Chapter 7 

Daily Life in Camp, Park, and Town 

 

 Since they might well serve in sabotage teams or guerilla units behind enemy 

lines, the typical recruit for Special Operations, Operational Groups, or the 

Communications Branch, was generally obtained from the armed forces. Most were 

former civilians, not career military, men who had simply enlisted or been drafted into 

the armed forces because of the war. For the agents who would operate behind enemy 

lines, OSS was especially looking for a combination of intelligence, imagination, courage 

and, if necessary, ruthlessness. OSS recruiters visited military training centers looking for 

high aptitude individuals with demonstrated initiative and ability and where possible 

fluency in an appropriate foreign language. They accepted only volunteers for possible 

hazardous duty. Most of the young recruits craved the excitement and challenge of a 

special overseas assignment. A college graduate seeking a different lifestyle, Richard P. 

(“Scotty”) Scott was drifting in 1942 when he was drafted into the Army. Despite his 

business degree, he was working as an electrician on a 247-foot diesel yacht in the 

Caribbean. The Army sent him to Officers’ Candidate School (OCS), but after becoming 

a 2nd lieutenant, he spent two years behind a desk in the Signal Corps. He yearned to get 

overseas. He was, as he recalled, rescued by an OSS recruiter, “a dashing Major in 

paratroop boots,” who interviewed him and got him into the OSS Communications 

Branch. After training at Area C, he was sent to the Far East. It changed his entire life. 

Two decades later, he became Assistant Secretary of State for Communications and then 

Director of Communications for the Central Intelligence Agency.1

 “In September 1943, I was in paratroop school at Fort Benning, Georgia,” 

recalled Caesar J. Civitella, a private from Philadelphia, “and then at Camp Mackall near 

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for airborne and gliders. A guy from the OSS came and 

interviewed me. I was 20 years old. He asked me did I speak Italian. I did. He asked me if 

I as sent to Italy and had relatives there and they were working with the Nazis would I 

shoot them. I didn’t know if I had any relatives in Italy. So I said, ‘Of course.’ He said, 

‘You’ll hear from us.’”2

 A month later, Civitella reported for training with an Italian 

Operational Group at Area F and then Area B before being sent to North Africa, France, 

and Italy. He spent the next thirty years in the special operations: OSS, Army Special 

Forces, and CIA. 

Asked about his fellow Special Operations trainees at Area B in the fall of 1943—

many of them brash young paratroopers with parachute wings on their blouses and 

 

1

 “Richard P. Scott, W3EFZ,” in James F. Ranney and Arthur L. Ranney, eds, The OSS CommVets Papers, 

2

nd ed. (Covington, Ky.: James F. Ranney, 2002), 211. 

2

 Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 18 April 2008. 
236 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

trouser cuffs jammed into their jump boots—one of them, future Jedburgh John K. 

Singlaub, who would serve in France and China, and end his Army career as a major 

general, recalled that “they were all independent thinkers. I mean I had this impression. 

They were all very active type people who were willing to do things rather than to sit 

back and wait. They quickly took charge when they were given a mission. They all 

wanted to be there and to succeed.”3 

 William (“Bill”) B. Dreux, a young lawyer from New Orleans, was an infantry 

lieutenant not a paratrooper and was therefore more typical of the Special Operations 

volunteer. He had enlisted in the Army, done his basic training, and completed OCS at 

Fort Benning, Georgia. It was there in June 1943, that he was interviewed by a visiting 

lieutenant colonel. After learning that Dreux spoke French fluently, the officer asked if he 

would be interested in a mission behind enemy lines in German-occupied France, 

working with the Maquis in ambushes and sabotage. “We are asking for volunteers,” the 

colonel said, “because these will be hazardous missions. We expect maximum 

casualties.”4 Elsewhere, Lieutenant Rafael Hirtz was told that operatives behind enemy 

lines had only a 50-50 chance of survival. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to a wealthy 

French-Spanish family, Hirtz had grown up in Hollywood in the 1930s. After the U.S. 

entered the war, he became an Army officer and was subsequently approached by the 

OSS to train for operations in France.5 While such warnings deterred some potential 

recruits, Dreux and Hirtz had both volunteered. Both trained first at Area F, then Hirtz 

went to Area B and Dreux to Area A. Both were later parachuted into Brittany, France in 

1944 in support of the Allied invasion. After the war, Dreux returned to New Orleans to 

become a highly successful lawyer. Hirtz finished college and spent the next forty years 

working international finance, grain, and trade. 

 The son of an American doughboy who married a French woman after World 

War I, Jacques F. Snyder was born in New York City but raised in France. His father was 

killed in an automobile accident. When the Germans occupied the country, 19-year-old 

Jacques Snyder returned to the United States to fight the Germans. He joined the 

Canadian armed forces, and when America entered the war, he enlisted in the U.S. Army 

Air Corps. He wanted to be a pilot but could not, and because of his fluent French, he 

was put in a language training school in Tennessee. On off-duty evenings, he played 

clarinet and saxophone in a swing band. Returning home late one night, he was hit by a 

car and suffered several broken ribs. An OSS recruiter visited him in the hospital and 

asked if he would volunteer for hazardous duty. Snyder’s son said his father told him that 

“he thought it couldn’t be more dangerous than playing in the swing band” and he 

volunteered. After training in Areas F and A, he was sent to North Africa and then 

 

3

 Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub (USA-Ret.), transcript of interview by Maochun Yu and Christof Mauch, 31 

October 1996, p. 9, OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 4, National Archives II, 

College Park, Md. , hereinafter, National Archives II. 

4

 William B. Dreux, No Bridges Blown (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 1-2. 

5

 Transcript of an undated interview with OSS veteran, Lt. Rafael Hirtz posted on Library of Congress 

Veterans History Project, 12 February 2004, accessed 10 January 2007. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 237

parachuted into France and later into Indochina. After the war, he worked for military 

intelligence, retiring from the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1991.6

 Bored as a company clerk in the Army in spring 1942, former Tulsa journalist 

Edgar Prichard was interviewed by the base intelligence officer, a major, who after 

reviewing his record and learning that he could speak Spanish and French, asked Prichard 

if he would like to volunteer for some “interesting duty.” “The only thing he told me was 

that if I agreed I would be placed on the detached enlisted men’s list,” Prichard recalled 

years later. “Of course, I had never heard of it, but the first sergeant of the company I was 

in told me it [detached service] was great duty, so I volunteered.” Under orders marked 

“Secret,” he arrived in Washington a week later “I learned there that I was in the office of 

the Coordinator of Information and that I was assigned to the S.O. Branch and that I was 

going to be sent to a secret camp. I was told to write any letters I wanted to write because 

I would be out of communication with my family and friends for a time. I was 

admonished not to tell anyone about what organization I had just joined or where I would 

be.”7 After training at Areas B and A, Pritchard was sent to North Africa. After the war, 

he became a lawyer in Arlington, Virginia. 

 The secret nature of the organization and the security background checks on 

recruits caused some difficulties as well as considerable anxiety for the recruits and the 

folks back home. Initially, Donovan’s organization used Dun and Bradstreet, the 

commercial, credit-rating firm,8 but usually the background checks for the OSS were

conducted by the Military Intelligence, the FBI, Treasury agents, or other federal law 

enforcement agencies. With agents asking questions of former employers and neighbors, 

parents knew that their youngster had gotten involved in something, but they did not 

know what. Some thought their son had gotten into trouble—desertion, being absent 

without leave (AWOL), or some such military offense—and not told them. “When I got 

home [on leave], everybody wanted to know what I had done because the Treasury 

Department had been around checking my references,” said Lieutenant James Ranney, of 

Akron, Ohio, who had been recruited for the Communications Branch. “I said that I was 

going into a job that required security clearance.”9 “We were investigated all the way 

back to high school,” said Albert (“Al”) Materazzi, a young engineering officer from the 

small, candy manufacturing town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, who had volunteered for the 

Italian Operational Group. “I remember a frantic call from my mother asking what had I 

done, the FBI was in Hershey asking all sorts of questions. I was able to calm her down 

by saying I was being considered for a government job and such investigations were 

 

6

 James Snyder, son of Jacques L. Snyder, email correspondence with the author, 16 January and 13 

February 2008. 

7

 Edgar Prichard, “Address to Historical Prince William, Inc.,” 16 January 1991, p. 1, typescript of a talk, 

located, along with a newspaper clipping of the speech, Park Archives, Prince William Forest Park, 

Triangle, Va. 

8

 Robert R. Kehoe, “ An Allied Team with the French Resistance in 1944,” Studies in Intelligence: Journal 

of the American Intelligence Professional, June 2002, 103, originally written in 1997 

9

 James F. Ranney, telephone interview with the author, 8 January 2005. 
238 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

routine.” 10 Materazzi trained at Areas A, F, and B and then served in Italy. With his 

postgraduate work on graphic arts, Materazzi worked after the war as vice President of a 

printing and lithography company and subsequently as director of research and quality 

control at the U.S. Government Printing Office.11

OSS recruits were prohibited from disclosing their new affiliation or describing or 

identifying the location of their training camp, even to their parents. 18-year-old Art 

Reinhardt from near Buffalo, was recruited for the Communications Branch from an Air 

Corps’ radio school. The OSS officer emphasized it was an elite group, spoke of an 

intriguing if vague assignment and mentioned that “there’s some danger involved.” 

Reinhardt readily volunteered. “I wanted to get involved in the war. That was my 

objective. When you are that old, you are adventurous. You don’t really concern yourself 

with the adverse consequences.”12 On detached service from the Army Air Corps, he was 

sent to OSS headquarters and then to Area F, Area A, while he was cleared for security 

purposes, and finally to the communications school at Area C. Not allowed to provide 

any details to his parents, he simply wrote that he was in Washington undergoing training 

and gave them, as he was told, a postal address: P.O. Box, 1925, Washington, D.C.13 

 Many of the men recruited from Army bases for the OSS did not know the name 

of the organization recruiting them or, if they learned its initials, did not know what OSS 

stood for. Captain Francis (“Frank”) Mills, an artillery officer from Oklahoma, recruited 

for Special Operations, was told that O.S.S. stood for “Overseas Supply Service.”14 

Information about the organization was withheld from recruits until they were cleared for 

service. The OSS buildings in Washington, D.C. at 2430 E Street, N.W., were supposed 

to be top secret, but as Ralph Tibbetts, a young recruit for the Commo Branch, found out 

from the waitress at a nearby delicatessen when he arrived too early, the neighbors 

correctly suspected that the buildings were filled with “a bunch of spies.”15 The entrance 

was protected by an armed solider and a guard dog, and no one was allowed in without an 

OSS pass, identification or an escort.16 Inside when William Dreux reported for duty, he 

found the long corridors were filled with men and women hurrying back and forth. Some 

were civilians, but most were military officers. The majority wore Army or Army Air 

Corps uniforms but some were from the Navy or Marines. Most strikingly were the 

 

10 Albert Materazzi, Bethesda, Md., OSS Society Digest, Number 992, 31 March 2005, 

osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 31 March 2005. 

11 Joe Holley, “Albert Materazzi, 92, Served in OSS during World War II,” Washington Post, 17 April 

2008, B7. 

12 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author, during a tour of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va. 

14 December 2004. 

13 Ibid. 

14 Francis (“Frank”) Mills in Russell Miller, Behind the Lines: The Oral History of Special Operations in 

World War II (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 60. 

15 Ralph Tibbett, memoir in OSS CommVets Newsletter, Spring 1997, paraphrased in Dorothy Ringlesbach, 

OSS: Stories That Can Now Be Told (Bloomington, Ind.: Author House, 2005), 33. 

16 Roger Hall, You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger (New York: W.W. Norton, 1957), 13-14. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 239

foreign officers: British officers with Sam Brown leather shoulder belts and riding boots; 

a Scot in kilts, and a Free French officer in light blue uniform and kepi cap. Dreux 

blinked when a major told him that his first OSS training would be at the Congressional 

Country Club. “Did you say Congressional Country Club, Sir?” he asked. “That’s right, 

Lieutenant. Very plush place. Herbert Hoover was one of the founders. It’s about six 

miles out of town. We’ve taken over the whole club for training, golf course and all.”17 

Dreux and the French OGs were there for a few weeks before being transferred to Area A 

where they would undergo intensive guerrilla training for the next two months.18

 

The Secret Intelligence Branch also recruited in various ways and from diverse 

groups. William J. Casey, born and raised in a Roman Catholic family in the Borough of 

Queens in New York City and attended Fordham University and St. John’s Law School. 

An able entrepreneur, Casey went to Washington as head of a private research bureau in 

1941 providing information to businesses on forthcoming mobilization and war orders. 

After Pearl Harbor, he worked as a consultant for the Bureau of Economic Warfare, 

helping the Navy get through bureaucratic tangles to increase production of landing craft. 

Casey was commissioned a naval lieutenant, but as he later wrote, “sailing a desk in the 

old Navy building on Constitution Avenue was not my idea of helping to win the war. I 

itched for action and the OSS seemed the best place to get it.” Consequently, he looked 

up an old friend with whom he had parked cars at Jones Beach as a teenager and who was 

now a member of Donovan’s law firm, and this led to introductions to Otto Doering and 

Ned Putzell, partners in the firm who had followed Donovan to Washington and become 

senior officials in the OSS. The 30-year-old Casey also impressed Donovan himself, who 

‘poached” the talented young officer for detached duty from the Navy. After four months 

of training and apprenticeship in Washington, including a hazardous paramilitary course 

at Area B, Casey was dispatched to London. Casey’s eyesight was too poor for working 

in the field, which he longed to do, but from his office, he ran a number of espionage 

operations, including efforts within Germany. By the end of the war, Casey briefly 

headed OSS intelligence operations for all of Europe. After the war, returning to become 

a Wall Street lawyer and active Republican, he eventually served as Ronald Reagan’s 

Director of Central Intelligence.19

 

Like Casey, Richard Helms, also worked in the Secret Intelligence Branch and 

subsequently served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), but via a different route. 

Helms came from a prominent family on Philadelphia’s Main Line, and he was educated 

at private schools in Germany and Switzerland. Graduating from Williams College in 

1935, he worked as a journalist in Europe and the United States. When the U.S. entered 

the war, Helms enlisted in the Navy as a lieutenant and was assigned to the antisubmarine warfare operations center in New York City. In August 1943, the OSS 

recruited him, without his seeking it, because of his experience and connections in 

Europe and his fluency in French and German in Europe. He worked first on the SI 

Planning Staff, and then from 1944 to 1945, he served under Ferdinand Meyer and then 

Allen Dulles conducting espionage operations from posts in England, France, and 

 

17 Dreux, No Bridges Blown, 11-12. 

18 Ibid., 13, 15, 17. 

19 William Casey, The Secret War against Hitler (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988), 3-5. 
240 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

Sweden.20 After the war, he worked his way up in the CIA, serving as DCI under 

Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Most of the SI training took place at 

Area RTU-11 (“The Farm”) an estate a dozen miles south of Washington or in Area E, 

estates north of Baltimore, but a number of SI recruits, like William S. Casey, received 

paramilitary or other Special Operations training at Areas A or B, and some of them 

received some communications training at Area C. 

 For the Communications Branch, most of the radio-operators for OSS’s 

clandestine field or regional base communications network were obtained from the radio, 

radar, or other electronic schools of the Army, Army Air Force, and Navy. They were 

generally enlisted men, who a short time earlier had been civilians. David Kenney from 

the small town of Encampment, Wyoming, turned 18 in 1943 and was drafted into the 

Army. He scored high on the aptitude tests and was also an amateur musician. He 

believes the Army thought musicians would be good at radio, because they sent him to a 

Signal Corps’ radio school at Camp Crowder, Missouri. “Then a friend of mine saw a 

notice on a bulletin board: `Forty volunteers needed for dangerous assignment,’” he 

recalled. “My buddy volunteered us. I talked to on OSS captain. I didn’t know he was 

from the OSS or a recruiter. I said that I was worried about the dangerous part. He said, 

`everything overseas is dangerous, but you’ll never regret doing this.’ He was right. I 

never regretted it. It was a wonderful experience.”21

Many of the “Commo” recruits had been amateur short-wave, radio operators 

(“hams”) before the war or had been trained or further trained in International Morse 

Code and telegraphy by commercial or military radio schools. In the first several decades 

of the twentieth century, when radio was in its infancy, amateur experimentation was an 

exotic hobby. Some individuals with scientific or technical inclinations and a desire to do 

things themselves, would tinker with equipment, constructing radio crystal sets, with 

voice or code wireless communication. They learned that they could communicate 

through the airwaves from their own home and reach out, depending on atmospheric 

conditions, to places around the country and even around the world. OSS CommVet Art 

Reinhardt, who continued his work in clandestine communications for the CIA for thirty 

years after the war, estimated that probably 30 percent or more of the OSS technical 

personnel had been hams.22 The importance of these amateur radio hobbyists, he said, 

cannot be overstated. “The hams were the real backbone of the OSS. They were 

especially important at the base station receivers. Because out in the field you had agents 

[especially the indigenous agents] who were poorly trained, who were operating under 

adverse physical, security, and technological problems against interference....So, to 

counter all that, you had more powerful transmitters and receivers at the base stations, 

you had better antennas, and you had these wonderful people with good, selective ears 

that could listen and sort of drag out these weak signals. These ham operators from the 

 

20 Richard Helms interview by Christof Mauch, 21 April 1997, CIA Records (RG 263), OSS Oral Histories, 

Box 2, National Archives II. 

21 David Kenney, telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005. 

22 Arthur Reinhardt, “Deciphering the Commo Branch,” OSS Society Newsletter, Fall 2006,: 6-7. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 241

1930s who had learned how to seek out the exotic signal, they are the guys who were 

really, really good, and they were the backbone of the OSS communications system.23

 Most officers recruited for the operational branches of the OSS met Donovan 

personally. He interviewed them briefly in his office on the second floor of the 

headquarters building in Washington. Lieutenant Jack Singlaub was partway through his 

training for Special Operations at Areas F and B when he was summoned to the director’s 

office. He did not know then that he was being selected for one of the elite, multi-national 

“Jedburgh” teams that would be parachuted deep behind German lines in support of the 

Allied invasion of France. Standing at attention in front of Donovan’s desk while a 

colonel read his military record, Singlaub eyed the rows of ribbons on the general’s 

uniform, particularly the light blue, star-spangled ribbon of the Medal of Honor he had 

earned in World War I. The maps on the wall behind him were marked “Secret.” 

Donovan seemed pleased, smiled and said “Lieutenant, you have an excellent training 

record. And you know how I feel about thorough training.” “Yes, sir,” Singlaub replied. 

“Well,” he said, and his bright, probing blue eyes fixed upon the young officer to 

reinforce the point, “I just want you to know that the kind of combat we’ll be in is a lot 

rougher than any training.”24

Arrival at Training Camp 

 

 OSS recruits were driven to the secret training camps in standard, 2 1⁄2 -ton Army 

trucks, the back enclosed in olive-drab canvas with the rear flap down.25 They were told 

not to open it, because their destination was classified information. Sometimes the drivers 

would talk with there recruits. As with the other OSS men dressed alike in Army fatigues, 

their background sometimes belied their appearance. The OSS Army private driving 

Edgar Prichard and his classmates to Area A in May 1942 turned out to have recently 

been a professor of English at Williams College.26 Many recruits did not know that 

these had been government parks. Robert R. Kehoe from New Jersey, a 21-year-old 

recruit from the Signal Corps, thought Area B-2 on Catoctin Mountain had been a 

 

23 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author during a tour of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., 

14 December 2004. 

24 John K. Singlaub, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (New York: Summit 

Books, 1991), 31. 

