In war it is the results that count, and the saboteurs and guerrilla leaders in Special Operations and the Operational Groups, the spies in Secret Intelligence, and the radio operators in Communications did produce some impressive results. In this unconventional warfare, Donovan believed that “persuasion, penetration and intimidation …are the modern counterparts of sapping and mining in the siege warfare of former days.” His innovative “combined arms” approach sought to integrate espionage, sabotage, guerrilla operations, and demoralizing propaganda to undermine enemy control and weaken the interior lines of communications and supply in enemy’s rear before and during the assault at the front by conventional forces of the Allies.1



At the end of the war in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, credited the Special Operations of the American OSS and the British SOE with the very able manner in which the Resistance forces were organized, supplied and directed. “In no previous war,” he added, “and in no other theater during this war, have Resistance forces been so closely harnessed to the main military effort....I consider that the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on the German war economy and internal security services throughout occupied Europe by the organized forces of Resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.”2



It has been estimated that during World War II, the total number of people who served in the OSS probably numbered fewer than 20,000 men and women altogether, less than the size of one of the nearly one hundred U.S. infantry divisions, a mere handful among the sixteen million Americans who served in uniform in World War II. Among the 20,000 OSSers, probably fewer than 7,500 served overseas.3 The number of agents the OSS had behind enemy lines was far smaller. It remains undisclosed, but one indication of how many OSS agents may have been infiltrated as spies, saboteurs, guerrilla leaders or clandestine radio operators, is the number who took parachute training, the primary method of infiltration. In all, more than 2,500 men and dozens of women received OSS parachute training.4 Yet, despite the comparatively small size of Donovan’s organization and the even smaller contingent who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives in the shadow war, the OSS made significant contributions to victory in World War II.



The following two chapters aim not at being a full account of the OSS accomplishments overseas, which would be impossible in such a limited space.5 Rather, within an overall context of the role of the OSS in foreign theaters of operation, the emphasis here is on the actions of OSSers whose preparation included training at Areas A, B, and C in Catoctin Mountain Park and Prince William Forest Park. Particularly important here are the achievements of the OSS and also how the spies, saboteurs, guerrilla leaders, and radio operators, who received at least part of their training at the camps in these National Park Service areas applied their training in their overseas missions and accomplishments.

The American Landings in North Africa, 1942 OSS’s first opportunity to prove itself came in connection with the U.S. invasion of French North Africa in November 1942. As early as the late summer of 1941, Donovan’s fledgling organization had begun placing a dozen agents, code named the “twelve apostles,” in the collaborationist Vichy French colonies of Morocco and Algeria. A bevy of American businessmen and scholars with connections with France and its colonies, they were ostensibly given minor assignments with U.S. consulates, but these were covers for their clandestine missions. By January 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed on the invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch) in November, the agents were given the missions of obtaining intelligence and building “fifth column” resistance in Vichy French North Africa. They quickly established a clandestine radio network, gathered intelligence about defenses and the 100,000 Vichy French troops and their commanders, obtained maps of suitable air and sea landing sites, and sought through encouragement and financial inducements to gain support from resistance elements among the Riff tribesmen and other indigenous, Muslim, anti-French groups along the coast and in the mountains and the desert.6



In the United States, Donovan, with approval by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a team of spies into the Vichy French embassy in Washington, D.C. in March 1942 to obtain code and cipher books. OSS operative Elizabeth (“Betty”) Pack, code named “Cynthia,” a beautiful aristocratic divorcee, and Charles Brousse, a press attaché at the embassy whom she had seduced, plus an unidentified safecracker, recruited by the OSS for his expertise in picking locks and opening safes, successfully photographed military and diplomatic codes and other secret documents from the safe in the Vichy French embassy.7



Summer 1942: As the time for the Allied invasion of North Africa grew near, OSS’s Secret Intelligence agents joined the effort to try to persuade the Vichy French forces to support the landings. Special Operations agents sought to prepare sabotage units and recruit native resistance fighters. When 50,000 U.S. troops followed by 15,000 British soldiers landed at half a dozen locations along the North African coast beginning on November 8, 1942, OSS reception groups met the troops on many of the beaches and guided them ashore.8 Inland, OSS agents sabotaged military targets, cut off enemy communications lines, and were ready to guide American paratroopers at a designated safe drop zone using a top secret radio beacon. Although the paratroopers’ planes never arrived because of false starts and high headwinds, other OSS efforts demonstrated their effectiveness in the field. Together with representatives from the U.S. Army and the State Department, OSS representatives helped convince much of the Vichy French officer corps in North Africa not to forcibly resist the American invasion.9 Despite some pockets of French resistance, the dangerous invasion, with troops convoyed thousands of miles to land on a hostile shore, was an overall success.10 The OSS received credit from Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall for its contribution to that victory through intelligence which was of high quality, abundant and accurate in its description of the terrain and the enemy’s order of battle, that is, the identification and nature of the enemy Army, Navy, and air force units facing the Americans, the location of French headquarters and the names of officials upon whom the United States could rely for assistance in the administration of civil affairs. The OSS, particularly its SI branch, had proven itself to the U.S. Army’s high command.11



With the successful Allied landings in French North Africa, the U.S. and British forces under overall command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower headed east toward German occupied Tunisia. OSS set up a regional headquarters in Algiers and worked with the British Special Operations Executive to aid the advance. In the process of gathering tactical intelligence and sabotaging enemy communication and transportation, OSS agent Carleton Coon, a Harvard anthropologist and authority on North Africa, led a group of some 50 American, French, and Arab guerrillas. Among other innovations, Coon is credited with inventing “detonating mule turds,” plastic explosives specially shaped and colored like mule or camel dung and scattered along desert roads to disable German tanks and trucks.12 The Allied advance came to a temporary halt, however, when the German Afrika Korps launched a counteroffensive in February 1943, catching the American Army by surprise and driving them back through the Kasserine Pass. A desperate local commander ordered Coon and his guerrillas to try to stop German tanks with hand grenades and other weapons, but after planting a few mines, Coon declined to have his highly-trained specialists used as regular infantry against tanks, a decision later endorsed by the OSS.13

Jerry Sage, German POW camps, and “the Great Escape” Misuse of OSS personnel in several incidents in North Africa also led to the wounding of several other OSS agents and the capture of at least two of them. Lieutenant Elmer (“Pinky”) Harris, from Areas A and B, was wounded in action near Sabeitla, Algeria, but quickly recovered and was subsequently assigned to Allied and OSS headquarters in Algiers.14 Less fortunate were Jerry Sage and Milton Felsen, both alumni of Area B. In January 1943, Sage, by then promoted to major, had been sent to North Africa for SO work. But when the Germans in Tunisia counterattacked at Kasserine Pass in February 1943, some local American commanders directed most of the OSS personnel there to the front. Carleton Coon’s group had been one of these, but it had quickly withdrawn and none had been captured. Others were not so fortunate. One such group included twenty OSS agents that William J. Donovan and a 37-year-old assistant named Donald Downes, had assembled in the United States to conduct espionage and other clandestine activities in Generalissimo Franco’s fascist but officially non-belligerent Spain. The possibility of a German occupation of Spain and a drive across the Straits of Gibraltar, with or without Franco’s consent, was considered a major strategic danger to the Allies. The Americans in Downes’ group were agents that he had trained at Area B at Catoctin Mountain Park. Among them were five former members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American leftists who had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. They knew Spain well and several of them were members of the Communist Party of the United States. This was an example of Donovan’s willingness to use some communists as agents when they knew the area and had contacts with local Resistance leaders in Europe, many of whom were communists. The other part of Downes’ group was composed of Spanish political refugees, members of the defeated Republican government, recruited by the OSS in New York and Mexico City.15 Now, despite Downes’ protest, most of his intelligence team was diverted from its planned mission to Spain to the front lines in French North Africa, where they joined Jerry Sage’s Special Operations unit.



By happenstance in North Africa, Sage had enlisted one of the few African Americans to serve in the OSS. The United States military still kept blacks in racially segregated units in World War II, and the OSS did not officially recruit African Americans. But when Sage arrived in North Africa and sought a truck to transport his men and equipment, an ordnance officer responsible for vehicles would not let Sage take the truck without a driver from the motor pool. With the truck came a driver, an AfricanAmerican corporal named Drake from an all-black transportation unit. Corporal Drake, whose Sage’s memoirs identify only by his rank and surname, was from Detroit. He became part of Sage’s OSS Special Operations team and quickly learned SO skills, including close combat, knife-fighting, and demolitions.16 Sage and his unit recruited locals, trained them in the use of explosives, and planning missions to infiltrate enemy areas and destroy lines of communication and supply as well as ammunition depots.17



Attached to the U.S. Fifth Army, the SO team came temporarily under orders of a British infantry regiment. The English colonel ordered them to make a reconnaissance patrol. Sage was reluctant to do so because it was daylight and his team usually operated at night, but he accepted the order. They advanced stealthily in two sections. Sage moved into a wadi, a dry channel, with two sergeants, Milton Felsen and Irving Goff, both former Spanish Civil War veterans, who had received OSS training at Area B. Sage then motioned the other section forward. As soon as they arrived, the Germans, tipped off by Arabs, Sage later concluded, opened fire with artillery. Sage and Felsen were both wounded, Felsen more seriously.18 Goff poured sulfa into Felsen’s open wound and helped bandage both men. When they heard the clank of approaching German tanks, Sage ordered Goff to escape with the other section. Goff looked back as he scurried away and the German soldiers approached: “The major, in an Abercrombie & Fitch brown jacket, was visible a mile away. He was silly, but great enough to stand up and divert them.”19 Sage’s action allowed the other three OSS men, including Goff, to get away. When Sage and Felsen were about to be captured, both of them quickly buried all their OSS gear in the sand: pistols in shoulder holsters, Fairbairn daggers, a special belt and vest with hidden pockets, and their spy gadgets. Felsen, an enlisted man and seriously wounded was turned over to the Italians for medical treatment. “Get well,” Sage told him, “because we’re going back.”20



