and the book of the
same name. “And ... you’re not writing about that?” I responded, somewhat incredulously. Fortunately, Dr. Perdue has chosen a
subject that has received far less attention than the Screaming Eagles. The
literature on special operations in wartime Greece is dominated by memoirs
of British special forces veterans——notably Chris Woodhouse’s The Struggle
for Greece, 1941-1949. I know of only
four firsthand accounts by American
OSS veterans who served in Greece:
one by Major Jerry Wines, first Deputy Commander of the Allied Military
Mission to Greece; the “war diary” of
Dr. Robert E. Moyers, the mission’s
medical officer; and memoirs of OG
veterans Andrew Mousalimas and
John Giannaris, the first commanding
officer of OG II.�
Perdue has adeptly woven together
a concise yet comprehensive history
of Greek OG II based largely on declassified OSS operational records,
Moyers’s diary, OSS personnel files,
unpublished letters and photos, and
interviews with participants, including Mousalimas and Giannaris.
In late 1942, General William
Donovan conceived of the OSS Operational Groups as small commando
groups trained to enter occupied
territory to harass the enemy and
organize local resistance. The OGs
were made up of volunteers from
various U.S. ethnic groups including the Norwegian, Italian, French,
and Greek immigrant communities.
These men would undergo rigorous
physical conditioning and parachute
training to prepare for their entry
into their ancestral homelands where
they could exploit their knowledge
of the local language and customs
to help foment resistance to German
occupation. Perdue’s Behind the Lines
tells the story of OG II, one of seven
Greek OGs. Group II operated in the
Roumeli area of south-central Greece
from June 18 until early October
1944, initially under the command
of 1st Lt. John “Yannis” Giannaris.
Behind the Lines in Greece begins
with Dr. Perdue’s account of how, by
chance, he became interested in the
OSS. He was researching the circumstances of his own wartime service
as a 1st Lt. Platoon Leader with the
506th PIR in the Netherlands when
he was given a photograph thought
to show two of his old unit members. It turned out the photo was of
OSS Greek OG II taken in Athens
in October 1944. Perdue’s curiosity
got the better of him. There was very
little written about the OGs and, by
coincidence, his wife’s parents had
emigrated from Greek villages near
Group II’s operational area. Thus began a “voyage of discovery to learn
more and satisfy my curiosity.”
The book describes the political and military situation in Greece
after the October 1940 Italian invasion. The Greek Army repelled the
Italian invaders back into Albania. In
April 1941, the Germans came to the
aid of the Italians and seven divisions
invaded Greece through Bulgaria
and Yugoslav Macedonia. Germany,
Italy, and Bulgaria divided Greece
into three zones of occupation. King
George II fled the country and formed
a government-in-exile. To quell any
resistance, the Germans confiscated
Book Reviews
food stores and thousands of Greek
civilians subsequently starved. Many
villagers died from harsh reprisals
and other unspeakable acts. But the
Greek Resistance thrived because the
central mountainous core of Greece
had few paved roads——just trails, suitable only for movement by foot or
mule——and was relatively impenetrable by German armor and infantry.
The invaders were forced to occupy
cities, large towns, and main lines of
communication, leaving the interior
open for resistance groups. Two main
guerrilla forces——the communist-inspired ELAS and the Royalist EDES,
collectively known as the Andartes——
formed during the occupation. Much
to the dismay of the Allies, ELAS and
EDES spent more time fighting each
other than fighting the occupiers.
Perdue outlines some of the early
efforts by the British to unify the warring Greek factions so as to conduct
sabotage operations. The successful
destruction of the Gorgopotamus viaduct along the critical north-south rail
line south of the Sperchios Valley in
late November 1942 was the highlight
of these operations. In 1943, the Allies
began to plan for more coordinated
guerrilla operations inside Greece. The
first OSS officers were recruited to
join the Allied Military Mission. Jerry
Wines and Bob Moyers, assigned to
OSS Special Operations Branch, were
among the first of the American contingent. They parachuted into Greece
in December 1943.
In January 1943, at the request
of the Greek government-in-exile,
President Roosevelt authorized the
establishment of the 122nd Infantry
Battalion formed of Greek-speaking
Americans and recent immigrants
from Greece. This “Greek Battalion” would be used in the event of
an Allied invasion of Greece——the
“soft underbelly of Europe.” The
army began recruiting to fill the
ranks. Eventually there would be
30 officers. All but eight of the men
were of Greek descent. The ranks of
the Greek Battalion would form the
nucleus of the OSS Greek Operational Groups.
Perdue highlights several of the
men who joined in 1943, but devotes
considerable space to the military service of John Giannaris, the original
Group II Commander. The Greek
Battalion trained at Camp Carson,
Colorado. In August 1943, OSS solicited recruits for “hazardous duty
in Greece.” A month later, the 122nd
Battalion was designated the “Third
Contingent, Unit B, Operational
Group” and was assigned to the
OSS. In October 1943, the 160 volunteers began OSS training at Area
F (the Congressional Country Club
in Potomac, Maryland) and at Area
B (present-day Camp David, Maryland). The men underwent intensive
physical conditioning and training in
map reading, night reconnaissance,
demolitions and sabotage, and handto-hand combat. OG II became a
cohesive, well-trained unit of 22 enlisted men commanded by a single
officer, Lieutenant John Giannaris.
Spies in the Garden
A Novel of War and Espionage
By Bob Bergin
Burma, China – the Flying Tigers and the OSS
The beginnings of American espionage in Asia
“Those who like their historical fiction with a heavy accent
on history will not be disappointed.” Historical Novels Review
Available in bookstores and on Amazon
Summer/Fall 2010
51
In November 1943, the OGs, now
known as Company C, 2671st Special
Reconnaissance Battalion, were sent
to Camp Russell B. Huckstep at Heliopolis near Cairo in preparation for
dispatch into occupied Greece. They
were to participate with the British
Raiding Support Regiment (RSR) in
Operation Noah’s Ark, guerrilla warfare against the retreating German
Army. The operation was planned to
begin in March 1944, but was not initiated until October 1944.
Perdue traces the activities of
Group II upon their infiltration
into Greece, near Parga, in June
1944, through 14 operations out of
their base near Lamia. This forms
the heart of his story. According to
Perdue,“OG II, alone or with small
British forces and Andartes, participated in 14 operations against the
Germans. They destroyed three locomotives and 31 railroad cars, six
trucks, mined roads and blew up almost 7500 yards of rail.”
Operation No. 5 was a combined
British-American-Andartes attack on
the German-held Dereli rail station
near the town of Kaitsa during the
night of August 20 and 21. The station was a “vital junction of the main
Athens-Thessaloniki rail line with a
branch line that extended to the east
to a chrome mine near Domokos.”
Chrome ore was a strategic material
for the Germans for production of
stainless steel. A train was attacked
and seven cars derailed. In the ensuing melee, 80 German soldiers were
reported killed. Through a critical
examination of the historical record,
Perdue determined that some of the
“official” accounts of the participants could not have happened as
described.
Operation No. 10 was an attack on
a heavily defended rail line, two miles
south of Dereli, on September 8 and
September 9, 1944. The team came
under intense enemy fire and suffered
its only fatality; Technical Sergeant
Michalis Tsirmulas was struck by a
burst of small-arms fire. Lieutenant
Giannaris attempted to aid Tsimurlas,
but accidentally detonated a landmine and was severely wounded. Captain Moyers——a dentist with limited
medical or surgical training——and his
corpsman, Bob DeWeese, struggled to
keep Giannaris alive for the nearly two
weeks required to evacuate him from
a clandestine airstrip near Neraida to
Brindisi, Italy. Bad weather over the
Adriatic thwarted several evacuation
attempts by air. Perdue recounts Giannaris’s remarkable 1989 reunion with
Flight Officer Norman Attenborrow,
the RAF pilot who volunteered to fly
a single-engine Lysander on the hazardous——and successful——rescue mission into Greece.
Perdue picks up the story with Lieutenant Nicholas Pappas taking over
command of Group II after Giannaris’s exfiltration. He concludes the
book with an account of the final four
Group II operations. He provides details of the men’s postwar lives and Giannaris’s successful lobbying effort to
have the Bronze Star bestowed belatedly on all 22 men of OG Group II.
Perdue supplements his narrative with dozens of previously unpublished photographs and several
maps of the operational areas. The
book would have been better served
by the inclusion of a regional map
of Greece showing topography since
many of the locations will probably
be unfamiliar to the average reader.
The books appendices include a unit
roster, award narratives, and examples of propaganda leaflets dropped
over Greece.
Behind the Lines in Greece represents
the fruit of Dr. Perdue’s prodigious
research into the wartime activities of
the Greek Operational Groups, and
is an important contribution to the
OSS historiography. It is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the OSS or U.S. Army special
operations during World War II.
Behind the Lines in Greece is available
for purchase from robertperdue.com.
World War II: Saving the
Reality (A Collector’s Vault)
By Kenneth Rendell
Whitman Publishing
Reviewed by
Dan Pinck
Ken Rendell’s Museum of World
War II is a wondrous place. An official at the Imperial War Museum
described it as “a fully staffed private
collection containing the most comprehensive display of original World
War II artifacts on exhibit anywhere
in the world.”
Mr. Rendell’s private museum
in Natick, Massachusetts, has been
open for the past eight years. This
exclusivity stemmed from Mr. Rendell’s determination to provide every guest with an exemplary and
unique environment in the museum. For example, when have you
been in an important museum or art
gallery when you’ve not been tailed
by uniformed guards? Where you’re
commanded by signs and guards not
to touch anything large or small? In
short, in an environment in which
each visitor is not judged as a potential thief.
To extend this, when did you last
visit a zoo in which guards were
not tracking you and you wondered whether they were protecting
you from once-wild animals or the
animals from you? When you walk
through the Museum of World War
II, you might feel as though you’re
walking through a friend’s house——a
friend who trusts you absolutely and
Book Reviews
who encourages you to touch anything you want to, with the exception
of original documents, manuscripts,
handwritten notes by world leaders
and very small espionage equipment,
including an OSS stinger, a camera in
a matchbox, and a Dunhill pipe that
contains a bullet.
Mr. Rendell writes in his book:
“The goal [of the museum] is to surround the visitor with all the elements
a person in World War II in that particular area would have seen, read,
touched, smelled, experienced.” Further, he writes: “The visitor’s mind is
the key to the interactive experience
in visiting the museum.” There are 17
areas in the museum, some of which
are War in the Pacific, Rise of Nazism, Occupied Europe, Resistance,
the Battle of Britain, the Holocaust,
and the Invasion of Europe.
I can’t imagine anyone visiting the
museum——from those with a profound, personal experience in World
War II to young students who are
beginning to study history——who
would not leave the museum without
a newfound sense of that war or an
understanding of the many roles and
contributions that the United States
and its Allies played and made in
achieving victory as well as the unspeakable savageries of the Japanese
and the Germans.
“What no museum can convey,”
writes Mr. Rendell, “is the anxiety
of danger people faced——the knowledge that a certain percentage of the
people around you wouldn’t be alive
the next day. And the reality that you
might be gone as well.”
How does the museum affect its
visitors? “The most common comment we receive from visitors is
that they are overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted,” Mr. Rendell
writes. “When I hear that I know
I have succeeded——World War II
was overwhelming and exhausting.” In a national broadcast with a
group of World War II historians
about his museum, Mr. Rendell said,
“What the museum is all about is trying to give as much a sense as possible
of what it was like to be there. What
life was like, the everyday objects of
life. It’s not about guns; it’s not a
museum about armor. It’s a museum
about the totality of the World War II
experience and living through it.”
I suspect that you are curious, as
I surely am, about the genesis of the
museum and the career of its founder
and director, and why the museum
succeeds in creating an experience
that’s in a league of its own.
Mr. Rendell has become one of the
rarest rare book dealers and autograph
and manuscript dealers in the United
States. He is a scholar and has written
and co-written more than 15 books.
Some experts among rare book dealers and collectors consider him one
of the professional descendants of Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, the great autograph and rare book dealer in the
early 20th century. A book Rendell
wrote more than 40 years ago focusing
on Churchill and other British World
War II leaders deepened his interest in
starting a museum devoted to World
War II.
Each time I visit his museum, I’m
excited by looking at Hitler’s eyeglasses and a section of the sofa that
he and Eva Braun committed suicide
on; the complete plans for the invasion of Normandy; a draft of the
1938 Munich Agreement, with Hitler’s handwritten changes; Japanese
war posters; silicon likenesses of the
period’s “Straighten your necktie,
son.” And the letters and battle orders
of well-known generals. More than
6,000 different items are displayed.
No wonder that a former curator at
Britain’s Imperial War Museum, Phil
Reed, said that the museum “simply
has no equal.”
What is most exciting to me about
World War II: Saving the Reality are
the jackdaws that bring a heightened
degree of authentic history. (Jackdaws are facsimiles of primary source
documents.)
World War II: Saving the Reality is a
notable book in every way. It ought
to be in the library of every person
who wants a prime fix on the war. It
consists of a magnificent 144 pages of
well-written text and more than a hundred photographs in color of items on
display, from a Sherman tank to the
instrument panel of a B-17; from a
British Type A, Mark III suitcase radio
to a Japanese postcard celebrating the
attack on Pearl Harbor.
Ken Rendell has produced a book
as magnificent and important as
his museum.
Japanese Intelligence in
World War II
By Ken Kotani
Osprey Publishing
Translated by
Chirharu Kotani
Reprinted from the Michigan War Studies Review
Reviewed by Robert Bergin
This is the story of Japanese intelligence operations before and during
World War II, and the ways policy
makers and war planners used and
misused the information that was
collected. In his forward, Williamson Murray of Ohio State University
describes the work as “a detailed examination of the bureaucratic, organizational, and cultural aspects” that
rendered the “Japanese military ... in
most respects dysfunctional in the
field of intelligence.”
Ken Kotani is a fellow of Japan’s
National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS), specializing in the intelligence history of Japan and the
Summer/Fall 2010
53
United Kingdom, with emphasis on
World War II. To write this history
he faced a formidable task: the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Navy
(IJN) “destroyed most intelligence
documents at the end of the war. In
addition, intelligence officers of the
IJA and IJN were unwilling to talk
about their roles, as they were afraid
of being punished by the victorious
Allies.” Kitani “dug up and struggled
with the fragmented primary sources”
as well as examining existing literature and available British and other
intelligence documents.
Japanese intelligence has its roots
in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which Japan’s early military thinkers studied.
From the establishment of the IJA
and the IJN in 1868, each service had
its own intelligence apparatus. Their
focus was tactical, “influenced by the
Prussian style of limited war.” That
served Japan well in wars with China
in 1894-95 and Russia in 1904-5, but,
not having participated in World War
I, it failed to understand “the concept
of total war” that required “total intelligence,” including factors well beyond the scope of military collection
and analysis.
In the run-up to World War II, both
services collected information through
methods ranging from exploitation of
open source material and military attachés abroad to signals intelligence
(SIGINT) and code breaking. The use
of foreign agents was apparently limited and, in some cases, not greatly
successful. One IJN officer wrote:
“We succeeded infiltrating the U.S.
government, but after the outbreak
of the war the agents were obliged
to move to Mexico, Argentina, and
Chile.... We hired native Chinese and
Australians in New Guinea, but they
eventually double-crossed.”
By contrast, the success of the Japanese in codebreaking is most impressive. The IJA’s main target was the So54 The OSS Society Journal
viet Union, while the IJN focused on
the United States and Britain. The IJN
broke low-level U.S. diplomatic codes
early in the 1920s, and also “part of
the British diplomatic code,” discovering “that the British defense of Malaya
was highly vulnerable.” Kotani asserts
that “the IJA had significant success
in breaking Allied [military] codes”
during the war, although a postwar
U.S. report suggests these were “low
grade…, principally weather and aircraft codes,” and that the Japanese
“apparently had not succeeded in
reading any high-grade American or
British cryptographic systems.”