25 John W. Brunner, telephone interview with the author, 21 March 2005. 

26 Edgar Prichard, “Address to Historic Prince William, Inc., 16 January 1991, typescript, p. 4, copy in Park 

Archives, Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va.
242 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

“private hunting lodge in pre-war days.”27 Marvin Flisser, a communications recruit from 

the Bronx, was told that Area C was originally a private camp, perhaps a hunting camp.28

Commo student, David Kenney from Wyoming, remembered the long trip from 

the Army radio school at Camp Crowder. “They put about forty of us on a train from 

Missouri to Washington, D.C. We didn’t have an inkling of what was up. Then they put a 

bunch of us in a canvas covered truck with the flaps down, and we headed south from 

D.C. Finally we could see the entrance to the Marine base at Quantico from our back 

flap, and we cheered when the truck turned away from it. We didn’t want to be there. We 

turned off to the west and up a dirt road into a forested area.” At Prince William Forest 

Park, they were taken temporarily to Area A-3 for security clearance. It was, Kenney 

recalls, “a bucolic campground consisting of a number of small, rustic cabins and several 

larger structures. It was my understanding that it was a former Campfire Girls 

facility....We poured out of the trucks and into a conference room. They said that we are 

in the OSS, but they did not even tell us what OSS stood for. They said it is a secret 

thing. We were not to tell anyone about it. Someone [in the group] had picked up a 

newspaper, probably the Washington Post. It had a column by Drew Pearson about the 

OSS. Pearson called it `Oh, So Social” or “Oh, So Secret.” He didn’t like it....Someone 

had that paper...when we arrived at Area A, and from that and what they told us, we 

figured it out that we were in the Office of Strategic Services, a secret War Department 

operation.”29 “We were told not to discuss it [the OSS] with anyone. If an MP [Military 

Police Officer] stopped us and asked for identification, we were to tell him that it was a 

`supply outfit.’ We were also required to supply about ten references for an FBI 

clearance....We spent about a week there, mostly undergoing indoctrination. We knew 

Morse code, but their equipment was different than the Signal Corps’. I don’t recall 

receiving any training there but, during this period, several in our group simply 

disappeared, apparently after failing to meet security or other OSS-specific 

requirements”30 

 OSS trainees were given fictitious code names in order to keep their identity 

secret. The code names (or “school names” as OSS Schools and Training called them) 

were generally common American first names such as “Harry,” “Ed,” “Jack,” “Sam,” 

“Bill,” and “Pete,” but sometimes they were closer to their ethnic background such as 

“Maurice,” “Leif,” “Ivan,” “Spiro,” “Gino,” or “Bruno.”31 Sometimes it was their real 

 

27 Robert R. Kehoe, “An Allied Team with the French Resistance in 1944,” Studies in Intelligence: Journal 

of the American Intelligence Professional, June 2002, 104. 

28 Marvin S. Flisser, telephone interview with the author, 27 January 2005. 

29 David Kenney, telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005; and Kenney email letter to the author, 

15 March 2005. 

30 Ibid. 

31 For such lists of “school names” for particular trainees at Area A, B, C, E, F, and RTU-11, including

women trainees such as “Sallie” and “Helen” at the SI training school at RTU-11, as well as identification 

of the particular class, such as A-33 or E-44 or C-204, see Kenneth H. Baker to Lt. Col. Lane Rehm, 18

November 1942, subject: report on trainees at present date; and Schools and Training Branch to Mr. R.H.I. 

Goddard, subject: report on trainees at present date, 29 September 1943, these and others in OSS Records 

(RG 226), Entry 146, Box 223, Folder 3106, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 243

first name but with letters and numbers were added. New arrivals were required to turn in 

all their personal possessions, even their driver’s license as well as their uniform. All the 

trainees received the same kind of Army uniform along with their “school name.” 32

Cameras were confiscated, because neither the trainees nor the staff was allowed to take 

pictures, as they might lead to future identification of secret agents or the secret camp.33

The cadre and instructors knew each other’s real names, but in regard to the students, the 

staff was given information only on a “need to know” basis, and asking too many 

questions was frowned upon.34

Herbert R. Brucker, who would later become one of the founders of Army Special 

Forces, was born in Newark, New Jersey to a German-American mother and a Frenchborn, American father who served in the U.S. Army, Brucker grew up in Alsace, France, 

raised by various relatives, before returning to the United States with his father in 1938. 

At age 19, he joined the U.S. Army in 1940 as a private and became a wireless radio 

operator soon sending and receiving twenty words a minute. He was so proficient that in 

1942, he was made a Morse Code trainer at Fort Meade and promoted to sergeant. But he 

wanted to see combat, and so in August 1943, he volunteered when he learned about the 

OSS. Brucker was not only an excellent radio operator but was fluent in both French and 

German, and the OSS snapped him up. After getting through the OSS Assessment 

program, Brucker and thirty other men were trucked up to Area B. Brucker remembered 

what looked like a CCC camp, eating at the mess hall and being put on guard duty the 

first night. The next morning when the new men were lined up in three ranks, Brucker 

was surprised to see a group of Norwegians carrying M-1 Garand rifles jogging by them 

at double-time. Just then a runner came looking for him. Trainee “Herbert E-54” 

(Brucker) had been sent to the wrong camp, presumably because Area B was being used 

mainly for OG training at the time. He returned to Washington and subsequently directed 

by the Special Operations desk to the Phoenix, Maryland railroad station and taken to 

OSS Training Area E-3, the Nolting Estate, a mile east of Glencoe, in a rural area north 

of Baltimore. He went through SO training there in August and September 1943, 

including infiltration into an Baltimore shipyard as a graduation project.35

 

 

32 Stephen J. Capestro, interviewed by G. Kurt Piehler, 17 August 1994, oral history transcript, p. 20, in 

files of Rutgers Archives of World War II, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. 

33 Headquarters, Detachment A, “Standard Operating Procedure,” 13 April 1944, p. 2, OSS Records (RG 

226), Entry 136, Box 174, Folder 1841, National Archives II. Emphasis in the original. 

34 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 31 January 2005. When Erasmus H. Kloman 

arrived at A-4, his cousin, Anthony Kloman, an instructor there, quickly informed him not to give any 

indication that they were related or even knew each other. Since the trainees had fictitious names, the 

family relationship remained a secret. Erasmus H. Kloman, telephone interview with the author, 24 January 

2005. 

35 Charles H. Briscoe, “Herbert R. Brucker, SF Pioneer: Part II, Pre-WWII-OSS Training 1943,” Veritas: 

Journal of Army Special Operations History, 2:3 (2006): 26-35. In a July 2006 interview for the article, 

Brucker referred to his SO training near Phoenix, north of Baltimore, Maryland, as being at “the Farm,” but 

what OSS itself referred to as “the Farm,” was the advanced SI training school, RTU-11, located at Clinton, 

Maryland, south of Washington, D.C. It is possible that some of the trainees and others at Area E-3, which 

was a country estate with manor house, may have referred to it also as “the Farm.” 
244 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

 Trainees, particularly those who were training for individual infiltration behind 

enemy lines, like SO and SI agents, and who might be captured were not encouraged to 

make friendships with their fellow trainees. Plus, as the course progressed, trainees were 

weeded out for any number of reasons, such as failing written or performance tests, being 

unable to function under stress, deemed too loquacious for a secret organization, or just 

giving up and voluntarily requesting return to their previous organizations. “We would sit 

at a round table at night...and one given day, I would see a face was missing. It wasn’t 

there anymore,” said Sergeant Stephen J. Capestro (“Steve A3”), a former football player 

from Rutgers College, who trained at Area A. “So, you’d ask, `What happened to 

“George A2?”’ He [the instructor] would say, ‘Well, he got caught divulging who he was 

or what he was doing.’”36 “You didn’t make lifelong friendships,” said Reginald (“Reg”) 

Spear from Los Angeles, who trained at Area B, “because you never saw the guy again, 

and you didn’t know his name.”37 James L. Boals III, a trainee at Area C in 1944, 

remembered someone outside their group being called out at roll call as “Jack-S1.” “At 

the time, we were told that a Nazi had gone through the school with our [OSS 

headquarters’] knowledge and was not arrested until graduation.”38

Daily Routine 

 As at any military facility, each day was tightly organized, but at OSS facilities, in 

keeping with the informal, quasi-civilian nature of Donovan’s organization, the emphasis 

was on individual initiative and responsibility rather than regimentation. The basic 

schedule, particularly at paramilitary camps like A, B, C, D and F, was similar to that at a 

military training base. Each day began with a wakeup at 6:15 a.m., the breakfast at 7:00 

a.m., classes in the morning, lunch at noon, more classes in the afternoon, supper at 6:00 

p.m. and lights out at 11:00 p.m. 39 Unlike regular Army bases, however, the OSS 

paramilitary training camps did not use bugle calls, no bugler trumpeting out the staccato 

notes of reveille or the slow, mournful echoing of taps. Instead, the men were awakened 

by the playing popular music over the public address system. Most of the camp 

commanders allowed the company clerk’s office to play almost any record they chose. At 

 

36 Stephen J. Capestro, interviewed by G. Kurt Piehler, 17 August 1994, oral history transcript, p. 20, in 

files of Rutgers Archives of World War II, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. 

37 Reginald G. Spear, telephone interview with the author, 25 March 2005. 

38 James L. Boals, III email to the author, 20 February 2007. Whether headquarters had fabricated the story 

of the Nazi spy to encourage security among the trainees or whether there actually had been a Nazi agent 

among the trainees remains unclear. The 1947 Hollywood feature film, 13 Rue Madeleine, starring James 

Cagney as the OSS instructor and Richard Conte as the German spy portrayed it. Certainly, it was 

something that the OSS was concerned about, and one of the missions of OSS X-2, counter-intelligence 

branch was to ferret out enemy agents in Allied countries and in Allied intelligence organizations. 

39 “MTP [Military Training Program]-OSS, Training Schedule for Class III, week of 21 to 27 May 1944, in 

OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 174, Folder 1840; see also Headquarters, Detachment A, 

“Standard Operating Procedures,” 13 April 1944, pp. 1, 4, ibid., Folder 1841, both in National Archives II. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 245

Area C, for example, contemporary musical hits were a favorite for reveille. Terry 

Samaras, remembered waking up to “Holiday for Strings.” Others recalled “Oh, What a 

Beautiful Morning,” and the country music hit “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving 

Somewhere.”40 

“Everything that I experienced was very informal,” said Private John W. Brunner 

a cryptologist from Philadelphia training at Area C. “There was no military routine at all. 

No marching or parading. We simply got up when we were told. An enlisted man would 

come down to our hut to wake us up. We went to the mess hall. Afterwards, we went out 

to our assignment for the day. There was no marching there. We just walked.”41 “They 

treated you like a man,” recalled another trainee at Area C, Private Art Reinhardt. “There 

was very little discipline. He [Major Albert Jenkins, the C.O.] was relying on the [self] 

discipline of the individuals and the motivation of the people.”42 To keep the men in 

shape, there were calisthenics every morning. Instructors and staff generally participated 

as well as the trainees. All would assemble individually, then line up and follow the 

directions of a physical training instructor on an elevated platform. It was held near the 

mess hall. Afterwards, they would walk into the mess hall for breakfast. 

 OSS training in the National Parks began in April 1942, when the first basic 

special operations course held in the United States was conducted at Area B-2 in Catoctin 

Mountain Park. The basic or preliminary SO course in 1942 provided physical 

conditioning as well as a variety of skills, which, as Lieutenant William R. (“Ray”) Peers, 

who would later command Detachment 101 in Burma, remembered it the students would 

later find very useful in their subversive activities. The included “methods of agent 

operations, secret writing, resisting an interrogator, searches for downed aircrews, 

cryptography, experiments with a variety of high explosives, learning the difference 

between blowing a stone or steel bridge.” Along with their other studies, they read and 

discussed British commando raids in Norway, France, and North Africa. The basic course 

at Area B in spring 1942 lasted only two weeks, but it was intensive. “It was,” Peers later 

wrote, “abnormal to get more than six hours sleep a day.”43

An inspector from headquarters visited Area B-2 in June 1942, by which time the 

basic SO course had been expanded to four weeks. 44 The inspector, who was from the 

Secret Intelligence Branch, talked to one of the SI trainees taking the paramilitary course, 

John R. Brown, whose code name was “Bill.” Later that student provided the SI office 

with a chronology of the four-week basic SO course at Area B. 

 

40 “Terry Samaras, W2QFP,” and “Harry M. Neben, W9QB,” in James F. Ranney and Arthur L. Ranney, 

eds, The OSS CommVets Papers, 2nd ed. (Covington, Ky.: James F. Ranney, 2002), 201, 208; Arthur 

Reinhardt, interview with author at Prince William Forest Park, Va., 14 December 2004. 

41 John W. Brunner, telephone interview with the author, 21 March 2005. 

42 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author at Prince William Forest Park, Va., 14 December 2004. 

43 William R. Peers and Dean Brelis, Behind the Burma Road: The Story of America’s Most Successful 

Guerrilla Force (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 30. 

44 R.P. Tenney to J.R. Hayden [schools and training in Secret Intelligence Branch of OSS], interoffice 

memo, subject: Area B, 8 June 1942, located in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 158, Folder 1721, 

National Archives II. 
246 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

First Week: 

Military Drill and Manual of Arms 

Interior Guard Duty explained; Articles of War read

Elementary First Aid course 

Rifle instruction and practice (M-1 Garand and Springfield ‘03) 

Elementary principles of explosives (with the use of dynamite) 

Guard problem opposed to raiding senior class 

Exercises and sports twice daily. 

Second Week:

Gas training (different types, precautions against, use of different types of gas masks) 

Elementary explosives and demolition 

Practice throwing hand grenades and firing rifle-propelled grenades 

Study of pistols and Thompson submachine guns (shooting from the hip) 

Rifle practice on moving targets with Garand and Springfield ’03 marksman rifle 

Field patrol training how to guard against raids 

Study and firing of flares and of .30 caliber Browning machine gun 

Study and practice firing 60 mm trench mortar 

Elementary compass instruction, map reading, and field compass problems 

Guard problem against raiding senior class 

Exercise once daily 

Third Week:

Elementary Cryptography and codes 

Practice firing pistols and submachine guns 

Advanced explosives and demolition 

Jiu Jitsu and close combat training without weapons 

Compass problems in field scouting 

Political studies of Nazi party, secret police and regular German police. 

Elementary photography 

Raid problem against guarding junior class 

Exercise once daily. 

Fourth Week:

Extensive pistol practice at stationary and bobbing targets 

Advanced demolition and incendiaries 

Raid problem against guarding junior class 

Elementary studies of German and Japanese Armies 

Close combat and unarmed defense 

Raid problem in mined field (“booby traps”) 

Lectures on street and house to house fighting 

Lecture on surveillance and criminal investigation 

Exercise once daily.45

 

45 “Area ‘B’ Training Course,” one-page, typed schedule for instruction 16 May to 13 June 1942, attached 

to J.R. Brown to Mr. J.R. Hayden [schools and training in Secret Intelligence Branch of OSS], 14 June 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 247

Recreational Activities 

 Although the class schedule was full at the training areas, there was some free 

time and some places to enjoy it. At every camp, there was a building large enough to be 

used as a recreation center at least part of the time. Movies were shown there, not just 

training films and footage of devastation caused by German and Japanese armies and air 

forces but occasionally Hollywood movies as well. In winter, the men could shoot hoops 

and play basketball there. Most camps also had some kind of common room, often called 

the “Day Room,” in which the men could relax in the evenings, listening to the radio, 

reading, or playing cards. Some, like the one at C-4, included a ping-pong table.46 In the 

summer, the men at Area C played baseball in a large parking area.47 At Area B-5, 

assistant company clerk Albert Guay played 78 rpm records on the public address system 

in the late afternoons after duty time and early in the evening. At the little PX, the men 

could buy candy, soda pop, snacks, toiletries, and perhaps a bottle of beer. Guay would 

purchase and eat crackers and sardines there. His diary in late 1942 indicated that he saw 

a movie, a training film, in the mess hall, and that in the recreation room, he watched 

other enlisted men on the staff playing darts and checkers, and gambling at poker. In the 

barracks, those enlisted men, he noted, wrote letters and did a lot of talking and joking. 

Some also took walks in the woods, and a few, like Guay, went hunting there. But many 

of the men got bored sitting around at night, and Guay wished they had some recreational 

equipment.48 

 Most camp commanders encouraged the healthy use of leisure time after a day of 

intensive coursework. The second C.O. at Area B, Lieutenant Montague Mead, did 

purchase recreational equipment. He also encouraged a healthy competition between the 

men at Area B-2 and those down the hill at B-5, half a mile or so away. By the summer of 

1943, an inspector from headquarters reported that the practice had developed there of 

playing games, such as soccer, between the two Training Areas.49 At Area A in the spring 

of 1944, a group of Commo recruits had very little to do while they waited at Area for 

clearance to proceed to communications training at Area C. There were about twenty of 

 

1942, forwarded by Hayden to Dr. [Kenneth H.] Baker, 7 July 1942, in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, 

Box 161, Folder 1754. I have also integrated comments from “Bill’s” oral report midway through the 

course reported in R.P. Tenney to J.R. Hayden, interoffice memo, subject: Area B, 8 June 1942, Appendix 

II to Part One of History of the Schools and Training Office, located in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, 

Box 158, Folder 1721, both documents in the National Archives II. 

46 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author at Prince William Forest Park, Va., 14 December 2004. 

47 Obie L. Etheridge, telephone interview with the author, 14 January 2008. 

48 Albert R. Guay, telephone interview with the author, 24 October 2005, and diary entries for 28 October; 

1, 4, 18, 20, 29, 30 November; 2 December 1942. 

49 A. Van Beuren to Mr. Weston Howland [forward to H.L. Robinson] 24 September 1943, subject: Areas 

B[-5] and B-2, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 223, Folder 3106, National Archives II. 
248 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

them with no recreational facilities. “So one day, a gentleman came by,” recalled Art 

Reinhardt. “It was one those two handsome movie actors who were in OSS—Sterling 

Hayden or Douglass Fairbanks, Jr.—I’m pretty sure it was Sterling Hayden. He saw us 

sitting around and asked: `Do you boys need anything?’ We said, `We’d like to have 

some athletic equipment.’ The next day, an open-stake truck came, and it was full of 

athletic equipment: basketballs, gloves, baseballs, softballs, anything you can imagine.”50

Special Operations Training Experiences 

 “Our training consisted mostly of sabotage operations and the conduct of guerrilla 

actions ranging from raids, ambushes, and assassinations,” Jacques L. Snyder recalled. 