As an officer, Sage was taken for questioning. He convinced his interrogators that he was a downed flier and consequently was taken to a prisoner of war camp for captured Allied aviators, first in Italy and then in Germany itself. Strong-willed, determined and imaginative, Sage escaped at least half a dozen times from such camps, but each time he was recaptured. Still, he earned the respect of his fellow prisoners and the nickname, “the Big X,” prison slang for an escape or exit artist.21



During his two years in German prisoner of war camps, Sage later reflected that he had drawn upon his inner resources, which he said were his religious faith and “the superb training I had received under Donovan.”22 His paramilitary training was of great use, he said, when at one of the main POW camps late in the war, he was put in charge of turning a group of aviators into commandos to seize the camp in case the Nazis decided to liquidate all the prisoners. Teaching them the art of silent killing, the sentry-kill, and other lethal techniques from the OSS schools, Sage trained his thirty, hand-picked “kriegies,” he said, into an effective “storm-trooper group.”23



That had been while Sage was part of the planning for the large-scale breakout from Stalag Luft III, later the basis for a 1963 film, The Great Escape with Steve McQueen. But because of his escape record, Sage was removed to a more secure prison camp before the actual breakout occurred at Stalag Luft III in the spring of 1944. He was fortunate, because all but three of the 76 men who escaped, before the discovery of the tunnel stopped the remaining 174, were recaptured, and 50 the 73 who were recaptured were executed by the Gestapo.24 Sage finally escaped successfully in January 1945, this time from a prison camp in Poland as the Red Army approached. From wireless radio transmitter in a hidden office of the Polish underground, he tapped out a message picked up by OSS base stations in Egypt, Italy, and England: “Jerry the Dagger is on the loose and coming home!”25 He made his way home via the Ukraine, Turkey, and Egypt. Arriving at OSS headquarters in Washington in March 1945 a month before V-E Day, Sage received a warm, personal welcome from General Donovan, who declared happily, “I knew you’d get home early, Jerry!26

Major Peter Ortiz, the most famous Marine in the OSS Although the majority of the uniformed OSS SO and SI officers had received commissions in the Army or the Army Air Corps, there were a few naval officers and a couple of dozen Marines.27 The most famous Marine in the OSS was Major Peter Julien Ortiz, who with two Navy Crosses and numerous other medals became one of the most decorated officers in the Marine Corps in World War II. Ortiz had been born in New York City in 1913 to an American mother and a French-Spanish father from a prominent French publishing family. Although he spent his childhood with his mother in California, his father insisted that he be educated in France. He studied in a lycée and then a French university, but in 1932, the rebellious 19-year-old youth joined the French Foreign Legion as a private. He was wounded in action against indigenous rebels in French North Africa, received many medals for heroism, and was promoted to sergeant and then acting lieutenant. In 1937, he returned to the United States and became an adviser on military affairs to film companies in Hollywood. Two years later, at the outbreak of World War II, he rejoined the Foreign Legion as a lieutenant, fought the Germans when they invaded France in 1940, was wounded and taken prisoner and held as a POW for fifteen months before escaping and returning to the United States.



In June 1942, Ortiz joined the U.S. Marine Corps as a private but after boot camp was awarded an officer’s commission and soon became a captain. In December 1942, he was sent to Tangier, Morocco officially as assistant naval attaché, but that was a cover for his real assignment. He had already been assigned to the OSS to organize Muslim tribesmen and scout German forces to help prepare the assault on the German position in Tunisia. In March 1943, as the new U.S. Corps Commander, Major General George S. Patton, Jr., launched a major attack, Ortiz was wounded during an encounter with a German patrol behind enemy lines. A German bullet shattered his right hand, but Ortiz rolled on his other side and with his left hand tossed grenades which quickly silenced the enemy machine gun. His men dragged him to safety. Ortiz was brought back to the United States, and after surgery and recuperation, he was temporarily reassigned to OSS headquarter in Washington, D.C. That spring, he spent time training and helping instruct at the OSS’s Special Operations training camps at Areas A, B, and F. In the summer of 1943, Ortiz was sent to England for Special Operations training with a multinational, “Jedburgh” team preparatory to being parachuted twice into German-occupied France in 1944, where eventually he too, like Jerry Sage, would become a prisoner of war, but at different German POW camps.28

OSS HQ, Training Camps, & Base Stations in MEDTO During the winter of 1942-43, OSS established its main headquarters for the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MEDTO) in Algiers. By February, OSS/Algiers had training officers for SI and SO operations, including a parachute school run by Colonel Lucius O. Rucker, a no-nonsense paratrooper from Mississippi who had run a similar school at Area A in 1942. His new parachute school just west of Algiers included weekly classes ranging from ten to seventy. They were mostly indigenous recruits, Spanish, Italian and French nationals, willing to become intelligence or special operations agents for the United States. Under an inter-Allied agreement, British SOE continued to have overall responsibility for the special operations in the Mediterranean Theater, including those of the American OSS. The first unit of Italian SI recruits, three officers and nine enlisted men, arrived in March 1943, a second contingent in June. From the United States, representatives of MO, R&A, and X-2 arrived in mid-1943. The North African campaign ended in May 1943 when the German forces in Tunisia surrendered. In July, the first Operational Group arrived, it was composed of Italian Americans who had trained at Areas F, B, and A. During the winter of 1943-1944, French OGs began to arrive, so did a second Italian OG. In addition to the parachute school, there were also OSS schools run by the SO, SI, and Communications Branches for indigenous agents as well as for advanced training for American OSSers who had graduated from the training camps in the United States. Similar OSS training camps were established in Britain, India, and China. In addition to the extra training for foreign-speaking American SO and OG members, OSS instructors at the main OSS training camps in Algeria also trained Italian, Yugoslav, and French agents recruited for special operations work in their own countries.29 Richard W. Breck, Jr., who after the war would play professional baseball for the Pawtuckett Slaters, as “Bobo Breck,” and who had gone through SO instruction at Areas B and A, helped train foreign agents in demolition work at the Algiers camp. He later participated in the Allied campaigns in northern Italy.30



Among the OSS recruits at the training camp in Algeria was John (“Jack”) Hemingway, son of the famous author. Young Jack had been only five when his parents divorced, and he had spent much of his youth in boarding schools. He later he dropped out of the University of Montana and Dartmouth College. After Pearl Harbor, the 19- year-old youth enlisted in the U.S. Army, and by the end of 1942, he was serving in the Military Police in North Africa. Like his father, young Hemingway wanted to see action and experience danger, so through friends of the family, he was able to leave the MPs and be reassigned to the OSS. First Lieutenant Jack Hemingway was welcomed into the OSS and assigned as an instructor and student at the organization’s initial main training camp at Chréa, Algeria, in a cedar forest on a 6,000-foot mountaintop behind the provincial city of Blida. The location would later be moved to Koléa on the beach near Algiers, after local boys sneaked into the mountain camp and accidentally blew themselves up with an unexploded mortar round. Hemingway taught weapons usage to French and American agents for SI, SO, and OG. He remembered that “among the teaching staff was a number of very tough, young men. They had all been to the OS training schools in the States, and some of them had been through training in England as well. One of them impressed me especially. He was the only one of the younger men who had been in the field, and his toughness was not put on….He had been commissioned in the field and, being several years older than I, he filled the spot one always has for a hero figure. His name was Jim Russell.” Lieutenant James Russell had risen through the ranks in the Army. He would later take part in Special Operations missions in Sardinia, Corsica, and France.31



Stephen J. Capestro from Edison, New Jersey, had undergone SO training at Area A, but when he arrived at the SO training camp in Algeria, he found Jack Hemingway as one of his instructors. Capestro remembered the intensive parachute training and as well as field exercises day and night. The trainees were, for example, dropped off in the countryside in uniform with only a compass and a hand drawn map and told to find their way back. The indigenous people, Berbers and Arabs, were often hostile, Capestro said, seeing the United States as helping France control of its colony. They sometimes booed the Americans soldiers. Later Capestro reflected on differences he felt in training in the United States and in North Africa, particularly the night exercises. “The difference is, for example, taking training overseas behind enemy lines, or lines that aren’t friendly lines [such as Arab North Africa] and doing training in the United States…. There’s a hell of a difference. If you’re on a highway in Virginia, and you hitch-hike home, there’s no problem. In North Africa, I didn’t know. If the people came out, they could have been enemies. They could have robbed me personally or attacked me out of hate for the Americans. Because on many nights on training sessions in North Africa, I saw them, their looks, and their snarling dogs. I could tell they were saying nasty, nasty things. On training missions if they found you alone, what would happen? They might have hijacked your wallet or worse. It concerned me. I just didn’t know.”32



Communications were vital, and following the invasion of North Africa, the OSS set up the first U.S. communications station in Algiers and transmitted all Army and State Department messages until an Army Signal Corps established a unit there. By March 1943, OSS had expanded its Algiers station into a major communication facility. It included a message center at SI headquarters in Algiers and a large Communications headquarters with a base radio station and a main receiving station nearby at Cape Matifou. Sarah (“Sally”) Sabow, daughter of Hungarian immigrants from Bayonne, New Jersey, was a cipher clerk and one of six women sent to OSS MEDTO HQ in Algiers. Her boss was Major Peter Mero, one of the Commo Branch’s main recruiters and entrepreneurs, and a frequent visitor to the CB School at Area C. From 1943 to 1945, Mero was in charge of all OSS communications units in the MEDTO. He and Sally Sabow married after the war.33 Some distance away from these stations, a communications school was established to train indigenous agent-operators for clandestine work in their native countries. By May 1943, OSS Algiers was in direct contact with OSS clandestine stations throughout the region and was also linked to stations around the world.34



Another OSS radio base station was established at the eastern end of the Mediterranean in Cairo, Egypt. Lieutenant James Ranney, a former instructor at Area C, was stationed there and remembered the powerful transmitters, which relayed messages between OSS headquarters and agents in the field and also beamed a daily news broadcasts prepared by Morale Operations or other OSS units to Italy, the Balkans and other areas of eastern Europe. The station’s equipment included half a dozen Hallicrafter HT-4 transmitters, each rated at 400 to 500 watts. There were four cage dipole antennas as well as two rhombic antennas and two Beverage “Wave” antennas, one of which was 3,000 feet long.35



