Chapter 11 

 

Summary and Conclusion 

 The 65th anniversary of the opening of OSS training camps for spies, saboteurs, 

guerrilla leaders, and clandestine radio-operators in the National Parks—in particular 

Catoctin Mountain Park and Prince William Forest Park—occurred in 2007. Although the 

training camps were closed and the OSS terminated in1945, the valuable contributions to 

the Allied victory made by those facilities and by Donovan’s organization itself are an 

important part of the history of World War II. William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan believed 

that intelligence, deception, subversion, and psychological and irregular warfare could 

spearhead the Allied liberation of Europe and the Far East, and he crafted a novel 

instrument to serve that purpose. Like the secret agency itself, much of its history was 

cloaked in silence and mystery. The American public remained only partially aware of 

the OSS, its members, their training, their missions and their accomplishments until the 

1980s when the CIA began to declassify the records of Donovan’s organization. 

Subsequently, OSS veterans, sworn to silence, began to feel free at last to talk about their 

experiences in training and serving in America’s first centralized intelligence and 

clandestine operations agency. Most of the remaining OSS files, including personnel 

files, were not declassified until 2008, more than half a century after the end of World 

War II.1

 

Particularly during the Cold War, with its extensive intelligence and counterintelligence operations and clandestine actions on both sides, the public became 

fascinated with the shadowy world of spies and secret agents. Before the cynicism of 

recent years, secret agents were seen as glamorous. Popular novels and films reflected 

that view. Sometimes they noted the institutional dichotomy between the civilian spies 

and the rowdy, covert action agents, whom the less combat-oriented members of the OSS 

sometimes referred to as the “Bang-Bang Boys.”2 But more often, particularly the 

sensational ones produced for the mass market, merged espionage, counterespionage and 

covert operations in a mélange of action, most famously in Ian Fleming’s debonair James 

Bond-007 series, but also in the tense, suspenseful Mission Impossible episodes 

 

1

 Brett J. Blackledge and Randy Herschaft, Associated Press, “Newly Release Files Detail Early US Spy 

Network,” 14 August 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/14/August; 

Spy Files Include a Justice, a Baker, and a Filmmaker,” Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger, 15 August 2008, A4.. 

The 750,000 newly declassified documents also seem to suggest that OSS had a total of 24,000 members 

rather than the 13,000 previously believed, but their status, whether permanent, temporary, member or 

consultant, American or foreigner, remains to be determined. The release of these three-quarters of a 

million documents occurred as the present study was going to press, and they have not been included in it. 

2

 Quoted in “History of Schools and Training, OSS, Part I: Chronology and Administration, June 1942 – 

October 1945,” p. 25, typescript, n.d. [apparently written in 1947], copy delivered by W.J. Morgan, who 

had been with OSS Schools and Training Branch during World War II, to Col. E.B. Whisner, 7 January 

1949, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 176, Box 2, Folder 12, National Archives II, College Park, Md. 
558 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

originated by Bruce Geller, and the action-filled techno-thriller films starring Tom 

Clancy, Tom Cruise, or Matt Damon. Aside from the three postwar films, O.S.S., Cloak 

and Dagger, and 13 Rue Madeleine, which celebrated the OSS and Robert DeNiro’s 

recent film, The Good Shepherd, which attacked both it and the CIA, the OSS itself has 

seldom provided the basis for Hollywood films. Because until relatively recently the full 

extent of the operations of Donovan’s organization had not been made public, the OSS 

has been portrayed mainly through historical, biographical, or autobiographical works 

rather than through the movies. 

 While the most popular topics concerning the OSS for the public and scholars 

alike have been the cloak and dagger work of the spies and counterspies, and the behind 

enemy lines operations of OSS guerrilla leaders and saboteurs, the least explored area of 

the OSS has been its training schools. The present study, commissioned by the National 

Park Service to help understand the role of the National Parks in the OSS’s activities in 

World War II, provides considerable new light on that aspect of the OSS—and indeed on 

the CIA and the Special Forces which inherited some of its personnel and adopted much 

of the training techniques of Donovan’s organization. 

Training Spies, Saboteurs, and Agent Operatives in the Parks 

 With its cardinal principle of secrecy, the OSS established its training camps in 

secluded yet accessible areas, most of them rural Maryland and Virginia within two hours 

drive from the organization’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Here as in many other 

matters, OSS initially drew upon the experience of the British secret services. Donovan’s 

Special Operations (SO) Branch replicated the British Special Operations Executive’s 

(SOE) penchant for rugged, isolated terrain for toughening up its covert operators for 

paramilitary missions behind enemy lines. It set up Training Areas A, B, C, and D in 

secluded woodlands. The only deviation was Area F, which was established on the 

grounds of the former Congressional Country Club for the Operational Groups. OSS’s 

Secret Intelligence (SI) Branch replicated British Secret Information Service’s (SIS) use 

of country estates as schools for introducing recruits into the murky world of espionage. 