“Emphasis was placed on stealth, approaching the target without raising any suspicion, 

crawling when necessary for long distances, using maximum cover and concealment as 

camouflage when needed. Another important point was the total ruthlessness and 

efficiency in dispatching guards and sentries in the target area....The overriding concern 

was silence and speed in execution.”51

 Everyone who went through OSS paramilitary training remembered the British 

close-combat instructor, William (“Dan”) Fairbairn. Most were shocked and some 

appalled by his “gutter fighting” techniques. But he argued that they had a job to do to 

defeat an evil enemy and they had a duty to learn to survive to do that job effectively. 

Memoirs that cover OSS training almost always mention Dan Fairbairn, the “Shanghai 

Buster.”52 “We called him delicate Dan the deacon,” Edgar Pritchard remembered. “He 

knew at least 100 ways to kill people without shooting them. He was a knife fighter and 

an alley fighter. It was said that he had killed dozens of people in hand to hand 

combat....Fairbairn had us throwing each other all over the place. Fortunately none of us 

killed any of our classmates. We all survived.”53 Most memoirs reveal a few of the 

surprising methods he taught them about hand-to-hand combat. How to fight barehanded 

(or with anything that came to hand), with all the dirty tricks of gutter fighting: “a knee in 

 

50 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author at Prince William Forest Park, Va., 14 December 2004. Both 

Sterling Hayden and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. had joined the OSS, but Hayden went on dangerous Special 

Operations missions behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia before returning to the United States. Donovan 

rejected Errol Flynn’s inquiry about joining the OSS. 

51 Jacques L. Snyder, “Cloak and Dagger Days,” typescript memoir, n.d., [late 1990s], p. 1, provided by his 

son, James Snyder, to the present author, 16 January 2008. 

52 Some accounts refer erroneously to Fairbairn as former chief of the Shanghai police, for example, Peers 

and Brelis, Behind the Burma Road, 31. In fact, Fairbairn’s highest law enforcement position had been as 

Assistant Commissioner of the international Shanghai Municipal Police. He was in charge of the Armed 

and Training Reserve, which was the special riot duty unit and its training force. See William L. Cassidy, 

“Fairbairn in Shanghai,” Soldier of Fortune, 4 (September 1979): 66-71. 

53 Edgar Prichard, “Address to Historical Prince William, Inc.,” 16 January 1991, pp. 2, 3, typescript of a 

talk, located, along with a newspaper clipping of the speech, in the Park Archives of Prince William Forest 

Park, Triangle, Va. Prichard trained at both Area B and Area A. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 249

the groin, a savage slash with the side of the hand across an Adam’s apple, a jab at the 

eyes with fingers stiffly hooked in a tiger’s claw.”

54 How to fall, roll, and come up on the 

offensive. How to kick, jab, punch—not with a fist but with a rigid open hand. How to 

dislocate an enemy’s shoulder or break an arm or leg; how to break a sentry’s neck from 

behind. He showed them how to use knives, hatchets, and other cutting or striking 

instruments. “Fairbairn taught us how to get rid of an opponent using normal everyday 

items such as a rolled-up magazine or newspaper, a matchbox, a pen or a pencil,” recalled 

Lieutenant Jerry Sage, who taught at Areas A and D. He showed us the pressure points on 

crucial arteries and demonstrated the sensitive nerve areas where a single blow could 

immobilize an enemy. With every tactic we also learned the counter-measures to protect 

ourselves in a similar attack.”55 Army Corporal Edward E. Nicholas from Rock Island,

Illinois, who was trained as an OSS radio operator at Area C in the fall of 1943, said the 

students there learned “`dirty fighting’ or pseudo judo as we called it.”56

 

Since few of the students, even those with military training, had any experience 

with explosives, the instruction in demolition work was generally new to them. It was 

dangerous work, and it was taught at Area B in 1942 by knowledgeable instructors from 

the Corps of Engineers, like Charles Parkin, Frank Gleason, Leo Karwaski, and Joe 

Lazarsky. They taught how to blow up railroad lines, bridges, and buildings and how to 

make booby traps. They would first lecture in class and then go outside, down the hill and 

have the students set small charges and explode them.

57

 

Plastic explosives, called P.E. or Composition C, had only recently been 

developed. At Area A in 1943, Lieutenant William Dreux and his fellow French OGs, 

watched intrigued as their demolitions instructor, a tough, grizzled engineering sergeant 

named Bolinsky, who had attended a British commando school, showed them how it 

worked. Unlike dynamite, which is highly sensitive and volatile, plastic explosive is 

extraordinarily stable, and unlike rigid dynamite sticks, P.E. is soft and malleable like a 

piece of clay. It was a highly effective explosive when a primer and detonator were 

inserted and a connecting fuse lit. The trainees practiced with various amounts of plastic 

explosive on different kinds of material used particularly in bridge construction, blowing 

up pieces of wood, concrete, and steel. In addition, in order to hamper enemy truck 

convoys, the students learned how to explode craters in roads. Sometimes, despite the 

National Park Service’s policies, they blasted off stout tree branches or even blew up 

trees in demonstrating the explosives.58

 

 

54 Lt. Col. Corey Ford and Maj. Alastair MacBain, Cloak and Dagger: The Secret Story of OSS (New York: 

Random House, 1945), 26. 

55 Jerry Sage, Sage (Wayne, Pa.: Miles Standish Press, 1985), 20. 

56 Edward E. Nicholas, “How We Won the Great War,” typescript memoir, n.d., [c. 1994], p. 5. Copy sent 

by Nicholas’s son, Ned Nicholas, to the author, 18 July 2005. 

57 Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interview with the author, 14 March 2005. 

58 Dreux, No Bridges Blown, 17-18. It is possible that Sergeant Bolinksi was the same demolition instructor 

that Jacques L. Snyder had at Area A in late 1943. An old timer with years of experience with explosives, 

he had only two fingers remaining on his right hand and still used his teeth to crimp the detonating caps on 

primer cord, a practice as dangerous as Russian roulette and one which he told the students never to do. 
250 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

Seaman Spiro Cappony, a Greek-American radioman from Indiana, receiving SO 

training for infiltration into German-occupied Greece, recalled that at Area B in1943 the 

instructors there also showed them the new Composition C “They showed us how to put 

fuses into it. They would also take a line of fuse cord and wrap it around a tree and show 

us how fast it traveled [burned]. So we became familiar with that. In Greece, [OSS] 

would airdrop it from Bari, Italy. They would airdrop it, but it would not explode. You 

had to put the fuses into it. We taught the [Greek] guerrillas how to do that.”59

In addition to using plastic explosives, instructors sometimes taught the trainees 

how to rig improvised explosive devices from artillery rounds. At Area B, Reginald 

Spear remembers that they blew up a 155mm. artillery shell as an explosive device along 

a fire trail. “You used [a particular chemical] to explode the 155 mm round. That gave 

you a few minutes to get away. But the enormous explosion could kill you. We were very 

respectful of those rounds. We wore steel helmets.”60

 

What most excited many of the trainees, the majority of them young men not long 

ago civilians, was learning and firing so many weapons. “We fired the Thompson 

submachine gun and the M-3 submachine gun, a little ‘burp’ gun. I wish I had more time 

for firing those,” John Brunner noted in his diary at Area C on an October day in 1944, 

“It was fun.”61 The OSS emphasized fast combat shooting rather than careful 

marksmanship and familiarity not just with the standard U.S. Army small arms, the .45 

caliber automatic pistol and the M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, but, since the men were 

being trained for service behind enemy lines, with a wide variety of Allied and Axis 

weaponry. They fired many different pistols including German Lugers and Walthers and 

Japanese weapons. The Colt .45 was the standard U.S. sidearm. Brunner called it “a 

sweetheart.” “It is superbly accurate at even 100 yards. It puts a man down. A 9mm. 

[pistol] causes hemorrhaging and death more effectively. You might survive more easily 

with a .45 wound, but you will be down and in pain and no longer a threat. And it will 

take several of your buddies to carry you back.”62 The .45 was big and heavy, 

consequently, Reginald Spear recalled, a number of OSSrs carried a 9mm or .380 caliber 

pistol, because they were smaller and lighter.63 

OSS training focused on rapid combat shooting rather than deliberate 

marksmanship. The primary instructors in pistol shooting at OSS training camps in the 

 

Jacques L. Snyder, “Cloak and Dagger Days,” typescript memoir, n.d., [late 1990s], p. 3, provided by his 

son, James Snyder, to the present author, 16 January 2008. 

59 Spiro Cappony, telephone interview with the author, 16 September 2006. 

60 Reginald Spear, telephone interview with author, 25 March 2005 and 24 June 2005. 

61 John W. Brunner, reading from and elaborating on his diary entry for Friday, 27 October 1944, in a 

telephone interview with the author, 21 March 2005. At Area A, Lt. William Dreux remembered the thrill 

of firing pistols, rifles, carbines, and submachine guns at moving and bobbing cardboard targets. Dreux, No 

Bridges Blown, 18. 

62 John W. Brunner, reading from and elaborating on his diary entry for 24 October 1944, in a telephone 

interview with the author, 21 March 2005. 

63 Reginald G. Spear, telephone conversation with the author, 25 March 2005. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 251

United States throughout the war were Rex Applegate and Dan Fairbairn. They taught 

their new method of couched, two-shot “instinctive firing” or what Applegate called 

“point-shoot.” With bursts of two shots fired within seconds, the first would unnerve the 

enemy even if it did not hit him and the second could kill him. “You chaps have been 

trained to aim a weapon,” Fairbairn told Jack Singlaub and the other SO trainees at their 

first session with him at Area B in fall 1943. “That’s all well and good on the range. The 

only problem is that your average Hun or Nip rarely stands still with a bull’s eye on his 

nose.” With that, three silhouettes of helmeted Germans suddenly sprang up in the bushes 

about 60 feet away. Fairbairn twirled around, pulling his pistol out of his belt, crouched 

and fired off three bursts of double shots, each pair right into the center of the paper 

targets. “The man and the pistol had become a single weapon.”64 At Area A, Jacques 

Snyder remembered that Fairbairn also taught the students how to use a submachine gun, 

the Thompson was his favorite, “with maximum efficiency, firing only three rounds at a 

time.”65

John Brunner remembers that the day after his group arrived at Area C-4 in 

October 1944, Fairbairn instructed them in knife and pistol work. “The first thing he told 

us was that if someone comes at you with a knife, pull out your pistol and shoot him! 

None of this fair fighting, Marquis of Queensbury rules nonsense. If you do not have a 

pistol, turn and run away. Do not attempt to fight him. If you cannot run, then and only 

then, here is what you do. Here is how you disarm a man and incapacitate him. He 

repeated, however, never enter a knife fight if you can avoid it. You can never predict 

how good the other guy is with the knife.” “From then on, Brunner said, “we spent little 

time with the knife. We trained with the pistol. Don’t ever be without your pistol [in a 

war zone],” Fairbairn said. “Even take it into the shower with you [hung up at arm’s 

reach]. I did [in China], even into the shower.”66

Applegate and Fairbairn were sticklers for realism and detail. They required 

students to be able blindfolded, in simulated night conditions, to disassemble and 

reassemble not only American but German and Japanese weapons as well. To get a sense 

of what it felt like to be shot at, they actually shot at—or rather near—the students. “I 

remember Delicate Dan the Deacon having us stand in front of a target and then firing a 

.45 so that it just missed us and we could feel the muzzle blast,” Edgar Prichard recalled 

vividly67 The former Tulsa journalist remembered the practical final examination held at 

a pistol house, what Fairbairn called a “mystery house,” built to test the trainee under 

stress as well as to replicate the dangerous reality that an agent might face in attacking an 

enemy-occupied house or command center. “Each of us over a period of a couple of days 

 

64 Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub with Malcolm McConnell, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the 

Twentieth Century (New York: Summit/Simon & Schuster, 1991), 32. 

65 Jacques L. Snyder, “Cloak and Dagger Days,” typescript memoir, n.d., [late 1990s], p. 4, provided by his 

son, James Snyder, to the present author, 16 January 2008. 

66 John W. Brunner, reading from and elaborating on his diary entry for 24 October 1944, in a telephone

interview with the author, 21 March 2005. 

67 Edgar Prichard, Arlington, Va., “Address to Historical Prince William, Inc.,” 16 January 1991, p. 1, 

typescript of a talk and newspaper clipping of the speech, in Park Archives of Prince William Forest Park, 

Triangle, Va.. Prichard’s reference in this case was to Area B. 
252 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

would be awakened in the middle of the night and hauled off to carry out a special 

mission. When it came my time I was told that there was a Nazi soldier holed up in a 

building and that it was my job to go in and kill him. I was given a .45 and two clips [of 

ammunition]. The house I was sent into was a log house with long corridors and 

stairways. I wasn’t sure whether there really was a Nazi soldier there or not. I kicked a 

door open with my gun at ready. Paper targets with photographs of uniformed German 

soldiers jumped out at me from every corner and every window and doorway. We had 

been taught to always fire two shots at the target. There must have been six targets 

because I got two bullets in each one. The last one was a dummy sitting in a chair with a 

lighted cigarette in his hand. If you didn’t shoot him you failed the test.”68

Field Maneuvers 

 Training exercises became increasingly demanding as the curriculum progressed. 

Sometimes in the hot, summer field exercises, the trainees found themselves plagued by 

insects. After a Sunday morning field problem at Area B in August 1943, Private First 

Class Arne I. Herstad, a member of the Norwegian Operational Group recently arrived 

from Colorado, wrote to his finance, “I have never seen so many bugs, flies and pests 

anyplace as there are here. I even walked past a snake hanging in a tree. Don’t like 

them.”69 Jack Singlaub recalled more dangerous and demanding aspects of the training. 

“By the end of November, our training at Area B...had become a grueling marathon,” he 

wrote. “We fired American, British, and German weapons almost every day. We crawled 

through rain-soaked oak forests at night to plant live demolition charges on floodlit sheds. 

We were introduced to clandestine radio procedure and practiced typing out code and 

encrypting messages in our few spare moments. Many mornings began with a run, 

followed by a passage of an increasingly sophisticated and dangerous obstacle course. 

The explosive charges under the rope bridges and wire catwalks no longer exploded to 

one side as exciting stage effects. Now they blasted directly below, a moment before or 

after we had passed.”70

Throwing hand grenades is a dangerous business for the jagged steel fragments 

fly in every direction. In every camp, the grenade range was positioned some distance 

away and a trench was dug for the trainees who would pull the pin and hurl the grenade. 

“It’s not like what you see in the movies,” Ellsworth (“Al”) Johnson, a medic from 

Michigan who trained with the French OGs at Area F and Area B in 1943. “You don’t 

 

68 Ibid. Prichard trained at both Area A and Area B. A similar account of Area B was given by Spiro 

Cappony, telephone interview with the author, 16 September 2006. 

69 Arne [I. Herstad] to his fiancé, Andi, 1 August 1943, OSS Society Digest, Number 2064, 28 May 2008, 

osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 29 May 2008. For the NORSO group at Area B-2. A, see Van 

Beuren to Weston Howland, 24 September 1943, subject: Areas B and B-2, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 

146, Box 223, Folder 3106, National Archives II. 

70 Singlaub with McConnell, Hazardous Duty, 32-33. 

 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 253

pull the pin with your teeth or you loose them; and the grenade doesn’t blow up a 

building or a truck. It’s an anti-personnel weapon.”

71 In Area C, the grenade range began 

with the trench that had been dug at the top of a big ravine in the woods. “We were in the 

trench,” John Brunner recalled. “We raised up and threw live grenades into the ravine so 

the fragments would not go all over the countryside. We ducked back down fast. The 

grenades exploded, and you could hear the shrapnel whipping through the trees above 

your head. You learned to respect those little things, those grenades. We also fired 60 mm 

mortars. You had to make sure they were firmly anchored. Then you just dropped the 

shell down the tube.”72

 Realism was what the OSS instructors were after. At Area A at least, exploding 

dynamite caps—not dynamite sticks—were used to simulate the sounds and dangers of 

battle. “One of our [field] problems involved dividing into two groups with one group 

being assigned to protect another summer camp area and the second group to try to 

penetrate the area. I was in the defending group,” wrote SO trainee Edgar Prichard about 

the summer of 1942. “We spread out in the woods and set booby traps all over the place. 

They were not armed with anything except dynamite caps, but it was a wonder someone 

didn’t get his eye put out from flying fragments. I recall one person got a piece in his 

abdomen, but it didn’t go in deeply.”73 The following summer, Norwegian OG, Arne I. 

Herstad wrote to his fiancé about a night field exercise his group had at the OSS training 

camp in Virginia, which produced “a little bit of excitement.” The instructors had set out 

some “booby traps,” and Herstad managed to set off four of them. “The last one was set 

very close to us, and a few of the boys got hit with a few pieces of copper. These little 

pieces go in about 1/8th of an inch, and if there are enough of them in one place, it makes 

your arm, or whatever it hits, a little numb. The traps were dynamite caps, and they are 

pretty noisy if they go off beside your ear.”74

 Field exercises sometime used live ammunition, sometime blanks. In either case, 

it was rigorous and intense. SO trainee Erasmus (“Ras”) Kloman, a Princeton graduate 

from Baltimore, said that the obstacle course at Area A-4 was “designed for the toughest 

and most combat-ready personnel. I remember keeping my head and the rest of my body 

down at snake level as we went through the exercise just as if live [and not blank] 

ammunition were being fired.”75 Private Albert R. Guay had never had Army basic 

training, so the field exercise he participated in at Area B in December 1942 was a new 

and sobering experience for the 21-year-old graduate of American University. The winter 

 

71 Ellsworth (“Al”) Johnson, telephone interview with the author, 27 June 2008. 

72 John W. Brunner, reading from and elaborating on his diary entry for Wednesday, 25 October 1944, in a

telephone interview with the author, 21 March 2005.

73 Edgar Prichard, “Address to Historical Prince William, Inc.,” 16 January 1991, p. 5, typescript of a talk, 

in the Park Archives of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va. 

74 Arne Herstad to Andi, 25 August 1943, in OSS Society Digest, Number 2088, 1 July 2008, 

osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 1 July 2008. 

75 Erasmus H. Kloman, Assignment Algiers: With the OSS in the Mediterranean Theater (Annapolis, Md.: 

Naval Institute Press, 2005), 13; and Erasmus Kloman, telephone interview with the author, 24 January 

2005. 
254 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

had set in and it was cold and the ground was covered with ice and snow on Catoctin 

Mountain. “Had my first combat training today,” he wrote in his diary that night. 

“Advancing over open field under fire. Ground frozen & awful hard. Slipped once & 

banged my knee cap hard. Probably be sore tomorrow. Enjoyed it very much, but it 

showed me how tough it would be to actually advance under fire. Casualties would be 

high. We are expendable.”76

Spiro Cappony was a 19-year-old sailor recruited by the OSS as a radio operator, 

but his naval training had not included ground combat exercises. At Training Area B, he 

remembered, he underwent field exercises amidst live ammunition. “We had ground fire, 

where they fired machine guns at us. We’re on our bellies crawling with live ammunition 

going over our heads.” This was in late summer 1943. Within six months, he was under 

similar fire, this time from the enemy, in northern Greece. “In fact that happened to me 

and Johnny—Johnny Athens [an OG lieutenant]—in Greece, where the Germans were 

firing at us. Our horses stumbled, and we went down a cliff, and we ended up in the 

vines, grapevines, and the Germans shooting at us. We were lying on our backs. The 

bullets were flying over our heads. And there we were. It seemed like we had trained for 

that. There I was doing the same thing. We crawled out of there with the live ammunition 

going over our heads.” Asked in 2006 to what degree the OSS training had prepared him 

and proven effective, Cappony responded without hesitation: “One thousand percent! 