The real threat to the Allies came
from Chinese codes. The IJA broke
Chinese military codes in Manchuria as early as 1928, the KMT diplomatic code in 1936, and subsequently “Chinese systems of all types.”
A senior IJA General Staff officer
wrote: “The IJA could divine the
intentions of the United States and
Britain through the Chinese coded
cables.” The Allies knew this from
reading the Japanese cables and had
to be very selective about information they passed to the Chinese.
IJA codebreakers who targeted
the Soviet Union had trained in
Poland in the 1920s. SIGINT sections in Manchuria broke the Red
Army’s code in 1935. During the war,
IJA code-breaking operations were
established in Hungary, Finland,
and Poland in cooperation with the
host services, while “British and US
codes decrypted by the IJA were exchanged for Soviet codes decrypted
by Germany.” The IJA’s SIGINT
was very extensive: “The IJA had
eight SIGINT sites in Manchuria …
acquiring 50,000 cables a year,” but
suffered severe shortages of staff and
funds. Kotani observes that “Japanese
SIGINT competence could have been
equal to that of the United States or
Britain if they had urgently increased
the staff to cope with the enormous
volume of traffic.”
The unfortunate term HUMINT,
designating IJA attachés working
abroad, encompasses their exchanges
with local counterparts, open-source
collection, and the “hiring” of agents.
From 1919, the primary target of IJA
HUMINT operations was again the
Soviet Union, while “Soviet security
centered on battling Japanese intelligence.” The full range of operations
against the Soviets included massive
watch operations along the Manchurian-Soviet border, exploitation of
Russian defectors, and attempts to run
Russian agents back across the border.
“Manchurians, Koreans, and Mongols
were also chosen as spies, but most
of them tended to be Soviet agents.”
Operations against the Soviets were
extremely laborious, “like searching
for very fine gold dusts in the mud.”
In the late 1930s, an attempt to
improve Japanese intelligence, particularly against the Soviets, included the establishment of the Nakano
School for the “rapid training” of officers who “would fight in the covert
war … of espionage, propaganda,
security, and plots.” The first class
of eighteen graduated in 1939, but
HUMINT successes against the Soviets did not increase significantly.
The most reliable information came
from censored open source material:
the attaché in Moscow predicted the
Soviet invasion of Poland by reading
Soviet newspapers.
HUMINT collection in China
was more effective. IJA attachés had
been posted in major Chinese cities
since the late nineteenth century and
a cadre of “China hands” developed.
Some, like General Kenji Doihara,
“Lawrence of Manchuria,” became
famous. But they were “specialists,”
and that meant a “shortage of expertise on Chinese affairs as a whole.” IJA
also ran counterinsurgency operations
Book Reviews
against both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the
outset, the IJA had no CCP specialists,
held the Eighth Route Army “in low
esteem,” and was “deeply shocked”
when 20,000 Japanese soldiers were
lost to CCP attacks in 1940.
The navy collected intelligence on
the United States starting in 1909,
although the section responsible had
“fewer than ten staff until the attack
on Pearl Harbor.” IJN code breakers had early successes, particularly
in China, but “from the interwar
period through the Pacific War the
IJN made a generally poor effort in
code-breaking while their own codes
were cracked by the Allies.” The navy
had long considered the possibility
of a war against Britain or the United
States, and in 1937 “decided to focus
SIGINT on the Hawaii area,” the
base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. During
the war, even though codes could not
be broken, traffic analysis gave useful
indications of the targets and timing
of U.S. attacks.
Few records of navy HUMINT
operations exist, but Britain’s MI5
had good files on Britons who served
as IJN agents, including several
Royal Navy officers who were compromised to MI5 early on. Herbert
Greene, brother of novelist Graham
Greene, became an IJN spy in 1933.
Great IJN hopes rode on ex-RAF officer F.J Rutland, a hero of the Great
War and an expert on carrier aircraft,
who became an “adviser” to the IJN
in 1923. He moved to California in
1934, set up front companies, and
“behaved like a billionaire.” The FBI
quickly pegged him “as in charge of
Japanese intelligence works in America.” He was repatriated to Britain in
1941 and interned as a collaborator.
Though he must have cost the IJN a
great deal of money, “he seems not
to have reported much genuinely
useful information.”
Summer/Fall 2010
55
Kotani believes that “in the first
phase of the Pacific War, Japan was
good at using tactical intelligence.”
Pearl Harbor was the outstanding
example. Once it was decided to
draft a plan for an attack, an IJN officer was posted to Hawaii as a junior
diplomat. He made sight-seeing trips
around Oahu and reported to Tokyo
details of installations, airfields, and
the strength and location of the U.S.
fleet. Other IJN officers booked passage on liners to explore the seaways,
and collected information “from human sources in Hawaii.” Security was
flawless. Neither the IJA nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was informed
of the target, and few in the IJN knew
the specific plan. Once the ships deployed, radio silence was total. The
Americans never had a clue: “This
was not American failure, but the
success of Japanese security.” That
would soon change.
“IJA and IJN information gathering was not poor, but structural flaws
meant that the efforts were often
wasted.” The flaws comprised “the
vulnerable position of the military
intelligence departments, the lack
of a central intelligence machinery,
and the war planners’ indifference
to intelligence.” Causing further
vulnerability were IJN operations
staff——the best and brightest——who
looked down on the intelligence staff
and tailored their own assessments to
support IJN strategic goals. Evidence
contrary to operational staff assessments was ignored. This was not
analysis, but wishful thinking.
The lack of a coordinating body—
a central intelligence organization—
caused many problems as the war
went on. The IJN took heavy losses
at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, but announced it had sunk eleven U.S.
carriers, two battleships, and three
cruisers. Crediting this report, IJA
planners shifted their main force
from Luzon to Leyte, only to have
much of it annihilated in transit by
U.S. aircraft that should not have
been there.
The most striking example of Japanese intelligence failure——on many
levels——was the compromising of
IJN operational codes prior to the
battles of the Coral Sea and Midway.
Though the IJA knew secrets were being leaked, its “conceit [was] that ‘our
codes cannot be broken.’”
Spies in the Garden
By Bob Bergin
Reviewed by
Alice A. Booher
A novel of war and espionage, this is the story of a
young journalist, Harry Ross, sent as General Donovan’s emissary to Rangoon. It is detailed and authentic
when it comes to the OSS in Burma, China (particularly Chungking
and Kunming), and Thailand. Bergin, himself a former Foreign Service
officer and Southeast Asia specialist, has packed his novel treasure with
historical characters and data. Recognizable names and scenarios are
skillfully integrated into a believable tale, portions of which are undoubtedly fiction-laced but all wildly decorated with a delicious icing
of espionage, aviation, romance, antiques, and art.
The chief staff officer of the 1st
Air Fleet noted: “The major factor of
the failure in the operation was the
leaking of the Japanese Combined
Fleet’s plan on the battle of Midway
to the U.S. Navy.” In the operational
diary of the General Staff it was recorded that “the enemy had grasped
our intentions beforehand.” However, in the minds of the navy General Staff, the major factors behind
the defeat were technical issues, such
as a problem in liaison between the
fleets and replenishment vessels and
the lack of reconnaissance. The lack
of thorough examination regarding
code failures resulted in the shooting down of the plane of Admiral
Yamamoto on April 18, 1943.
And there was no help from
the army: “Although the army SIS
could break some of the U.S. military ciphers … the navy SIS failed
to break them. The army was superior to the navy in code-breaking
and the code-breakers of the IJA
knew the vulnerability of the navy’s
code. However, they did not share
their knowledge of code-breaking,
and the navy was not informed of
their vulnerability.”
“But the fundamental problem
was the Japanese decision-making
process itself, which could not handle intelligence for war planning or
for strategic policy.” Official decisions, once made, became impervious to change by “rational ideas” or
by intelligence. In the prewar period, three power centers——the IJA,
the IJN, and the government——each
pulled in its own direction, with
no one entity formulating national
strategy. Before that, the Genro (the
Emperor’s advisers) had set Japan’s
grand strategy, but they had been
pushed aside by the IJA. Intelligence
became useful when it supported a
position being negotiated within the
power structure. “The war planners
usually chose reports in an arbitrary
and impromptu manner for their
own strategic goals.” The IJA Chief
of Staff is quoted on one such occasion: “The report is perfect and there
is no room to argue. But the report
is against our national policy.” The
report was ordered burned.
Kotani convincingly describes what
Professor Murray calls “not so much
a failure of the intelligence organizations themselves as a massive failure of
the culture and bureaucratic organization of the Japanese military from top
to bottom.” The book is indeed a significant contribution to the literature
of intelligence and World War II, particularly for English-language readers
with no access to works in Japanese.
The translation, by Kotani’s wife, is
competent, despite a few odd word
choices (for example, Japanese agents
are “hired,” not recruited), too many
unfamiliar acronyms, and occasional
imprecise phraseology.
The bibliography attests to extensive use of Japanese and British documents, but U.S. documents are limited to Office of Naval Intelligence
“Records of the Oriental Desk” and a
brief history of communications intelligence in the United States. There
is but a single reference to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and
none to Chinese documents. This
does not diminish Kotani’s accomplishment, but suggests that future
explorations of U.S. and Chinese
sources may add further insights into
Japanese intelligence operations, perhaps like those Kotani gained from
MI5 files. Nonetheless, this important work will benefit specialists and
general readers and indeed anyone
wanting a more complete picture of
Japanese intelligence during World
War II than previously available.
Summer/Fall 2010
57
Remembering OSS Veterans
Barbara Podoski:
Her Missives Weakened
Enemy Soldiers’ Morale
B
arbara Lauwers Podoski, 95, who launched one of the
most successful psychological operations campaigns
of World War II, which resulted in the surrender of more
than 600 Czechoslovakian soldiers fighting for the Germans, died of cardiovascular disease on August 16, 2009,
at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Washington, D.C.
One of the few female operatives abroad in the Office
of Strategic Services, she found creative ways to undermine German morale. Much of her work remained secret
until 2008 when her OSS personnel records were declassified. She was awarded the Czech Presidential Medal by
President Vaclav Klaus on her 95th birthday.
A multilingual native of Czechoslovakia, Barbara Lauwers, as she was then known, primarily interrogated prisoners of war from the OSS base in Rome. An antagonistic
Nazi sergeant under her questioning in 1944 mentioned
that Czechs and Slovaks were used to do the Germans’
“dirty work” along the Italian front.
Mrs. Lauwers, a private, realized there was an opportunity to flip the loyalties of her former countrymen. She
borrowed the Vatican’s Czech and Slovak typewriters and
prepared leaflets in both Czech and Slovak languages that
urged the conscripts to change sides, telling them that
they were being used. “Shed this German yoke of shame,
cross over to the partisans,” her message read.
Within a week, many Czech and Slovak soldiers who
had been working for the Germans crossed the Allied
lines and surrendered. At least 600 had her leaflet in
their pockets.
The pamphlets she wrote were distributed by other German POWs being held in and near Italy whom she helped
select and train during Operation Sauerkraut, which sent
them behind German lines to litter the countryside with
propaganda claiming that the attempt on Adolf Hitler’s
life in July 1944 sparked a rebellion in the army.
One of the circulars they distributed, which Mrs. Lauwers wrote, purported to come from the “League of Lonely
War Women.” It said, in perfect German, that lonely soldiers on leave only had to pin a button with two entwined
hearts on their lapel and loyal German hausfraus would
find them and “give themselves over to the fulfillment of
the soldiers’ dreams.”
“It is you we want, not your money,” the circular said.
“There are members everywhere, since we German women
understand our duties toward the defenders of our country. Naturally we aren’t unselfish. Naturally we long to
have a real German boy to press him to our bosom. Don’t
be shy. Your wife, sister and sweetheart is one of us.”
Born Bozena Hauserova in Brno, Bulgaria, which became part of Czechoslovakia in 1918, she studied at the
University of Paris and received a law degree from Masaryk
University in her home town. She married an American,
Charles Lauwers, when the Germans annexed her country
in 1938 and moved to the Belgian Congo with him to
work for the Bata Shoe Company.
Two years later, she immigrated to New York. After her
husband was drafted in late 1941, she moved to Washington and went to work at the Czechoslovak legation in the
press section, where she ghost-wrote two books for Czech
colonels stationed there.
She joined the Women’s Army Corps on June 1, 1943.
As a fluent speaker of English, German, Czech, Slovak,
and French, she was selected after basic training for OSS
and sent to Washington. By the start of 1944, she was sent
to North Africa, and from there to Rome. Her decorations
include the Bronze Star.
She and her first husband had divorced during the war.
After Mrs. Lauwers returned to the United States, she was
involved in broadcasting for the Voice of America and
worked as a “girl Friday” at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.
She eventually joined the Library of Congress as a research analyst, where she worked for 20 years before retiring in 1968. She returned to Austria for a visit in retirement and stayed there nine years, assisting in the Vienna
office of an international refugee organization.
She moved back to Washington in 1977. Her second husband, Joseph Junosza Podoski, to whom she was married
for 30 years, died in 1984. A companion, J.R. Coolidge,
died in 1999. Survivors include a daughter, Marina Lee
Bragg of Chevy Chase, and a granddaughter.
Maria Gulovich Liu helped OSS
agents during WWII
M
aria Gulovich Liu who, as a young schoolteacher
in Slovakia during World War II, joined the underresistance as a courier and later helped a small group of
American and British intelligence agents evade the German Army as they fled through the frigid mountains to
safety, has died. She was 87.
Liu, who received a Bronze Star for her “heroic and meritorious” service to the Office of Strategic Services, died at
her home in Oxnard, California, on September 25, 2009.
“I interviewed men who were with her, and they were
flabbergasted by how brave she was,” said Jim Downs,
who first met Liu when he interviewed her for his 2002
book World War II: OSS Tragedy in Slovakia.
In the book, former U.S. Army Sergeant Ken Dunlevy,
who escaped Slovakia with Liu and three other OSS personnel, called her “our little sweetheart for whom I am
and will be grateful forever. To her, it is no doubt that I
owe my safety and perhaps my life.”
Liu was born Maria Gulovich on October 19, 1921, in
the village of Jarabina near the Polish border.
She was attending the Greek Catholic Institute for
Teachers in Presov when her homeland came under German dominance in 1939. The next year, she became a
teacher, first in Jarabina and later in the farm community
of Hrinova. But her life began to change dramatically in
early 1944.
A Jewish family friend, who operated a lumber mill and
was considered useful to the Germans, had been hiding
his sister and her young son. When he came under suspicion, he asked Liu to take in the woman and child.
She reluctantly agreed: If caught and arrested, Liu faced
likely imprisonment or worse.
A few weeks later, a Slovak Army captain turned up at
the school and confronted Liu with her “crime.”
But the captain was secretly part of a rebel group conspiring against the Slovak fascist government and gave her
a choice: If she would join the underground espionage
operation against the Germans, he would find another
Maria Gulovich, second from right, with Allen Dulles (right)
in Prague.
hiding place for the woman and her son, and he would
see that no charges were made against Liu.
“She didn’t want to be a courier; it was very dangerous,” said Downs. “But once she did, she went at it 100
percent.” As part of her bargain, Liu moved to Banska
Bystrica, where she worked as a dressmaker for an underground sympathizer.
On her first mission, Liu was told to pick up a suitcase
in a city 65 miles away. She had no idea what was in the
suitcase——years later, she learned it was a short-wave radio
—and had to contend with the Gestapo searching luggage
on the return train trip.
“There was a bunch of Wehrmacht officers sitting in a
compartment and one started flirting with me——which I
gladly returned,” she told the Washington Post in 1989.
“They said ‘Fraulein’——I spoke German at the time—
‘would you sit with us?’ They made a seat for me in the
compartment and the officer carried my suitcase into the
compartment with him. The Gestapo came by, saluted,
and went on.”
Liu was fluent in five languages, and after a couple of
months as a courier, she was assigned to work with a Russian military intelligence group translating messages from
Slovak into Russian.