The main OSS communications base in the Mediterranean remained at Algiers, until well into 1944, but after the invasion of Italy in September 1943, a station was established at the Italian Adriatic port of Bari and subsequently at Brindisi, when Bari became inadequate for certain operations due to mechanical and atmospheric difficulties.36 In July 1944, the main headquarters for OSS communications in the MEDTO was shifted from Algiers to Naples, or more precisely, the 1,200-room Royal Palace of the Bourbon Kings, at Caserta, which in 1944-1945 served as the headquarters of the Supreme Command of the Allied Forces in the Mediterranean Theater. Naval Lieutenant Frank V. Huston, who trained at Area C, was in charge of communications training and the message center at Bari and Caserta and succeeded Peter Mero when the latter left for the United States in 1945.37



Gail F. Donnalley, an OSS code clerk, who had spent a few weeks at Area C before being trained at OSS headquarters, served at CB base stations in Cairo, Egypt, and Bari and Caserta in southern Italy. He had a very small part in the negotiations for the surrender of the German troops in Italy. At Bolzano where Waffen SS Lieutenant General Karl Wolff, military commander in northern Italy, had his headquarters and was negotiating through OSS’s Allen Dulles in Bern, Switzerland to surrender, the OSS had assigned a young, German-speaking Czech, code-named “Wally”, as a radio operator in Wolff’s headquarters to transmit the messages back and forth. They put him in the attic of Wolff’s headquarters, and he would send messages from the German commander to the OSS base station in Caserta, where Donnalley, working at the OSS radio base station. “We would decipher it, then cipher it [with a more complex cipher] and send it on to Dulles in Switzerland,” Donnalley recalled. “This went on for four to five months. On the day before the surrender [which occurred 2 May 1945], the S.S., who, of course, knew he was up in the attic, brought him down and beat him up and then sent him back up to radio the German surrender. They were frustrated and angry about having lost the war. After the surrender, ‘Wally’ was brought down to Caserta, where we in the OSS met him. He looked about 17 and was about 5 foot 5 and had curly hair. By that time, he did not look beat up. He did not speak English, or at least not to us. We shook hands and thanked him in English, and he mumbled something in his own language.”38

Donovan Joins the Invasion of Sicily Although the OSS rejected use of its agents as combat infantrymen as a misguided waste of resources, Donovan, himself personally enjoyed being in combat at the front and frequently and needlessly exposed himself to its dangers. In the U.S. invasion of Sicily in July 1943, the OSS director and a few of his men accompanied the 1 st Infantry Division, landing with them on the first day, and staying with them for a few days during their advance inland. Captain Paul Gale, a staff officer from the 1st Division whom Donovan later recruited for OSS, said Donovan kept pushing him to take the jeep farther forward. “General, we’re getting where the Italian patrols are active,” Gale warned. “Fine,” Donovan replied. Soon enough, they ran into an Italian patrol. Donovan leaped up and fired the machine gun mounted on the jeep. “He was happy as a clam,” Gale recalled. “We had a hell of a fire fight.” But Major General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the division commander, subsequently chewed Gale out “for getting such an important man into such a bad position.”39 Donovan’s delight in getting into dangerous situations became legendary. Years later, Irving Goff, who had trained at Area B and had been with Jerry Sage’s unit until Sage was captured, told oral historian Studs Terkel about the general’s bravado in Sicily and Italy. “We moved from North Africa into Sicily. Donovan’s on the boat with us. He’s on the beach with us. He’s in a foxhole with us. Hell, we hit Anzio on a PT boat together. German plane came down, Donovan’s standin’ there. He was a great guy, but he had foolish guts. I yelled at ‘im, `Get down, general!’ He wouldn’t get down, and bombs droppin’ all around.”40



In the invasion of Sicily, the U.S. Army command did not want to alert the Germans to the impending operation, and, therefore, refused to authorize a major OSS infiltration to lead guerrilla resistance. Nevertheless, in addition to Donovan’s personal landing with the invasion force, some OSS teams were infiltrated behind enemy lines at the beginning of the invasion. Although some members of one team were captured,41 other OSS teams did some effective work. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall told a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the completion of the Sicily campaign, that “the O.S.S. got in ahead of operations in Sicily and evidently accomplished things rather satisfactorily.”42



The OSS subsequently played important roles in Sardinia, Corsica, and on the Italian mainland. With the invasion of Sicily, the Italian monarch Victor Emmanuel ordered the arrest of fascist leader Benito Mussolini and replaced him with Army Chief of Staff, General Pietro Badoglio, who immediately began secret but prolonged negotiations with the Allies over armistice and peace terms. Eventually, the Allies agreed to recognize the royal government of King Victor Emmanuel with Badoglio as prime minister. Meanwhile, the Germans quickly freed Mussolini, moved in 16 divisions and took control of most of Italy. The Allies were supported by the Italian government in exile and the disarmed Italian Army, but most effectively by the anti-fascist Italian Resistance groups behind German lines. The Allies invaded southern Italy in September 1943 after the Italian Government surrendered.

A Four-Man OSS Team Takes Control of Sardinia While the main Allied planning in the Mediterranean in late summer 1943 concerned the invasion of the Italian peninsula, General Marshall saw a job for the OSS in the Italian island of Sardinia. There were almost 20,000 German troops still on the island in addition to an Italian garrison of 270,000 men. Marshall wanted to “give Donovan a chance to do his stuff without fear of compromising some operation in prospect. If he succeeds, fine, if not, nothing will be lost.” Eisenhower, acknowledging that OSS was “a high level intelligence gathering agency,” concurred.43



OSS’s mission to capture Sardinia without the need for a full-scale Allied invasion was assigned to a four-man Special Operations team led by Lieutenant Colonel Serge Obolensky, who had trained at Areas B and A and then co-authored a training curriculum for Operational Groups and taught them at Area F.44 By 13 September 1943 when the mission was parachuted into Sardinia, the Italian government had surrendered a few days earlier and the U.S. Army had landed at Salerno. The Germans were taking over Italy and there were German units on Sardinia. Eisenhower wanted the OSS to obtain the surrender of the Italian forces on the island and if possible to get the Italians to harass the Germans who were departing for Corsica. The OSS team would carry letters from Eisenhower as well as the Italian King and Prime Minister to the garrison commander, General Basso, ordering him to surrender. Donovan apparently selected Obolensky because he believed the former Russia prince had both the social standing and the bravado to persuade the Italian general in charge to surrender to him as a representative of the Allied Force Headquarters.



The team consisted of Obolenksy, First Lieutenant Michael Formichelli from New York City, an original member of the Italian-American OG, whom Obolensky had known at Areas A, F and B, who would serve as an interpreter, plus two communications specialists, Second Lieutenant James Russell, SO, an instructor at the OSS training school in Algeria, and a British radio operator, Sergeant William Sherwood, SOE, who would relay information to the OSS base station in Algiers. Neither Formichelli nor Russell had ever jumped before, but both volunteered. Since, the OSS had no contacts on the island, this would be the most dangerous of infiltrations, a “blind jump,” leaving them entirely on their own in enemy territory. On the night of 13-14 September 1943, the four men parachuted into the Sardinian countryside through an escape hole in the belly of a black-painted bomber. The drop went smoothly. Jumping into a combat zone at age fiftytwo, Obolensky became the oldest combat paratrooper in the U.S. Army, but this was not a point he thought about at the time. Rather he was concerned that in the bright moonlight, the white parachutes might alert the island’s defenders to their arrival. It did not, and the team members landed safely, buried their parachutes and assembled. While Russell and Sherwood were left in the valley to protect the radio equipment, Obolensky and Formichelli set off hiking through the night and early dawn for the city of Cagliari fifteen miles away. A friendly farmer told them that the nearest town was still occupied by the Germans, so they skirted it and using their map and a compass reached a railway station at the next town. In their U.S. Army uniforms and with submachine guns, the Americans emerged from a field into the railroad station to the astonishment of the passengers and waiting there and the local police officers at the station. Taking the initiative and acting boldly as if he had a regiment of troops waiting behind him, Colonel Obolensky demanded to see the officer in charge, and when he appeared declared brusquely: “I have a very important message from the King of Italy and General Badoglio to General Basso….Take me to him!”45



At the station, the watching crowd thought the American liberation of the island had begun and started to cheer. Uniformed members of the carabinieri politely led the two American officers to the local military commander, a colonel, who, cordially if cautiously because the Germans were still in the area, arranged to have them escorted to General Basso’s headquarters. There the general anxiously consented to “follow the orders of my king.” He agreed to surrender, but warily declined to attack the German troops which were leaving for Corsica and then northern Italy. Some of the Italian officers wanted to fight the Germans, but a fascist paratroop division mutinied when it heard of the surrender and shot the general’s representative. Until the paratroopers’ mutiny was quelled, the four Americans, now reunited, were kept in a safe house protected by armed carabinieri. Thirty-six hours after having left Algiers, the OSS team was able to radio headquarters that the mission had been accomplished: “except for the Germans retreating in the far north, Sardinia was ours.”46 A few days later, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. arrived with a token occupation force and formally accepted the surrender of the 270,000 Italian troops on Sardinia.47

To Die in Corsica A separate OSS mission to the nearby French island of Corsica proved more costly. Special Operations Branch had sent a four-man team—an American and three Corsicans—ashore from a submarine one night in December 1942. It was the first OSS secret agent team infiltrated into enemy-occupied Europe. As they arrived on the beach, they carried weapons, munitions, and a million French francs and Italian lire. Mussolini’s Italian Army had occupied the Vichy French island the previous month. Disliking the occupying Italian fascist regime, French Corsicans supported the team, but the secret agents were eventually captured, tortured and executed in the summer of 1943.