Without that training, I wouldn’t have made it. It saved my life!”77

As a member of a French Operational Group, Jacques L. Snyder’s OSS training 

began in the fall of 1943 at Area F, the former Congressional Country Club. Part of it was 

learning how to live off the land, surviving on what they could find in our near the 

woods. “Some of our people became very adept at stealing pigs from local sharecroppers 

and organizing some fabulous barbecues in the boondocks. This activity reached such 

proportions that the locals living in the sticks were terrified of the ‘night people’ and no 

longer dared to get out at night, keeping a loaded shotgun behind the door. This...training 

included the quick and silent disposition of rabbits and chickens without raising the 

alarm, and the different ways to prepare them to make them edible. This talent came in 

handy when I had to sustain my group while operating behind German lines in Alsace 

[northeast France] and had to raid farms to steal rabbits, chickens, and eggs.”78

Since Jacques Synder had grown up in France and was entirely fluent in the 

language and customs, OSS decided to shift him to Special Operations for solo 

infiltration as a spy and saboteur. For that training, he was sent to Area A. “The accent 

was on sabotage, learning more sophisticated techniques and acting as an individual 

agent....The course was even more rugged than the previous one and had to meet all the 

requisites of security, using false identity and cover stories.” He learned radio 

transmission and codes and other clandestine tradecraft with dead letter drops, cutouts, 

 

76 Albert R. Guay, diary entry for 16 December 1942, and telephone interview with the author, 24 October

2005. 

77 Spiro Cappony, telephone interview with the author, 16 September 2006. 

78 Jacques L. Snyder, “Cloak and Dagger Days,” typescript memoir, n.d., [late 1990s], p. 2, provided by his 

son, James Snyder, to the author, 16 January 2008. Similarly, one of the Italian OGs in Fall 1943 

remembered raiding the nearby farm of columnist Drew Pearson, author of hostile columns about the OSS.

Caesar Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 18 April 2008. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 255

concealing devices, recognition signals, and the forging of identity documents. In 

addition, “we were conducting night operations, being dropped in an unknown territory 

with just a map and a compass and had to rendezvous with other groups at a certain time, 

generally in secluded wooded areas, using prearranged recognition signals. We had a 

very extensive, in depth sabotage training, which included all the latest methods of 

destruction, by fire, by explosives, by chemicals, to attack any targets of the 

opposition....We were also taught how to manufacture our own incendiary mixtures and 

explosives out of ordinary chemicals.”79

Espionage and Sabotage Exercises in the Region 

 For many future spies, saboteurs or guerrilla leaders, OSS field training exercises 

culminated in real-life, if mock espionage or sabotage missions at nearby facilities or 

cities. Bridges and dams were ready made targets. Lieutenant Al Materazzi from 

Hershey, Pennsylvania, along with a dozen other officers of the first Italian Operational 

Group were sent to Areas A and C in the spring of 1943 before meeting and training the 

enlisted men of their OG. At A-4, they were given some night problems. One was to 

sabotage a major iron bridge carrying U.S. Route One across the Rappahannock River. 

“At night, we clambered out and placed charges strategically—dummy charges, of 

course,” Materazzi said. “Another exercise was when we were to sabotage a dam on the 

Rappahannock River. That one required descending into the gorge and climbing up the 

other side and—ah—taking care of any guards that might be there and sabotage it. The 

only one that was there was the poor night watchman. We scared him half to death. 

Nobody had told him.”80

Fredericksburg, not far from Prince William Forest Park, was chosen for a 

training problem for one of the early classes to graduate from Advanced SO school at 

Area A in June 1942. That class of more than a dozen men included, among others, Jim 

Goodwin, a football player from upstate New York; Ben Welles, whose father, Sumner 

Welles, the Assistant Secretary of State; Robert Schlangen from the State Department,; 

Jack Okie, from Marshall, Virginia; Roger Prevost, a lieutenant in the Free French Army, 

who had connections at the White House; and Edgar Prichard. The entire group was 

taken to Fredericksburg and told to find out everything they could about the city that 

would be useful if they were a sabotage team in enemy territory. With a forged letter on 

White House stationery which requested assistance for Lieutenant Prevost in establishing 

a supply base for Charles de Gaulle’s French forces, three of them visited the City 

Manager and came away with complete information on Fredericksburg, the water supply, 

the electric supply, the telephone system, the labor force and all of the factories then in 

Fredericksburg. Meanwhile, Prichard and Scotty Lockwood posing as fishermen 

pretended to fish on the city reservoir. They crawled through the inside of the dam into 

 

79 Jacques L. Snyder, “Cloak and Dagger Days,” typescript memoir, n.d., [late 1990s], p. 3, provided by his 

son, James Snyder, to the present author, 16 January 2008. 

80 Albert Materazzi, telephone interview with the author, 26 January 2005. 
256 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

the hydroelectric plant from below, located the generators and marked them “destroyed” 

with chalk. “There wasn’t much we didn’t know about Fredericksburg by the end of the 

day,” Prichard said. But he added, “I do know that later on the same type of 

reconnaissance program we carried out in Fredericksburg was repeated and that some of 

the students ended up in the clink.”81

 The practice continued throughout the war, particularly using larger industrial 

cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. In the winter of 1943-1944, a fourman team of SO trainees from Area A was assigned to breach the security of steel plants 

in Pittsburgh. By that time these OSS industrial field problems—“schemes” they were 

called—were run in cooperation with the Civil Defense Agency, which assigned the 

targets in order to check their security. In each city, OSS assigned a senior person to 

watch over the mission, obtain release of the students if they were arrested, and prevent 

publicity. This particular team included Ras Kloman, 23, a Princeton graduate; William 

Woolverton, 23, a Yale graduate from a socially prominent Manhattan family; William 

Underwood, 32, from an affluent Connecticut family, who left the prominent Wall Street 

firm of Sullivan and Cromwell for the OSS; and Norman Randolph Turbin, from 

Richmond, Virginia, who had become a paratrooper at Fort Benning, and who would 

later, after behind the lines operations in Italy, would be killed in action in the 

Philippines.82 

At Area A, the team Kloman was on worked out cover names and stories and 

prepared false identification papers. Their assignment was to penetrate US Steel and 

National Pipe and Tube, both which produced gun barrels and other military ordnance. 

They rented separate rooms in Pittsburgh and met regularly in working-class bars. The 

radio operator assigned to them from Area C relayed their progress. Woolverton got a job 

at U.S. Steel by pretending to be a metallurgist. Underwood posed as a magazine reporter 

got some information and had interviews lined up with senior management, until the 

company checked with the magazine which had never heard of him. Unsuccessful at 

getting a job at National Pipe and Tube, Kloman became discouraged and decided on the 

last night of the mission to break in at night. Risking being shot by a guard, he squeezed 

through a space in the chain-link fence. The plant was working round the clock, and no 

one seemed to notice anything wrong as Kloman walked around making observations and 

gathering up a number of documents, including plans of the plan. Kloman later learned 

that he had been the first OSS trainee to actually break into a plant rather than gaining 

access through a cover story. It was a bold and risky gamble, and he gained some 

acclaim for it. Richard Helms on SI’s European desk, later asked him, probably 

facetiously, whether he would like an assignment parachuting into Berlin. Kloman did 

not go to Berlin, but he did go to Egypt, Algeria, and Italy. At 24 years old, he became 

Acting Chief of Operations in the Mediterranean Theater, and during the war, he helped 

 

81 Edgar Prichard, “Address to Historical Prince William, Inc.,” 16 January 1991, pp. 5-6, typescript of a 

talk, in the Park Archives of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va. The five SO agents were sent to 

Nigeria in August 1942 to work with British SOE and set up chains of agents in case the German offensive 

in North Africa drove down the Atlantic coast of West Africa. After the U.S. landings in North Africa in 

November, the team was recalled and re-assigned. OSS, War Report of the OSS, Overseas Targets, 40. 

82 Kloman, Assignment Algiers, 4, 7-9, 11, 111n. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 257

organize and coordinate Special Operations teams that infiltrated Italy and France on 

sabotage missions.83

 

Communications Training Experiences 

 

 

Trainees at the Communications School at Area C were learning primarily how to 

be OSS base station operators overseas; they also learned how to be radio operators in the 

field if needed. They had to know electrical theory, and they all had to know how to 

communicate between the base stations and the operators in the field, who were equipped 

with the mainstay of the agents, the small SSTR-1, a suitcase sized clandestine wireless 

telegraphy sender/receiver.84 “The transmitter was absolutely exceptional. The receiver 

was very difficult, especially in the lower frequency ranges, of course, because the 

spectrum was noisier, and there was more interference...,” Art Reinhardt, who used the 

SSTR-1 in China explained. “You did not have very much band spread, so your 

selectivity was very critical. So the operators relied on their expertise and also the 

phenomenal ability of the communicators [the operators at the base stations], digging out 

signals from the interference, static, and what have you.” “The major problem sets had 

was when they were airdropped to agents in the field. They were not designed to handle 

the shock, and many of them broke on impact.85

 Agents from OSS branches and operators from the Communications Branch 

operators both learned how to use the SSTRs out in the woods. Mostly this was done in 

the woods of Prince William Forest Park, but often this was done in the Virginia 

countryside. Directing the antenna was crucial in either case. “We would have to do it all 

in a quick period of time, because if we were really in the field,” trainee Marvin Flisser 

recalled, “we would be triangulated by the enemy. We would have to get that antenna up, 

send out messages, and get the antenna down and out of there before the enemy gets you. 

Within a half hour we had done everything.”86 Reinhardt had similar recollections: We 

were sent out on live field exercises, where we took our SSTR-1s, and they drove us out 

in trucks to areas in Virginia somewhere, to abandoned farms. They would give us a 

lunch. We would encrypt our message, and we would contact the base station back at C. 

We would create simulated field operations.... Of course, as part of our training, Area C 

had a base station, which had the more powerful transmitters that you would find at an 

overseas base station. We were taught how to tune them and be familiar with them. 

Because, once you went overseas, you didn’t know whether you would end up at a base 

 

83 Ibid., 11-12, and passim. 

84 R. Dean Cortwright, W9IRY, “Reflections Concerning the SSTR-1,” and James F. Ranney, W4KFR, 

“The SST-1 Transmitter,” both in Ranney and Ranney, eds, The OSS CommVets Papers, 2nd ed., 61-65; 

John W. Brunner, OSS Weapons, 2nd ed. (Williamstown, NJ: Phillips Publications, 2005), with pictures, 

232-235. 

85 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author at Prince William Forest Park, Va., 14 December 2004; see

also Arthur Reinhardt, “Deciphering the Commo Branch,” OSS Society Newsletter (Fall 2006): 6. 

86 Marvin S. Flisser, telephone interview with the author, 27 January 2005. 
258 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

station or whether you would be an operator at a field station, or what you would be. It 

depended on the need.”87

 During classroom instruction, students would sit at telegraph keys with earphones 

on their heads, practicing sending or receiving messages in code. For nonCommunications Branch student agents the minimal goal was at least six words, or more 

precisely six five-letter code groups per minute. But for Communications Branch 

personnel the minimum as Private Harry M. Neben from Illinois remembered, it was 25 

words per minute88 In the code training room everyone would be wearing earphones, and 

civilian instructors like John Balsamo and Timothy Marsh would supervise as a dozen or 

so trainees. The students would first work with simple telegraph keys, but as they became 

more proficient, they would graduate to using superfast, double actions, fiberplex “bugs,” 

as these semi-automatic telegraph keys were called. The class would not all be doing the 

same thing, it would depend on the individual’s progress and also the instructor’s 

decisions. “You know we all came in from all walks of life. We were all used to 

operating with different procedures and protocols,” Reinhardt recalled. “They were trying 

to standardize somewhat. But that changed, because depending upon what field or theater 

you went in, because sometimes they might want you to simulate the German field 

operators, the Italians, or whatever. So it varied from place to place.”89

 

 Sometimes, the instructor would simply play audiotapes of someone sending 

Morse code, and the students would copy it, but while that improved speed, it was not 

realistic. “The stuff on the tapes is all perfect sending, and they weren’t going to hear 

much of that [in the field],” Lieutenant James Ranney said. “So I would do it by hand, so 

they could get used to that. It would be imperfect. Everybody has a different—what they 

call a `fist,’ and you can actually identify someone on the key by his `fist.’ You can have 

two people send, and they won’t sound anything alike. It is all in the international Morse 

[code], but it will be different in the spacing and in how careful they were and how many 

mistakes they made and so forth.”90

Area C Relationship with Area A 

Most of the students at Area C knew little or nothing about Area A, the secret 

training area for saboteurs and spies, even though it was only three or four miles on the 

other side of Prince William Forest Park. Because of the widespread field exercises with 

live munitions, it was off limits. Area C had its own pistol and rifle ranges, grenade 

trench and ravine, and even its own obstacle course, as well as a meadow in which 

trainees crawled along the ground with rifles under barbed wire.91 Morse code instructor 

 

87 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author at Prince William Forest Park, Virginia, 14 December 2004. 

88 “Harry M. Neben, W9QB,” in Ranney and Ranney, eds, The OSS CommVets Papers, 2nd ed., 201. 

89 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author at Prince William Forest Park, Virginia, 14 December 2004. 

90 James F. Ranney, telephone interview with the author, 8 January 2005. 

91 Marvin S. Flisser, telephone interview with the author, 27 January 2005. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 259

Timothy Marsh remembered that Area A was a place where OSS was using explosives 

and other munitions and that “Commo” instructors got to meet some of the agents from 

there.92 “We had a vague notion that it was a big wooded area and that there were other 

people in other areas around us,” trainee John Brunner said. “We did not know the 

nearest town. The truck did not open the flaps until well into the woods. We did not know 

that Quantico Marine base was nearby.”93 Wandering around the forested area was 

discouraged, and the men were directed to stay in camp. Art Reinhardt, a student at C-4 

for three months in the summer of 1944, recalled that he stayed at the training camp, 

except to go on leave. He did not explore the forest park.94

Communications instructor James Ranney got into trouble when some of his 

students wandered into Area A by mistake. He assisted in planning a nighttime field 

exercise for SO or SI agents that was supposed to be held within Area C, which was 

unfamiliar to them. ”They wanted me to make up a set of instructions guiding them to a 

certain point, where they would then set up their radio and talk back to the base station. 

Either my directions were not too clear, or they didn’t read them right, or they just got 

lost. But they—at least some of them—mistakenly ended up in Area A, where there were 

all kinds of unexploded mortar shells and everything.”95 They were not the only ones 

who got lost in the forest during the war. Ranney himself, an instructor at Area C for six 

months in 1943, said “I never was really sure where I was in that camp and forest. It was 

a forest, and we routinely got lost in the place.”96

Accidents 

Accidents do occur, particularly with weapons and explosives around, and there 

were injuries and a few fatalities at OSS training camps. There is little record of minor 

injuries, but veterans do remember some of the more dramatic ones. Instructor Frank 

Gleason certainly recalled being blown off his feet and knocked unconscious by a 

demolitions accident at Area D on the Potomac when someone had improperly wired the 

detonator.97 A communications student from Area C, while helping set up a remote 

transmitting site near Richmond picked up an antenna wire already connected to the 

power source and it knocked him about fifteen feet. The student was sore but otherwise 

 

92 Timothy Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 January 2006. 

93 John W. Brunner, telephone interview with the author, 21 March 2005; similarly Obie L. Etheridge, 

telephone interview with the author, 14 January 2008. 

94 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author at Prince William Forest Park, Va., 14 December 2004. 

95 James F. Ranney, telephone interview with the author, 8 January 2005. 

96 Ibid. 

97 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 26 December 2007. 
260 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

unhurt.98Another student received a wound, albeit not a deep one, in the abdomen from 

debris from one of the dynamite caps being used to simulate the noise of battlefield 

explosions at a field training exercise in Area A in the summer of 1942.99 William J. 

Casey, a future Director of Central Intelligence, but an SI student in 1942 had his jaw 

broken by a flying chuck of tree branch when he triggered a trip wire on the demolition 

trail at Area B and was down crouched down far enough.100 “I was just sick about it,” 

Instructor Frank Gleason said. “It was the only accident we had that I know of....We 

were very, very careful that we did not hurt anybody.”101

Although the final war report of the OSS did not list them, there were several 

fatalities during paramilitary training. At least two occurred on the obstacle course at 

Area F, the former Congressional Country Club, where, as at the other paramilitary 

training camps, in order to simulate battle conditions, students were required to crawl 

with their weapon along a trail while machine guns fired live ammunition over their 

heads. Two students were killed when they rose up into the machine gun fire, one of them 

because he unexpectedly came face to face with a snake.102 In another instance, this one 

at the Maritime Unit School at Area D in 1942, a trainee accidentally drowned in one of 

the underwater exercises on the Potomac River.103 

A bizarre tragedy occurred during a nighttime field exercise at Area F in 1943. It 

was planned as a standard exercise, very similar to those done at Area A or B, and it 

involved a group of OG trainees assigned to make a mock attack on a bridge nearby. The 

plan was to overcome the guards, whose part was played by enlisted men on the camp 

cadre, and then set up mock explosive charges to destroy the bridge. Lieutenant Al 

Materazzi was an observer. Years later, he recalled the events of that summer night. “In 

the morning, we had received our knives, the famous Fairbairn knife [a razor sharp 

stiletto]. We were told how to place it, where to carry it. We were given strict instructions 

not to remove it from its scabbard for the exercise. The exercise was that the officer 

[Materazzi] would be an observer, and the enlisted men would do the mission, which 

consisted of going, as I remember it, to a bar along the Cabin John Creek, rendezvous 

with the others and attack the place with another group. Opposing us was the station 

complement [enlisted members of the cadre at Detachment F]. The patrol moved in like a 

classic infantry patrol. There were two points [two members out in front], and as they 

reached the bridge, they were captured. Now, nothing happened, and one of them [one of 

the remaining men in the patrol] came to me and said, ‘Lieutenant, I can get up there and 

 

98 Obie L. Etheridge, telephone interview with the author, 14 January 2008. Etheridge witnessed the 

accident. 

99 Edgar Prichard, “Address to Historical Prince William, Inc.,” 16 January 1991, p. 5, typescript of a talk 

in the Park Archives of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va. 

100 Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interview with the author, 14 March 2005. 

101 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 31 January 2005. 

102 Congressional Country Club, Congressional Country Club, 1924-1984, n.p., n.d. (Bethesda, Md.: 

Congressional Country Club, c. 1985), 29. I am indebted to Maxine D. Harvey of the club for this volume. 