While working for the Russians in the rebel headquarters
after the Slovak National Uprising broke out on August 29,
1944, she met OSS personnel who were there to assist in
the uprising and also rescue downed American airmen.
By the end of October, the Germans had overrun Banska Bystrica and crushed the uprising.
Liu then fled with the Russians into the mountains,
where the Americans and several thousand rebel troops
also had gone to evade the Germans.
Summer/Fall 2010
59
The Americans included about a dozen OSS personnel
and about 18 U.S. airmen.
Within days, Downs said, an elite German intelligence
unit was looking for the American and British agents.
Liu “was not comfortable with the Russians,” he said,
and when the Americans asked her to join them as an
interpreter and guide, “she eagerly accepted.”
The OSS group, he said, “had to find food and a way
out, so they had to have someone who could talk to the
villagers to get intelligence and also buy food.”
Posing as a peasant girl, Liu had several confrontations with German soldiers on roads and in villages,
said Downs. But, he said, “she got by through wit and
guile and her German (language) ability.” Liu and the
others not only had to deal with the enemy but with
the weather.
When a blizzard hit Mt. Dumbier, Liu recalled in
Downs’s book, “the wind blew so hard that it turned
people over. Our eyebrows and hair changed into bunches of icicles.”
They didn’t dare sit down, even for a moment, she recalled. “We later saw those partisans who tried it——and
froze stiff. We later counted 83 of them.”
On December 26, 1944, most of the Americans were
captured in a hunter’s hut during a surprise raid by the
German intelligence unit. Liu, however, was in another
area and avoided capture.
From then on, Downs said, it took Liu and the four
agents who were with her——two Americans and two British——nine weeks to get to the Russian lines in Romania.
“That was a tricky operation because there were Germans everywhere,” said Downs. “They were shooting people on sight.”
After reaching Bucharest, Romania, on March 1, Liu
was flown to OSS headquarters in Italy, where “she was
put on army status so she could get paid,” said Downs.
She later was sent to Prague as an interpreter and
met Allen Dulles, who had been OSS chief in Switzerland and later became director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
With the help of Dulles and OSS head General William Donovan, Liu immigrated to the United States with
a scholarship to Vassar College after the war.
General Donovan personally awarded Liu the Bronze Star
at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1946 in front
of the Corps of Cadets——the first woman so honored.
“All I knew, I wanted to help those guys in any way I
could,” Liu said, “I believe in freedom.”
Liu, who became a U.S. citizen in 1952, worked for
many years as a real estate agent.
She is survived by her husband, Hans P. Liu; her son
and daughter from a previous marriage, Edmund Peck and
Lynn S. Peck; her sisters, Ana Gulovich, Tanya Kalenska
and Eva Lamacova; and a granddaughter.
Julian M. Niemczyk
J
ulian Martin Niemczyk,
89, a retired Air Force colonel who was the U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia
from 1986 to 1989, died
September 16, 2009, of cardiac arrest. He was a resident
of Annandale, Virginia.
Colonel Niemczyk, who
was appointed by President
Ronald Reagan to serve
as ambassador, started his
political career in the early
1970s with the Republican National Committee. From
1973 to 1980, he was executive director of the heritage
groups division.
In 1980, he was director of the nationalities division for
the Reagan-Bush presidential campaign committee. From
1983 to 1986, he was chief executive of People to People,
International, an educational exchange program founded
by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Julian Martin Niemczyk, a native of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of
the Philippines in 1955.
He was an Army Air Forces veteran of World War II and
an Air Force veteran of the Korean War. During World
War II, he had assignments with the Office of Strategic
Services in Burma and China and later was stationed in
Manila, Warsaw, and Prague. During his military career, he
also had assignments with the National Security Agency
and the CIA. He retired from the Air Force in 1971.
His military decorations include the Legion of Merit,
Bronze Star, and Defense Commendation Medal. He also
received The OSS Society’s Distinguished Service Award.
His memberships included the Council of American
Ambassadors, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta,
Knights of Columbus, and the Army-Navy Club.
Survivors include his wife of 63 years, Margaret McCann Niemczyk of Annandale. The funeral was held on
December 17, 2009, at Arlington National Cemetery.
Remembering Oss Veterans
Donal McLaughlin, Envisioned
U.N. Emblem of Peace
D
onal McLaughlin Jr., 102, an
architect who helped design
the original U.N. emblem toward
the end of World War II, died September 27, 2009, at his home in
Garrett Park, Maryland.
A Yale University-trained architect and interior designer, Mr.
McLaughlin was recruited to the
Office of Strategic Services, assigned to the OSS’s Presentation Branch as chief of its
graphics division, and worked on visual presentations for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and more espionage-oriented fare
such as cigarette-paper packages showing diagrammatic instructions for derailing German trains.
Mr. McLaughlin was part of an OSS team headed by
architect and industrial designer Oliver Lundquist that
in 1945 was asked to design all graphics for the United
Nations Conference on International Organization. The
convention of delegates from 50 Allied nations met in San
Francisco and signed the United Nations charter.
The Lundquist team was assigned to create displays,
certificates, maps, and guides for the delegates as well as
what became their most enduring contribution: an official
form of identification for the delegates. This became the
prototype for the U.N. logo.
Lundquist, who died in January, said the team had a
contest to develop an appropriate design and that Mr.
McLaughlin, the graphics director for the conference,
came up with the best choice.
The design was a top-down view of the globe showing
all continents but Antarctica, cradled between two olive
branches, symbolizing peace. The color was an important
element of the design. Shades of blue were chosen to form
a contrast with red, a color associated with war.
Mr. McLaughlin told the Yale alumni magazine in 2007
that designing the lapel pin involved a great struggle to
blend an appropriate image with the conference’s name,
date, and location——all within a circle 1 1/16 inches across.
He called his winning design “an azimuthally equidistant
projection showing all the countries in one circle.”
When Trygve Lie, the first elected U.N. secretary-general, called in 1946 for a new seal to be used on official
documents, Mr. McLaughlin’s design was slightly modified by a U.N. cartographer.
An architect’s son, Donal McLaughlin Jr. was born in
New York on July 26, 1907, and graduated from Yale University with a Fine Arts degree in 1933.
Leaving college during the Depression, he had trouble
finding work until a friend recommended him for a job at
the National Park Service in Washington. He later went
to New York and worked for prestigious industrial designers Walter Dorwin Teague and Raymond Loewy. He also
helped design the Kodak and the U.S. Steel exhibits for
the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the interior of Tiffany
and Co.’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
He moved to Washington in the early 1940’s to work
for OSS and eventually settled in Garrett Park. There, he
designed his family home, nicknamed “Mole Hills Estate,” and lived with his wife of 61 years, Laura Nevius
McLaughlin, who died in 1998.
After World War II, Mr. McLaughlin owned and operated Presentation Associates in Washington, an exhibit design and graphic services company whose clients included
government agencies and foundations. He taught architecture classes at Howard University for many years.
“I dreamed once of seeing my designs in brick and
stone,” Mr. McLaughlin joked to the Yale alumni magazine. “And instead, the thing I’m best known for is
a button.”
Irene K. Fischer
By Jim Lawrence
Reprinted from the Boston Globe
I
rene K. Fischer fled Nazi Austria in 1939 and became
an internationally known geodesist who spent her career
measuring the Earth for the U.S. government.
Mrs. Fischer, who died at age 102 at Heritage at Cleveland Circle retirement center in Brighton, Massachusetts,
found her profession by chance.
In 1952, Mrs. Fischer interviewed with the Army Map
Service in Washington, where supervisors explained their
goal of determining the size and shape of the Earth.
“Wasn’t I taught that in grade school already? How come
they don’t know?” Mrs. Fischer thought, according to her
2005 memoir, Geodesy? What’s That? My Personal Involvement
in the Age-Old Quest for the Size and Shape of the Earth.
Her first supervisor, Bernard Chovitz, remembered
her as an extremely intelligent and determined scientist
who struggled against bureaucracy, sexism, and Cold WarSummer/Fall 2010
61
era security concerns. She spent 25 years in the geodesy
branch and worked her way up to division chief.
Her most prominent work, known as the Fischer Ellipsoid 1960 and its 1968 update, improved the World Geodetic System, which is the standard coordinates framework
used for the planet. She worked on more than 120 scientific publications.
In 1931, she married Eric Fischer, a geographer and historian, whose family founded the first professional kindergarten and school for kindergarten teacher training in
Vienna, Austria.
After Kristallnacht, the murderous Nazi pogrom of November 1938, Mrs. Fischer and her husband escaped Austria with her daughter, Gay, eventually settling in Boston
in 1941.
Though she was a highly trained mathematician, Mrs.
Fischer at first took work as an assistant to a seamstress
and later graded blue books for professors at Harvard
and MIT.
The family moved to Washington, where her husband
worked as a geographer for the Office of Strategic Services.
He worked in the same building as his wife, who was with
the Army Map Service.
Mrs. Fischer and her husband, who died in the 1980s
were extremely close during their 54 years of marriage, her
son Michael said.
“People used to joke at the Army Map Service that
they spent every lunch together and walked arm in arm,”
said Michael, a professor of anthropology and science
and technology studies at MIT. “They were totally devoted to each other.” She retired in 1975 and later moved
to Rockville, Maryland.
Art Jibilian
W
orld War II hero Art “Jibby” Jibilian, who volunteered with two others to parachute into Nazi-occupied Serbia and orchestrate the air rescue of 513 downed
U.S. pilots, died at his home in Fremont, Ohio. The
86-year-old had battled leukemia for two years.
He continued to give speeches, he would get blood
transfusions, and he would keep traveling,” said his daughter, Debi Jibilian. “What I’ll miss most is his stubbornness.
Persistence, that was his watchword.”
He was trained as a U.S. Navy radioman and volunteered
with the OSS. The other two operatives who parachuted
in with Mr. Jibilian are dead. They were Eli Popovich and
George Musulin, who played tackle on the University of
Pittsburgh’s 1936 Rose Bowl team.
The Tuskegee Airmen, the famed all-black air squadron,
provided air cover for what was called “Operation Halyard,” which had several phases and took several months.
“They thought they were going over to rescue 50 airmen. Then it was 250, 350, and then 513,” said Brian McMahon, a Perrysburg businessman who became friends
with Mr. Jibilian after reading about the mission. “They
all got together with the Serbians and hacked a runway out
of the forest.”
U.S. Rep. Bob Latta (R) offered praise for Mr. Jibilian in
a speech on the U.S. House floor.
He introduced a resolution on July 31, 2009, to award
Mr. Jibilian the Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. military honor.
Mary Gardiner Jones
M
ary Gardiner Jones, 89, a prominent lawyer, consumer advocate, and feminist pioneer, and one of
the last direct descendants of Thomas Jones, the namesake
of Jones Beach, New York, died of natural causes on December 23, 2009, in Washington, D.C.
Jones grew up in Cold Spring Harbor and had written
that her childhood on the Gold Coast had not been easy.
“I was always uncomfortable with the privileged life we
led and distressed over the falseness of my family’s values,” she recalled in a 2007 memoir Breaking Down Walls.
“My most vivid memories of the family are their constant
fights over property.”
The relative whose lead Mary most wanted to follow
was her aunt, “General” Rosalie Jones, the first woman to
graduate from the Washington (D.C.) College of Law and
a prominent suffragist in the early 1900s. She was dubbed
“general” as she led marches of women demanding the
right to vote.
During World War II, Mary Jones worked for the Office of Strategic Services and in 1945 entered Yale Law
School——one of only two women in her class. “The law
school had a deep commitment to using the intellect to
making the world a better place,” she wrote. “I came out …
an idealist, and for good or ill have been that ever since.”
Idealist or not, she was turned down for employment
by 50 law firms. During a talk at the Cold Spring Harbor
Library in September 2008, she dryly noted the reaction
by the head of one white-shoe Manhattan firm: “He said:
She was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on January
22, 1921, to Captain Alistair
Robertson and Blanche Mary
(Christie) Robertson. Her father served with the Gordon
Highlanders and had been
repatriated in 1918 following
four years as a prisoner of
war in Germany. The family
subsequently moved to Sussex County, England, where
they lived in a 16th-century
farm house while operating a poultry farm and raising Great
Danes and Sealyham terriers. She was orphaned at the age
of 10 and was raised by relatives in Toronto, Canada. She
attended English boarding schools, Pensionn at Brillamont
in Lausanne, Switzerland, and finishing school in Paris.
At the beginning of WWII, she went to work for Gloster
Aircraft Company. In 1942, she joined the motor pool of
Services of Supply (SOS) driving all vehicles including a
half-track and was assigned her own truck. In October 1944,
she was recruited by the OSS in London and was a driver
for General Donovan.
After the war she moved to Canada where she worked
as a model and took up competitive marksmanship. She
moved to Northern Virginia in 1960 and worked for several
D.C. trade associations, and honed her horsemanship skills
in her spare time. Earlier marriages to James Blair Monteath Cairns and Edward Phipps-Walker, both of the UK,
ended in divorce. She married William White Ingraham in
1980. From 1984 to 1989, she worked for the Association of
Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) in McLean, Virginia.
During that time, the Ingrahams also hosted numerous international students.
Anne Mary Ingraham
‘Miss Jones, if I suggested to my partners we hire you,
they’d have a heart attack.’ I couldn’t argue with that.”
Jones eventually found a job in the New York law firm
founded by her OSS boss, General William “Wild Bill”
Donovan. She later switched to the public sector, as an
attorney in the New York office for the U.S. Department
of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Jones
head of the Federal Trade Commission. She was selected
for the post, she learned later, because Johnson said he
wanted both a woman and someone with private-sector
experience. “I come from a family of intelligent women,”
Jones recalled the president saying when they first met.
“We undervalue the talents of women.”
As Federal Trade commissioner, a position she held until 1973, Jones was instrumental in bringing about greater
FTC activism on consumer issues.
After leaving the agency, she taught social responsibility
and ethics at the University of Illinois schools of Law and
Business before being named the first female senior executive at Western Union.
As an accomplished professional with an expertise in
consumer issues, she was sought after by many corporations
and later sat on the boards of American Airlines, MCA, Alcon Pharmaceuticals, and John Wiley Publishing.
Jones spent much of the last years of her life in volunteer positions in Washington. A particular passion was
mental health. She was candid about the importance of
psychoanalysis in her own life, particularly in dealing with
some of the anger she felt toward her family and their
elitist views. However, she noted, her analyst “helped me
accept that I came from a long line of people who made
important contributions of which I am proud.”
A
nne Mary Ingraham, a 30-year
resident of Alexandria, Virginia,
died in her home on December 12,
2009. She was under hospice care due
to cancer. She was an active member
of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in
Alexandria, served on the Board of
Directors for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Society, McLean,
Viriginia; and was an active life member of American
Legion Post 24, Alexandria, Virginia.
Whitney Harris, the Last
Nuremberg Prosecutor
By John Q. Barrett
Reprinted from Time Magazine
W
hitney Robson Harris, the last surviving prosecutor who appeared before the International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg, died at his home in St. Louis on
April 21. He was 97.
Summer/Fall 2010
63
John Q. Barrett, professor of law at St. John’s University, is
writing the biography of Nuremberg chief prosecutor Justice
Robert H. Jackson.
Rene Defourneaux Sr.
R
Harris assisted in the cross-examination of Nazi defendant Hermann Göring at Nuremberg and later wrote
Tyranny on Trial, a monumental account of the major war
crimes trial.
Harris, a Seattle native, attended the University of
Washington and the University of California’s Berkeley
Boalt Hall School of Law. As a young lawyer, he was in
private practice in Los Angeles. Following Japan’s attack
on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the navy. During his World
War II navy service, he was recruited to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where his assignments included work
relating to war crimes. He joined the Allied war crimes
legal team as the war in Europe came to a close.