Thus, it established Training Areas E and RTU-11 (“the Farm”) in spacious manor 

houses with surrounding horse farms. Yet some members of each of the two American 

branches trained at the other’s facilities. This was particularly true in the teaching of 

rugged survival and close-combat techniques at the Special Operations training camps at 

the two National Parks, where men preparing to be spies or other operatives sometimes 

joined the military recruits who were being trained physically and psychologically for 

clandestine raids from forest or mountain hideouts upon enemy outposts, command 

centers, or vital communication or transportation facilities. 

 The appeal of Catoctin Mountain Park and Prince William Forest Park, then 

known as Catoctin and Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Areas respectively, 

was precisely because of their location not far from Washington, their comparative 

isolation in rural areas, their existing camp facilities, and the fact that they were already 

federal property. That meant they could be obtained quickly and easily in the spring of 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 559

1942. With war declared, the War Department simply demanded that the Department of 

the Interior lease those lands of the National Park Service to it for military purposes for 

the duration of the war. The two parks had cabins for accommodation, woods in which to 

practice hit and run attacks on enemy targets, and open meadows for firing ranges, 

demolition work, and other field exercises. With nearly 10,000 acres each, the two parks 

were sizable enough to cloak the secret training that would be provided there, yet they 

were only one or two hours away from OSS headquarters. 

 The first three OSS training camps were established in the two parks in April and 

May 1942. Training Area B for the basic paramilitary course was created in Catoctin 

Mountain Park in northwestern Maryland, 70 miles north of Washington. Training Areas 

A and C were established thirty-five miles south of Washington in Prince William Forest 

Park. Area A for the advanced courses in special operations was located in the cabin 

camps in the western part of Prince William Forest Park. Training Area C, a school for 

preparing clandestine radio operators, was established in the cabin camps in the 

northeastern sector of Prince William Forest Park. At the end of the war, Schools and 

Training (S&T) Branch’s only complaint about the facilities for Areas A and C at Prince 

William Forest Park was that OSS had to make a considerable number of changes to 

winterize them for its year around training, since they had originally been built as 

summer cabin camps.3 Although S&T found the mountainous terrain of Catoctin 

Mountain Park useful for paramilitary training exercises at Area B, it concluded that the 

location a full two hours north of Washington was somewhat too far for efficient 

coordination, and that Franklin Roosevelt’s use of his Presidential Retreat there during 

the summer considerably curtailed the paramilitary training exercises when he was in 

residence.4

 Although additional OSS training schools for other operational branches of the 

OSS were subsequently established, Areas A, B, and C in the two National Parks served 

as the primary training sites for the Special Operations and Communications branches. 

Areas B and A also served as subsidiary training sites for the commando-like units of the 

OSS Operational Groups (OGs) after their initial training at Area F, the former 

Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, acquired by OSS in 1943. The lakes 

in Area A served as the training site for waterborne infiltration practice before the 

acquisition of Area D on the eastern bank of the Potomac River and the establishment of 

the OSS Maritime Unit. The fields of Area A were used for parachute practice and low 

altitude jumps before OSS parachute training was relocated to the Army’s main parachute 

school at Fort Benning, Georgia. 

In the summer of 1942, the Secret Intelligence Branch acquired a country estate in 

Maryland 20 miles south of Washington as a training school called RTU-11, or “the 

Farm.” The following year, the newly established Schools and Training Branch 

 

3

 “History of Schools and Training, OSS, Part I: Chronology and Administration, June 1942 – October 

1945,” p. 17, typescript, n.d. [apparently written in 1947], copy delivered by W.J. Morgan, who had been 

with OSS Schools and Training Branch during World War II, to Col. E.B. Whisner, 7 January 1949, OSS 

Records (RG 226), Entry 176, Box 2, Folder 12, National Archives II. 

4

 “Excerpts from History of Schools and Training , OSS,” attached to L.B. Shallcross, Deputy, STB/TRD, 

to John O’Gara, Chief, Staff Training Branch [of CIA], 1 February 1951, subject: information on OSS 

Schools and Training Sites, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 161, Box 7, Folder 76, National Archives II. 
560 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

established Area E, ultimately consisting of two country estates north of Baltimore, 

which served as training sites for a general introductory course for OSS recruits of 

various operational branches (as would sub-area A-3 in Prince William Forest Park). 