103 John Pitt Spence, telephone interview with the author, 28 January 2005. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 261

do it.’ And what did he do? He put the knife between his teeth, did a magnificent job of 

crawling over the parapet, waited until the guard turned his back, and then put the knife 

loosely on the man’s back, and then said, ‘All right, you’re captured. Now, we can go 

on.’ The guard wore glasses thick as bottles, you might say, and he turned and walked 

into it [into the knife]. He was killed immediately. Then they started to scream for me...I 

broke cover. Found out what it was, and arrested him on the spot. I sent him [back] to the 

F Area. I then took over the platoon to get to where we were supposed to go, which I 

did.”104 The man went before a court-martial. He was found not guilty but was transferred 

out of the OSS.105

Serious accidents were indeed rare in OSS training in the United States. 

Instructors emphasized safety measures with the weapons and took great precaution with 

the explosives. Spiro Cappony, a sailor and a radio operator, had never had any 

paramilitary training until the OSS recruited him and send him to Area B in 1943. He 

remembered that a big, red-haired instructor was particularly good. “He taught you to be 

confident in yourself. Not to be afraid to do things. Learning about your weapons. The 

weapon is your friend, but it is also your enemy. Because you don’t want to make a 

mistake with it either. You had to be very careful how you used your weapons. How to 

store them, how to carry them, and all of that. You were taught not to be careless, but to 

be careful with them and to respect their firepower.

106 Learning and practicing with hand 

grenades and mortars was, Cappony, recalled, “really scary. Because you knew it could 

explode. That was live stuff, not play stuff. They were very, very strict about training us 

with that. They were really on top of us. They made us appreciate the danger...to be very, 

very careful. There was very close supervision because they didn’t want to see any 

accidents. Thank God, we never had any accidents.”107

 

Celebrities in Disguise at OSS Training Camps 

 OSS training camps had a few nationally known celebrities as trainees. Among 

those students were professional wrestler “Jumping Joe” Savoldi; professional baseball 

player “Moe” Berg; New York socialite and former Russian prince, Serge Obolensky; 

and movie star Sterling Hayden. 

 Born in Italy but growing up in Michigan, Joseph Savoldi first became famous as 

an All-American fullback on Knute Rockne’s football team at Notre Dame University in 

the late 1920s. The Chicago Bears wanted him as a halfback, but Savoldi decided to 

 

104 Albert Materazzi, telephone interview with the author, 26 January 2005. 

105 Albert Materazzi, Close Combat, OSS Society Digest, Number 1123, 18 August 2005, 

osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 23 August 2005. 

106 Spiro Cappony, telephone interview with the author, 16 September 2006. 

107 Ibid. 
262 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

become a professional wrestler, and in 1933, he won the world wrestling championship 

by defeating Jim Londos at Chicago stadium. His winning streak continued, and in 1938, 

he garnered the European wrestling championship.108 In 1942, the 34-year-old Savoldi 

was recruited by Donovan’s organization, and he was a member of one of the first classes 

trained at Area B in Catoctin Mountain Park.109 During close-combat practice one day, 

instructor Jerry Sage, who knew Savoldi only by his code name “Vic” was taken aback 

when “Vic” leaped at him feet first, caught him around the legs, toppled him and pinned 

him to the ground. “Where’d you learn that?” Sage asked, spitting grass. “That’s my 

specialty in the ring,” Vic replied, “It’s called the flying scissors.” He then acknowledged 

being a professional wrestler.110 After his SO training, Savoldi was selected in 1943 for 

the “McGregor” Mission to negotiate with Italian admirals for the surrender of their fleet. 

Michael Burke, all-American football player for Cornell and later president of the New 

York Yankees, a member of the mission recalled that Savoldi “was built like a gorilla and 

moved as lightly as a leopard. His wrestler’s face had been mashed against the ring 

canvas a thousand times. He was enthusiastic; I thought he would be perfect. He would 

terrify Girosi [Marcello Girosi, New York brother of the Italian admiral they were trying 

to contact] and maybe the entire Italian fleet.”111 Savoldi would be Girosi’s bodyguard. 

Before the group left, however, Mussolini’s fascist government had been toppled, the 

new Italian government had joined the Allies, and the OSS had already smuggled out of 

German-occupied Italy, a dozen Italian naval officers and scientists with crucial 

information about the new radio-guided bombs, high-speed “commando” submarines, 

and special torpedoes the Axis had developed and were using against Allied forces.112

Morris (“Moe”) Berg was an extraordinary individual, an intellectual, linguist, 

spy, and most famously a professional baseball player. Growing up in Newark, New 

Jersey, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, he starred academically and athletically 

in high school and at Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and captain of the 

 

108 I am indebted to the grandson of Joseph (“Jumping Joe”) Savoldi for this information. Emails from J.G. 

Savoldi to the author, 26 May 2006. See also, “Information Sought on OSSer `Jumping Joe’ Savoldi,” OSS

Society Newsletter (Summer 2005), 16. 

109 There are two references to Joseph (“Jumping Joe”) Savoldi at OSS Training Area B in the spring of 

1942. He was identified by name, but incorrectly described as an instructor, by Edgar Pritchard, a 71-yearold Arlington, Virginia, lawyer and OSS/SO veteran in a talk to an historical society in Prince William 

County, Virginia, “Address to Historic Prince William, Inc.,” 16 January 1991, page 2, typescript of talk in 

Park Archives at Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va. A 1942 contemporaneous, internal report on 

OSS Training Area B does not give Savoldi’s name, but states that one of the students there in early June 

1942 was “a professional wrestler,” presumably a reference to Joseph Savoldi. R.P. Tenney to J.R. Hayden, 

interoffice memo, subject: Area B, 8 June 1942, in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 158, Folder 

1721, National Archives II. 

110 Jerry Sage, Sage (Wayne, Pa.: Miles Standish Press, 1985), 36. 

111 Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune (Boston: Little Brown, 1984), 94. See also Corey Ford and 

Alastair MacBain, Cloak and Dagger: The Secret History of OSS (New York: Random House, 1945), 149-

176; and Max Corvo, The O.S.S. in Italy, 1942-1945: A Personal Memoir (New York: Praeger, 1990), 83, 

86, 113, 134. All of the above authors had served as officers in the OSS. 

112 Ford and Mac Bain, Cloak and Dagger, 173-74. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 263

baseball team in 1923. He spent the next 16 years as a catcher for the Chicago White Sox, 

Boston Red Sox and a couple of other teams, while also earning a law degree at 

Columbia and taking classes at the Sorbonne. Sportswriters called Berg, “the brainiest 

guy in baseball.”113 Berg liked being a hero and the excitement of taking risks. That and 

his intellect, self-confidence, charm, and his iron nerves made him a perfect OSS agent. 

In August 1943, he was hired as a civilian by the OSS.114 Apparently, Berg received 

some OSS training at Area B at Catoctin Mountain Park.115 Subsequently, he was 

assigned first to the Balkan desk until May 1944, when he left for England and worked 

on special missions throughout Europe.116

 

Berg directed a series of daring field operations, in many of which he played the 

primary role himself. He parachuted into Yugoslavia, and his report supported Tito’s 

efforts against the Germans. Later, he was flown into Norway, where he obtained more 

information about the Germans’ nuclear-related heavy water plant, subsequently 

destroyed by Allied bombing. But his most extraordinary mission was in 1944, when 

because of his knowledge of physics, Berg was sent to a conference in neutral 

Switzerland to listen to a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, the leading nuclear physicist in 

Germany. If Berg judged from Heisenberg’s remarks that a German atomic bomb was 

imminent, he was to assassinate Heisenberg. Listen to the lecture, Berg correctly 

concluded that the Germans had not made significant progress toward an atomic bomb. 

Later, Berg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his accomplishments 

with the OSS.117

 

 

113 Moe Berg’s fascinating life has been sketched in several biographies, the fullest being Nicholas 

Dawidoff, The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (New York: Pantheon, 1994); but see 

also Louis Kauffman, Barbara Fitzgerald, and Tom Sewell, Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy (Boston: 

Little, Brown, 1975); and a family memoir/document collection by his sister, Ethel Berg, My Brother 

Morris Berg: The Real Moe (Newark, N.J.: E. Berg, 1976), copy in Special Collections, Alexander Library, 

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. Another, if lesser known professional baseball player who 

trained at Catoctin Mountain Park was Richard W. (“Bobo”) Breck, an OSS Special Operations agent who 

served in Italy. Breck had played baseball at preparatory school and at Harvard and after the war, was a 

pitcher for the Pawtuckett Slaters, a farm team for the Boston Braves in 1946 and 1947 until he broke his 

leg. He subsequently worked as a production manager for Raytheon on radar for missile and other defense 

systems. C.G. Lynch, obituary, “Richard W. Breck, 83, was Veteran of World War II, Raytheon Manager,” 

Patriot Ledger, Quincy, Mass., 17 March 2005, p. 25, reproduced in OSSSociety Digest, Number 984, 18 

March 2005, osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 18 March 2005. 

114 Dawidoff, The Catcher was a Spy, 150, 152-153. 

 

115 Alex Flaster, Chicago, email to the author, 24 February 2006; Flaster is a Chicago based documentary 

filmmaker who was in 2006 producing a feature length documentary film on Moe Berg. At the infiltration

test at the end of Berg’s training, he was apprehended in his attempt to penetrate the Glenn Martin aircraft 

factory in Baltimore. The publicity from his arrest caused a minor scandal in Washington, because there 

already had been some concern that the OSS might be used for domestic spying on Americans. 

116 “I was in charge of General Bill Donovan’s OSS Balkan Desk from August 1943 until I left for England 

in May 1944.” “Moe Berg,” photocopy of a summary in Berg’s handwriting, undated; and Mr. Morris 

Berg, Acting Area Operations Officer, ME-SO, to Mr. Thomas Damberg, Special Relations, 12 November 

1943, subject: future correspondence, both documents in Berg, My Brother Morris Berg, 200, 224. 

117 Dawidoff, The Catcher was a Spy, 169-217. For some unknown reason, Berg declined to accept the 

award in 1946. His sister accepted it for him after Moe Berg’s death in 1972. 
264 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

Prince Serge Obolensky was born in St. Petersburg in Czarist Russia in 1890 to a 

family that traced its ancestry back to Igor, the Grand Duke of Kiev in the tenth century. 

Although not a member of the Romanov family, the Obolenskys won the right to use the 

title prince in the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Serge’s father was a general and his mother 

was from one of the wealthiest families in Russia. Serge studied at St. Petersburg and 

Oxford universities. When the First World War broke out, he left college and joined an 

Imperial Guards cavalry regiment. He fought against the Germans in World War I and 

against the Red Army during the Russian Revolution. After the communist victory in 

Russia, Obolensky became one of the many white Russian émigrés, settling first in 

London and then in New York. Working in banking and real estate in New York in the 

1920s, he married into the socially prominent and extremely wealthy Astor family. He 

became a US citizen in 1931, and in 1935 having lived in many of the best hotels in 

Europe and America, was given the job by Vincent Astor of consulting and promoting 

the renovated St. Regis Hotel in New York. This led him into the hotel business, and he 

later became vice President of the Hilton International hotel chain. 

In 1940, when the German Army overran Western Europe, Obolensky tried to 

enlist in the U.S. Army, but was rejected because he was 49. Instead, he joined the New 

York National Guard as a private and was soon promoted to captain. After Pearl Harbor, 

he sought out William Donovan and asked to join as a commando. Donovan obtained an 

Army commission for him as a major. The 51-year-old Obolensky reported to Colonel M. 

Preston Goodfellow in Donovan’s office in Washington in early 1942 and was sent 

immediately to Area B-2 for Special Operations training.118 

 At B-2, Obolensky worked hard. He recognized that the course was designed to 

toughen the men as well as provide them with commando skills. “We got up early and 

went to bed late, training in special tactics, shooting at sounds at night, guerrilla tactics, 

memory tests of smell and configurations of places in total darkness, and especially 

demolition work.”119 Obolensky’s code name was “Sky,” it was written on an 

identification tag he wore. Lt. Jerry Sage, then an instructor at B-2, remembered “Sky, 

the tall gentleman...then about fifty-four years old...He was a real man—tough, resilient 

and good-humored. He trained hard, and despite his greater age, he kept up with all the 

younger fellows and did everything we did.”120 Sage recalled that despite his age, Sky 

(Obolensky) insisted on going along with the OSS tradition of making all five qualifying 

parachute jumps in one day. When the group had completed the first two jumps, Sky’s 

legs began to hurt. He had the medics wrap them in tape, but the tape broke when he hit 

the ground again—on both the third and fourth landings. The jumpmaster tried to get him 

to stop, but he insisted on completing the fifth jump that day. Up in the plane, his legs 

hurt so badly he could hardly walk and the jumpmaster tried to block his way. But 

 

118 Serge Obolensky, One Man in His Time: The Memoirs of Serge Obolensky (New York: McDowell, 

Obolensky, 1958), 342. Obolensky wrote in 1958 that Goodfellow sent him immediately “to a commando 

school in Virginia,” but he undoubtedly confused this with Maryland, as Lt. Jerry Sage remembers training 

him at B-2. 

119 Ibid., 342-343. 

120 Sage, Sage, 30-31. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 265

Obolensky yelled out, “Throw me out of the plane, damn it!” They did, and he received 

his paratrooper’s insignia that day.121

 Back at OSS headquarters, Goodfellow put Obolensky to work in the summer of 

1942 helping to prepare tables of organization and manuals for guerrilla units, what 

would later become known as Operational Groups. Obolensky was told that the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff only reluctantly approved Donovan’s idea for these uniformed, military 

units and that the U.S. Army had feared a repetition of the nineteenth century’s U.S. 

Volunteers. Those had been ad hoc units of citizen soldiers led by amateur officers such 

as in the Civil War and most famously in the Spanish-American War, Theodore 

Roosevelt and his “Rough Riders.” The Army, Obolensky claimed, would not even allow 

the OSS units to use the standard military nomenclature—platoons, companies, 

battalions. Nevertheless, Obolensky declared, eventually “we got everything we wanted, 

the newest and most secret weapons. We had the bazooka long before anyone else, high 

explosives, pliable plastics, quite safe with detonators.”122 

 After being dispatched on a tour of Army training camps by Goodfellow, 

Obolensky returned to Washington and was sent to OSS Area A in Prince William Forest 

Park, Virginia. Colonel Russell (“Russ”) Livermore was there in the spring of 1943 and 

Obolensky says that he worked with Livermore on the development of the organizational 

and training program for the OGs. It was while he was at Area A that he made the five 

jumps in one day and earned his paratrooper’s winged insignia. Afterwards, Obolensky, 

later wrote, he was assigned to prepare a camp for guerrilla warfare training of the OGs, 

or what he called “our OSS commando combat teams.” The facility was Area F, the 

former Congressional Country Club.123

 

 Obolensky obtained two young instructors in guerrilla warfare at the infantry 

school at Fort Benning who would play key roles in the Operational Groups: Captains 

Joseph Alderdice and Alfred T. Cox. While the men for the OGs were being recruited, 

Obolensky and Alderice wrote the training curriculum, lectures, and manual for the OGs. 

They drew upon British commando material, Fairbairn’s methods, insights that 

Obolensky had gathered in his career and his tour of American bases, and in addition, the 

translation of a smuggled copy of the Soviet Russian Guerrilla Manual. The manual they 

wrote, The Operational Group Manual, eventually became the United States Army 

Guerrilla.

124 The brilliant Albert (“Al”) Cox, who had been a civil engineering student at 

Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, President of his class, captain of the football and 

baseball teams, and Phi Beta Kappa, also played a significant role in organizing and 

training Operational Groups at Area F, and later in leading and directing them in action. 

In the Mediterranean Theater, Cox led the first OG teams sent to Corsica from Algiers to 

 

121 Ibid., 31-32. 

122 Obolensky, One Man in His Time, 343. 

123 Ibid., 347-348. 

124 Ibid., 343, 349, 404, although Obolensky spelled it Alderdyce. See “Lecture: Guerrilla Warfare,” in Lt. 

Col. Serge Obolensky and Capt. Joseph E. Alderdice, “Outline of Training Programs at Areas `A’ and `F’

for Operational Groups, Office of Strategic Services, n.p., typescript, n.d., [August 1943], OSS Records 

(RG 226), Entry 136Box 140; Folder 1466, National Archives II. 
266 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

stage raids along the Italian coastline, and he also led the final OG team into southern 

France to coordinate all the OG sections in the Rhone River Valley behind German 

lines.125

 

 In late August 1943, Obolensky, by then a lieutenant colonel, was sent overseas to 

the Mediterranean. In Algiers, Donovan himself explained to Obolensky that the Allies 

were soon going to invade the Italian mainland south of Naples from Sicily. General 

Dwight Eisenhower, the theater commander, wanted a prestigious person—in this case 

Obolensky—to neutralize the Axis forces on Sardinia by delivering special letters to the 

Italian commander on Sardinia from the General Eisenhower and by the head of the new 

Italian government, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, ordering him to surrender. The four-man 

OSS team, including Obolensky, an assistant, Lieutenant James W. Russell, a British 

sergeant as a radio operator, and one of the Italian American OG officers, Lieutenant 

Michael Formicelli, from Areas A, F, and B, as an interpreter, parachuted into mountains. 

At 52, Obolensky thus became the oldest combat paratrooper in the Army. After leaving 

two members of the team and the radio in the valley, Obolensky and Formicelli made 

contact with the Italian commanding general, who agreed to surrender. Although 

Obolenksy could not convince the general to use his troops to try to neutralize the 19,000 

Germans already leaving the island, his mission to Sardinia proved successful in 

achieving Allied control of Sardinia and its Italian garrison of 270,000 troops without a 

fight.126

 The best known celebrity among the OSS Special Operations agents who trained 

in the parks was Hollywood star, Sterling Hayden. He had dropped out of high school at 

17 and run away to sea, and the 6’5”, 230-pound, ruggedly handsome, blonde adventurer 

had been picked by Paramount, which billed the 24-year-old in1940 as “The Most 

Beautiful Man in the Movies,” and “The Beautiful Blonde Viking God.” The next year, 

he married his co-star, the vivacious, sexy Madeleine Carroll. But after only two films, 

Hayden left Hollywood in 1941, did some parachute training in Scotland at Donovan’s 

suggestion, and in 1942, joined the Marine Corps. He went through boot camp and 

enrolled in Officers Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. To complete his break with 

Hollywood and to minimize public recognition after the publicity of his enlistment 

(“Your face looks familiar,” officers and others would say to him), he legally changed his 

name to John Hamilton. In the summer of 1943, the 26-year-old lieutenant, soon to be 

promoted to captain, transferred to the OSS. In his memoirs, Hayden wrote simply that 

“after a series of false starts in the direction of China, I was handed an enlisted man from 

the Navy who was fluent in Greek, telegraphy, and cipher, and we were dispatched to 

Cairo to harass the enemy.”127 Overseas they were separated. The enlisted man was sent 

behind German lines to help the guerrillas in Greece. Hayden went to Yugoslavia to aid 

Tito’s Communist partisans against the Germans. The seafaring actor also operated a 

small fishing boat along the Dalmatian and Albanian coastlines, part of an OSS air rescue 

team and also ferrying supplies to OSS agents in Yugoslavia and southwestern Greece. 