At Nuremberg, Lieutenant and U.S. Trial Counsel Harris
was chiefly responsible for the prosecutions of defendant
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, former Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office). Whitney Harris
also was a principal, trusted aide to U.S. chief prosecutor
Justice Robert H. Jackson and assisted him throughout the
trial. Harris also participated in the interrogations of former Auschwitz concentration camp commandant Rudolf
Hoess, who claimed that 2.5 million people had been exterminated under his supervision.
Following Nuremberg, Harris served as Chief of Legal
Advice during the Berlin Blockade and, later, as a law professor at Southern Methodist University, as director of the
Hoover Commission’s Legal Services Task Force, as the
first Executive Director of the American Bar Association,
and as general solicitor of Southwestern Bell Telephone
Company in St. Louis. He also became a generous philanthropist, including at Washington University in St. Louis.
In recent years, Harris devoted his energies primarily to
speaking, writing, and teaching in the area of international
law and justice. He was a strong supporter of modern international tribunals, including the court for the former Yugoslavia, the court for Rwanda, and the International Criminal
Court. “We should not fear,” said Harris, “to establish the
principles of law which will permit civilization to survive.”
ene Julian Defourneaux Sr.
died on April 21, 2010, in
Indianapolis, Indiana, after a
long illness. Born in Lebetain,
France, in 1921, he emigrated
with his family to New Jersey.
At the start of World War II, he
joined the U.S. Army and was
stationed in London. He was recruited by OSS and parachuted
into occupied France to organize and train French Resistance groups. After the liberation of Paris, he was transferred to Southeast Asia with the OSS Deer Team. He
parachuted into Japanese-held French Indochina to train a
group of natives selected by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen
Giap, who later led the Vietminh forces to victory against
the French at Dien Bien Phu.
After World War II, Defourneaux served in the U.S.
Army for 20 years before retiring to Indianapolis with his
wife, Virginia, and their six children. He was the author of
four books. Internment took place at Arlington National
Cemetery on June 9, 2010.
OSS Deer Team members pose with Viet Minh leaders Ho
Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap during training at Tan Trao
in August 1945. Deer Team members standing (l to r) are
Rene Defourneaux (second from left), (Ho Chi Minh), Allison Thomas, (Vo Nguyen Giap), Henry Prunier, and Paul
Hoagland, far right. Kneeling, left, are Lawrence Vogt and
Aaron Squires.
Academy Award-Winning
Screenwriter Budd Schulberg
By Adam Bernstein
Reprinted from The Washington Post
B
udd Schulberg, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter who wrote about corrosive ambition and power
in On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd and in bestselling books such as What Makes Sammy Run?, died on
August 5, 2009, at his home in Westhampton Beach, N.Y.
He was 95. No cause of death was given.
Mr. Schulberg was the son of a legendary Hollywood
producer whose fortunes rose and fell dramatically. As a
result, he once said he was intrigued by “how suddenly
[people] go up, and how quickly they go down.”
He used his insider knowledge of Hollywood politics to
write his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? in 1941. A
grotesque account of vice being rewarded, the book was
widely praised (though not in Hollywood) and made him
a star author at 27.
Vivid, crackling dialogue was his hallmark in about 10
other books and a handful of riveting films. He wrote the
memorable speech that included the line, “I coulda been
a contender,” spoken by actor Marlon Brando in On the
Waterfront (1954).
Besides Mr. Schulberg’s Oscar for best story and screenplay, the film won for best picture, best director (Elia Kazan), best actor (Brando), and best supporting actress (Eva
Marie Saint).
Mr. Schulberg’s next project, A Face in the Crowd
(1957), skewered the television industry and became a
lasting favorite of critics and moviemakers. The film,
again directed by Kazan, featured Andy Griffith in what
many regard as his best role. Griffith played “Lonesome”
Rhodes, a cracker-barrel prophet who self-destructs after
he lands a national television show. Face was an underrated gem, a perceptive look at the future of television
and politics.
“It never got the credit it deserved for its commentary
on media that in some ways was as visionary as Network
about what lay ahead for broadcasting,” Los Angeles Times
television critic Howard Rosenberg wrote in 2000. Network, released in 1976, was writer Paddy Chayefsky’s acid
view of television news.
The influence of A Face in the Crowd stretched even further into the present. Spike Lee dedicated Bamboozled, his
2000 film that satirized television, to Mr. Schulberg.
Budd Schulberg, left, with his brother, Stuart Schulberg.
Mr. Schulberg’s fascination with ambition found a consistent theme in boxing in his films, books and short stories. He considered the fight game the rawest depiction of
human struggle, a bruising metaphor for life.
Legendary boxer Gene Tunney rated Mr. Schulberg’s
1947 novel The Harder They Fall among the best fictional
accounts of boxing. A film version followed in 1956, with
Humphrey Bogart as a sports reporter turned boxing promoter who sells out his good name for big money.
He was also a popular boxing authority, his work having
appeared in the first issue of Sports Illustrated magazine.
He supported heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali’s
right to defend his title after being stripped of it when Ali
would not fight in the Vietnam War. In 1972, he wrote a
well-received biography of Ali, Loser and Still Champion.
He was the only non-boxer the World Boxing Association
named a living legend of boxing.
Budd Wilson Schulberg was born in New York on
March 27, 1914. He grew up in Los Angeles, where his father, Benjamin “B.P.” Schulberg, was head of production
at Paramount studios. His mother was the former Adeline
Jaffe, a powerful literary agent.
He grew up on the studio lot, being kissed as a child by
Mary Pickford and Clara Bow. He once playfully threw
figs at stars such as Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. The
enormous set for the silent Ben-Hur was his playground.
A childhood stutter left him with a fear of speaking and
prompted him to write. But it was a crushing experience
putting pen to paper, he recalled in his 1981 autobiography,
Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince. His demanding father called the eight-year-old’s first poem “lousy.” He
forgave his father with time, saying the encounter taught
him a valuable lesson in the need for revision.
He was a 1936 summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College and edited the student newspaper. He reSummer/Fall 2010
65
turned to Hollywood after school and worked as a junior
writer, usually a lowly and unrewarding job, yet he was
lucky in his assignments.
He worked with Ring Lardner Jr. polishing up A Star Is
Born (1937) and then with F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of
The Great Gatsby, on the college picture Winter Carnival
(1939).
He was stunned meeting Fitzgerald, whose career had
spiraled downward from drink, debt and other personal
problems. He had thought Fitzgerald was long dead, but
producer Walter Wanger reassured him, “If he is, he must
be the first ghost who ever got $1,500 a week.”
The two authors were ordered to Dartmouth to gather
local flavor for Winter Carnival. Fitzgerald got drunk, embarrassed the studio and was fired. Mr. Schulberg later finished the project with two other writers.
He used the episode with Fitzgerald for the core of The
Disenchanted (1950), a bestselling novel credited with helping revive serious study of Fitzgerald’s career.
After Winter Carnival, Mr. Schulberg launched into his
celebrated first novel, What Makes Sammy Run?
The title character, Sammy Glick, a newspaper errand boy,
slithers and slices his way to wealth as a film producer.
“Going through life with a conscience,” Sammy says, “is
like driving your car with the brakes on.”
B.P. Schulberg, long gone from Paramount after
gambling and womanizing helped end his career there,
warned his son against publishing the book. He feared
his son would be blacklisted for writing about Hollywood backstabbing, casual sex, an ineffectual writers
guild and the first-generation Jews who helped build
the film community.
Jewish groups, the Communist Party and actor John
Wayne decried the novel as, respectively, anti-Semitic,
anti-union and anti-American.
The book went through 10 printings in 1941. Mr. Schulberg won praise from Fitzgerald as well as authors Dorothy
Parker and John O’Hara, and the New York Times called it
that year’s best first novel. Sammy Glick is still used as
shorthand to describe an amoral power-seeker.
During World War II, Mr. Schulberg served under film
director John Ford in the Office of Strategic Services’s photography unit. He collected photographic evidence to use
against war criminals at the postwar Nuremberg Trials.
In the late 1940s, Mr. Schulberg began researching what
would become the screenplay for On the Waterfront. He
bought film rights to the New York Sun’s Pulitzer Prizewinning series on waterfront crime and studied waterfront
lingo by socializing with dockworkers and famed labor
priest John Corridan.
Few studios were convinced of its promise. “Who’s going to give a damn about a bunch of sweaty longshoremen?” 20th Century-Fox executive Darryl Zanuck reportedly told Kazan. Eventually, Columbia studios gave
Kazan a shoestring budget of about $900,000. The film
earned $9.5 million in its first year.
Brando played Terry Malloy, a punched-out prizefighter
and muscle for the corrupt union controlling the waterfront. Terry falls for the sister of a man he set up, leading
him to probe his conscience.
Terry confronts his older brother, Charley, the union’s
lawyer, about the fixed boxing match that forever changed
Terry’s life: “So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in a ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to
Palookaville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda
looked out for me a little. You shoulda taken care of me
just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for
the short-end money.”
He adds: “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I
coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody. Instead
of a bum, which is what I am.”
Many were convinced the film, about the dangers of
conformity, was Mr. Schulberg’s apology for his 1951 appearance as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He always denied that,
saying he pursued the project long before he testified.
He was in the Communist Party briefly after college but
became disillusioned when the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis. He also said the party tried
to censor his writing.
His fame with On the Waterfront led then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to ask Mr. Schulberg to write the
screenplay to The Enemy Within, Kennedy’s book about exposing labor racketeers. That movie never came about, but
it influenced Mr. Schulberg’s novel Everything That Moves
(1980), a veiled account of Kennedy’s hearings on Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa.
Mr. Schulberg was active in literary causes and helped
found a writers workshop in the Watts section of Los
Angeles after riots there in 1965. He also co-founded
in 1971 the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in
New York.
Mr. Schulberg adapted many of his novels and stories
for the stage, and he continued writing until his death. In
an updated epilogue to Sammy, he noted how the story’s
moral punch changed with time. Sammy Glick, he wrote,
once seen as “the quintessential anti-hero ... the free-enterprise system at its meanest,” had been transformed into
a yuppie hero by a culture obsessed with “do it to him
before he does it to you.”
In Memoriam
Julia N. Barnhart, 95, a Bethesda
artist for more than 50 years, died of
stomach cancer on February 13, 2010,
at Carriage Hill House in Maryland.
Mrs. Barnhart won a number of local awards over the years for her watercolors. A former art director for Warner
Bros. Pictures in Hollywood and an artist at the Disney Studios, she won first
place in a national poster contest.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Julia
Neff moved as a child to Washington
where she graduated from Central
High School. She received a Bachelor’s
degree from George Washington University and a Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Southern California in 1938. During World
War II, she worked for the Office of
Strategic Services in Washington.
Alexander Bodi, 94, died on
November 23, 2009, in Utah. He was
born in Satoraljaujhely, Hungary, and
at 6 years old moved to Fairfield, Connecticut. He spoke or studied English,
Hungarian, German, Chinese, French,
and Italian. He served in the OSS behind enemy lines in China. He held
numerous jobs in the newspaper business. Bodi was involved in many organizations including the American
Society of Newspaper Editors and Society of Professional Journalists.
Piero Boni died on June 28, 2009,
at the age of 87 in Ravenna, Italy. He
was a member of the OSS and head
of a mission that parachuted into the
Apennines of Parma with the partisans.
He was also a partisan fighter in Rome
with the Matteotti Brigade. He was
president of Fondazione Brodolini for
many years.
Philip S. Brown, 100, a writer who
specialized in economics and published
a business newsletter, died on November 17, 2009, in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Brown worked for the State
Department and the Economic Co-
operation Administration, helping to
administer the Marshall Plan before
starting an economic consulting business in 1952. During WWII he was
assigned to OSS.
Alvin I. Brown, 94, died on February 28, 2010, at his home in Palm
Beach, Florida. He was born in Philadelphia and moved with his family to
Washington during the Depression. He
worked for his father on construction
projects before establishing his own
real estate company, building more
than 100 homes before World War II
started. During the war, he served in
the Office of Strategic Services.
Arthur L. Burt, 93, a geographer
who worked for OSS, died on October
8, 2009, at the Morningside Assisted
Living facility in Gainesville, Georgia.
A native of Worcester, Massachusetts,
Arthur Lowe Burt received Bachelor’s
and Master’s degrees and a doctorate,
all in geography, from Clark University
in 1938, 1940, and 1942, respectively.
He was a member of the Association
of American Geographers. He was a
past vice president of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History
and a founding member of its Conference of Latin American Geographers.
Joseph Campis of old Brookville,
New York, died on November 1, 2009,
at age 93. A graduate of Brooklyn Law
School in 1939, he practiced law before
joining the FBI in 1941. His assignments with the FBI included overt and
covert work with its Special Intelligence
Service in Central and South America.
It was during this period that he served
as security adviser to President Enrique
Penaranda of Bolivia. He took a leave of
absence from the FBI in 1944 and joined
the U.S. Marine Corps. After basic training, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services. His assignments with the
OSS took him to England and France.
At the end of World War II, he was dis-
charged from the Marine Corps, resigned
from the FBI, and began working for the
Bulova Watch Company. During his
36 years with Bulova, he was crucial to
establishing Bulova’s international business, eventually becoming executive vice
president of its international operations.
When his alma mater Brooklyn Law
School graduated its class in 2003, Joe
was given the honor of presenting the
school’s diploma to his grandson, Bryan
Bughman, who graduated Cum Laude.
Joe is survived by his wife Zosh, having
been married for 64 years.
Joe Ciras, 85, of Ft. Myers, Florida,
passed away on January 21, 2010. He
was a veteran of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment in WWII and a member of the Office of Strategic Services.
William A. Condon of Mansfield,
Ohio, died on September 26, 2009.
Condon graduated from Ohio State
University and served as a staff sergeant
in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946 in
the Office of Strategic Services.
Creekmore W. Fath, 93, died in
Austin, Texas, on June 25, 2009. He
grew up in Cisco and Fort Worth, Texas, before moving to Austin in 1931.
He attended the University of Texas
College of Liberal Arts and School of
Law. He was licensed to practice law in
1939 and opened an Austin practice.
In September 1940, he moved to
Washington, D.C. to serve as acting
counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of
Destitute Citizens. He served later as
counsel to the President’s Advisory
Commission on the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project. In January 1942,
he became general counsel to the U.S.
Senate Committee on Patents investigating German cartels with American
corporations. His work there attracted
the attention of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt who, on June 14, 1943, called
Summer/Fall 2010
67
Creekmore to the White House for advice concerning American Cyanamid’s
trade contract with Mexico. He then
became Assistant General Counsel of
the Board of Economic Warfare.
In 1943, he was drafted into the U.S.
Army and assigned to the Office of
Strategic Services, where he served until the end of WWII. During this time,
he was involved in sending coded messages from the President to commanders and Allies in the field.
After the war, he became Associate
General Counsel of the Office of War
Mobilization and Reconversion and
later Special Assistant to the Secretary
of the Interior.
He married Adele Hay Byrne, daughter of Clarence and Alice Appleton
Hay and granddaughter of John Hay,
aide to President Lincoln and later U.S.
Secretary of State.
Creekmore returned to Austin in
1947 where he opened a law office and
became active in Democratic politics.
Paul Makepeace Curtis, a former FBI, OSS, and government agent,
died on February 16, 2010. He was 93.
A native of Greensboro, North Carolina and graduate of Duke University,
Curtis spent 25 years as an investigator
for the U.S. government following early
work as a radio broadcaster and newspaper reporter in Georgia. As a member
of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, he ran counter-espionage networks into occupied China,
apprehended collaborators, collected
information and occupied Tientsin before the arrival of the Marines. He later
worked for the War Assets Administration in San Francisco, Honolulu, and
Atlanta as an investigator.
John S. DiBlasi, 85, died on November 1, 2009, at Kimbal Medical
Center in Lakewood, New Jersey. He
owned and operated John DiBlasi & Associates of Great Neck, New York, for 40
years before retiring in 1982. He attend68 The OSS Society Journal
ed St. Anastasia School in Douglaston,
New York, Bayside H.S. and graduated
with a BS degree from St. John’s University. He joined the Army Signal Corps
and was assigned to the 75th Infantry
Division. He applied for hazardous
duty assignment and was transferred to
OSS in Washington for radio training.