After the Italian government in Rome surrendered on 8 September 1943, the French Resistance on Corsica rose up, 20,000 strong, seized many towns, and called upon the Allies to help them get rid of them of the occupying Italian and German forces. An expeditionary French force from North Africa landed along with a detachment OSS French and Italian speaking Operational Groups, consisting of two officers and thirty enlisted men that Eisenhower had requested to accompany the French as a token Allied force. The two officers were Major Carleton Coon and Lieutenant Elmer (“Pinky”) Harris now recovered from the wound suffered in the North African campaign.48



Because of the earlier OSS mission, the local Corsican Resistance cooperated more with the OGs than with the French troops, whom they distrusted. The OSS proved both aggressive and heroic. On 25 September near Barchetta, a three-man OG team led by First Lieutenant Thomas L. Gordon of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, one of the four original OG officers trained at Areas A, F, and B, was on advanced patrol when it under heavy German mortar and artillery fire. The OSSers remained in position to cover the withdrawal of a French unit when enemy reinforcements arrived. A French captain observing it from a nearby hilltop, stated later that it was one of the bravest acts he had ever seen. Continuing to fire until the end, the three OSS men, Lieutenant Gordon, Sergeant Rocco T. Grasso of Babylon, New York, and Sergeant Sam Maselli, were killed by mortar fire. All three were posthumously awarded medals for bravery from the American and French governments.49 Gordon was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest military decoration for heroism of the U.S. Army (after the Medal of Honor); Grasso and Masselli the Bronze Star Medal.



During the twenty-five days that the Germans held their defensive perimeter while withdrawing through the post of Bastia, the OSS had the only Allied agent inside Bastia, sending information on enemy movements. Moving around the city to avoid capture, this indigenous agent was able to flash daily reports that enabled Allied planes to blast German armored units and ammunition caches as well as transport vessels in the harbor.50When the Germans completed their withdrawal, OSS established advanced OG and SI bases on Corsica from which they infiltrated agents and staged raids along the coast of German-occupied Italy.

OSS on the Italian Mainland As the American Fifth Army and British Eighth Army began their agonizingly slow progress up the Italian peninsula from September 1943 through May 1945, they were aided by various branches of the OSS. The main Allied effort in the Italian campaign, a grinding war of attrition involving series of largely frontal attacks on successive German-fortified positions up the mountainous peninsula, was one of the least mobile and comparatively most costly of the war.51 The Allies found themselves confronted by the skilful German Field Marshall Albert Kesselring and dogged German troops in formidable defensive positions. Under Lieutenant General Mark Wayne Clark, one of the war’s most complex and controversial commanders, the Americans and their Allies fought ferociously lethal battles at Salerno, Anzio, the Rapido River, Monte Cassino, before finally arrivin in Rome in June 1944, just a few days before the invasion of Normandy. Thereafter, his resources drained for the campaigns in France, Clark put increasing reliance in 1944-1945 on coordination between his slowly advancing troops and the sabotage and intelligence from behind the German lines in northern Italy by Italian Resistance forces supplied and guided by agents of the OSS.



OSS agents went ashore soon after the U.S. Fifth Army’s initial landing at Salerno, south of Naples, on 9 September 1943. Italian-speaking OSS agents from various operational branches, SI, SO, OG, X-2, MU, even R&A, served as interpreters, helped recruit Italians for supporting functions, and penetrated German lines and report on enemy units and deployments. From North Africa, OSSer Donald Downes attached his 90-man SI unit, including Irving Goff and other former leftists from the Spanish Civil War, who had been given paramilitary training at Area B, to Clark’s Fifth Army. Mexican-born but Kansas raised, Sergeant Louis Joseph (“Luz”) Gonzalez, 25, who trained at Area A in September 1943, worked in the Research and Analysis Branch office at OSS headquarters in Caserta, supervising a staff of 50 enlisted men and 100 Italian civilians engaged in translating Italian documents. He later described himself to his family as having been a “Rear Echelon Cloak and Dagger Kid.”52 The operational branches also recruited indigenous agents. At one point there were three different OSS units reporting back to OSS Mediterranean headquarters in Algiers but with practically no coordination. They had some great successes, such as getting four Italian agents into German-occupied Rome with a transmitter/receiver (Radio Vittoria), which produced important information, and a joint operation (code-named Simcol) between the Italianspeaking OGs and British SAS, which, with the help of the Italian Resistance movement, exfiltrated to safety by air, land, or sea at least 2,000 Allied POWs who had escaped or were released from Italian prison camps when Italy surrendered.53



It was in this period, that Joseph (“Jumping Joe”) Savoldi, Jr., the Italian-born American football star and professional wrestler who trained at Area B, participated in the “McGregor” Mission, first seeking surrender but subsequently looking for information from Italian admirals and scientists about recent new weapons developed by the Axis. The McGregor team included Commander John M. Shaheen, former Republican party publicity director in Illinois, Ensign E. Michael Burke, sports promoter and later President and co-owner of the New York Yankees, Lieutenant Henry Ringling (“Bud”) North, scion of the circus family, Savoldi and a few others.54 Most of the team, including Savoldi, went ashore with the invading Army at Salerno in September 1943. Later they took high-speed PT (patrol-torpedo) boats to the island of Capri where they met with sympathetic Italian admirals and anti-fascist scientists and learned about the Germans’ new radio-guided bomb as well as the Italians’ deadly new magnetic-activated torpedo designed to explode underneath a ship, breaking it in two. This was an important coup for the OSS.55



Infiltrated Italian and American agents some ten to fifty miles behind German lines in southern Italy were particularly helpful in providing target information for Allied artillery and bombers.56 One of the most effective of these was Peter Tompkins, 24, son of an affluent American family who had lived in Rome before the war. Infiltrated into German-occupied Rome, he made contact with the Italian Underground. Using the clandestine Radio Vittoria, he sent real time tactical intelligence about German plans and deployments, which proved more immediately useful than the Ultra decrypts which took two or three days to decipher and deliver. The intelligence provided by Tompkins and his Italian agents was credited by the U.S. Army with saving the Anzio beachhead with its 50,000 American and British troops southwest of Rome from being crushed by the Germans in early 1944.57



In a separate operation in 1943 and1944, the OSS Secret Intelligence Branch, seeking strategic as contrasted to tactical intelligence, inserted and recruited agents in central and northern Italy. The overall effectiveness of that operation remains the subject of controversy.58 A few of those indigenous operatives ultimately became double agents and were “turned” against the Allies by the Nazis, or were Nazi agents from the start. As the Allies advanced, the Nazis and Italian fascists also planted “stay-behind” agents for purposes of intelligence gathering and sabotage. The task of hunting them down belonged to OSS Counter-Intelligence, X-2, and particularly its chief in Italy, 26-year-old Lieutenant James Jesus Angleton, Jr., who had joined the OSS in September 1943, and gone through OSS training camps in Virginia and Maryland, including SO training at Area B. Dr. Bruno Uberti, a refugee from fascist Italy who trained at Area B with Angleton remembered Angleton as “extremely brilliant but a little strange….I would have liked to have been one of his friends,” Uberti said, “but he never gave me the chance because he was so secretive.”59 The son of an overseas vice President for the National Cash Register Company, Angleton completed his training with a successful industrial espionage scheme in which he was able to infiltrate the office of the chairman of the Western Electric Company. Fluent in Italian because his father’s office had been in Milan, Angleton was enrolled in Counter-Intelligence and soon dispatched to the Italian desk of that branch in London and subsequently in Rome, where by the end of the war, his special X-2 units were credited with capturing more than a thousand enemy intelligence agents. This was the beginning of a career that would make James Jesus Angleton, Jr., the most famous and controversial of the CIA’s spy catchers.60

Operational Groups Join the Fight in Italy The Operational Group for Italy was the first of the OSS OGs to be sent into combat. It consisted of nearly 150 officers and men, primarily second-generation, Italian Americans, who had been recruited from U.S. Army units, then given OG training at Areas F, B, and A before being dispatched in September 1943 to North Africa for additional training there and use in Italy.61 A second Italian Operational Group was organized and trained at Areas F and B in October and November 1943. It then followed replaced the first group at the OSS training camps in Algeria. The OSS Italian OGs were under the overall command of Colonel Russell B. (“Russ”) Livermore, a New York lawyer with whom Donovan had worked before the war. In the first group, the operations officer was Captain Albert R. (“Al”) Materazzi, who trained at Areas A, F, and B, and been with the unit from the beginning. As the first OG unit to be trained, it had had its problems, Materazzi recalled. Area F at the Congressional Club had not been ready for them when they arrived and their training was rushed.62 By the end of October 1943, the unit moved from Algiers to liberated Corsica with orders to harass Germans in northern Italy, while the main Allied forces were bogged down 200 miles to the south. Corsica is only 35 miles from the Italian mainland, and it became the headquarters for the first Italian Operational Group and the point of departure for its raids as well as some of the infiltration of SO and SI agents into central and northern Italy, usually by fast boats but by parachute drops if farther inland. The OGs took control of some of the smaller islands off the important port of Livorno (Leghorn), south of Pisa, and beat back raids by German commandos. Allied Forces Headquarters ordered the OGs to undertake coastal raids for intelligence, sabotage, and to draw German units away from the front line in the South. The Italian OGs staged a series of raids, probing behind enemy positions, capturing prisoners, destroying bridges, cutting rail lines, and exploding concrete shore gun emplacements before withdrawing.63 Throughout the winter of 1943-1944, these OG teams gained the distinction of becoming the northernmost American troops fighting in the Mediterranean Theater. However, they paid a heavy price for their harassment of the Germans.64

The “Ginny” Mission and a German Atrocity Most of the raids by the Italian-American OGs were successful, but the “Ginny” Mission in late March 1944 ended in disaster. Part of Operation “Strangle” to cut the main German supply line in Italy, the Genoa-La Spezia coastal railroad, the plan was to blow up a crucial railroad tunnel near Stazione di Framura some fifty miles south of Genoa. In the week to ten days it would take to repair the tunnel, Allied airpower would be able to destroy the long lines of backed up supply trains backed up far beyond the mountains.65



On a moonless night, a team composed of 15 Italian Americans from the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area, all of them trained at Areas F and B, set out in PT boats with 650 pounds of explosives to blow up the railroad tunnel. First Lieutenant Vincent (“Vinny”) J. Russo of Montclair, New Jersey, one of the initial four OG officers to train at Areas A, F, and B, was in command; First Lieutenant Paul Traficante was his deputy. Among the 13 enlisted men was Technician 5th Grade Rosario Squatrito, (nicknamed “Saddo” and “Rosy Squat”), a quiet, young tool and die-maker, from Staten Island, New York, whose nephew would later write an account in his uncle’s memory.66 In the darkness, the fifteen men, hoisted their weapons, radio, explosives and other gear into three inflatable dinghies and paddled silently to shore. They headed inland toward the tunnel, and their radio operator soon reported back that they were “on the target.” But suddenly enemy flares light exploded off the coast and shore searchlights began flashing across the water as German patrol boats raced toward the American PT boats. There was an exchange of machine gun fire, and the Americans headed back to Corsica. The PT boats returned the next several nights to the prearranged point, but there was no contact with the OG team. There had been no explosion at the tunnel, and the team had disappeared.