 

125 Kloman, Assignment Algier, 34. 

126 Obolensky, One Man in His Time, 353-371; Albert Garland and Howard Smyth, Sicily and the 

Surrender of Italy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 1965), 258-261. 

127 Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (New York: Knopf, 1963), 310. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 267

For his exploits, Hayden was awarded the Silver Star Medal. Afterward, he returned to 

Hollywood, where his placid strength and taciturn, solid, weathered persona served him 

well in such films as The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Killing (1956), Dr. Strangelove

(1963), The Godfather (1971), and The Long Goodbye (1973).128

The enlisted man assigned to Hayden in the summer of 1943 was Seaman Second 

Class Spiro Cappony from Gary, Indiana, who had been recruited by OSS naval radio 

training school at Miami, Ohio, in July 1943. He and Hayden, who Cappony knew as 

Captain John Hamilton, were assigned as a combat team to be sent behind German lines 

in Greece. Cappony was sent first to the OSS Communications School at Area C in 

Prince William Forest Park. There, he learned OSS equipment, polished his telegraphy to 

22 words a minute and practiced coding and decoding. He learned to tap the telegraph 

key with either hand, a skill that proved useful in Greece when he was wounded in the 

right arm. He credits the instruction at OSS Communications School with saving his life. 

“[In Greece,] the Germans would follow us. They had direction finders. I had my crystals 

and my radio in a suitcase. We learned how to use that, and we learned how to change 

our crystals to get the Germans off our backs. I learned how to set up my messages and 

the numbers and so forth. I had that all in my mind. I had to memorize all that stuff. I 

picked my [high] school song as my starting point. The guys in Cairo [the OSS radio base 

station], they knew my school song. So when they would get my messages, they would 

know it was me. When I got wounded [in my right arm], I had to transmit with my left 

hand, they wouldn’t accept it. They didn’t recognize my `fist’ [his telegraphic style]. I 

had a hard time convincing them it was me.”129

 

Training at Area B in the use of the bayonet later served Cappony well in action 

in Greece in 1944. “I remember when I first went into Greece, we were there the first 

day, and I had my rifle. I heard a whistle. I look around, and I asked the captain [Captain 

James Kellis, head of the four-man SO team], I said `Captain Jim, what’s that sound?’ He 

said, `It’s from the guerrillas. They’ve spotted a German. The Germans are coming at us.’ 

When he said Germans and here it is my first day, and the Germans are coming at us, I 

got a tingle. I heard my captain say, `Get your bayonet ready.’ I tell you, when I got my 

bayonet ready, I started to think about my training that I had in Area [B]. I thought, ‘Oh, 

my God, there’ll be hell to pay up here.’ But thank God, the Germans just came by. We 

were very, very quiet. There were about three or four hundred of them. They came up and 

looked around, but we had disappeared. It really scares you, because you are there for 

combat duty, but thank God for the combat training.”

130

 Sterling Hayden [Captain John Hamilton] returned to the United States in 

November 1944, visiting Areas F and A, before being sent to France and Germany 

 

128 On Hayden the actor, see, for example, the entries on him in David Thomson, The New Biographical 

Dictionary of Film, exp. and rev. (New York: Knopf, 2004); and Karen Burroughs Hannsberry, Bad Boys: 

The Actors of Film Noir (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003), 288-299. 

129 Spiro Cappony, telephone interview with the author, 16 September 2006. Mr. Cappony recounted much 

of his entire OSS experience at home and abroad in a letter to a friend in 2004. At the author’s request, Mr. 

Cappony has made a recording on 4 October 2006 of his reading that letter to the author. The recording has 

been donated by Mr. Cappony to Catoctin Mountain Park, Thurmont, Md. 

130 Ibid. 
268 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

in1945 hunting for anti-Nazi Germans to use against the Nazis. Spiro Cappony returned 

from Greece in late 1944, but did not have any money because he obviously had not 

received his pay while behind enemy lines. “Captain John Hamilton was my buddy. I met 

him in the Congressional Country Club. He says, `Hey, Gus,’ what are you doing here?’ I 

said, `I can’t get out of here. I don’t have any money.’ He said, ‘Get out and get drunk.’ I 

said, I’d love to get drunk.’ He said. `Here’s twenty bucks.’”131 

 

Some Lighter Moments in a Tough Training Schedule 

Despite the seriousness of the training, there were inevitably some lighter 

moments at the training camps. Some were funny, some ridiculous, some dangerous. 

Some resulted from carelessly by personnel inexperienced with firearms. One private on 

the cadre at Area B-5 in 1942 accidentally shot a hole in one of the walls of the arsenal 

where all the ammunition was stored. Two weeks later, another private there was caught 

using the bottom of the handle of a pistol like a hammer to tamp down a nail. He was 

caught and relieved of the weapon before it went off. For punishment, he was chewed out 

and confined to camp for a month.132 A much less dangerous violation of regulations and

procedures occurred at B-5, one afternoon in October 1942, when Private Albert Guay, 

the new assistant company clerk, who had only been in the Army for three weeks, was, as 

part of his duties, playing musical records over the camp’s public address system after 

duty hours. “I was leafing through a bunch of records,” he recalled. “We had a big stack 

of 78 rpm records.” And I found `The Star Spangled Banner.’ I had no more than started 

to play it when the phone rang. It was Major Blogg, and he said: `Who? Why? What for?’ 

and `Stop!’ and `Come over to my quarters!’ So I went over to his quarters, and I told 

him that I had not had basic training yet, and I did not know that that you were not 

supposed to play the National Anthem except on special occasions. It brought the camp 

to a standstill.”133 At Area C in Prince William Forest Park in January 1945, Lt. Richard 

P. (“Scotty”) Scott, who had just arrived, was “schooled” by Major Albert Jenkins, the 

camp commandant, because one Monday morning on the P.A. system, Scott played an 

inappropriate song for reveille. Others had played “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” and 

such, but Major Jenkins did not approve of Scott’s choice of “Drinking Rum and Coca 

Cola” for reveille.134

An extraordinary use of the public address system at Area C was made on June 6, 

1944, D-Day, as the Allies landed on the coast of Normandy. On that historic occasion, 

the OSS Communications Branch relayed information on the landings directly from their 

base station in England. The men of Area C gathered in a recreation hall to follow the 

news. “We had another civilian named McEwen, an old Navy radio operator, who was 

 

131 Ibid. 

132Albert R. Guay, diary entries of 11 and 30 November 1942. 

133 Albert R. Guay, diary entry of 28 October 1942. 

134 “Richard P. Scott, W3EFZ,” in Ranney and Ranney, eds, The OSS CommVets Papers, 2nd ed., 211. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 269

one of us, an instructor in the code department,” recalled Timothy Marsh. “He could copy 

[receive] up to 60 words per minute while talking at the same time. Like the old telegraph 

operators. Extraordinary! That day, D-Day, they tied in military circuits into one of the 

Rec halls, where we were, and he would listen and then tell us verbatim what was going 

on. He was telling us what was happening in the D-Day invasion as it was sent in Morse 

code from overseas. This was the only time that that kind of thing happened.”135

Parachute training was hard work, but it sometime produced some humorous 

moments. In the summer of 1942, Area B instructors Captain Charles Parkin and 

Lieutenants Frank Gleason and Ed Stromholt and a couple of trainees went down to Area 

A and used it and the Marine Base at Quantico to make the five jumps necessary to 

qualify as certified paratroopers. “We got in one of those old B-10 bombers, and we took 

off,” Gleason said. “When we were over the OSS camp, they would throttle it down to 90 

m.p.h.; you could hear the ‘beep, beep’ of the warning indicator that it was about to stall, 

and we would jump. We did five jumps that day. The last one was from 500 feet. It was 

just: swing, swing, and bang, you’re down. It was a forested area, but there was clearing, 

and we jumped into that clearing. There were two [OSS airborne] instructors with us. 

One was a Colonel [Lucius] Rucker.”136 The comings and goings of the OSS parachute 

trainees produced some confusion at the entrance to the Marine Base. As Parkin later 

recalled, “Each time, we would take off from a plane from Quantico, jump into clearings 

in Area A and walk back across the road to Quantico. Finally, the Marine sentry at the 

gate stopped me and said, `Captain, I have seen you walk into the base three times today, 

but I’ve never seen you walk out. How are you doing this?’”137 

For Parkin, the fifth jump did not quite go off as planned. His friend, Frank 

Gleason, remembered it. “The last jump, we were only 500 feet high. We jumped and we 

were practically on the ground. Charlie landed in a tree, he was upside down, hanging by 

his leg in that tree. It was quite a sight. I helped him get out of that tree. You’ve got to 

remember that those were crazy days. We were all young, and we were immortal and 

fearless, and we would do anything, anytime, anywhere.”138

 

 OSS high command liked to show off its paramilitary, commando-like training to 

certain dignitaries who wished to visit the camps. Sometimes such demonstrations went 

well. Norwegian OG member Arne I. Herstad from Tacoma, Washington, wrote to his 

fiancé of how more than a dozen of a “Norso” group, headed by Captain William F. 

Larsen, were called down from Area B-2 at Catoctin Mountain Park to Washington, as 

Herstead explained, to “put on a small program for the benefit of [Swedish-born, 

Norwegian] Crown Princess Märtha, Wild Bill Donovan, and a few more brass hats. I 

and 5 other fellows fired [sub]machine guns, 6 others fired pistols, and the rest of the 

boys were divided up for close order drill and a few other things we have had in our 

training. She talked with most of the boys and shook hands with all of us. Then we all 

 

135 Timothy Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 January 2006. 

136 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 9 May 2005. 

137 Charles M. Parkin, transcript of interview on a tour of Catoctin Mountain Park, 18 May 2005. 

138 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 31 January 2005; and interview on tour of tour 

of Catoctin Mountain Park, Thurmont, Md., 18 May 2005. 
270 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

had a real swell dinner with the princess of course. She’s really swell, speaks excellent 

Norwegian. Very much more beautiful than her pictures.”139

 Sometimes the visits did not go well. In 1943, a stream of crisply uniformed staff 

officers—from colonels to generals—was escorted out to Areas A, B, and F to watch the 

SO and OG exercises or even to address the trainees. Such visits did not always sit well 

with the trainees, many of whom resented what they considered gratuitous pep talks by 

staff officers who would ride out the war in offices and clubs in Washington. Lieutenant 

Jack Singlaub recalled that at Area B his training group, which included many irreverent 

paratroopers and future Jedburghs, quickly became fed up with being forced to dress up 

and listen to such ceremonial visitors. On one particular occasion, they decided to deflate 

such pomposity. Halfway through the distinguished visitor’s talk, the began to yell out a 

count in unison, concluding “forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty! Some Shit!” That ended the 

visits to that group in Area B.140 

During one night field exercise at Area A in Prince William Forest Park, other 

trainees were simulated an assault including overcoming “German” guards and blowing 

up a dam. At a small concrete dam in the woods in Area A, a few enlisted members of the 

cadre pretended to be German guards. The attacking force of trainees would sneak 

through the woods, overcome the guards and set dummy charges to “blow up” the dam. 

Lieutenant William Dreux recalled one such exercise which went slightly awry. His cabin 

mate Lieutenant Robert Farley, who had experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War, 

led his attack force with particular gusto that night, using a flying tackle that left the 

“enemy” sentry sprawled on the ground and almost unconscious. The problem was that it 

was not an enemy sentry, but a staff colonel from Washington who had come down to 

observe the exercise. According to Dreux, the colonel never returned to observe any more 

such maneuvers.141

Practical jokes were not unusual. One night at Area C in the winter of 1943-1944, 

trainee Marvin Flisser of the Bronx decided to play a practical joke on his best buddy, 

with the help of some friends and the camp guards. “We had girlfriends [in Washington, 

D.C.],” Flisser said. “One day my friend [code named] Larry Lamont—now we didn’t 

tell these girls where we were....We made up a story—There are several different 

entrances to this little camp. I don’t know, three or four different entrances. We made up 

a plan ourselves that we were going to play a trick on Larry, and we were going to tell 

him that his girlfriend, Helen, was looking for him. We told him, “Larry, Helen is at the 

gate, she’s looking for you.” He says, “What! I’m going to be court-martialed!” He was 

so frightened. So, he goes to one of the gates, and he says, “I’m looking for Helen.” And 

they [the guards] say, “Oh yeah, she was here, but she went to the next gate.” So he ran to 

the next gate, and said, “I’m looking for Helen.” They say, “Oh, she was here looking for 

 

139 Arne [I. Herstad] to Dearest Andi, 6 October 1943, OSS Society Digest, Number 2062, 26 May 2008, 

osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 26 May 2008. They were selected from nearly 100 men under 

Captain William F. Larsen at Area B-2. A, see Van Beuren to Weston Howland, 24 September 1943, 

subject: Areas B and B-2, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 223, Folder 3106, National Archives II.

Larsen later led his Norsos on the Percy Red OG Mission in Central France in early August 1944. 

 

140 Singlaub with McConnell, Hazardous Duty, 33. 

141 Dreux, No Bridges Blown, 18. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 271

you, but she went to the next gate.” We had him running around, all around the camp. We 

finally told him that this was all a ruse, a phony. (Laughs) Nobody knew who we were or 

where we were.”142

 One of the stranger elements of OSS training to many of the students was the role 

of the psychologists trying to assess them. Art Reinhardt remembered a very brief 

interview in a darkened tent at Area A in which the main question the psychologist with a 

pencil flashlight asked him was why he wore his sideburns so long. “I said I didn’t know 

they were that long. That was the end of it.”143 Caesar Civitella remembers the first 

question that the psychologist asked him was: “’How did you feel just before you made 

your first parachute jump?’ I said I had butterflies in my stomach. He said ‘How did you 

know that? Did you ever eat a butterfly?’ I said, ‘Of course! With chocolate!’ What kind 

of question was that.”144 Even more mysterious, civilian instructor Timothy Marsh 

remembered that sometimes at night, the psychologists used to project weird noises from 

their office in Area C. “We had this psychology tent, a cabin made up primary of 

psychologists, which was kind of remote from the rest of the camp. However, it had 

weird sounds coming from it at night, such as wolves chasing babies, children. You could 

hear them start a long way off and then getting closer and closer and closer. It was very 

unusual and unnerving. That was one of the things they liked to play late at night. There 

were other things that were unnerving, other sounds that were just unnerving....They 

were military [personnel]. We didn’t know much about them, to tell the truth. But they 

seemed to be trying to unnerve people.”145

 

 

“Going into Town” 

 

 Despite the long hours for staff and trainees, there was some leisure time at the 

OSS training camps. Most of the recreation and leisure time activities, especially for the 

staff, came from visiting local towns on an evening pass. At Area B in Catoctin Mountain 

Park, the nearest town was Thurmont, Maryland, then home of about 6,000 people on the 

east side only a couple of miles from the entrance to the park. Initially, some of the cadre 

would occasionally go to Thurmont. Assistant Company Clerk Albert Guay, for example, 

attended the Lutheran Church there one Sunday in November 1942.146 Some of the old 

time Thurmont residents remember seeing occasional soldiers, who were not local men 

 

142 Marvin S. Flisser, telephone interview with the author, 27 January 2005. 

143 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author while touring Prince William Forest Park, 14 December 

2004. 

144 Caesar Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 18 April 2008. 

145 Timothy Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 January 2006. 

146 Albert R. Guay, telephone interview with the author, 24 October 2005, and diary entry for 1 November 

1942. 
272 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

home on leave, in the town during the war, but they did not know where these men came 

from.147 Around Catoctin Mountain, rumors suggested that the sealed off area had 

become an officers training camp or later a facility for rest and rehabilitation for combat 

veterans.148 A report from the OSS Security Branch in September 1943, indicated that the 

local residents were naturally aware that there was military activity in the area, “but there 

appears to be little concrete evidence of any special curiosity or interest exiting regarding 

the nature of that activity.” “The entire Area [B] is ideally situated from the standpoint of 

physical security,” the report concluded, “being far removed from any town or settlement 

of any size.”149

By 1943 in order to maintain secrecy about the training at Area B, personnel from 

the camp were no longer allowed to go to the nearby hamlets, like Thurmont. Instead, 

their evening passes permitted them to go to either “Hagerstown or Frederick. These were 

small but lively cities, each about a dozen miles away. Hagerstown’s normal population 

of 40,000 was swollen by the influx of many people seeking jobs in the booming defense 

industry, particularly the Fairchild Aircraft Factory, which transports and other planes. 

Permanent staff members at Area B seem to have had regular brief excursions to 

Hagerstown on evenings during the week and on weekends. They could go to the movies, 

dance halls, roller skating rinks, bowling alleys, or local taverns, bars, cocktail lounges, 

and nightclubs, or, of course, the facilities provided by the United Service Organization 

(USO), which served the morale needs of U.S. military personnel. 

 There were nearly fifty enlisted men on the camp staff in Area B-5 in late 1942, 

and Al Guay, a recent college graduate serving temporarily as assistant company clerk, 

recalled that among them were “a rough bunch of guys up there.” On his secondary day 

in camp, he noted in his diary that “last night a couple of guys got in a fight in 

Hagerstown & one got a fractured skull.” As Guay told the author in October 2005, “I 

wasn’t in town that night. But our recreation was to get into a truck and go to 

Hagerstown, Frederick, or Thurmont. We would go in town in the evenings, not just the 

weekends. I looked earlier this month to see if I could remember where we parked our 

truck. In Thurmont, it was in a square. We parked there and most of them went to the 

bars. I was not a barfly, so I didn’t do that. I would walk around or go to a movie or a 

dance. There were a lot of USO dances around.”150 A number of the other enlisted men, 

Guay recalled, got mean when they got liquor in them.151 “Sgt. got kinda loud & tough to 

a girl in a restaurant; finally got him outside to cool off,” reads one diary entry. On a bus 

jammed with soldiers returning to camp from Saturday night leave, there was much 

trouble with drunks. One soldier “went after the major with a knife.” Guay never saw that 

 

147 Frank Long, Thurmont, Md., 5 June 2006; William A. Willhide, Thurmont, Md., 13 January 2006; and 

James H. Mackley, Thurmont, Md., interviewed by the author, 13 June 2006. 

148 William A. Willhide, Thurmont, Maryland, telephone interview with the author, 13 June 2006. 

149 A. van Beuren to Weston Howland, 24 September 1943, subject: Areas B and B-2, p. 1, OSS Records 

(RG 226), Entry 146, Box 223, Folder 3106, National Archives II. 

150 Albert R. Guay, diary entries for 12 and 28 November, and 9 and 11 December. 

151 Albert R. Guay, telephone interview with the author, 24 October 2005. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 273

soldier again; he probably ended up in the stockade. Another time, two enlisted members 

of the cadre went absent without leave (AWOL). The soldier who slept in the bunk above 

Guay was, the diarist noted, “a real character. Has [in the past] been shot several times in 

brawls, stabbed, beat up, etc. A very nice fellow when sober: friendly, polite & retiring. 