DiBlasi flew the “Hump” to China and
served behind the lines reporting on
Japanese troop movements and coastal
shipping activities.
At the end of hostilities, he was
transferred to Formosa and helped in
the repatriation of that island as radio
operator and cryptologist.
Alex N. Dragnich, 97, a retired
Vanderbilt University political scientist
who wrote many books on Serbia and
Yugoslavia, died of pneumonia on August 10, 2009.
Dr. Dragnich taught at Vanderbilt
for 28 years before retiring in 1978. He
was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University for the
next three years, and then lectured at
Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, from 1982 to 1988.
The son of Serbian immigrants from
Montenegro, Alex Dragnich was born
on a homestead near Republic, Washington. He graduated from the University
of Washington and was working on his
doctorate at the University of California
at Berkeley when World War II began. He
received the degree in 1945. During the
war, he worked for the Justice Department
and the Office of Strategic Services.
Mattie Dickerson Estill, 90,
died on February 14, 2010, in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana. Born in Franklin
County, North Carolina, she was a graduate of Epsom High School and the Raleigh School of Commerce. She worked
as a stenographer for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
Juanita Howle Frome died in
Houston, Texas, on November 7, 2009.
She was born in Chicago. After graduation from high school during World
War II, she enlisted in the Women’s
Army Corps (WAC) where she served
in the Pentagon and Shanghai, China.
She later served with the OSS. She returned to Chicago and received a nursing degree at St. Luke’s nursing school.
She then enlisted to the U.S. Air Force
where she trained as a psychiatric nurse.
Benjamin E. Gay, a founding principal in the Savannah engineering firm
of Hussey, Gay, Bell & DeYoung, died
at age 84.
In 1958, he co-founded the firm of
Hadsell & Gay, a multidiscipline engineering and architectural firm that
employs more than 225 personnel,
with two offices in Georgia, two in
South Carolina, and three international locations in Saudi Arabia, Bermuda, and Africa.
The only child of a long distance
telephone operator and regional grocery chain salesman, Gay attended
public schools in Wilson, where he
played trombone in the high school
band. He was awarded the Rubenoff
Medal for Excellence in Music and
performed not only with the Raleigh
Symphony Orchestra, but also played
with such big bands as Tommy Dorsey
and Jimmy Dorsey.
In 1944, he eloped with his childhood sweetheart, Mildred Lamm, before departing to serve nearly three
years in OSS during World War II.
He earned two battle stars as a forward observer with the 761st Field
Artillery Battalion.
Edward Glassmeyer, 94, died
on September 25, 2009, at his home
in Vero Beach, Florida. He was a 1936
graduate of Princeton University. He
served in the army during World War
II in Germany as a member of the Office of Strategic Services. He was senior
vice president at the investment firm of
Blyth and Co. in New York City.
After retiring in 1969, he was elected
president of Athens College, Athens,
Greece. In 1973, he was elected chairman of Interamerican Hellenic Life
Insurance Co. in Athens. He was a
trustee of the Archaeological Institute
of America and fellow of the American
Numismatic Society.
Fernleigh Rocksworth Graninger, 94, a special assistant to two
Secretaries of State, died on December 16, 2009, at Montgomery General
Hospital.
Graninger was director of audiovisual services in the State Department,
where he worked from 1946 until
1973. He was special assistant to Dean
Rusk and William P. Rogers when they
led the department.
A native Washingtonian and graduate of McKinley Tech High School,
he began working for the federal government in the 1930s as a statistical
draftsman in the Works Progress Administration. During World War II,
he served with the Office of Strategic
Services in Europe and the Pacific as
a clandestine demolition expert. After
the war, he came back to Washington
and joined the State Department.
Virginia Louise Greenfield,
91, of Annapolis, Maryland, died on
October 7, 2009. She was born on April
23, 1918, in Cochise County, Arizona,
to the late Norman MacKenzie and Eva
Irma Smith.
Upon graduation from high school
in 1936, she attended Northwestern
University in Chicago where she majored in music and minored in English
literature. Louise loved books as much
as she loved music, and all of her life
her home was full of both. In 1938,
she moved to Washington, D.C., and
worked as a secretary for a general and
later worked on Capitol Hill as an administrative secretary. She married
George Greenfield, a George Washington University law student from Idaho,
in 1941. During the war she continued
working while he served as a captain in
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
The Rev. Donald R. Hammerli,
86, died on July 23, 2009 at the Presbyterian Manor, Salina, Kansas. Hammerli
was born at Broughton, Kansas where
he spent his early childhood on a farm.
He enlisted in the Army Reserve
in December 1942 while a student at
Kansas State University and served
on active duty from 1943 to 1946.
He completed the army’s Specialized
Training Program and joined the Office of Strategic Services in Washington
D.C., serving as a teletype operator and
later as a message coder in England and
Italy. He was commissioned as second
lieutenant in 1945.
After the war he committed to
full-time Christian service and was
ordained a minister by the Topeka
Presbytery in 1951.
Edwin Hughes Hammond, 91,
died on March 2, 2010, following a
short illness. He was born in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, and raised in Columbia, Missouri, near the campus of the University
of Missouri, where his father was a professor of Physics.
In WWII, he accepted a position in
Washington, D.C., as a geographer in
the Office of Strategic Services, where
he participated in intelligence and
mapping exercises that preceded U.S.
and Allied military activities in both
the European and Pacific theaters.
Robert Otto Hess, 86, of Wheeling, West Virginia, died on November
8, 2009, in the Forest Hill Retirement
Community in St. Clairsville, Ohio.
He graduated from Linsly Military
Institute in 1941. He attended West
Virginia University and the West Virginia Institute of Technology, receiving
an Associate’s degree in electronics.
He got his basic training at Camp
Crowder, Missouri, and Camp Mc-
Dowell, Naperville, Illinois, and was
assigned to the Army Signal Corps.
He was recruited by the Office of
Strategic Services and served during
World War II as a counterintelligence
agent and radio operator in the European Theater of Operations (ETO).
Robert was a lifetime member of
the American Radio Relay League, the
Quarter Century Wireless Association,
the Gold Coast Amateur Radio Association, and the Triple States Radio
Amateur Club.
Mary M. Miller Holder, 85,
passed away on December 5, 2009. In
WWII, she worked for the Office of
Strategic Services while her husband,
Reeves Miller, served overseas in the
Army Air Corps.
Frances A. Kleeman, 91, a former educator who later became a medical translator for the Johns Hopkins International Exchange Program, died in
July 2009 at the home of her twin sister
in Baltimore, Maryland.
Ms. Kleeman was raised there and in
Switzerland. She graduated from Oxford in 1934. She was a 1938 graduate
of Barnard College, where she earned
a Bachelor’s degree in music and two
years later, a Master’s degree in music
from Columbia University.
During WWII, fluent in French and
German, she was an editor and translator of political and military documents
for the OSS from 1944 to 1945 in Washington, London, Paris, and Wiesbaden.
She resumed teaching at Miss Fine’s in
1945 and moved to Baltimore in 1953 to
be director of music at Friends School.
Captain Borge Langeland, 95,
died on February 20, 2010, after a long
illness. Born in Flekkefjord, Norway, he
remained a loyal son of Norway for his
entire life. Captain Langeland served in
the Norwegian Merchant Marine prior
to and during World War II. In 1943,
he was serving as 2nd mate aboard the
Summer/Fall 2010
69
Norwegian vessel Grenanger which was
attacked and sunk by a German submarine. He spent seven days in a lifeboat
and was picked up by the Coast Guard
and brought to the Virgin Islands. At
that time he volunteered for service in
the U.S. Army. Because of his radio skills
he was selected to join the Office of Strategic Services. His commanding officer
was William Colby, who would become
director of the CIA.
After the war he received a battlefield commission and was awarded
both the Purple Heart and the Bronze
Star for valor in combat in Norway and
in France. He returned to civilian duty.
He delivered numerous shipments of
helicopters to Vietnam where, in 1964,
his vessel was sunk in Saigon Harbor.
Louie Delaplane Strother
“Teenie” Leas, 86, died on October
26, 2009 at her home in Delaplane, Virginia. She was born at Carrington, Delaplane, to the late William Smith and
Louie Henrietta Delaplane Stother.
A graduate of Marshall High School,
she served with the OSS during World
War II and later worked for the CIA as
an operation manager until her retirement in 1971. For many years, she operated the Delaplane Store. She was one
of the original organizers of the Strawberry Festival and helped the Red Cross
reopen offices in Fauquier County.
John H. Leavitt, 91, died on December 31, 2009. He was a World War
II British Royal Air Force bomber pilot
and senior Central Intelligence Agency
officer. A graduate of Brown University,
he was teaching English at Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1939 when
Britain declared war on Germany. He
volunteered with the RAF through the
British Consulate and trained in Rhodesia and South Africa before returning
to England as a Lancaster bomber pilot
with the renowned 617 Dambuster’s
Squadron. His first two sorties were
against the German battleship Tirpitz.
He flew 11 combat missions and
logged 911 hours in the Lancaster. His
final mission was a joint British-American operation to destroy Hitler’s “last
redoubt,” the Eagle’s Nest, in Berchtesgaden, Germany.
He joined the Office of Strategic
Services——and later the CIA——as an
intelligence analyst specializing in
Middle Eastern issues and drafting
National Intelligence estimates, predicting that it would be a long time
before the Arabs and Israelis saw eye
to eye on any issue. Preferring to be
more engaged in the CIA’s clandestine operations, he transferred to the
Directorate of Operations and joined
the inner cadre of the Agency’s campaign to overthrow Iran’s Mossadeq
government and reinstate the Shah.
He spent 15 of his 30 years of service
at U.S. embassies in Tehran, Athens,
Ankara, and Tel Aviv. Retiring in 1978,
he continued working as a private
consultant on Middle Eastern affairs,
among other things, returning to the
Agency to assist with the Iran hostage
crisis and to investigate the bombing
of the American embassy in Beirut,
Lebanon, in 1983.
Joseph W. Linek, 86, of South
Grafton, Massachusetts, died on October 1, 2009, after a long illness.
Mr. Linek was a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific and
European Theaters with the Office of
Strategic Services and also was a pilot
with “Angel Flight” and the American
Medical Support Flight Team.
Horace A. Marston, born in
1909, formerly of New York City, died
in Villefrance-sur-Mer, France, on
January 4, 2010. A Ph.D. in Law and
Economics, he served during WWII
in the Office of Strategic Services,
founded several French language book
clubs in New York and Montreal, and
represented the Society of French Authors, Painters and Sculptors in the
U.S. In 1958, he was decorated by the
French government with the Legion
of Honor.
Thomas F. McCoy, 91, a retired
OSS and CIA officer who later had a
long career as a political consultant,
died on November 25, 2009, of heart
disease at his home in Chevy Chase,
Maryland. Mr. McCoy joined the CIA
in 1951 and served as a political officer
in Rome for six years in the 1950s. He
had additional overseas assignments
in Spain and Southeast Asia before
he retired from the agency in 1968.
Mr. McCoy was born in New Haven,
Connecticut, and attended George
Washington University. He served in
the Office of Strategic Service. While
serving in London, he met his future
wife, another OSS employee, Priscilla
Johnson, during WWII.
William McKay, 88, a retired army
lieutenant colonel who later spent 20
years as a computer systems analyst
at the National Security Agency, died
on November 12, 2009, at the Hebrew
Home of Greater Washington in Rockville. Colonel McKay joined the army
in 1941 and served in the infantry,
Army Air Forces, Signal Corps, and Office of Strategic Services during World
War II. After the war, he served with
the Army Security Agency, with assignments in Japan, Germany, and Korea.
He retired from the army in 1962. He
then worked at the National Security
Agency until his retirement in 1982.
Colonel McKay was born in Galston,
Scotland, and as a child moved with
his family to Indiana and Ohio. He
was a 1962 graduate of the University
of Maryland.
Roy Lee Mundy died in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 27, 2009.
He was 87. In WWII, he served with
the OSS in China where he trained
and led in combat the first Parachute
Battalion, Chinese Nationalist Army.
In Memoriam
Later in the Korean War, he helped
establish a field laboratory for the surgical research team that developed the
first kidney dialysis treatments and applied them to save the lives of severely
wounded soldiers.
William R. Page, 87, of Pembroke
Pines, Florida, died on October 24,
2009. Born in Bronxville, New York, he
graduated from Penn State University
before joining the U.S. Army. He was
recruited into the Office of Strategic
Services and served in India and China
as a cryptographic technician during
World War II. He was honored as an
Elder Emeritus at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, was appointed to positions
addressing local government concerns,
and served as Commander of the Gold
Coast Basha of the China-Burma-India
Veterans Association.
Mae Ness Ryan, 88, died on January 25, 2009, in Melbourne, Florida.
Following Pearl Harbor, she entered
civil service in the Treasury Department,
transferring to the OSS and serving in
Italy in World War II. At the end of the
war, she was sent to Nuremberg, Germany, to participate in the war crime trials
of the Nazi leaders. At the trial’s end,
she returned home and was recruited by
the CIA and in 1950 sent to Japan during the Korean War. There she met her
husband, John J. (Pat) Ryan, a USAF pilot who also served with the CIA.
Clemens Harold Sandresky, 93, died on June 25, 2009, in Winston Salem, North Carolina. He was a
distinguished professional musician, a
gifted pianist, a prominent educator,
and a leading figure in the cultural life
of Winston-Salem.
Mr. Sandresky was the first generation of his family to be born in the
United States. His parents were the children of Lutheran ministers who served
congregations in the German colonies
of Brazil. His paternal grandfather, de-
scended from the landed aristocracy in
Poland, renounced his hereditary titles
when he left Europe.
Mr. Sandresky received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1938, and a Master’s
degree in music from Harvard University in 1952.
His education was interrupted by
four years of service in the U.S. Army
during World War II. He served at Fort
Bragg from 1941 to 1942 and was in
the Princeton University Arabic program from 1942 to 1943. He served
in the Office of Strategic Services in
Washington, D.C. from 1943 to 1945.
During the war years, he had contact
with several world-famous refugee musicians, notably Igor Stravinsky, Paul
Hindemith, and Sergei Prokofiev for
whom he temporarily served as translator. After the war, he established a studio in Asheville, North Carolina.
Dr. Bert David Schwartz, 94,
formerly of South Orange and Millburn, New Jersey, died on July 9, 2009,
in Sarasota, Florida.
Dr. Schwartz was one of the pioneers
of psychology in New Jersey. He began
his career in psychology, serving in the
Office of Strategic Services during World
War II. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical
Psychology from Princeton University
and, in 1948, began his private practice
in Newark and Maplewood with a specialty in group psychotherapy.
Dr. Schwartz served as president of
the New Jersey Psychological Association, president of the N.J. Academy of
Psychology, and president of the Organizing Council that developed the
Graduate School of Applied Professional Psychology at Rutgers University. In addition, Dr. Schwartz was instrumental in writing the Psychology
Licensing Act in New Jersey.
John Berry Sharp, 84, died on
December 28, 2009, in Pomona, California. Born on May 18, 1925, in Pitts-
burgh, Pennsylvania, he was a resident
of Calimesa, California, for 12 years.
He served his country in the U.S.
Army during World War II with OSS,
entering at age 17 and serving in China, Burma, and India. After the war, he
finished high school and went to work
for the Gulf Oil Co. He was a reserve
deputy for both the San Bernardino and
Riverside County Sheriff’s Departments
as well a member of the sheriff’s posse.
Maurice Shire, an honorary
member of the 24 Karat Club of New
York City and the founder of gemstone
company Maurice Shire Inc., died in
January 10, 2010. He was 86.
Shire founded Maurice Shire Inc.
in 1965, establishing the company as
an importer of precious stones. Active
in the industry, Shire was elected to
the membership of the 24 Karat Club
in 1973.