Not until a year later in April 1945 did OSS discover the fate of the Ginny Mission. Once ashore, the team had left the explosives in the rafts and sent scouts to locate the nearby tunnel. But it was almost dawn when the scouts returned, and Lieutenants Russo and Traficante decided to wait until the next night to approach the guarded tunnel and set the charges. Meanwhile, the team hid in an empty barn. They had hidden the dinghies well from the land side, but in the morning a fisherman saw them from the water and informed the local fascists. Alerted, the fascist militia and the German garrison sent out patrols and soon found the saboteurs in the barn about a mile from the tunnel. Although surrounded, the Americans opened fire from the barn. In the fire fight, a number of them were wounded, including their leader, Lieutenant Russo. Facing the inevitable, the group surrendered. They were interrogated, and on Sunday morning, March 26, only five days after they had landed, all fifteen, were taken in trucks to a open field along the coast called Punta di Bianca, southeast of La Spezia. There in two groups, their hands tied behind their backs, they were executed by a German firing squad and their bodies thrown into a large pit, their hastily dug, unmarked grave.67



Early in the war, Hitler had issued an infamous “Commando Order,” directing that captured Allied commandoes or parachutists engaged in sabotage or guerrilla operations should be treated as spies instead of prisoners of war and summarily executed regardless of the fact that they were in military uniform and operating as Army units.68 This was, of course, a violation of the Geneva Conventions about treatment of military prisoners of war. In regard to the Ginny Mission, a German communiqué at the end of March 1943 had stated that the commandoes had been “annihilated in combat,” but the truth gradually emerged through subsequent message intercepts as well as local Italians. When he learned that the members of the Ginny Mission had been executed, Donovan ordered that the German general in command of the region, General Anton Dostler, was to be taken alive so that he could be tried as a war criminal. Dostler was captured at the end of the war, and although he pleaded that he had only followed Hitler’s orders, this was not accepted as justification, and it was noted that he had continued to insist on the execution over the objections of several of his subordinate officers. In October 1945, Dostler was tried and convicted by a U.S. military commission in Rome, the first German general to be tried as a war criminal. Dostler was executed by an American Army firing squad near Naples, Italy at daybreak on 1 December 1945.69

Arming the Partisans against the Germans in Northern Italy For nearly ten months, until the summer of 1944, U.S. Army commanders in Italy failed to understand how best to use the men of Donovan’s organization, because many of the professional soldiers still viewed them with a mixture of jealousy and contempt as privileged but naïve amateurs. As Peter Tompkins, the highly successful SI agent in Tome, recalled bitterly, “Unfortunately, despite the fact that we had been at war over two years, the OSS had been granted little opportunity by field commanders to prove itself an effective weapon of espionage and sabotage behind the enemy lines; most of us were still being frowned on by the brass as a collection of madmen. I had therefore been obliged, by lack of facilities, or even of recognition, to operate more or less clandestinely not only from the Germans, but from our own side as well.70 An official account by the OSS put it more diplomatically, stating that a summary of the operations of the Italian-speaking OGs from September 1943 to June 1944, showed that the type of operations they performed, “though highly successful and effective, was not strictly that for which they had been originally intended.” “It was not until July of 1944 that AFHQ [Allied Force Headquarters, MEDTO] began to understand the manipulation of OGs as a weapon to weaken and disrupt enemy communications behind his lines.”71



This realization by Allied theater commanders in the Mediterranean that they could and should use OGs effectively in connection with indigenous resistance movements, may have resulted from a combination of factors. One was their successes in Italy, another was their successes in France in the summer of 1944, and a third may have been because the Allied armies in Italy were reduced in strength in 1944 as veteran units were transferred to the new battle zones in France. Consequently, the American campaign in Italy was forced to place more reliance than in the past on anti-fascist partisans behind German lines in northern Italy. The Italian Resistance Movement was composed of a diverse spectrum of anti-fascist groups that had arisen spontaneously, but these parties joined together after the Allied landings in September 1944 under the National Liberation Committee (CLN) to cooperate with the Allies, which said it could put 90,000 partisans into the field if the Allies would supply them with arms and other material support.72 Dealing with Resistance movements in enemy-occupied countries was a new phenomenon for the Allies in World War II and one that was complex because it often interlinked political and military problems. The British secret service agencies sought to undermine communist, socialist and other leftist groups in the Italian Resistance. London’s postwar political aim was for a conservative Italian government under a constitutional monarchy. In contrast, most of the American agents, unlike the British, were of Italian ethnicity, and even more importantly, unlike the British, the American OSS dealt equally with the partisans groups regardless of their political affiliation. The primary OSS strategy was to facilitate mutual relationships with all active partisan groups in order to maximize the military effectiveness of the Resistance against the German Army.73



More than a hundred SO, SI, and OG teams, including both Americans and Italian nationals, were infiltrated behind German lines into northern Italy between 1943 and 1945. Among the Italian nationals trained and deployed by the OSS was Piero Boni. After the war, Boni, a member of the Socialist party, would emerge as the second highest ranking official in CGIL, Italian General Confederation of Labor, the largest confederation of labor unions in Italy. But in 1944, he was a 24-year-old labor lawyer from Rome, who had been earlier drafted into the Italian Army as a 2nd lieutenant, and after the Italian surrender in 1943, had returned to Rome, joined the Italian Resistance movement in the capital and met OSS’s Peter Tompkins. In the summer of 1944, Boni was among those members of the Resistance selected and trained by OSS for intelligence and special operations missions in the North. Like many others in the Resistance, he was struck by the political impartiality of the OSS in dealing with the partisans from the left to the right.74



Boni and the other members of his OSS training class underwent three weeks training by the Americans in July 1944. The first two weeks were spent at an OSS school by the sea in Naples, where the instructors were Italian Americans, who had been trained at Areas F, B, or A, and the curriculum replicated that of those OSS training camps in Virginia and Maryland. “They gave us American cigarettes and my first chewing gum,” Boni recalled.”75 Instruction was in Italian and the OSS recruits were trained in observation and reporting, transmission and reception using five-letter groups in code, and the effectiveness of various demolitions, particularly plastic explosives. They also practiced with American and British pistols, submachine guns, hand grenades and bazookas. “I particularly liked the bazooka,” Boni said. “That was a new weapon, and it was good. Later [in northern Italy], we used the bazooka to shoot out a window at German headquarters!”76 From Naples, the Italians were taken for a week of training and jumps at a parachute school staffed by British and American instructors at Brindisi. Captain Elmer (“Pinky”) Harris had helped to establish the school in the winter of 1943-1944, but in April, Harris had become so ill with abdominal pains in what would eventually be diagnosed as intestinal ulcers that he was transferred back home to Bethesda Naval Hospital for recuperation.77



After their training, Boni and five other Italian agents were parachuted into northern Italy in late July 1944 as the “Renata” Mission. They were soon performing their mission’s goals: making contact with the local Resistance group, in this case near Parma, arranging for arms, food, and other supplies to be airdropped to the Resistance, and most importantly, obtaining information about the German forces in the area. By wireless radio or couriers, they information on enemy units, equipment, particularly armor and artillery, minefields, and movements of troops and military supplies, usually with dates and map coordinates.78 The information sent back was valuable. One of their couriers took the German plans for reinforcing the Gothic Line, the main German defensive position in northern Italy. “We had an Italian engineer, who was working in the German Army headquarters, and he provided the plans to us, and we sent them to the Americans, so they knew exactly what the Germans were going to do, when and where.”79 Soon, however, the Germans learned about Boni and the others by capturing and torturing a team member until he gave them the information. A special brigade of SS troops was sent to find them, and on 17 October 1944, the team awoke to find the village surrounded. “We destroyed the radio,” Boni said. “Eight men were killed in the fighting with the Germans, including the head of the Partisans… I jumped from a window… to the ground and then leapt into the river and thus escaped.” Dodging Germans for a month, Boni and another survivor, code-named “Comandante Beretta,” were finally able to get to the OSS command post in Siena in mid-November 1944.80



Despite incursions by the SS brigade, the partisan forces in the district of Parma had increased in size and momentum, and through Boni and Commandante Beretta, they requested a full-fledge OSS mission to operate between the partisan command in Parma and the advancing Allied armies. Allied Command quickly authorized the “Cayuga” Mission.81 It was typical of the approximately thirty OSS Italian OG missions in northern Italy during 1944-1945. It was composed of Italian Americans and consisted of Captain Michael Formichelli, a veteran of Sardinia, and six enlisted men, all of them trained at Areas F and B. With the way cleared by Boni and Beretta, the initial elements of the “Cayuga” Mission parachuted into the Parma district on 23 December 1944. Back in the zone, Boni was reassigned to the “Rochester” mission, an SO mission, continuing the tasks of the earlier Renata Mission and including several Italians headed by another American, a Captain McClusky. The “Cayuga” and “Rochester” missions now operated on their own but kept in frequent contact with each other.82 They provided much valuable information for the advancing American Army, such as enemy targets and where the retreating Germans were building defenses, erecting anti-tank ditches and emplacing mines.83 OSS Florence praised “Coletti” (Boni’s code name) for “the high level of intelligence you have been sending.”84 The praise came from Lieutenant Irving Goff, who years later recalled that “We had eighteen radio teams speaking German, French, English, Italian in northern Italy….The intelligence we sent was called by Allied headquarters the best from any source. We had house-by-house….We had an overlay map of all the German positions. The American Army knew where every German was.”85