But when drunk, he’s loud, obscene & ornery.” On 11 December 1942, the camp doctor 

“gave us a good sex lecture tonight, because too many men are getting venereal 

diseases.”152

Since they were assigned to the secret OSS rather than a US Army unit, even the 

cadre did not have unit patches on their uniforms. Some simply let it go that way, others, 

like Guay went out and bought a shoulder patch. “It was just an Army shoulder patch 

with a star on it,” he recalled. “We weren’t supposed to let anybody know we were in the 

OSS. I bought the shoulder patch so I would just look like all the other soldiers. I was 

wearing a “Class A” [dress] uniform.”153 “When we would go downtown, people would 

ask us where we were stationed. We would tell them Camp Ritchie, Fort Detrick. But 

nobody from Camp Ritchie was ever around Hagerstown or Thurmont, and they would 

laugh and say, `Oh, you mean up at the old CCC camp.’”154

Guay, who was from a suburb of Washington, D.C., made his first trip to 

Hagerstown on Thursday night, 29 October 1942, as his diary indicated: “Went to 

Hagerstown tonight. Not much of a place, though Shep Fields [a well known band leader] 

was there at a dance; cost me $1.65. Soldiers aren’t treated very nicely. Gals gave 

civilians a better tumble [more attention].”155 Two days later on Saturday night, he went 

back to town, saw a movie, and wandered around the streets alone for hours. “An old 

woman, whose 18-year-old son had just enlisted, stopped me on the street and asked me a 

lot of questions. I tried to make her feel better. She was pretty worried. I am homesick 

too. For the first time in my life, I am not able to come and go as I please, and I don’t like 

it.”156 It took several visits to local towns before he began to meet young women. 

Accompanying different sergeants who had been at B-5 longer than he had, Guay began 

to meet some women, one at a bar, another at a USO dance. Finally, he did meet “a fairly 

attractive girl” named Dolly in Frederick and later a pretty young woman named Virginia 

at a dance in Hagerstown. He wrote to them both. He went dancing with Virginia and 

then to her house for ice cream and cake. On their second date, after bowling, he walked 

her home, and she let him kiss her goodnight. They went to a local USO talent show for 

their third date. He enjoyed it, but as he recorded in his diary, “She wouldn’t let me kiss 

her tonight. She is too prudish that way. It does no harm to kiss a bit.” A week later, he 

was back to see Virginia again, noting in his diary afterwards: “I’m getting to enjoy her 

company greatly. She hasn’t let me kiss her anymore after the first time. If I’m around 

 

152 Albert R. Guay, diary entries of 12 and 28 November and 9, 11, and 12 December 1942.

153 Albert R. Guay, telephone interview with the author, 24 October 2005, and diary entry for 23 October 

1942. 

154 Albert R. Guay, telephone interview with the author, 24 October 2005. 

155 Albert R. Guay, diary entry for 29 October 1942. 

156 Ibid., diary entry for 31 October 1942. 
274 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

much longer, though, I will. I don’t expect to be here much longer, I hope.” He was 

trying to get into Officers’ Candidate School. Seven days later, he went to Hagerstown 

again, “but when I called Virginia, she wasn’t home. She had to go to a party given by 

her company. I sure wanted to see her tonight; I think of her a lot.” The next day, 

however, he learned that he was being transferred, and the day after that the 19th of 

December 1942, he left, never to return.157 

 Trainees, under pressure to conclude an intensive training curriculum in a 

specified number of weeks, had less leisure time than the staff. Trainee Spiro Cappony 

remembered that they were occasionally allowed into Hagerstown on weekend evenings 

“if we had behaved ourselves.” “If we were good soldiers, and they were proud of us, 

they would reward us with a pass. They would take us in a bus [or more often an Army 

truck] and drop us off at a corner, forget about us for a few hours, and then, at 10:30 or 

11:00 o’clock in the evening, they would come back and pick us up....”158 Some of the 

men went to local bars and got drunk. Some would get into fights, sometimes with 

civilians but more often with other soldiers, because, as Cappony recalled, “they were 

jealous of us because we had money and also because we were kind of cocky. We were 

sure of ourselves. We knew we were strong, and we kind of poured it on a little bit.” But 

most of the young trainees and staffers going to Hagerstown or occasionally Frederick, 

went to places to dance with young women: dance halls, USO halls, or even, if they had 

the money, to nightclubs. The single, young men were looking for female 

companionship, and young men in uniform were often very popular with young women. 

“We had a hell of a time” at the dance halls, Spiro Cappony recalled. He and others said 

that most of the young women did not ask what base they came from (and if they did, the 

men told them Camp Ritchie). “All they wanted was a good time,” Cappony said, “and 

we wanted a good time.”159

 

 Among the officers, urban socialites like Roger Hall, son of a Navy admiral, 

found the remote setting at Area B, terribly boring. Transferred in fall 1943 from Area F, 

the Congressional Country Club located only six miles from Washington, D.C., to the 

western Maryland mountain camp, Hall said the “B” in Area B apparently stood for “By 

God, it’s a long way from nowhere.”160 “Everyone bitched more because of its remote 

locale,” Hall recalled, “but it was no different in pattern” from other OSS training areas. 

There was still the detachment cadre, the instructional staff, and the student trainees. But 

because of the pressure to get the Operational Groups ready for the invasion of France the 

following spring, Hall said he and his fellow instructors, working under chief instructor 

Lieutenant Sam Robelards, worked five weeks straight without a day or night off. 161

 When they could, staff members from Area B obtained two- or three-day passes, 

which enabled them to go down to Washington, D.C., two hours away. An Army truck or 

 

157 Ibid., diary entries for 10, 12, 14, 19, 21 November and 1, 3, 10, 17, 18 December 1942. 

158 Spiro Cappony, telephone interview with the author, 16 September 2006. 

159 Ibid. 

160 Hall, You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger, 34. 

161 Ibid., 36. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 275

bus would drop them off at the main bus station in Frederick, a city of more than 50,000. 

From there, they could take a commercial bus, or the enlisted men could hitchhike. 

Private First Class Albert Guay did both, and the handsome soldier in his snappy, ClassA uniform had some interesting experiences along the way, as he recorded in his diary. 

“Thursday, November 5th, 1942....Hitchhiked home; 4 women picked me up. There was 

a 16 yr. old blonde sitting next to me that was plenty O.K. They wanted me to visit ‘em in 

D.C. tomorrow, but I’m not going to, I guess.”162 A month later, after being home on a 

three-day pass and heading back to camp, he recorded, “Tuesday, December 15th

, 

1942...Dad took me down to the bus. A girl, not bad either, sat down by me & was 

friendly. So I proceeded to make love to her. Mugged [kissed] her all the way to 

Rockville where she got off & wanted me to get off with her [but he did not].”163

Training Areas A and C and Neighboring Towns 

 

At Training Areas A and C in Prince William Forest Park, the cadre and staff, as 

well as sometimes the students, would go into neighboring cities for relaxation. As at 

Area B by 1943, the closest villages—in this case Triangle, Dumfries, and Quantico—

were “off limits” to the trainees, except for transit at the Greyhound Bus Terminal or the 

Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad Station. Officers of the cadre and 

instructional staff seem to have been exempt from this prohibition. Some of them lived 

there with their families. Bachelor officers were allowed to go into Triangle and talk with 

the local people. Lieutenant James Ranney, a telegraphy instructor at the 

Communications School in1943-1944 explained, “The Commo guys didn’t know a whole 

lot of information. We operated on a `need to know’ basis. Triangle was just a little 

crossroads. There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot to do there.”164 The facilities of the U.S. 

Marine Base at Quantico could be used by permanently attached personnel but not by 

students or trainees.165 Some of the permanent personnel and their families used the 

Marine base across the highway for its PX and movie theater. Captain Arden Dow and 

his wife attended the movies there, for example, often with Park Manager Ira Lykes and 

his wife. However, many of the cadre and instructional staff did not use the Marine Base. 

Army officer and communications instructor Jim Ranney recalled that he never had any 

 

162 Albert R. Guay, diary entry for 5 November 1942. 

163 Ibid., diary entry for 15 December 1942. 

164 James F. Ranney, telephone interview with the author, 8 January 2005. 

165 Headquarters, Detachment A, “Standard Operating Procedure,” 13 April 1944, p. 2, OSS Records (RG 

226), Entry 136, Box 174, Folder 1841, National Archives II. 
276 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

interaction with that facility. “Marines,” he said, “look down their noses at everybody 

else.”166 

When on a pass or leave, most of the OSS personnel went to nearby cities: 

Manassas, a dozen miles away; Fredericksburg, 20 miles; or Washington, D.C., some 35 

miles. Communications trainee Art Reinhardt recalled that there would occasionally be a 

“liberty run” on Wednesday nights to Manassas or Fredericksburg. Trainee Marvin 

Flisser said “we used to go in the evenings, once or twice a week to Manassas. We would 

go in an officer’s car, but officers and enlisted men went together, and we would go to a 

place called the Social Circle, a nightclub or something like that. It was a big—like a 

barn, a big barn, and there was music there, a band....There were a lot of girls and men 

there and a lot of booths and tables. The orchestra played only country music. All the 

people would get up and dance to this country music. We used to laugh. In between, the 

band would rest, and during that period, they would turn on regular music. Nobody 

danced during that period, only during the country music. And the girls would dance with 

girls, and they would walk around—they didn’t do any square dancing particularly. They 

would just hold hands and walk.” The men from Area C went out and danced with the 

women, “we did pretty well.”167 

Given weekend passes, men usually went to Washington, D.C. Sometimes they 

were driven to the bus stop at Triangle for the hour ride to the capital. More often, a 

canvas covered Army truck would drive them from the camp to the city. It would drop 

them off on Friday night or Saturday afternoon at Union Station and pick them up there 

on Sunday night. Some went in uniforms with the identification patches of their parent 

unit; others went in just plain khakis without insignia.168 Sometimes members of the 

cadre and instructional staff from the training camps in Prince William Forest Park and 

Catoctin Mountain Park were taken over to Area F, the former Congressional Country 

Club, near Washington for additional lectures or instruction followed by some 

entertainment. Timothy Marsh, civilian instructor in telegraphy at Area C recalled that 

“We were there for some lectures, instruction on security, but we also had some 

socializing. We did sort of fraternize with the girls [from the OSS in Washington].”169

 Some of the married members of the cadre and instructional staff at Areas A and 

C, those whose families accompanied them to the new assignment, lived in nearby cities, 

particularly Manassas, only about a dozen miles northwest. Timothy Marsh lived there at 

the Prince William Hotel with his wife and one-year-old daughter; so did Lieutenant Ellis 

Marshall, who was also married, and who was in charge of the radio repair department at 

 

166 James F. Ranney, telephone interview with the author, 8 January 2005. Civilian instructor Timothy 

Marsh never went to the Marine base at Quantico. Timothy Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 

January 2006. 

167 Marvin S. Flisser, telephone interview with the author, 27 January 2005. The men from Area C were in 

uniform, but as far as the dance hall patrons knew, “we were [just] regular soldiers.” 

168 Arthur Reinhardt, interview with the author at Prince William Forest Park, Va., 14 December 2004; also 

James F. Ranney, telephone interview with author, 8 January 2005. 

169 Timothy Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 January 2006. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 277

Area C. Quite a few the staff lived in Manassas and commuted daily by car to Area C, 

although sometimes they had to stay overnight at the camp.170

Because of the secrecy surrounding Prince William Forest Park after the War 

Department took it over, and the fact that there were Army guards around the perimeter 

of the camp and gates as the entrances, there were various rumors in the local area about 

what was going on in the park. One rumor was that the park had been converted to a 

camp for conscientious objectors. One instructor there heard it so often in Manassas 

where he lived that he believed it was a cover story circulated intentionally171 Many local 

residents believed that the camp housed German prisoners of war.172 Reinforcing that 

rumor was the fact that some residents saw covered Army trucks driving along Joplin 

Road at night and they heard voices coming from inside in a foreign language, that they 

assumed was German.173 There was some plausibility for this as there soon were German 

and Italian prisoner of war camps in the United States, a number of them in Virginia and 

Maryland, and at least one of those facilities located at nearby Fort Hunt, Virginia, was 

classified top secret.174

Life of a Wife of an OSS Instructor 

 

 One of the OSS families that lived in Triangle for a while was that of Arden and 

Dorothea Dow. In the spring of 1942, the newlyweds from Washington State had driven 

across the country to Training Area B, where Dow was assigned as instructor, and bride 

had joined four other young wives taking up housekeeping in a big old house a half hour 

away. That fall, Dow had been sent to Britain for training with SOE. When he returned in 

October, he was promoted to captain and assigned to be chief instructor at Area A-4 in 

 

170 Ibid. 

171 Timothy Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 January 2006. 

172 Lee Lansing, town historian, Dumfries, Va., interviewed by Susan Cary Strickland, 15 July 1985, in 

Susan Cary Strickland, Prince William Forest Park: An Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: 

National Park Service, 1986), 27. 

173 Robert A. Noile, Triangle, Va., telephone interview with the author, 27 April 2007. Noile, who grew up 

on Joplin Road across from the park, reported on what his father told him soon after World War II. 

174 John Hammond Moore, “Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Virginia, 1943-1946,” Virginia Magazine of History 

and Biography, 85 (July 1977); on a wider scale, see Judith M. Gansberg, Stalag USA: The Remarkable 

Story of German POWs in America (New York: Crowell, 1977). The most super secret camp for German 

prisoners of war was actually an interrogation center at Fort Hunt on the Potomac River down near Mount 

Vernon in Fairfax County, Virginia. Known only as P.O. Box 1142, this facility was an Army/Navy 

installation at which 3,400 captured German submariners, airmen, soldiers, and scientists were held 

incognito for a few weeks or several months while German speaking interrogators questioned them about 

plans, equipment, and inventions, before they were sent to regular POW camps. Fort Hunt is today a park 

on the George Washington Memorial Parkway administered by the National Park Service. Petula Dvorak, 

“A Covert Chapter Opens for Fort Hunt Veterans; As files on Nazi POWs Are Declassified, Their 

Interrogators Break Their Silence,” Washington Post, 20 August 2006, A1. 
278 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

Prince William Forest Park. He and his wife drove to Triangle and rented a house there. 

So did several of the other former instructors at Area B now assigned to Area A, 

including Joe and Rita Collart and Elmer (“Pinky”) and Betty Harris, and Jim Goodwin, 

a graduate of B-2, now an instructor at Area A and his wife, Helene.175 Art and Dodie 

Dow rented a tiny, furnished house with a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and a 

bath.“I had an I.D. card, and I remember that at that time our address was Box 2601 

Washington, D.C.,” Mrs. Dow recalled.176 “Here, I always had a hard time cashing a 

check, because they couldn’t figure out why I was living here [in Triangle] but had a Box 

2601 [in Washington, D.C.]....And I didn’t know either. I couldn’t explain it either. We 

[OSS wives] didn’t really know what was going on at all.”177 

OSS staff couples frequently went to the big U.S. Marine Corps Base just down 

U.S. Route 1 at Quantico. They had privileges there and could shop there in the 

commissary for food and other supplies. They also went to see the latest movies at the 

motion picture theater on the Marine base. Frequently, the Dows went with the Park 

Manager Ira Lykes and his wife. “I remember the ranger [Lykes], who lived up in 

Chopawamsic [Recreational Demonstration Area] would come and go with us to the 

movies...his wife was there too,” Mrs. Dow recalled. “I guess they were maybe in the 

thirties...very friendly. She was a small, petite woman with dark hair. He was a slender 

fellow with dark hair. He dressed in a [Park] Ranger’s uniform, and that was amusing, 

because when we would go to the movies [at the Marine base], all the young officers 

there would be out on the steps or somewhere when we walked up. And they didn’t’ 

know whether to salute him or not. You could tell they were puzzled by that strange 

uniform [the forest green uniform and light tan, broad-brimmed hat].” They did not know 

whether he was a civilian, or a serviceman from another branch, or even another 

country’s armed forces. They didn’t know, but they would stand up.”178

 During the six months that they lived in Triangle, Captain Dow would leave his 

home each morning for Area A-4 and come home every evening. He did not tell his wife 

what he was doing there, but Mrs. Dow remembers that “he did tell me some things 

like—They didn’t really know anybody’s name. They [the trainees] were like a number 

or a nickname. And he did say it was amusing to see some of the servicemen [enlisted 

men] associate with the officers. They didn’t know what rank they were [because all the 

 

175 Dorothea (“Dodie”) Dean Dow, telephone interviews with the author, 15 May 2005, and 9 and 16 June 

2005. 

176 Later in the war, when Detachment A was officially closed effective 11 January 1945, the mail drop for 

the OSS personnel at Prince William Forest Park was shifted from Washington, D.C. to the Marine Base at 

Quantico. The new mailing address was Detachment A OSS, Box 1000 Marine Barracks, Quantico, Va.; 

see Col. H.L. Robinson, chief, Schools and Training Branch, OSS to Lt. Col. James A. Hewitt, Post 

Engineer, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 6 January 1945, subject: Closing of Detachment A, OSS in OSS Records

(RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II. 

177 Dorothea (“Dodie”) D. Dow, telephone interviews with the author, 15 May 2005, and 9 and 16 June 

2005. 

178 Ibid., She remembered the name of Park Manager Ira Lykes, when the author mentioned it to her but 

not the other NPS supervisor, John Gum. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 279

trainees were dressed in the same fatigues].”179 The Dows socialized with the Lykes and 

also with the other married officers on the staff at Area A, the Collarts, the Harrises, the 

Goodwins, as well as George White, the former Narcotics agent and instructor, and his 

wife, with whom the Dows went to the theater in New York City one weekend. These 

Special Operations Branch instructors did not socialize with the separate cadre or staff at 

the Communications Branch School at Area C.180 

 The Dows’ first child, Sharon, was born on 15 March 1943, at the Marine base 

hospital. Three weeks later, Captain Dow, who had been given a new assignment in 

China, took his wife and infant daughter and Mrs. Dow’s mother to the railroad station 

where they left for the cross-country trip to Washington state. He left for China a few 

days later. So for the next two years, the 25-year-old Mrs. Dow and their newborn 

daughter stayed with her parents in her hometown on the Washington coast west of 

Olympia. “It was very lonesome,” Mrs. Dow recalled. “I would go weeks without word 

from him.” Even then, she did not learn too much more than he was still alive. “The VMail, they had all been censored, always censored.”181 When her husband returned from 

China in May 1945, Mrs. Dow and the baby, now two years old, returned to Washington, 

D.C. After the war, Lieutenant Colonel Dow remained with the regular Army. He spent 

the next twenty years in the Army, in Korea, Taiwan, and the Panama Canal Zone, 

retiring in 1963 as a full colonel, by which time the Dows had two daughters. The family 

then moved to Athens, Georgia, where he worked for nearly twenty years as an 

administrator at the University of Georgia.182

OSS Relationship with the National Park Service 

 

 The National Park Service maintained a presence at Catoctin Mountain Park and 

Prince William Forest Park to keep an eye on the use of the property and to ensure that 

the military conformed to the terms of the use permit. 