He was a graduate of L’Ecole de
Travail in Paris, a school operated by
ORT, which is the world’s largest Jewish nongovernmental educational and
vocational training organization. Shire
served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
Loren Singer’s 1970 conspiracy
thriller, The Parallax View, was later
made into a movie starring Warren Beatty. It was one of the first novels to offer a politically paranoid vision of the
United States as a country controlled
by ruthless technocrats. He died on
December 19, 2009, in Valhalla, New
York. He was 86 and lived in Mamaroneck, New York.
Mr. Singer, who picked up a few
pointers on covert operations while
training with the Office of Strategic
Services during World War II, seized
on the political assassinations of the
1960s as a starting point for The Parallax View. The main character, a newspaper reporter played by Mr. Beatty in
the film, witnesses a presidential assassination and soon discovers that nearly
Summer/Fall 2010
71
all other witnesses to the event have
been hunted down and killed.
His investigations led him to the
Parallax Corporation, a quasi-governmental body that, in the interests of
maintaining social order and control,
trains professional assassins.
The book, with its sense of all-enveloping menace, shadowy actors and conspiracies reaching to the highest levels
of government, tapped into a mounting sense of unease in the United States
at a time when political murder and social disorder dominated the headlines.
It became a big best seller for its publisher, Doubleday, which chose it as a
first venture into film production.
Loren Adelson Singer was born on
March 5, 1923, in Buffalo where his
father was a doctor. He enlisted in the
army soon after high school and, after
being elected for training by the Office of Strategic Services, was sent to
Yale to learn Malay. The war ended
before he could go to the Far East, and
he enrolled at Ohio State University,
earning a Bachelor’s degree in English
in 1947.
Mr. Singer moved to New York and
in the early 1950s began writing for the
TV shows Westinghouse Playhouse, Kraft
Television Theater and Studio One. At the
same time he worked as a salesman for
his father-in-law’s printing business, a
job he hated, and from which The Parallax View liberated him.
He went on to publish three more
novels in the crime and thriller categories. In That’s the House, There (1973), a
police procedural set in a small town,
he took the unusual tack of reporting
the local sergeant’s investigation as a
series of overheard telephone conversations——in other words, with half the
dialogue missing.
His enthusiasm for sailing provided material for Boca Grand (1974), in
which the skipper of a boat competing
in a Nassau-Jamaica yacht race carries
out a covert mission in Cuba. In Making Good (1993), an army detachment
taking inventory of property stolen by
the Nazis stumbles into a strange conspiracy when its members uncover a
cache of paintings by Klee, Kokoschka
and other banned artists.
In 1987 Mr. Singer and his son Andrew founded Ethikos, a journal that
examines ethical issues in business.
Mr. Singer, its book reviewer and copy
editor, had just finished working on the
current issue before he died.
Richard Sonnenfeldt died in
October 2009 in New York. He was a
German-born Jew who fled his native
land at the age of 15 for England in
1938, where he was mistakenly designated a “German Enemy Alien” and
deported to Australia on a prison ship
torpedoed by a Nazi U-boat. He survived, arrived in Australia, and eventually persuaded the authorities to release him. He then miraculously made
his way to the United States, enlisted
in the army, fought at the Battle of the
Bulge, and was among the American
troops who entered the Dachau concentration camp.
During his wartime service, Sonnenfeldt was recruited by the Office
of Strategic Services to assist the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. He
became the chief interpreter for the
OSS group and, later, the prosecution
team that interviewed the Nazi war
criminals on trial. His book Witness to
Nuremberg recounts his many meetings
with the notorious defendants, including Hermann Göring, in the historic
judicial proceedings.
After the war, Sonnenfeldt attended
Johns Hopkins University, graduating
first in his engineering class. He went
on to a successful career in business
and technology, helping to create color television, working on NASA projects, and obtaining numerous patents
for his inventions.
Frank Herron Spears, 94,
died on November 11, 2009, in Wilsonville, Oregon.
Major Spears had a distinguished
U.S. Army career in World War II
which included training new recruits,
breaking the Japanese radio code, writing the rubber rationing policy, and
becoming one of the first members
of the Office of Strategic Services.
Frank attended the University of Oregon, graduating in 1936, then earned
a degree from Harvard Law School in
1939. Following Harvard, Frank joined
the firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton
& Lumbard in New York. He became a
partner in 1948 in what was to become
one of the West Coast’s most prominent law firms, Lane Powell Spears Lubersky. Frank retired at the age of 85.
His interests included travel, French
culture, fishing, wine, and gardening
at his Amity farm.
Nancy Sweezy, 88, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 6,
2010. She was born in Flushing, Queens,
New York. During WWII she worked as
an analyst with OSS in Berlin.
Sweezy revived Jugtown, the famous
pottery center that was started in 1917
in Cambridge.
She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston.
Mary Theresa Symington, 88,
an interior designer who did volunteer
work with the International Executive
Service Corps, an organization that
sends executives overseas on consulting
projects, died on February 12, 2010, at
the Georgetown Retirement Residence
in Washington, D.C.
Mary Theresa Norris was a native Washingtonian and a graduate
of Georgetown Visitation Convent’s
high school and junior college. During World War II, she was a secretary in Europe with the Office of
Strategic Services.
James Tsolas, 95, of East Hartford, Connecticut, died on February
8, 2009, at Salmon Brook Center in
In Memoriam
Glastonbury. He was born in Mytilene,
Greece, and came to the United States
as a boy.
He was a veteran of the U.S. Army
and served in World War II as a member of the OSS.
and the Silver Star for saving the crew.
These honors were among 19 others including the Distinguished Flying Cross.
He received medals and honors from
Canada, Great Britain, Korea, and the
Republic of Vietnam.
Stuyvesant Wainwright II
died on March 6, 2010, at his home
in East Hampton, New York. A former
United Stages congressman for the First
Congressional District of New York, he
was 88 years old.
Mr. Wainwright, the son of Carroll L.
Wainwright, an artist, and Edith Gould,
granddaughter of the financier Jay
Gould, was a great-nephew of four-star
General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright.
In January 1942, Mr. Wainwright
enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private.
Commissioned in 1943, he served overseas with OSS during World War II.
He transferred and served on the staff
of General Courtney Hodges in the 1st
Army G-2 section. After the war, he remained an active reservist, finally retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1960. Mr.
Wainwright was a member of diplomatic
missions to Korea and Vietnam. He also
served in Congress for eight years.
Catharine Conroy Ward, 88,
of St. Petersburg, Florida. passed away
on July 17, 2009, at Hospice House
Woodside. She was born in Washington, D.C., and worked for the Office
of Strategic Services and the National
Institutes of Health.
She moved to St. Petersburg with
her husband, William Ward, in 1969.
She was active in the Florida Suncoast
Opera Guild, Mt. Vernonaires Singing
Group, and Interlock.
Lt. Col. Robert P. Walker, USAF
(Ret.), 86, of Merritt Island, Florida,
formerly of Austin, Texas, died on January 7, 2010. In March 1941, at age 18,
Robert joined the RCAF. After being
sent to England, he transferred into the
RAF. He flew the Mosquito airplane
during most of World War II. He later
transferred to the U.S. Army Air Corps
and became a pilot for the OSS. After
the war, he flew the Berlin Air Lift. He
then again flew reconnaissance during
the Cuban Crisis, the Korean Conflict,
and the Vietnam War. While there, his
airplane was hit by a SAM missile. He
was able to fly the badly damaged aircraft as far as the sea. He and his crew
were able to eject, thus avoiding being
captured. He received the Purple Heart
after breaking both legs in the ejection
Col. Grahl Henry Weeks died on
October 14, 2009. Weeks and one other
OSS officer, Lieutenant Paul Swank, led
OSS Operational Group PEG with 12
enlisted men, parachuting behind German lines near Le Clat, France. Operation Group Peg resulted in the liberation
of Le Clat, Axat, Quillan, Alet Le Bahn,
Couisa, Limoux, and Carcassonne. He
was recalled for the Korean Conflict
where as a captain he served as an infantry company commander in the 3rd
Infantry Division and later in the 40th
Infantry Division. He was serving in the
G3 operations staff of 9th Corps HQ’s
at the conclusion of the war.
He received his BA and MA degrees
from the University of Alabama. He
taught school and also served in the
U.S. Army Reserve until 1974 when he
retired as the Commanding Officer of
the 40th Civil Affairs Group in Anniston, Alabama.
Marjorie L. Weiss died on September 4, 2009. She was born May 4,
1922, in Lewiston, Idaho.
After completing studies at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, she worked for the Oregon Journal in 1943. There she met J. Thomas
Weiss, a reporter for United Press International. They married in 1945 while
he was serving in the Office of Strategic
Services. The two spent World War II
in Hawaii. For the next 30 years, Marge
traveled the world on assignments with
Tom, now with CIA. The two were in
the CIA’s Cyprus bureau during the
Turkish invasion of the island in 1974.
John A. White, 86, of Walpole,
Massachusetts, died on January 12,
2010. He served in World War II with
the Office of Strategic Services as a
Jedburgh and was the recipient of the
French Croix de Guerre and the Silver
Star. After serving in the war, he graduated from MIT where he played on
the varsity hockey team. He graduated
from Suffolk University Law School.
He spent time as Trappist monk at St.
Joseph’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts. He was
also a former member of the Massachusetts Bar Association and the Massachusetts Nurseryman’s Association.
Hugo Lee Will, 94, died on October 14, 2009, at St. John’s Hospital
in Springfield, Missouri. A veteran
of World War II, he was a captain in
the Office of Strategic Services in the
North African and European Theaters.
Andrew Howell Wright, 86,
died on August 3, 2010, in La Jolla, California. He was born in Columbus, Ohio.
He was attending Harvard when he was
recruited to serve in the OSS during
World War II in the ETO. He returned
to Harvard after the war and earned a
Bachelor’s degree. He later earned Master’s and doctorate degrees from Ohio
State University, where he taught for 11
years before joining the University of
California’s staff as co-founder of the
UCSD Literature Department.
He was awarded Guggenheim and
Fulbright Fellowships and was a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Literature of
the United Kingdom.
Summer/Fall 2010
73
Help Wanted
I am writing to inquire about a photograph of the Duke of Windsor that was taken in the Bahamas in 1945 with the Operational Swimmer Group II. Why would the Duke of Windsor, a known Nazi sympathizer whom the FBI did not want to
visit Florida, have been allowed to visit an OSS base and meet OSS personnel?
Greg Mathieson
[email protected]
I had a good friend, Albert Kaufman,
who died a few years ago and who told
me that he was recruited to serve in
the OSS during WWII. He served in
Europe until the end of the war. He
was born in Germany, went to school
in Paris, and emigrated to the USA in
the 1930s. He was an entrepreneur and
built a very successful plastic hose business in New Jersey. He spoke fluent
German in various dialects, including
Switzerdeutsch, and French. After the
war he continued to serve in the CIA.
I would like to get some information on his role in the OSS and his
assignments during the war.
Zehev Tadmor
[email protected]
I have a copy of my father’s Marine
Corps separation papers. His principal
military duty is listed as “Intelligence—
OSS Unit (Pacific Far East).” He died
in 1991. Is there any way to find out
what he or his Marine Corps unit might
have done during this campaign?
Alan O. Bommueller
[email protected]
My uncle, Robert Schlangen, told
us he was an assassin chosen by
General Donovan himself. I think
he was using the Field Photographic Branch as a cover. His passports
have stamps, tourist and official,
from Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, South Africa, Ireland,
UK, and Denmark. Does anyone
think this was possible? Every trail
we found at the National Archives
led to a classified document. He
spoke German, Danish, Swedish,
and Arabic. He flew airplanes,
dropped people behind enemy
lines, and got a red Willys Jeep for
an Egyptian prince.
Katherine Lostan
[email protected]
Several of my Alexandria, VA,
neighbors were in a London group
of OSS economists picking targets
for the Eighth Air Force. Two of
the members were Walt Rostow
and Charles P. Kindleberger.
I’ve never seen much mention
of them or their work. Is there
anyone you know who remembers
the group?
David Eddy
781-455-0949
[email protected]
I am helping my 13-year-old son with
a school project. We are interested
in learning more about his grandfather, Ivan Spear, and his work with
the Graphic Arts Department of the
OSS during the Nuremberg Trials. It
is my understanding that Ivan helped
prepare the exhibits for the trials and
then spent substantial time in Germany during the trial itself. Can anyone
help us learn more about my grandfathers and this OSS department?
Lisa McLean
[email protected]
Did any OSSers know my grandfather, Patrick Quinn, who was stationed in Tienstin, China with the
Marines during World War II? I believe he ran the postal operations for
all American personnel there.
[email protected]
I met an OSS veteran, André Surmain, in Southern France where we
commemorated Operation Dragoon.
He told us that he parachuted with
five other OSS personnel into Saint
Lo before D-Day. He was wounded
in Normandy and spent 14 months
in a U.S. hospital. I’m searching all
information about this veteran or an
OSS operation in Normandy before
D-Day.
[email protected]
I am trying to confirm or deny stories
I have heard through the years about
a member of my family. Her name
was Verda Dougherty. She was attending George Washington University in D.C. at the beginning of the
war, joined OSS, and was allegedly
stationed in Italy during the later part
of the war.
Todd Curran
301-775-5775
[email protected]
I am currently writing about my uncle who served in Spain from 1943 to
1945, working out of the American
Embassy. I’ve been advised that his
work might have been, at times, covert. Where might I find information
about OSS activities in Spain during
this period?
Fred Schock
[email protected]
I am seeking information regarding
my father, Andrew Sawyer, and his
involvement with the OSS. He was
a civil engineer who was involved in
projects that took him to many countries and very remote locales.
Dr. Valerie Sawyer-Smith
[email protected]
I learned after my grandfather’s death,
Perry S. Francis, that he was a mem-
ber of OSS and did intelligence work
in Europe before D-Day. Is there any
way to get any information about
what he did for the OSS?
men met in Rome and Athens, and
the diaries indicate the connection
had to do with covert missions in
the Balkans.
Scott Francis
[email protected]
Tom McNiff
[email protected]
My wife’s father, Hans Hollstein,
served with OSS. I am trying to find
out details of his war service.
I am unable to find records on my
father, Robert T. Hoopes, who was recruited by OSS. He was summoned
to the UK from Iceland and went
through security scrutiny before beginning work with OSS. Dad revealed
very little of his operations. He was
about to participate in an oral history
project at the UW-Madison about
his war experiences at the time of his
death in 1985.
My initial search of the recently
released OSS personnel files at the
National Archives does not include
any record for my father, nor of his
brother, Donald Francis Hoopes,
whom he recruited into OSS, nor a
man who later became his brotherin-law, William Nimmo Brown, who
was also in OSS.
John Walker
[email protected]
I am the youngest son of Major Richard V. McLallen, who served with
OSS. I am curious if anyone connected with the OSS remembers him. I
would be thrilled to meet someone
with personal remembrances of him
during his life.
Jim McLallen
[email protected]
I am interested in learning more about
the role my father, Richard Edwards
Hibbard, performed in OSS. He had
specific knowledge of Greece and he
taught at Anatolia College.
Elizabeth Hibbard Isaacson
[email protected]
I am hoping that someone among
this group may remember the name
Chester Rivett, who may have served
with OSS.
Rivett brought his family to
Europe with him when he served
with the CIA/OPC. I think he was
based in Athens in about 1951, and
I know he worked with ex-OSS officer Mike Burke (who later headed
up the New York Yankees, Madison
Square Garden, and the Barnum &
Bailey Circus).
The only printed reference to
Rivett I have found is in a set of
diaries that Mike Burke left to Boston University’s library. The two
Patricia A. Hoopes
[email protected]
608-770-1634
My mother, Beryl H. Schroeder, was
secretary to the head of the Los Angeles office of OSS from 1942 to 1945.
I would be pleased to hear from anyone who may have known her during
that period.