Formichelli’s “Cayuga” mission established contact with the unified Resistance command in the Parma area, which directed thirteen partisan brigades, nearly 4,000 partisans. Despite having their radio broken and suffering a broken ankle on the drop into the mountains, Formichelli and his team of Italian-American OGs evaded or beat off several German patrols. The team was constantly on the move, traveling through the mountains at night, on foot or with horses or mules, stayed in private homes, churches, barns, even shepherds’ huts. Formichelli held several meetings with partisan leaders, and after they accepted OSS leadership, he dispersed members of the mission to instruct the various brigades in guerrilla tactics, sabotage, and the proper use and maintenance of the weapons, explosives, radios and other materials. With his approval, 76 air drops were made bringing supplies to the partisans and the Cayuga Mission.86 Preparatory to the final Allied offensive in April 1945, General Mark Wayne Clark called for a partisan uprising to immediately attack enemy transport columns, garrisons and encampments, blow up . enemy command posts and ammunition and gasoline depots, and cut enemy telegraph and telephone lines. At the same time, they should try to prevent retreating enemy from destroying bridges, power plants, and other facilities that would be needed by the advancing Allies.87 The partisans, including those in the Parma area, did rise up and simultaneously staged night attacks on all German command posts in the area. They also attacked local garrisons and established roadblocks to hinder the German retreat. On 25 April partisans, according to plans approved by Formichelli, rose up in Parma, as in other northern cities, overcame the German guards and took over the city. In Parma, the 34th U.S. Infantry Division arrived that night. Formichelli arranged for the partisans to stage a victory parade through the city’s streets and then surrender their weapons.88



During the five-month “Cayuga” mission, Formichelli subsequently reported that the partisans in his zone had been engaged in 182 actions, conducted 38 acts of sabotage, blowing up 6 railroad bridges and 7 highway bridges. They destroyed two trains loaded with arms and ammunitions, three locomotives, 41 trucks, and captured 57 trucks and numerous weapons and stocks of ammunition. They had attacked 43 enemy command posts and eliminated 26 of them, killed 612 enemy soldiers, wounded 750, and taken 1,520 prisoners, which did not include the enemy prisoners taken during the final stages of the partisan cooperation with the Allied Forces.89

Danger and Death in the Dolomites What would become one of the most famous OG missions in northern Italy, the “Tacoma” Mission, began rather strangely. Both the commanding officer, Captain Howard W. Chappell, and his radio operator, Corporal Oliver Silsby, were members of a German-American Operational Group that OSS had recruited and trained in Maryland and Virginia for use in German-speaking countries. Why were these two members of the OSS German OG being deployed in Italy? The main reason was because of Chappell’s persuasiveness and his ardent desire for action.



Howard W. Chappell was one of those extraordinary individuals that so typified the OSS. He came from Cleveland, Ohio, the first of four children of a post office worker and a nurse. Because of his mother’s Prussian birth and ancestry, he was bilingual in English and German. A natural athlete, he played football in high school and college at Ohio State and Case Western Reserve and was also a Golden Gloves boxer. In June 1942, he joined the U.S. Army, earned an officer’s commission, and served first in the Military Police and then as a parachute instructor at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was at Benning, that he gained his nickname, “Flash Gordon.” This was due in part because of his movie-star looks—he was 6’2” tall, with broad shoulders, blond hair, and blue eyes. It was also because of his daring, even reckless, antics. In one episode, he allegedly perched on one of the horizontal bars of a jump tower, tossed out his parachute and leaped with it to the ground. In another, when some of his men were beaten up in a bar fight in notorious Phoenix City, Alabama, just across the state line from Fort Benning, he retaliated by driving a 2 ½ -ton Army truck through the front of the tavern. As a paratroop officer fluent in German, Chappell was recruited for the German OG being organized by the OSS. Like most other OGs, he trained at Area F and then Area B. In June 1944, he was sent to North Africa to await further orders.90



As the months dragged by, Chappell became tired of waiting to be deployed, and he asked Italian OG operational officer, Albert Materazzi for mission behind enemy lines.91 He got his wish in December 1944, a month after his 24th birthday. It was an assignment to organize the partisans to block the German Army’s vital supply and escape routes from northern Italy to Austria and Germany through the passes in the Alpine and Dolomite Mountains. This was the “Tacoma” Mission. The other two original volunteers were Corporal Oliver Silsby and Sergeant Salvadore Fabrega. Silsby, the radio operator, was from Detroit, Michigan. He had received his OSS communications training at Area C, then been sent to North Africa and subsequently made two jumps into Yugoslavia.92 At 32, Fabrega was the oldest of the three; trained as part of the Italian Operational Groups, he was fluent in Italian and accompanied the mission as its interpreter. He had a complicated and somewhat unclear history. Born in Catalonia in 1913, he later left with his Spanish parents to spend four years in Germany before the family moved to Argentina. In his teens, he became a merchant seaman and traveled around the world. In addition to Spanish and German, he learned to speak Italian, French, and English. From 1936-1939, the former Catalan fought in the Loyalist Army against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. Twice wounded, he left for France at the end of the war and joined the Foreign Legion. Later, he deserted and when France fell in 1940, he fled to England and then the United States, working in the merchant marine and becoming a U.S. citizen. Living in New York City, he joined the U.S. Army in1942; the OSS recruited him into the Italian OGs and trained him at Areas F and B in 1943.93



The day after Christmas 1944, Chappell, Silsby and Fabrega leaped out of plane into a snow-covered Alpine clearing, 200 miles behind the Germans’ front lines. They quickly began training the partisans in the raiding tactics, demolition work, and the use and maintenance of Allied weapons provided by air drops. Two raids successfully destroyed forty thousand liters of fuel and a locomotive with four cars of troops and material. Later, the team took in a couple of Austrian Luftwaffe personnel, who said they were deserters. But when it was discovered they were planning to rejoin their unit and inform on the team, their throats were cut. On 21 February 1945, three American sergeants of the “Tacoma” mission parachuted in to help with the partisans, Eugene Delaini, a weapons expert, Charles Ciccone, a demolitions man, and Eric Burchardt, a medical corpsman. When Italian Fascist militia moved into the local village and cut off the Americans’ food supply, the team and its partisans sneaked down from the mountain at night and in a firefight, blasted their headquarters with machine gun fire and 18 rounds from the bazooka, a new weapon which the frightened fascists referred to as a “mysterious cannon.”94



The raids and rumors about the presence of an American team caused the German headquarters in the area to dispatch initially more than a hundred, heavily armed Fascist troops to capture the “Tacoma” mission. The Americans and partisans moved through the snow in mule-drawn sleds, but the Americans were awakened the morning of 28 February with cries from the partisans that “Fascists are coming—hundreds of them!”95 The Americans and partisans hit the Fascist troops with fire from rifles, submachine guns, light-machine guns, and mortars. There were now six American OSSers, plus nine rescued Allied aviators, and two dozen Italian partisans. During the day’s action, 120 Fascists and two partisans were killed. That night, both sides withdrew; the next day, German troops arrived and blasted the mountaintop with artillery for six hours before overrunning it, only to find it the stone-hut vacant, except for a booby trap that the Americans left inside the door and which killed six Germans.96 Field Marshal Kesselring, the German commander in Italy, concerned about the threat to the key German lines of supply and potential routes of withdrawal through the Alpine passes, now ordered that the partisans and their American leaders had to be captured at all costs. In the ensuing manhunt by 3,500 German troops, the combined “Tacoma” and “Aztec” missions found themselves surrounded on the morning of 6 March 1945; they had been betrayed. Everyone had to run for his life in different directions through the mountainous countryside. Most escaped, but half a dozen partisans and two Americans were captured. Radioman Oliver Silsby was the first to become exhausted and collapse. Captain Chappell stopped to help him, and both were captured, although Chappell was able to escape into the brush. Fabrega, who had dropped behind with two partisans, was also captured.97



Interrogated by the SS in Belluno, Fabrega stuck to the story that he was a downed American aviator and knew nothing of the OSS or the partisans. He, like the partisans captured with him was tortured, tied to chairs, beaten with clubs, and given electric shocks to various parts of the body. Fabrega did not disclose information. The next day, he and forty other prisoners were taken to the Belluno town square. The square was filled with townspeople, but all was quiet except the barked orders of the SS officers. A small German truck was backed under a tree; two youthful but beaten partisans stood in the rear. An officer brought Fabrega brought forward and asked the two youths if they knew him. Both said “no,” despite the fact that they had been allied with the “Tacoma” mission for weeks and had shared the same stone hut with Fabrega only forty-eight hours earlier. Germans now beat them again and looped nooses over their necks, but neither said a word. Both looked up at the sky. The officer waved his arm, the driver pulled the truck forward, and the two bodies swung on the ropes. The silence was broken by a woman’s scream.98



The rest of the Italian prisoners were then hanged, some by rope nooses but others savagely snagged by the throat on meat hooks. Fabrega kept to his cover story and continued to be starved and tortured. After eleven days, he was taken to an SS prison camp near Bolzano, 150 miles north. Startlingly while on the way, the Italian driver, “Sette,” a chauffeur for the SS commander in Belluno, told Fabrega that he was also a spy for the OSS and tried to convince Fabrega to escape with him to the partisans. But the sergeant, either not believing him or realizing the importance of the kind of information the spy provided the Americans, declined. Instead Fabrega remained in the car all the way to the SS-run prison camp. There, he continued to undergo torture and interrogation.99