At Area B, the NPS official was Garland B. (“Mike”) Williams. “I remember the 

Park Ranger, who would make frequent visits to our site,” recalled Lieutenant Frank 

Gleason, an instructor there from the spring of 1942 to the spring of 1943. “He was just 

keeping a close look to make sure that we didn’t tear up his forest too much. He was a bit 

upset to learn that we had caught a rabbit in the winter and cooked it for a rare 

treat....Two soldiers had caught a rabbit running in the snow. We took the rabbit and 

skinned it and cooked it. He [Williams] reported me, because I was the officer in charge, 

and I was in on killing that rabbit. We killed a rabbit on his reservation. We’re supposed 

 

179 Ibid., 15 May 2005, and 9 and 16 June 2005. 

180 Ibid., 1 January 2008. 

181 Ibid., 15 May 2005, and 9 and 16 June 2005. 

182 Ibid., 15 May 2005. 
280 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

to love every little creature, and we did too,” he chuckled. “But soldiers are soldiers, and 

in the winter, it was something to do.”183 

Wildlife was abundant in the parks, but although the National Park Service had 

banned hunting, there were numerous instances when OSS cadre, staff or trainees got 

themselves some game. But sometimes the game got the staff, or at least their provisions. 

Instructor Frank Gleason remembered that “While living here, I had told [Sergeant] Joe 

Lazarsky that I loved Kielbasa [Polish sausage]. So we went up to Hazelton [his 

hometown in the coal mining region of northeastern Pennsylvania], and brought me back 

a big Kielbasa. I loved it. So I thought, I’ll put it in the snow [to preserve it]. I went out 

and covered it up with snow. I came back about a day later. It was gone! Some bear or 

other animal had eaten it.”184

 Assistant company clerk at B-5, Albert Guay, an avid hunter like his father, 

planned to so some hunting. As he recorded in his diary, 23 November 1942, “talked to 

an old guy here who is going to show me where to go hunting. Said we might get a few 

crows, pheasants, rabbits, etc.” Guay’s father had sent him a shotgun. “The shotgun came 

tonight. As soon as I get a chance, I’m going out and do some shooting. First I have to 

find out where I can & can’t go.”185 No one told him that hunting was not allowed 

anywhere in the park. Consequently, he did go out hunting. Sometimes he saw nothing, 

and other times they were just out of range. As he indicated on 29 November 1942, 

“Went hunting crows, but too cold & crows too smart. Saw lots, but out of range.”186 

 The senior demolitions instructor at Area B, Captain Charles Parkin, recalled that 

he frequently saw Park Manager Mike William, who came by in his National Park 

Service uniform with his nameplate on it. “I would see him at least three of four times a 

week in our area,” Parkin said. “He was just keeping his eye on us.”187 Gleason also 

remembered Williams, whom he called the park ranger. Gleason described him as 5’9” or 

5’10,” dark hair, nice-looking man, medium build, who looked like he was in his early 

40s. He came up to the OSS B-2 camp regularly in his National Park Service uniform. 

“He would come up and see what was going on in the camp and how we were conducting 

ourselves.” He mainly he talked with the camp commander, Major, later Lieutenant 

Colonel, Ainsworth Blogg, but he had a few brief conversations with Gleason, then a 

young lieutenant instructor. “See we cut down a number of trees to build this training 

facility that we had here [the “trainazium,” a kind of extensive, wooden, jungle gym],” 

Gleason said. “Of course, I am sure that he was concerned about that. He counted every 

tree apparently!188

 

 

183 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 31 January 2005; and letter to the author 9 

August 2005. 

184 Frank A. Gleason, interview during a tour arranged by the author of Catoctin Mountain Park, Thurmont,

Md., 18 May 2005. 

185 Albert R. Guay, diary entries for 22 and 23 November 1942. 

186 Ibid., diary entries for 29 November and 6 December 1942. 

187 Charles M. Parkin, interview during a tour arranged by the author of Catoctin Mountain Park, Thurmont, 

Md., 18 May 2005. 

188 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview by the author, 31 January 2005. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 281

 Like many teenage boys, some of the young OSS men liked to whip around at 

high speeds in motor vehicles. Some of them did that in the park. Diarist Albert Guay 

noted an exciting afternoon that would surely have distressed Park Manager Williams. 

“Had my first ride in a jeep today and enjoyed it. Hit 60 m.p.h. down a dirt road.” The 

next day, he had a second jeep ride, this time with a sergeant and a load of 125 pounds of 

dynamite they took to a magazine constructed in the park. “Had another ride in a jeep. 

Rode fast over a bumpy road, quite a bit of fun.”189 On at least one occasion, reckless 

driving nearly resulted in a catastrophe. On a frigid evening in mid-December 1942, one 

of Area B’s canvas-covered Army trucks was bringing nearly a dozen staffers returning 

from leave back from the bus terminal in Frederick. On the high road that leads up the 

mountain sometimes running high above Big Hunting Creek, the truck skidded on a patch 

of ice, and spun around. Only a tiny ridge of gravel stopped it from going over the edge 

and plunging down a forty-foot bank into the creek below.190

 

At Training Areas A and C in Prince William Forest Park, Park Manager Ira 

Lykes also had his problems watching over the OSS, particularly after he was inducted 

into the Marines and had could only be physically present in the park on weekends. 

Civilian communications instructor Timothy Marsh remembered seeing Lykes, in his 

uniform and broad-brimmed hat, walking around the camp at Area C.191 As he made his 

rounds, Lykes was usually accompanied by his big German shepherd dog, “Fritz.”192As 

Dorothea Dow noted, Mr. and Mrs. Lykes did socialize with some of the married officers 

on the instructional staff at the OSS Training Area. 

The park, of course, was sealed off from the public for the duration. The OSS 

took over the park north of Joplin Road (Route 619), and the Marine Corps occupied it 

south of Joplin Road and west of Route 626. Military security was pervasive, but the OSS 

was particularly secretive. Even Lykes, the park superintendent, had to be cleared by a 

sentry to get to and from his home and office.193 The park headquarters was the old 

Smith family house, not far from Joplin Road on the north side about 1 1⁄4 miles from the 

old CCC work camp that became OSS Area A-4.194 As with the other buildings in the 

 

189 Albert R. Guay, telephone interview with the author, 24 October 2005, and diary entries for 3 and 4 

November 1942. 

190 Albert R. Guay, telephone interview with the author, 24 October 2005, and diary entry for 15 December 

1942. 

191 Timothy Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 January 2006. 

192 Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview by S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, tape number 261, 

transcription, p. 45, National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va. I am 

indebted to David Nathanson of the Harpers Ferry Center for responding to my request for a copy the 

relevant parts of Ira Lykes’ oral history interview. David Nathanson to the author, 10 November 2005.

193 Ira B. Lykes, interview with Susan Cary Strickland, 4 September 1985, in Susan Cary Strickland, 

Prince William Forest Park: An Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1986), 

27. 

194 Robert A. Noile, Triangle, Va., telephone interviews with the author 27 April and 16 May 2007. Born in 

1939, on the south side of Joplin Road diagonally across from the park, Noile knew both the Lykes and 
282 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

park, the National Park Service gave it up for the duration. Instead, the park headquarters 

was shifted temporarily to a small, one-room building a bit off the south side of Joplin 

Road. Lykes and his secretary, Thelma Williams, continued to use the building regularly 

until January 1943. At that time, the Marine Corps made him a commissioned officer in 

charge of forestry and fire security at the Marine Base reservation.195 From 1943 to 1945, 

Lykes worked at the Marine Base during the week. On the weekends, he would return to 

supervise the park.196 During the week, the park office was staffed by Thelma Williams, 

the park’s sole fulltime employee during the war.197 Ms. Williams worked Mondays 

through Fridays, managing routine business and holding other matters or documents 

requiring Lykes’ signature for his weekly visits. The small building included a woodburning stove for heat in winter. Serving in effect as acting park manager Mondays 

through Fridays, Ms. Williams shared the little building with a uniformed clerk that the 

OSS had assigned to the park office, who it was reported was “a secretive man given to 

drink.”198 

Lykes had one frightening moment during the war, when it appeared that the 

Marine Corps might take over his house. The quarters for the park superintendent were a 

big two-story house with a porch about a mile south of Joplin Road, a site where the NPS 

maintenance building on the south side is located today. Lykes continued to occupy it 

even though the National Park Service had officially given it up for the duration. In 

addition to the living room, dining room and kitchen on the first floor, Lykes had built a 

small, temporary office on the enclosed porch.199 Since the National Park Service was no 

longer paying utilities for the park or its structures, the Marine Corps furnished the fuel 

and paid the electric and other bills for the house. Lykes did, however, experience at least 

 

Gum families and played with his friends in the park beginning when the War Department returned it to the 

Park Service in 1946. He added that the park office was near the road to the old Wilson place. 

195 Lykes was provost marshal, security officer, for 94,000 acres of Marine Base at Quantico, which 

included 13 firing ranges, plus what he called “little Tokyo’s” makeup houses for simulated urban fighting. 

The Marine base during the war included 8,000 to 10,000 acres of the park south of Joplin Road which was 

known as the “Guadalcanal Area” and was used for training. By the end of the war, Lykes was a major. He 

was mustered out in January 1946 and returned immediately to his job as project manager of the park. Ira 

B. Lykes, oral history interview by S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, tape number 261, transcription, 

pp. 42-43, National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va. 

196 Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 26. 

197 Thelma Williams Hebda, Dumfries, Va., interview with Susan Cary Strickland , 15 July 1985 cited in 

Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 26. Ms. Williams later married Joseph Hebda, who became an 

NPS employee at the park after the war. Robert A. Noile says other than Superintendent Ira Lykes, the only 

civilian allowed into the OSS area of the park north of Joplin Road during the war was Epp Williams, who 

did maintenance work. Robert A. Noile, Triangle, Va., telephone interviews with the present author 27 

April and 16 May 2007. 

198 Ira B. Lykes to Frank T. Gartside, superintendent, NPS National Capital Region, 31 May 1943, Records 

of the National Park Service (RG 79), File Number 1460/4, which in the 1980s was at the Federal Records 

Center, Suitland, Md, as quoted in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 27. These records have 

disappeared. 

199 Robert A. Noile, Triangle, Va., telephone interviews with the author 27 April and 16 May 2007. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 283

one worrisome moment in regard to this house, during a visit by the commandant of the 

Marine Base at Quantico. “I’ll never forget General Philip H. Torrey came in one day. I 

don’t know why General Torrey liked me, but he seemed to. He came in one day for 

quarters’ inspection, and he walked in and looked around, and the first thing he said was, 

what a damn good officers’ club this would make. I didn’t know how to respond to that, 

so I didn’t respond. They never did turn it into an officers’ club.”200

As at Catoctin there certainly were episodes of cutting down trees and of shooting 

wildlife in Prince William Forest Park during the war. At Area C one day when, a group 

of nine or ten Communications Branch trainees were practicing at the rifle range near 

Quantico Creek, a flock of wild turkeys suddenly flew through the valley. According to 

one the trainees, “the command was given to fire at will and the entire group qualified [as 

marksmen], and they ate turkey for a week.”201

 A peaceful man who loved nature and had a sincere desire to protect the flora and 

fauna under his care, Ira Lykes had considerable philosophical differences with the 

Special Operations Branch of the OSS with its emphasis on secrecy, violence, gutter 

fighting, and winning at any cost. He certainly supported the war effort against the Axis, 

but the OSS often shocked his sensibilities—perhaps they sometimes did so purposely. 

At the very beginning of OSS’s take over of the park, for example, in the spring of 1942, 

the first commanding officer of Area A, Captain William J. Hixson allegedly made Lykes 

an offer. As Lykes retold the story thirty years later, Hixson “came to me, and he said, we 

would like you to join the OSS and leave the Park Service. He said, we will offer you a 

full colonelcy. I said, what do I have to do for this? He said, well, we will drop you 

behind the lines in France and, he said, I might as well tell you, your chances of getting 

back are about 1 in 8 or 1 in 10. I said, thanks but no thanks, I don’t think so. I don’t 

think so. I think I have a career with the National Park Service when this thing is over. Of 

course, he used the old argument, what if it doesn’t get over, you won’t have a Park 

Service. But I think discretion is a better part of valor and here I was discrete enough to 

say so.”202 He declined Hixon’s perhaps facetious offer. 

 Although Lykes helped the OSS with information about the park and the area and 

in the location and construction of new buildings and some of the other training facilities, 

he remained distressed years later about many of their methods. In 1973, long after his 

retirement, the 66-year-old Lykes was formally interviewed in an oral history project by 

the National Park Service. . The following is Lykes’ remembered impressions of the 

OSS, which certainly convey a sense of his suspicion and criticism of it, even if some of 

it may have been misremembered or exaggerated :203

 

200 Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview by S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, tape number 261, 

transcription, p. 44, National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va. 

201 Ralph Tibbett, memoir in OSS CommVets Newsletter (March 1997), paraphrased in Dorothy 

Ringlesbach, OSS: Stories That Can Now Be Told (Bloomington, Ind.: Author House, 2005), 34. 

202 Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview by S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, tape number 261, 

transcription, p. 42, National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va. 

203 Ibid., 39-42. 
284 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

 “Well, one day I had a call to come to Washington, and I think it was in, 

oh probably, the latter part of 1942, the middle of ’42 [it was early spring 1942]. 

There the Director [of the National Park Service] and his staff advised me that the 

Office of Strategic Services, Colonel Donovan with his cloak and dagger boys, 

were looking for a place, and they thought Prince William Forest—

Chopawamsic—was the ideal place to do it. So anyway, we would have to cancel 

all the leases on camp grounds, and they would move the OSS in there. I was to 

remain as the liaison between the Park Service and help them in any development 

they wanted done in the war effort because we were right in the beginning of 

World War II. 

 “I do recall that they—one of the processes was—I later found this out 

with my Marine Corps experience, that in recruiting men for OSS they would go 

into a military unit such as [a] Marine Corps platoon or Marine Corps battalion, 

and they would say, do you have any Italians or Germans in this organization or 

any of Oriental extraction in this, and when the commander would say yes, he [the 

OSS recruiter] would say, I would like to see them. Now this was done by the FBI 

in connection with the OSS officials and several other security agencies. They 

would get these individuals aside and they would say, do you have any relatives—

for example, in Germany—Yes, I have a grandmother there. Well, how is she 

being treated? Well, the last we heard she was being poorly treated. Particularly if 

they were Jewish. Finally, they would get this boy, how would you like to get 

even with them?204

 “Then from that point on, they would test this man, and they would run a 

check on him and make absolutely certain that he was a loyal American. Then, 

they would take them to Washington from all around the United States and there 

at 2 o’clock in the morning, they would put them in a bus [or truck] with the 

windows all sealed so they couldn’t see where they were going, and they would 

ride them down to Charlottesville and [from] Charlottesville to Richmond, and 

Richmond [to] somewhere else and finally wind up 35 miles away from 

Washington where they started. They [the recruits] had not the slightest idea of 

where they were. And here, they would be put into a camp with only three other 

men, plus one instructor. They were never allowed to mix generally within the 

camp. They had to stay in their group of four with one instructor present at all 

times, even sleeping in the barracks—eating and sleeping. Well, this is what made 

the place so ideal, because of the little tent building[s] we had there. They were 

winterized by the way, and they could put four in there with an instructor, and 

they didn’t have to have any other services, except they would eat at the dining 

room, which they divided off into cubicles of four.205

 “The [OSS Special Operations] officers there—they had one officer there 

who was a Britisher, a very stern looking individual with a ramrod back. He had 

 

204 The author has not heard such stories from any of the former OSS Special Operations, Operational 

Group, Secret Intelligence, or Communications personnel that he has interviewed. 

205 Author’s note: The author has not found any other evidence of this restriction and the continuous close 

supervision by an instructor, except perhaps for certain groups of foreign nationals and their own leaders 

training at OSS camps. 
 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 285

been Chief of Police of Hong Kong [sic] for 20 years, and he knew everything 

there was to know about killing a man without a weapon. That was his 

instruction.206 Another one [training course] was how to build a radio—or a 

transmitter out of an ordinary radio. Another one was how to demolish an 

automobile without being detected. Another one was how to blow up a bridge 

without being seen or how to make explosives out of ammonia and [word on 

audiotape unclear] acid and different things like this. This was taught to these 

men. 

 “Also, one of the training exercises was that you had to jump out of an 

airplane in the daytime. You [also] had to jump at nighttime over a designated 

place, and you had to jump at nighttime over anywhere. So they had an old C-23 

[sic] down at Quantico [Marine Base], and I used to ride in the blister [plexiglass 

bubble] of that thing and take moving pictures of these men bailing out in the 

daytime. And then we would have a critique that afternoon of these men jumping 

out of an airplane. I think we killed two or three [sic; that is, two or three were 

killed in the jumps], but that was part of the game anyway. 

 “They had to take different lessons in how to bail out, and I built them a 

long cable with a pulley on it, and they would jump off a platform and come 

down and land and roll. This sort of thing. This was a tremendously involved 

business of which I want no more part, because I’ve seen men suffer as a result of 

this. For example, I remember we built a little place we called Little Tokyo in 

which we had one building, and we had to train the men how to get through the 

door of that thing and walk down a labyrinth in a blue light, a very, very dim 

light, while they were being fired at [and they had to fire back] in order to protect 

themselves. 

“They taught them such delicate things as when they burst into a room of 

German staff officers, which one to shoot first. The one that stood up was the one 

that got shot first, and the one that had the wild look and stare on his face got shot 

last because he hadn’t collected himself yet, and he didn’t know what to do. This 

was the fine shadings in murder. Of course, we had to do it, because we had to 

fight fire with fire, and it was a really justified program.”207

 Twelve years later in 1985, at age 78, during another oral history interview, Lykes 

continued to be critical of the OSS Special Operations training program in the park. He 

told Susan Cary Strickland, an historian working for the National Park Service, that 

“Students were not permitted to gather in groups larger than four. An unexplained 

absence could result in imprisonment for the remainder of the war.” In what one suspects 

was actually Captain Hixson pulling one over on a gullible Lykes as the OSS arrived, 

Lykes told Strickland that Hixson had called upon him to serve as a guide during a 

 

206 Another’s note: William E. (“Dan”) Fairbairn, former Associate Commissioner of the international 

Municipal Police of Shanghai. 

207 Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview by S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, tape number 261, 

transcription, pp. 39-42, National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va. I am 

indebted to David Nathanson of the Harpers Ferry Center for responding to my request for a copy the 

transcript of Ira Lykes’ oral history interview. David Nathanson to the author, 10 November 2005. 
286 Chapter 7 Daily Life in Camp 

manhunt through the woods for a student who was AWOL (absent without leave). Hixson 

had given the park superintendent a .45 caliber pistol and told to “shoot first and ask 

questions later.” Lykes told Strickland that he was very relieved that they had not found 

the AWOL student, at least while Lykes was with the search party.208 During the 1985 

interview, Lykes told Strickland that he was grateful to General Torrey, the commandant 

at the Marine Base, for getting him a position at base during most of the war, because it 

enabled the park manager, in Lykes’ words, to get “away from the stomach-turning 

roughhouse of the OSS!”209

 

208 Ira B. Lykes, Venice, Fla., interview with Susan Cary Strickland, 4 September 1984, quoted in 

Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 28. 

209 Ibid., 26.