Bob Birchard
[email protected]
Cornelia Groenveld, my mother,
passed away in 1985. During World
War II she was in the first WAC Officer Candidate School. She was a lieutenant with the OSS. Born in New
York City to Dutch immigrants, she
spoke fluent Dutch and was a U.S.
contact with the Dutch underground.
Summer/Fall 2010
75
I would like to find more information
about her OSS service.
Hughie Kelly
3735 Camden St. SE
Washington, DC 20020
202-583-6850
[email protected]
My father, Eugene Kingman, worked
as a cartographer with OSS during
WWII as Chief of Presentation in the
Map Division in Washington, D.C.,
from 1944 to 1945. I am continuing
my mother’s efforts to archive his
wonderful and talented life, which
includes his work with the OSS during this time.
Elizabeth Anne Kingman
4709 Sundial Way
Santa Fe, NM 87507
505-471-4903
[email protected]
My father, Fred J. Johanson, served
under Major William Colby’s command in the NORSO Group during WWII. My dad passed away in
1999 and during his lifetime did
not speak very freely about his wartime experiences. I am wondering
if your organization could provide
me with names of any other surviving members of the NORSO
group who served with Colby so
that I may contact them for further
information.
Daniel G. Johanson
1761 Parkmeadow Dr.
Jamestown, NY 14701
716-664-7474
[email protected]
I am looking for information on my
grandfather, Rene E. Audet, who served
in the OSS. I don’t really know much
about that time in his life as he shared
little information with his family.
Elana Cox
[email protected]
My grandfather, Vern Nelson, was in
the OSS. He said that he was a teacher. He took all of his history to the
grave with him. I am looking for any
information about his OSS service.
Shaun Tyson
[email protected]
217-447-3208 Office
Does anyone know William Leonard
Engle of the OSS? He was recalled to
serve in Korea and was badly injured
in a tank accident which broke his
back and from which he fully recovered. In later life, he was a real estate
broker in N.J. and died at age 48.
Dick Kim
[email protected]
Quentin Roosevelt, my mother’s father, was with the OSS from August
1944 to September 1945. It’s my understanding that he served primarily
in Chungking. He died in a plane
crash in Hong Kong in 1948 when
my mother was a baby. I am in the
process of going through his declassified files at the National Archives,
but would love to hear from anyone
who ever met him in OSS.
Mary Weld
[email protected]
My uncle, Arthur (Artie) D. Howard,
a geologist and Stanford University
professor, joined OSS in 1944, learned
Chinese, and was sent to southwest
China. When Japan surrendered, he
was flown with nine other OSS people to Peking to persuade a Japanese
general to surrender. In November
1945, when my ship was anchored
in Tsingtao Harbor, a Marine aviator
agreed to fly me over to Peking to see
Artie, but my captain said no.
Artie’s sister and my mother once
got a postcard all in Chinese from
Artie, but only at the bottom he
wrote in English saying, take this
to your Chinese laundryman, who
laughed! I did talk to John Taylor in
the 1980s, but all he found was four
sheets, mostly blank, merely saying
Uncle Artie was recruited in 1944,
sent to China, and returned home
in 1946. When working at Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory in the 1950s,
I stayed over with Artie and Julie at
their Stanford home, but uncle Artie
was very close-mouthed about his
time in OSS.
Howard D. Greyber
[email protected]
I am asking for help relating to my
aunt, Vera Atkins. She held an important role in the British Special
Operations Executive during World
War II in connection with the French
Resistance movement. That part of
her life has been well documented.
At some point in the 1980s, she
was invited to the United States. During that time, she had at least one formal meeting with William Casey, the
head of the CIA. One of her biographers says she attended the OSS dinner in New York in September 1983
at which Sir William Stephenson was
presented with the Donovan Award.
Does anyone recall meeting her?
In connection with the Donovan
dinner, attended by over 700 people,
is there a surviving guest list? I should
be extremely grateful for any reminiscences or for date-references to anything recorded in newspapers and
magazines of what was possibly her
only visit to the USA.
Ronald Atkins
[email protected]
Does anyone rememberd the late
Robert Chappelet? He was recruited
in Calcutta and was assigned to the
“experimental station” at Nazira, notably as instructor of the “Chinese
Help Wanted
Camp” composed of Chinese from
Malaysia. He then went to Ceylon
and was transferred to OSS/MO
China where he served up to the
end of the war and even later in the
MO group “Viper.” He does not appear in the Detachment 101 roster,
but his service is confirmed with the
rank of captain. Many civilians who
served in the ranks of 101 with assimilated rank are not mentioned in
the official roster.
Jean Louis Conne
[email protected]
I am the daughter of SOE agent Lieutenant Violette Szabo who was executed under Himmler’s orders almost
at war’s end in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. My book in tribute to
her is entitled Young Brave and Beautiful. The website I have created for her
is www.violetteszabo.org.
Does anyone know whether Charles
Michaelis, a boxing manager in Paris,
was in the OSS?
Tania Szabo
[email protected]
My father’s brother, William E. Webb
III, died in a plane crash in Quito,
Ecuador, while in the service of the
OSS. My father died in 1969 and I
knew very little about my uncle’s
death. I would appreciate any information about him.
Robert M. Webbe
260 Maple Road
Easton, CT 06612
203-220-9404
[email protected]
Toward the end of my father’s service
in the navy during WWII, he was invited to join the OSS where he was
trained in underwater demolition. My
mother and I have most of his navy
Can anyone identify the people or event in this 1945 photo? General Donovan is
seated at the far end of the table on the left. Please contact [email protected]
if you have any information about it.
records, but have not been able to obtain any information on his OSS service. My father’s name was Richard
Myron Schatz.
Richard Schatz
[email protected]
My father did something during the
war that was highly classified and
which he never spoke about. His
name was John Gardiner Bridge
and he was in North Africa, Europe,
England, and South America during
the war.
Capt. James B. Bridge, USN (ret.)
[email protected]
I am looking for anyone who served on
air crash rescue boat P-584 during 1944
and 1945. It was under administrative
control of the OSS. My father was in
the navy and served aboard this boat.
I would like any information about the
missions conducted by this boat.
Allen Conover
[email protected]
My father, Alex L. Vellis, served in
Company C of the 2671 Special Reconnaissance Battalion, known as
the Greek Battalion. He was later
assigned to the OSS and served in
Operational Group III in the mountains of Greece. I have accessed the
National Archives Records pertaining to OG III and they are less detailed than those of other groups. I
would appreciate any information,
suggestions, or advice on conducting further research.
Nick Vellis
[email protected]
Summer/Fall 2010
77
I am writing to see if anybody can
help me solve a long-standing family mystery surrounding my maternal
grandmother, Ruth Elizabeth Turner
Soper, and the OSS. At some point
during WWII, my grandmother took
a two-year leave of absence from her
job as a secretary at an architectural
and engineering firm in Manhattan.
She went to work in the Manhattan
office of the OSS for those two years,
performing secretarial work.
Her daughters remember that when
my grandmother broke her foot and
could not get to the office, her boss—he
was introduced to them as Bill——coming to their apartment to give dictation
to my grandmother. They recall she
told them after the war that there were
too few secretaries with clearance high
enough to handle the sensitive content.
I cannot locate a personnel file for
her. I feel I owe it to her memory
and to her surviving family to exhaust all available means to confirm
her account.
We are looking for photographs
from the OSS Maritime Unit for a
book about Naval Special Warfare
that will be published by the Naval
Institute Press.
We are very interested in pictures of Area D near the current
Quantico/USMC base on the Potomac River, photos of the Chariot
and Troy submersibles, SEAC, and
OSS Detachment 404, OSG-2, in
Kandy, Ceylon.
Does anyone remember being at a
training camp with a bar called The
OSS Club? Surrounding the name of
the club is a mural of images about
15 feet across of dancing girls in long,
leggy Mexican dresses and images of
soldiers with them.
Greg Mathieson
[email protected]
703-968-0030
Elizabeth S. Davidson
[email protected]
My husband’s father, Rollo Beck, was
a member of the OSS in WWII and
won the Bronze Star. He is listed on
the Guardian Spy website as a Coast
Guard frogman. My husband spoke
about his father being trained to “fly”
a boat and swimming through waterways in Burma before being transferred to the South Pacific. I would
be grateful for any information about
his OSS service.
Julie Beck
480-671-1365
I am trying to find information on
my father, Major James A. “Buzz”
Sawyer, USMC (Ret.) and Admiral Cecil H. Coggins, MD, USN
(Ret.), who were assigned to duty
in China after WWII in Tsingtao.
I was told their true assignment
was OSS-related. Over the years I
was given snippets of information
of what Captain Coggins’s and my
dad’s true objectives were in Greater China and Mongolia.
Gregory J. Sawyer
715-392-7101 ext. 6344
Emerson E. Peters, my grandfather,
was in Burma during WWII with
OSS Detachment 101. I am looking
for any information to piece this part
of his life together.
Ryan Peters
[email protected]
I was hoping to find out how I could
get information on the service and
activities performed by my father,
Gifford M. Proctor, during WWII.
He was in the war working for the
OSS in Africa and Caserta, Italy. He
performed translation of radio messages from Italian to English.
Melanie Barker
[email protected]
Help Wanted
I am the grandson of Oliver Andre
Olson, who served as an OSS officer
during World War II in China. I am
writing to ask if there is anyone within
The OSS Society who would help our
family piece together the OSS history
that my grandfather was involved in.
We knew of his involvement in the war
but did not know of his involvement
with the OSS until his death about 10
years ago. At that time, my mother was
shown by my grandmother some of his
personal journals during the war years
and we read some truly amazing stories that seem like a Hollywood movie.
Some of the documents are reports that
he was making about the atrocities that
the Japanese were inflicting on the Chinese, and that he led a guerrilla warfare
outfit of 150 men deep into China.
More recently, I was telling some
of my grandfather’s stories to a friend
who was moving to Quantico and
when I told him my grandfather’s
name, his ears perked up and he said
that the name sounded familiar. He
told me about the OSS and CIA museum that is at the CIA headquarters
and he thought he might have read
my grandfather’s name on one of the
plaques on the wall. A month later,
this same friend emailed back, “Your
grandfather is a pretty amazing man.”
Benjamin Rench
[email protected]
I am writing a novel which includes
an episode in which two OSS operatives work with a communist resistance group in Vichy France. I would
be grateful for any stories about OSS
operations relating to aiding the Allies
on the invasion of southern France,
the Normandy invasion, or actions
around Cassis. I am also looking for
information about Jerome Hill, a
member of my family.
Patricia Beard
[email protected]
Our television production company
is currently producing a special for
the Military Channel on special operations equipment. One of the items
we want to feature is the FairbairnSykes fighting knife. We are looking
for any footage of the knife being
used in training.
djangokill65
[email protected]
Does anyone have contact information for the following members of
operation PERCY RED: S/Sgt Alf H.
Paulsen, T/5 Oddberg P. Staiansen,
S/Sgt Marinus D. Myrland, or Major
Charles Brown who served on Jedburgh Team LEE?
I am conducting research regarding
my father’s Signal Corps and DOD
career spanning 1943 to late 1969. I
am trying to understand the relationship between his unit, the 3104th Signal Battalion (HQ Communications
Center, 12th Army and SHAER) and
any OSS activity. He was a T-5 in the
HH detachment of the battalion in
1944-1945 after a year as an instructor
at Signals School in Camp Crowder.
Does anyone have a map or description of locations and functions
of the OSS bases on Ceylon (Colombo, Galle, Trincomalee, Camp Y
etc.), India (Calcutta, New Delhi) and
in the Arakan, Akyab)?
Does anyone have any contact
information for the family of Paul
Hoagland, the OSS medic who
served on the DEER mission to Vietnam? I assume Mr. Hoagland has
passed away.
Does anyone know anything about
the role of the OSS in the United Nations Conference and International
Organization (UNCIO) during April
and May 1945? It seems that a sizable
contingent was sent to San Francisco
to cover the conference, but it is not
clear why.
Can anyone tell me precisely
where the Area “H” Packing Station
was north of London? Better yet,
does anyone have any photos of that
packing station?
Does anyone know anything about
an unsuccessful OSS French SI attempt to kidnap the Chief of German
Intelligence in Spain/Morocco in September 1943? Supposedly this would
have been done by submarine.
Jonathan Clemente
[email protected]
I am doing some background research on the OSS office in Algiers
for a WWII novel. I am trying to find
where the OSS Headquarters building was located in Algiers.
Internet research indicates that
Blida airfield was less than 20 miles
from OSS HQ. It was known as 2667
HS OSS Provisional located in the
hills above the city. Villa Sineti, a
handsome suburban villa, may have
served as OSS headquarters.
Tom Townsend
[email protected]
I am currently stationed at Naval Station Great Lakes where I teach naval
history. I am working on a research
project about U.S. Navy operations
and OSS during WWII. I am looking
for navy personnel assigned to OSS.
ATI (AW) Mark Peterson
[email protected]
I hope someone can help me with information about OSS operations on
Hainan Island and Southern China
during WWII. I’m working on an
adventure/survival TV show for the
Discovery Channel and will be filming on the island.
Much of our television show revolves around wilderness survival
skills and great real-life adventure stoSummer/Fall 2010
79
ries drawn from the country we are
filming. I’m therefore very interested
in personal stories of OSS operations
behind Japanese lines on Hainan Island and Southern China and how
individuals managed to operate in
the jungles. I’m also interested in
any accounts of how U.S. pilots shot
down over Hainan Island managed
to survive, evade capture, and escape
from the island.
As well as broad stories of operations
and escapes, there is some specific information I’m after: What methods
were used to evade capture? How did
operatives build shelters and conceal
their fires and camp? What food did
people collect from the forest? Where
did OSS operatives fight alongside indigenous peoples and what skills did
they learn from them? How was life
fighting along side communist guerrillas and Nationalist forces?
On Hainan Island, we’ll be heading into the mountains and drawing
on the stories of Li resistance leader
Wang Guoxing and famous communist leader Feng Bauji, both of whom
fought both the Nationalists and the
Japanese during the 1930s and 1940s.
I have been digging into the stories of these characters and stumbled
across a vague reference that suggested
both movements had some help from
the OSS during their fight against the
Japanese. Is this true?
station’s cover was as a research unit
and referred to as MB.
I belong to the Medmenham Club,
an association of wartime and presentday photographic interpreters and imagery analysts, centered on the Allied
Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham in WWII. We have a flourishing membership, including many
Americans, who we have worked with
very closely over the years. I have submitted a short article on MB in the autumn edition of our journal, through
which I ask for similar help from our
American members.
I would be very grateful if anyone
could advise me of how to best research the OSS aspects of MB.
Matt Fletcher
[email protected]
I am writing a biography of James
Roosevelt, a son of FDR, and it is my
understanding that he worked for General Donovan and the Office of the
Coordinator of Information in 1941.
I am a retired Royal Air Force intelligence officer living in Cyprus. For
the past year I have been researching
the work of the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE), in particular
the “Black” propaganda radio broadcast station at Milton Bryan, England. I know that OSS was involved
with PWE and I believe had some
relationship with Milton Bryan. The
Chris Stacey
(Wing Commander Ret.)
Kathikas, Cyprus
[email protected]
Researcher and published author on
High Standard pistols requests assistance and referrals. Previous articles
document development and production of the High Standard USA Model
HD MS pistol for the OSS and similar
groups. Author is now attempting to
document anecdotes and information
regarding application of this weapon.
story about the OSS in Stockholm
and its involvement in intelligence
operations into Denmark, Norway,
and Germany. If anyone has pictures
that they would like to share, I would
be most delighted.
Peer Henrik Hansen
[email protected]
I am a former member of the U.S.
Army. I am trying to find the history
of a former member of the OSS during WWII, Lester A. Kolste. I met him
about 5 or 6 years ago. I later found
out that he was a member of the OSS.