While Sergeant Fabrega and Corporal Silsby were prisoners, Captain Chappell had escaped capture, despite being wounded in the leg. He was caught again, but using the silent killing technique taught by William (“Dan”) Fairbairn, he snapped the guard’s neck and took his weapon. He later killed an SS lieutenant with a walking stick. He was able to regroup with the partisans and other American OSS team members, Sergeants Ciccone, Delaini and Burchhardt. When the Allied offensives began in April 1945, they and the partisans scattered roadways with four-pronged road spikes, which caused considerable damage to vehicular traffic, they tore down telephone poles and telephone and electric wire, and blew up bridges at Vas and Busche, and killed a couple of dozen enemy troops. On 24 April, seeking to get to a mountain pass to prevent retreating Germans, Chappell and two other Americans, aided by a blonde Italian countess, hid in boxes in the back of a truck, as their partisan driver narrowly got them though two German road blocks. Together with partisan groups in the area, they mopped up a number of small German garrisons and learning that a large convoy was headed north, they blew up a bridge just north of Caprile and set up a road block and a trap for the Germans in the narrow winding mountain road. When the convoy arrived, Chappell and the partisans opened fire from the high ground, killing some 130 Germans in fifteen minutes. The single-file convoy was trapped, and after the initial firefight, its leaders asked for terms of surrender. Chappell said unconditional surrender, and after a few minutes of threats and discussion, the 3,500 Germans surrendered. Among the prisoners were a number of SS men, including the notoriously cruel Major Schroeder, head of the SS in the region and responsible for the torture and executions in Belluno and elsewhere. When Schroeder surrendered, after first threatening to kill all the civilians he had as hostages, he was found to be carrying the weapon the Americans had given to a teenage partisan who had served as Chappell’s assistant. The youth had been captured in March, and in torturing him in a vain attempt to get him to betray the Americans, Schroeder’s SS men had cut off his hands and gouged out his eyes before executing him. The morning after the surrender of the German convoy, several officers of the 504th Panzer Division and other units told Chappell that they were very disturbed about being confined with SS and asked to be separated. Chappell granted their request. That night, he summoned Major Schroeder and his seven SS officers to his quarters, where they talked in German. Chappell’s report tells what happened next:



We became quite friendly and even joked about how they had once captured me. We drank a little wine, and I learned the name of the spy who had disclosed my location prior to 6 March. This man was later killed in an attempt to escape.



We laughed about the fact that some of my equipment that had been captured was in his, and some of his officers, possession. He told me at this time that neither he nor any of his officers had ever committed any outrages and they regretted some of the brutalities that other Germans had committed.



Before he left he told me that he was glad that he had surrendered to me because all of his staff felt I would treat them as they would have treated me, if they had the chance. That was the way I felt about it. All of them were killed that night trying to escape.100



Over the next few days, as the Allies advanced north, Chappell, his men, and the partisans extended their roadblock farther south preventing the escape of more German troops. They tied up several German divisions and forced the surrender of 7,500 Wehrmacht troops. On 3 May, Chappell drove down to Feltre and welcomed the U.S. 85th Infantry Division and turned the German prisoners and his intelligence information over to the advancing American Army.101 Both Fabrega and Silsby had survived the prison camp. In the final days of the war, Fabrega escaped in the confusion and went to Merano, where the top SS officials in the region were located. Brazenly, he walked into an SS barracks, announced he was a U.S. Army captain and told the Germans they were restricted to the barracks. His bluff worked, they stayed put, and when the U.S. 10th Mountain Division arrived the next day, Fabrega turned the city and the SS troops over to them, courtesy of a sergeant of the OSS. Thus ended the Tacoma Mission. All three initial members were awarded medals, Fabrega the Distinguished Service Cross, Chappell the Silver Star Medal, and Silsby the Bronze Star, for their heroism.102

Effectiveness of the Resistance in Italy Although the most publicized, the Tacoma Mission’s success was not unique.103 Lieutenant George M. Hearn, a former football player from San Jose State College in California, who joined the OSS in December 1943, received SO and MU training in OSS training camps in Virginia and Maryland, and then ran boats along the Adriatic coast, bluffed a German commander in the city of Chioggia near Venice with the threat of an air attack, and accepted the surrender of a heavily armed garrison of 1,100 German troops on 24 April 1945.104



Sergeant Caesar J. Civitella, who had trained at Areas F and B with the OSS Italian OGs, was part of the “Spokane/Sewanee” Missions in the Tyrolean Alps in March 1945, which prevented German destruction of bridges and power facilities by seizing a hydro-electric facility supplying power to Milan, removed road mines, and forced the surrender of various German garrisons including the one guarding the Stelvio Pass in April 1945.105 Across northern Italy, within days after the uprising had begun on 25 April, the patriot forces had taken over the cities of Turin, Genoa, and Milan, which formed Italy’s key industrial triangle. Mussolini, his mistress, and some of his ministers sought to escape to Switzerland. Civitella and his unit were directed to go after Mussolini, capture him and hold him for trial.106 But before the Americans could reach him, the Italian dictator and his mistress were captured by partisans near Lake Como and the Swiss border. They were summarily executed by partisans on 28 April and their bodies hanged upside down in downtown Milan. The German military governor of northern Italy, Waffen-SS Lieutenant General Karl Wolff, who had been negotiating via the OSS office of Allen Dulles in Bern since February, finally signed an armistice on 2 May 1945, six days before Germany surrendered. Those negotiations helped provide a crucial framework for the surrender of the German Army in Italy, and the fact that it was the OSS that Wolff approached indicates the importance that German High Command attached to Donovan’s organization.107



This new form of warfare, the use of small teams of highly trained special operations combatants to supply, train, and direct indigenous insurgent groups, proved successful in Italy. In 1944, the Germans had used a hundred thousand Italian police and Fascist militia to contain the Italian Resistance. But by February 1945, the unified and Allied-directed Resistance movement had grown so strong in northern Italy that Field Marshal Kesselring ordered his commanders to suppress it, even if it meant bringing German combat units from the front.108 Even so, entire regions of northern Italy had by the end of the winter been cleared of German forces, and the German commander-inchief admitted that it was impossible to move troops or supplies through the area except in large, heavily-guarded convoys.109 British General Harold Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, estimated that Kesselring had detached as many as six of his nearly twenty divisions to control the partisans, and some historians agree with that judgment.110 In addition to their main role in espionage and sabotage, the partisans, inflicted 2,700 German casualties and 3,800 casualties among Italian Fascist troops, according to official figures. But Kesselring argued that a more realistic estimate was some 5,000 German soldiers killed and 8,000 missing and presumed killed. His intelligence officers claimed the figures were even higher.111



The number of Americans in the OSS Operational Groups in Italy who were killed in action included three officers and nineteen enlisted men; several officers and enlisted men were wounded; one officer and seven enlisted men were captured. This was from an original contingent of seventeen officers and 126 enlisted men.112 These figures did not include casualties in other OSS branches, for example, the mysterious death of Captain Roderick G. (“Steve”) Hall, a 28-year-old Special Operations officer who had trained at Areas F and A in the winter of 1943-1944, parachuted into northern Italy, but was caught, tortured and executed by the OVRA, an Italian Fascist organization similar to the Gestapo, in January 1945.113 Nor does it include the killing of Major William G. Holohan, deputy chief of SO in Italy, murdered in December 1943, allegedly by two American members of his own mission, the Chrysler Mission, as a result of personal animosities and differences over Holohan’s policies towards the partisans in Northern Italy.114 Many more Italians, of course, also paid with their lives in the shadow war against the Nazis. The Germans launched major anti-partisan offensives in the winter of 1944-1945 that included massacres of civilians, sometimes whole villages, for aiding the Resistance in its attacks on German soldiers. A total of some 35,000 Italians, including partisans, died, some 21,000 were wounded, and 9,000 were deported to slave labor camps in Germany, as a result of German reprisals and the anti-partisan campaign.115



At the end of the war in Europe, General Mark Wayne Clark commended the OSS Special Operations and Operational Groups for their roles in the “outstanding success of partisan operations in the areas where these men operated.” The OSS operational unit with the U.S. 5th Army later received a Presidential Distinguished Unit Award.116 In the long, frustrating Allied campaign in Italy, the OSS, like the British SOE, helped to compensate for the limited resources available to the Allied commanders in Italy by supplying and directing thousands of Italian partisan forces in the German’s rear. The OSS did not alter the course of events in Italy, but they, particularly the OGs who called themselves “Donovan’s Devils,”117 did help, in ways far beyond their small numbers, diminish some of the difficulties confronted by the Allies in their advance up the Italian peninsula.

Directing the Resistance in France To the U.S. high command, the Mediterranean theater was always peripheral to the main arena, the cross-channel assault on the German Army in France and the thrust into Germany itself. OSS, like British SOE and SIS, had an important role in that strategy. The role was firstly to establish contacts inside German-occupied France and provide intelligence about enemy strength and defenses and secondly, when the Allied invasions began, to lead French Resistance groups, the maquis,118 and block or at least impede German reinforcements.



The Allies decided to invade northern France, with a smaller subsequent attack in the south, at the Quebec Conference in August 1943. The target date set for the early summer of 1944. As part of the planning for this major western drive against Hitler’s Third Reich, the OSS created large bases in London and in Algiers from which it planned, trained, and directed the extensive operations with the French Resistance to aid the Allied invasions. Rivalry and distrust existed among the different political groups in the Resistance in France, as in Italy, and there was outright hostility between the Communist Partisans and the others. The Communists were also deeply suspicious of the OSS and the British SIS and SOE. The Allied agencies were often caught among these rivalries, but they were able in varying degrees to work with most of them with the frequent exception of the Communists.119 Indeed, it was in part because of the internecine rivalries among the French underground, that General Eisenhower approved the use of British, American and French special operations teams in an attempt to direct the fragmented French underground to accomplish effective, coordinated attacks upon targets that would directly aid the Allied invasion and defeat of the German Army.120



Joint discussions in London in the summer of 1943 among OSS, SOE, SIS and the Free French forces of General Charles DeGaulle concluded that the main Resistance efforts before the D-Day should be directed toward obtaining intelligence as well as conducting sabotage of factories, power plants and fuel storage depots, in order to reduce the flow of war materials to the German forces. SO began infiltrating agents—Frenchspeaking Americans or French nationals dressed in civilian clothes--into occupied France by parachute or rubber raft in early summer 1943. Months before the Allied invasion, 85 OSS officers, enlisted men, and civilians worked behind enemy lines in France as part of the SO/SOE effort to build secret circuits among the maquis that would serve as nuclei for an eventual uprising of Resistance at the time of the invasion.121 In the first six months of 1944, Resistance groups connected with the Allied agents sabotaged more than 100 factories producing war materials for the Germans, cut power lines, several railroad tracks, disabled more than a thousand locomotives and fomented strikes in coal mines.122 Several agents were killed in skirmishes or captured and executed by the Germans, as were members of the French Resistance who had helped them.123 Although SO initially suffered a considerable number of casualties, it became increasingly effective. By the time of the Normandy invasion, OSS SO had become as effective as British SOE as the two agencies organized a potent, armed French Resistance of some 300,000 men and women.124



Women did play an important part in espionage and sabotage in France. The maquis had long used women as well as men, and the British and Americans joined them. The risks were high. Thirteen SOE women agents were executed by the Nazis.125 There were fewer American women agents and none was captured. The most famous, Virginia Hall, a Radcliffe graduate and former Baltimore socialite, was one of the most effective OSS espionage agents in France. This American socialite, who spoke fluent French, had been working as a code clerk in the U.S. embassy in London in 1940 when SOE recruited her and sent her, posed as a New York journalist, to Vichy France, where she organized and ran a very effective string of French undercover agents. She had a wooden leg, the result of a prewar hunting accident. It did not deter her, but it gave her a characteristic limp. “The woman who limps is one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France,” the Gestapo declared. We must find and destroy her.”126 The Germans never did find her, but their intensive search forced her to leave France and return to England via Spain.



In late 1943, Virginia Hall transferred to the OSS SO Branch, and was codenamed “Diane.” Because of her wooden leg, she could not be parachuted back in, so OSS returned her to France by swift boat. She was landed on the Brittany coast at night, three months before the Normandy invasion. Dying her hair gray and hiding her limp under the full skirts and shuffle of her disguise as an elderly peasant woman, Hall moved around the countryside in the central region of France, living in different places to avoid the Germans who tried intensively to find her by triangulating her radio signals and offering rewards for her capture. She was co-organizer of the Heckler Mission, and working in the central France regions of Haute Loire and Le Puy in 1944, she financed, armed, and helped to direct a couple of thousand members of the maquis. In July 1944, three plane loads of arms, ammunition, and demolitions finally arrived, and these enabled the maquisards to destroy a number of bridges and tunnels and eventually to force the several thousand German troops out of Le Puy by sheer bluff. Her three battalions of Resistance fighters killed 150 German soldiers and captured 500 more, Finally in mid-August a three-man, multinational Jedburgh team arrived from OSS Algiers, and they organized a Resistance force at Le Puy of 1,500 men, a group, which Hall continued to supply with money and arms as she obtained them from Allied airdrops. For her heroism, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.127



The D-Day invasion, June 6, 1944, was the largest amphibious invasion in history; 175,000 American, British, and Canadian troops landed in Normandy that day, followed by hundreds of thousands of others. An OSS Special Operations unit attached to the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, was scheduled to land at Omaha Beach at 4:30 a.m. two hours before the infantry assault began, in order to make contact with maquis, who knew the local area. Although their ship anchored within 300 yards of the shoreline in the predawn darkness, it proved impossible to land the OSS SO party. One of them, Major Francis (“Frank”) A. Mills, a 29-year-old Oklahoman from the field artillery who had trained at Area A, looked on in horror at the slaughter on Omaha Beach. “Standing on the open deck, we could only watch as thousands of U.S. soldiers died during the day. We saw many small craft sink and many soldier’s bodies floating past us with the outgoing tide….God was with us that day and did not allow us to land two hours earlier as planned—or our OSS detachment would certainly have been destroyed.” It was not until the next day that the OSS unit was allowed to go ashore with division headquarters. “We did land, moved across the beach the next day, and finally got ashore,” Mills recalled ‘— making our way through bodies and body parts, and debris, and on and into the village of St. Mere Eglise…until contact was made with the French Resistance.”128



Always seeking adventure, Donovan himself was also in the action. Against orders of the Secretary of the Navy, he persuaded an old friend to allow him in the forefront of the naval armada. From the cruiser U.S.S. Tuscaloosa, he and David Bruce, SI chief in London, watched the first waves of troops hit the beaches. In mid-afternoon, the two men went ashore at Utah Beach. That landing spot had been easily secured, but when Donovan and Bruce followed the infantry and OSS men into the hedgerow farm country, they suddenly came under enemy machine gun fire. Both dove to the ground, and, according to Bruce, Donovan turned and said, “David, we mustn’t be captured, we know too much.” Checking their pockets, they realized that neither had brought any of the OSS cyanide pills given to agents to avoid being tortured into revealing agency secrets, Donovan then whispered, “I must shoot first.” “Yes, Sir,” Bruce responded, “but can we do much against machine-guns with our pistols?” “Oh, you don’t understand,” Donovan said. “I mean if we are about to be captured I’ll shoot you first. After all, I am your commanding officer.”129 Fortunately the Germans were pushed back by American units, and Donovan did not have to shoot either of them to avoid capture. Afterwards, Donovan returned to London and then to Washington, while Bruce set up an OSS field headquarters in a secured area of the Normandy beachhead.

The Jedburghs The special operations plan to support the Normandy invasion was to use various Allied teams to lead the French Resistance in the disruption of enemy communications, attacks on troop movements and supply columns, and raids on enemy headquarters in order to impede the German opposition to the Allied advance. The most famous of these teams were the Jedburghs.130 This was the code name for nearly one hundred three-man, multi-national teams, composed of two officers and an enlisted man as radio operator. The teams were drawn from Special Operations forces of the United States, Great Britain and France, and always included at least one native-speaking Frenchman. The “Jeds” went through advanced training together in Britain and served together, but each wore the military uniform of his country. Their mission was to direct, supply and coordinate the Resistance groups according to directives from the Allied high command. The American Jeds were OSS Special Operations officers or enlisted radio operators, who before advanced and team-training at Milton Hall and other locations in Britain had completed their OSS training in the United States, at Areas F, B or A for the officers and Area C for the radiomen. Between June and September 1944, 276 Jedburghs were parachuted into the war zone. Of these, 83 were Americans, 90 Britons and 103 Frenchmen. Most of them were dropped into France (with a few dropped into Belgium and Holland).131

In support of the Normandy Landings In northern France, ten Jedburgh teams jumped into the countryside on D-Day, and some twenty more teams followed in subsequent weeks. Most went into Brittany, the large peninsula west of Normandy that was heavily garrisoned with German troops, which could pose a threat to the flank of the invasion force. Allied headquarters wanted the Jeds to direct thousands of French Resistance fighters and contain the Germans there by cutting off rail and roadways. They might also help conventional forces seize the big ports of Brest, Lorient, and Nazaire, which would be needed for supplying the rapidly expanding expeditionary force.132



Secretly airdropping OSS agents and supplies behind enemy lines in northern Europe from January 1944 through the end of the war, was the mission of the “Carpetbaggers,” a couple of squadrons of special, black-painted, four-engine, B-24 “Liberator” bombers assigned to the U.S. 8th Air Force in Britain (OSS airdrops in the Mediterranean were conducted mainly from Algeria and later from Italy).133 Flying alone at night, quickly and at low altitudes, usually not more than a mile high, the plane would drop propaganda leaflets as a cover for its real mission. “We’d be looking for a meadow, then flashes from a couple of flashlights would appear,” recalled Lieutenant Eugene Polinksy, a navigator from Maywood, New Jersey. “We would drop down to 200 to 400 feet, open the bomb bay doors and send out supplies, munitions, etc. in parachute containers—or insert an agent.”134 The anonymous agents, whether men or women, were known simply as “Joes.” He or she would slide back a cover from a round hole in the bottom of the fuselage, the “Joe hole,” sit with legs dangling out and when given the signal would drop into the night. At 200 to 400 feet, the agent would be on a ground in a few seconds, barely enough time for the parachute to open.



One of the first, French-speaking Jedburgh teams dropped into Brittany right after D-Day was Team “Frederick” that included Sergeant Robert R. (“Bob”) Kehoe, 21, from New Jersey, a graduate of Areas C and B, as the radio operator. It included a 26-year-old British major, Adrian Wise, who had been on two commando raids along the Norwegian coast, and a French lieutenant, Paul Bloch-Auroch, a 32-year-old reservist who had served in France and North Africa. Although unlike them Kehoe had never been in battle, he felt ready. “The experience at B-2 was a great morale builder,” Kehoe recalled later, “and, when we departed in mid-December [1943 for Britain], we are in top physical condition.”135 In England, he spent several months training with his new teammates.



On the night of 9 June 1944, three days after D-Day, Jed Team “Frederick” parachuted into the Forêt de Duault, a forest in the north central part of the Brittany Peninsula. Their mission: connect with the French Resistance and prevent German troops or supplies from getting to Normandy by blowing up bridges and railroad lines and setting up barricades and ambushes on roadways. As they neared the drop zone, Kehoe remembered that after checking his equipment, he repeated the 23rd Psalm. The local Resistance set a triangle of bonfires to mark the drop site and when the three men reached the ground, gave them a warm cups of strong Breton cider. Kehoe quickly established radio contact with the OSS base station in London. Consequently, more than one hundred reinforcements from British Special Air Service (SAS), Frenchmen in this case, soon arrived. But the increased activity also led several hundred German troops to come looking for them. The Germans may have been tipped off by informers. They posted notices declaring that those found aiding parachutists would be shot, but informants would receive monetary rewards. The SAS dissipated into small groups and headed south, several were killed in skirmishes along the way. The Jed team decided to go it alone. With the Germans only a few hundred yards behind them, Kehoe buried the radio equipment so the team could move faster. With the help of courageous local French men and women, the team survived and even continued operations against the Germans. The first night on the run, as the team huddled in a concealed drainage ditch, their savior was a young woman, who like so many other female schoolteachers played a key role as guides, couriers, and coordinators in the maquis. Kehoe called them “the lifeblood of the Resistance.”



For the next three weeks, despite German searches and ma