I have found a few facts about him,
but he is not listed in the OSS personnel records. I do not want to see his
service disappear but be remembered
in the history of the OSS. I would appreciate any information or help to
get his records listed for public view.
He served on General Lucius Clay’s
staff in Berlin. He was involved in the
Berlin Airlift. He ran the restitution
office in Berlin. He jumped into occupied France to organize the French
Resistance and was awarded the Silver Star.
Lloyd Pirl
[email protected]
Jon Miller
High Standard Collectors Association
[email protected]
Stuart Weiss
[email protected]
I am currently working on an English version of my book on OSS and
U.S. intelligence in Scandinavia from
1943 to 1946. I need photographic
material to illustrate the fascinating
I am looking for any information about
the combat system of William Edward
Fairbairn, an instructor at OSS and
SOE camps and his assistants, Eric
Sykes and Rex Applegate. I know that
some instructional films and documents were created about his system.
I’ve already found information about
some OSS training films at National
Archives. Other documents and films
were created, especially combat manuals and films for OSS instructors. Can
you please give me advice where I can
find these films and documents?
Vasily Sizov
[email protected]
Help Wanted
I collect and study WWII-era weapons. I am especially interested in the
Marlin UD-M42 submachine gun
used by the OSS.
Bryan Risner
[email protected]
Does this WWII address look like a location used to assemble goods and materials such as small arms for overseas
shipment for OSS agents in the UK?
Transportation Officer
New York Port of Embarkation
Brooklyn, New York
Att: Port Strategic Services Officer
[email protected]
I am trying to contact General Donovan’s relatives for a book I am writing that involves his niece, Patricia
Donovan.
[email protected]
I am trying to find out if a book published in France in 1990, OSS: La
guerre secrete en France, 1942-1945 by
Fabrizio Calvi, has been translated
into English. I bought this book and
have translated several of its pages.
It provides very good, detailed coverage of OSS operations in France.
I attempted to contact the author
and publisher but had no success.
If anyone knows Fabrizio Calvi or
how to get in touch with him, please
contact me.
Similarly, I am trying to find out
how to contact George Chalou, author
of The Secrets War: OSS in World War II.
Randy Harris
[email protected]
I am trying to identify Jedburgh members who were New Orleans, LA,
natives. One, William Drew, was a
member and is now dead. There was
another, whose name escapes me, who
was a member but did not deploy. The
WWII Museum here would like to
contact him.
Again, if you could give me his
name——or point me in the direction
of someone who could——I’d appreciate it. It’s sad that we have the
WWII Museum in New Orleans yet
so little is known of many of the veterans we have here who could leave
important historical information for
future researchers.
Reginald L. Dobolek
[email protected]
I am interested in speaking to anybody who collects OSS artifacts from
WWII. I have just received a historical
letter from Colt Manufacturing Company in Hartford verifying my .32
M1903 was sent to the OSS in England on December 15, 1944, one out
of 100. Any ideas as to what that separate contract of 100 pistols was for?
[email protected]
I am trying to find anyone who
served in OSS with John W. Kurissink. He was a manufacturer of fine
wood products from Chicago, IL. He
manufactured the Charlie McCarthy
puppets for the famous ventriloquist
and was recruited to OSS and served
in the Pacific Theater. After the war,
he returned to Chicago and resumed
his work, obtaining a number of patents for special design furniture, including stadium benches. I suspect
he was involved in some kind of technical services, although he was in an
adjutant post for at least part of his
service in the Pacific.
Jeff Steinberg
[email protected]
The Fort Sam Houston Museum is
currently tracing the history of a Colt-
Maxim 1904 water-cooled machine
gun, serial number 139, in its collection.
We have traced the gun back through
the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson AFB through the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to
the Clarkson College of Technology
in New York. In the correspondence
from the last mentioned institution,
there is a reference that mentions the
gun as part of “the whole hodge-podge
(which) are relics of the Yugoslav resistance to the Germans during the late
war. The hodge-podge also includes
M1915 Chauchats, M1909 Benet-Mercies, German World War I Maxims and
Lewis machine guns.”
I realize that your organization
cannot trace this single gun, but can
you direct me to sources of information about operations or programs to
deliver small arms to resistance organizations in Yugoslavia?
John Manguso
Director, Fort Sam Houston Museum
[email protected]
I am doing research on OSS activities
in Paris after liberation and would like
to know if anyone has any information relating to that general subject or
pictures of OSS headquarters.
[email protected]
I am working on a biography of Nelson Ackerman Eddy. I am trying to
document and verify information
concerning his work during World
War II. Another biographer has already published the following information about this period in his life.
In December 1943, Nelson left Los
Angeles for Washington, D.C. He
was sent on an overseas concert tour,
encompassing Brazil, Central Africa,
Arabia, Egypt, and Persia.
In January 1944, a press release issued in Cairo stated that Nelson had
finished his tour of Central Africa and
Summer/Fall 2010
81
Brazil, having given 29 concerts in 26
days. During the same month, he is
reported as being in Cairo giving concerts to the troops there, sent to Tehran, Iran, to entertain troops there for
18 days, and then returned to Cairo.
According to the same biographer, it
appears that Nelson had actually been
recruited by the CIC and was working
for the OSS. His real mission was to
track a suspected double agent.
While in Cairo, someone discovered that Nelson was working for
the government. While the OSS was
trying to get Nelson out of Egypt
(and others were making “desperate
attempts to keep him from leaving
Egypt”), there was a confrontation
with an Axis sympathizer who tried
to kill Nelson. In self-defense, Nelson
killed the other man and was wounded in the confrontation. Nelson was
airlifted to Scotland. A woman in
England claimed to be the ambulance driver who transported Nelson
from the airport to the hospital.
Nelson was seen in Edinburgh,
Scotland, and a photograph of him
there allegedly exists.
There were reports of his plane
nearly crashing on the return trip to
the U.S. He finally arrived by ship at
West Palm Beach on February 14 or
February 16, 1944.
We have been able to verify bits and
pieces of this information and placed
everything into a time line, but there
are many gaps and discrepancies such
as overlapping dates. Since we do not
have access to the source material and
individuals available to the other biographer, we are trying to verify the story
independently and possibly augment
it with additional information.
east of France. I am seeking information on the attention paid by the
OSS to the Departments of AlpesMaritimes and the Var. There are
three specific matters of interest.
When did the OSS first become interested in the southeast of France and
what activities did it engage in there to
prepare for an Allied debarkation?
Two Jedburgh teams landed early
on August 14, 1944: Sceptre with
Lieutenant W.C. Hannah (U.S.), Lieutenant Francois Franceschi (“Tevenac”) (Fr.), and 1st Sergeant Howard
Palmer (U.S.); and Cinnamon with
Captain Cat. Henri Lespinasse-Fonsegrieve (Fr.), Captain R. Harcourt
(Br.), and S/Lieutenant Jacques Maurin (Fr.). I have read their after-action
reports but am seeking any additional
information on them.
Another three-man team landed in
early August in the southern HautesAlpes or northern part of the AlpesMaritimes to assist “Sapin,” the French
Resistance leader (FFI) of the R-2 area.
I have only two of their names: Major Havard Gunn (“Bamboos”), a
Scottish officer in Kilt, and Captain
Fournier (Fr.). Were these members of
an OSS operational group? Does anyone know more about them or their
mission? Thanks in advance for any
help you may be able to provide.
George Kundahl
[email protected]
I am trying to learn what role Charles
B. Dyar played in the OSS. I understand that he served with Allen Dulles in Switzerland.
[email protected]
Douglas Valentine
136 Captain Road
Longmeadow MA 01106
413-567-9236
I live most of the year on the Cote
d’Azur where I am doing research on
the World War II years in the south-
Did the interrogation of Japanese
prisoners at the Sino Translation Interrogation Center in Chungking,
China, by Nisei (second generation)
Japanese-American members of the
MIS (Military Intelligence Service)
have an OSS component?
[email protected]
I am looking for anyone who knew
Lieutenant John W. Sullivan. John
served in Kunming from 1943 to
1945. He was a radio operator. After joining the army and prior to his
OSS service, he taught electronics
at Yale.
[email protected]
Can anyone locate Area O, a remote
country manor outside London where
OSS agents were trained by SOE? I
know all the SOE houses but have not
heard of Area O before.
[email protected]
I’m doing research on the OSS’s use
of kayaks during World War II. While
British development and operations
have been well documented——they referred to them as “canoes”——not much
has been published about the Americans. If there are any members who
trained in or operationally used kayaks
(or family members who heard stories
about the small boats), I’d love to hear
from you. At this point I’ve yet to visit
the National Archives to look at the
Maritime Unit records, so any contacts
with dedicated MU researchers (or others who may have encountered kayaks mentioned in their own research)
would be greatly appreciated.
Joel McNamara
[email protected]
I am William Field, a senior U.S. History major at Bates College in Lewiston,
Maine. I am writing my undergraduate
thesis dissertation on OSS operations
abroad during the Second World War
Help Wanted
focusing on the command structure,
operational structure and affiliations
with partisan groups and communists
in various corners of the globe.
I am writing to ask if any member of
your organization would be willing to
answer a few questions for my thesis.
William Field
[email protected]
Warren Lerude, Professor Emeritus,
Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, wants books, magazine or interview sources on Leopoldville, Congo, and OSS activity
at American Legation from 1943 to
1945. I am researching a book about
the late Robert Laxalt, a Nevada author who served as a code officer
with the American Legation in 1944
in Leopoldville coding top-secret
messages for the OSS about, among
other things, the uranium mine at
Shinkolobwe. He wrote about it in
his book, A Private War, published by
the University of Nevada Press.
I need details about the operation,
the sights and smells of Leopoldville,
the consulate, the legation at that
time, to flesh out Bob’s own account
of being there. He got malaria and almost died, and was then sent home
to heal. He was the brother of former
Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada.
Warren Lerude
775-784-4192
[email protected]
I am interested in Jedburgh Team
IAN and two of its members: Major
John J. Gildee Jr. (who also served in
Detachment 101 in Burma) and F/
SGT Lucien Bourgoin.
Julian le Maux
[email protected]
A visitor to the National Museum of
the Marine Corps asked about a Major Ernest L. Cuneo of the OSS. I am
hoping someone can provide some
information about his OSS service.
Bob Sullivan
[email protected]
I’m researching intelligence operations in CBI for my screenplay and
I want it to be as factual as possible.
These operations may or may not be
coordinated with OSS which is why
I’m hoping someone can point me in
the right direction.
I am looking for information on
the organizational structure of OSS
and the location of its intelligence
headquarters in the CBI and methods of debriefing Allied officers and
agents in the field.
Mitchell Oppenheim
[email protected]
I’m doing research on a POW supply
mission to the Konan POW camp in
northern Korea in August 29, 1945.
I have evidence that it had an OSS,
intelligence, and photo reconnaissance component. The Konan mission is similar to Operation Cardinal
in Mukden, Manchuria [see page 22], a
known OSS operation to assist POWs
at Hoten and nearby camps. The main
similarity between Konan and Hoten
is that the prisoners in both camps
were liberated by advancing Russian
troops within one week of each other.
Is there a list of OSS personnel and
OSS missions? I would like to compare that list with the names of men
who took part in the aid and rescue
of Konan prisoners.
Bill Streifer
[email protected]
I am a WWII reenactor. I portray a
resistance fighter, French or Belgian,
depending on the situation. I also
portray OSS operatives. I have always
been curious about the uniform an
OSS operative would wear when he
needed to report to an official army
Post. Hypothetically, let’s say he
holds the rank of U.S. Army captain.
What sleeve patch unit and collar pin
designations would he wear? Would
he wear his rank on his shoulders
with ribbons and paratrooper wings?
If you could clarify this for me it
would help me a great deal. I continually strive to portray my characters
as historically accurate as possible.
Bruce Form
[email protected]
I am writing to learn more about the
role of African Americans in OSS.
The only example I could find was
Ralph Bunche and there is relatively
sparse information on his activities. I
was hoping you had further examples
that I could start researching. Were
there any who operated in SI or SO
in the European Theater? Any assistance that you can provide with this
would be appreciated.
Reggie Allen
[email protected]
I am researching the history of Banbury, my home town in the United
Kingdom. I have come across a reference to an OSS location in Banbury
called Orchard House. Any information about it would be appreciated.
James Tobin
[email protected]
I was reading The OSS Society Journal
(Spring/Summer 2009, Volume 2
No. 1) and I was wondering if anyone
knows the names of the men in the
picture on page 27 on the upper lefthand corner identified as OSS Greek
Operational Group III.
Robert J. Tsolas
132 Maple St.
East Hartford, Conn. 06118
Summer/Fall 2010
83
My grandfather, Count David Yorck
von Wartenburg, was employed for
a year and a half by the OSS in Italy starting in June 1944. He was a
staff sergeant in the German Army
during WWII, but worked for both
the British and American secret service agencies. I have very little information about the specifics of what
he accomplished.
There’s a letter from Major E.P. Barry of the OSS, dated October 1945,
saying David Yorck, while in Italy,
“held a position of great responsibility and trust and at all times carried
out his assignments in a superior manner.” My uncles tell me that he helped
downed British airmen escape.
Major E.P. Barry of the OSS wrote
another letter, dated November
1945, “Yorck’s active anti-Nazi efforts in Italy are, in part, on record
with the British Intelligence Service
under whose guidance he worked
from January 1944 to June 1944
while still retaining connections
with the German Army. He would
have continued in that role had not
a necessary act on his part in the Allied cause led to the discovery of his
work by the Germans.”
What was this “necessary act”?
Jessica Hahn-Taylor
415-656-1279
[email protected]
Information is being sought about the
officers and secretaries who served in
the OSS Field Photo Branch, which
was based in the South Agriculture
building in Washington, D.C., and
about the men and women assigned
to its War Crimes Unit and sent to
Germany to locate and prepare film
evidence for the Nuremberg Trial between June and December 1945.
[email protected]
I am an author searching for information about Jane Foster, who joined
the OSS in 1943 and worked in Moral Operations in Ceylon. In 1945 she
was sent to Java after the surrender of
the Japanese to report on the political
situation in Indonesia. She left OSS
in 1946 and went to New York. She
lived the rest of her life in Paris where
she died in 1979. She was good friends
with both Betty McIntosh and Julia
(McWilliams) Child. In 1954, she was
accused of being a spy and was later
indicted for “conspiracy to commit
espionage.” I would appreciate any
information, tidbits, or leads. [email protected]
My father, Ernest Adolph, served in the OSS (MO) from 1943 until 1945 in
Washington, D.C. and in China. I found this photo of Detachment 202 personnel in Kunming in his photo album. I also found a letter from a Chinese serviceman from the 1st Parachute Regiment. I would like to speak to someone
who served with him or knows more about this unit. He was born in China to
American missionary parents, spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese, and attended
Cornell before enlisting.
Robin Diebold
[email protected]
I’m currently researching a book
about OSS/CIA and the Middle East
from World War II to 1967 featuring
Kim Roosevelt, Archie Roosevelt, and
Miles Copeland as its central characters. I have come across a couple of references to Kim Roosevelt participating
in an operation codenamed SOPHIA
while he was serving in the OSS Cairo
station under Stephen Penrose in 1944.
I would be very grateful indeed for information concerning SOPHIA, as I
have not found any other references
to it. Any other thoughts about the
Roosevelt cousins and/or Copeland
would also be gratefully received.
Hugh Wilford
Prof. of History, California State University
[email protected]
Nonprofit
U S POSTAGE
PAID
Permit No. 4025
Southern, MD
This poster was made by
Henry Koerner for the Office
of War Information (OWI).
Koerner served with OSS as
the chief illustrator at the
Nuremberg Trials. To read
more about Koerner and
see additonal examples of
his artwork, please turn to
page 41.
Poster provided courtesy of the Northwestern University Library.
The OSS Society, Inc.
6723 Whittier Ave., 200
McLean, VA 22101-4533
w w w.o ssso ci et y. org

The OSS SOcieTy JOurnal

Transcription

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