Area E eventually served mainly the Secret Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, and 

Morale Operations branches. 

The majority of the 13,000, or more, men and women in OSS, however, did not

go to the training schools of the so-called operational branches. The clerks, typists, office 

workers and other administrative and support personnel, as well as the scientists and 

engineers of the Research and Development Branch and the scholars and other analysts 

of the Research and Analysis Branch, most all of these civilian employees, had been 

employed because they already had the skills required.5 

In the winter of 1944-45, as the war in Europe neared its end, and the U.S. Army 

began plans to transfer many troops to the Far East, most of the OSS operational branch 

training sites in Maryland and Virginia became holding areas for returning veterans 

awaiting reassignment to Asia or other purposes. Most of the OSS’s Far Eastern training 

programs had shifted to the agency’s new training schools located on Catalina Island and 

Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base in southern California. These West Coast schools 

were modeled after those in Maryland and Virginia. With the Japanese surrender and the 

rapid termination of the OSS in October 1945, all of the OSS training sites were returned 

to their former owners. They were given back without the firing ranges, demolition areas, 

“houses of horrors,” and other facilities that the OSS had built for the rough and tough 

training of the Special Operations teams (SO) and Operational Groups (OGs). 

Aims and Methods 

 “Set Europe ablaze!” was the goal enunciated by Prime Minister Winston 

Churchill when he authorized the creation of the British commandos and Special 

Operations Executive (SOE) forces, and it became part of Donovan’s grand vision of the 

OSS as well, not just a centralized intelligence agency but also one that acted to subvert 

the enemy. It was widely believed at that time that the Germans’ success in conquering 

much of Europe so quickly was not simply due the capability of their armies but also to 

the effectiveness of their spies, saboteurs and sympathizers (“fifth columnists” in the term 

of the day), who undermined the ability of the targeted nations to resist Hitler’s forces. 

Churchill and Donovan sought to turn that technique against the Axis. They would use 

spies, propagandists, saboteurs, commando raiders, and guerrilla leaders to inspire, 

supply, and direct resistance movements to conduct subversive activity and raids behind 

 

5

 However, as Schools and Training Branch acknowledged after the war, too often OSS men were sent 

overseas without any military training, because it was assumed they would continue to work in purely 

service and support functions, such as Research and Analysis or Administrative Services, but once overseas 

were transferred to operational or other duties. “History of Schools and Training, OSS, Part I: Chronology 

and Administration, June 1942 – October 1945,” p. 29, typescript, n.d. [apparently written in 1947], copy 

delivered by W.J. Morgan, who had been with OSS Schools and Training Branch during World War II, to 

Col. E.B. Whisner, 7 January 1949, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 176, Box 2, Folder 12, National 

Archives II. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 561

enemy lines in the Axis-occupied countries. What Churchill meant by his famous phrase 

was to set German-occupied Europe ablaze with the fire of subversion by indigenous 

resistance movements supplied and directed by the Allies. The German Army’s lines of 

communication and supply would be hampered by subversive efforts by these Allied-led 

local partisans. Eventually, when the Allied conventional armies were raised and 

assaulted Hitler’s Empire from the front, the Allied agents played a crucial role in 

sabotaging the German Army’s supply lines with explosives they set as well as by bombs 

dropped by Allied aircraft they directed to the supply depots, assembly points, troop 

trains and convoys and other tactical targets. 

Such unconventional warfare was made possible largely by two technological 

developments: the airplane and the radio. Airplanes facilitated the delivery of spies, 

saboteurs, guerrilla leaders and other personnel as well as weapons and supplies into 

enemy-held territory. Agents and supplies were generally parachuted in at night from low 

flying, black painted bombers. Radio, or more precisely the wireless transmission (W/T) 

of telegraphic messages by short-wave radio signals, provided a means of communication 

between regional headquarters and the spies and agents behind enemy lines. The idea 

was to obtain strategic and tactical intelligence and to engage in sabotage and other 

subversive activities behind the enemy lines. The regular military was suspicious, even 

hostile, to Donovan’s group of civilians and former civilians. They disdained the absence 

of military discipline and protocol in the OSS and the inattention to the precision of dress 

that the regular military required. But the professional soldiers made a mistake in so 

easily dismissing Donovan’s neophyte crew, since these were glorious amateurs, who 

were talented, eager, daring, and innovative, and most importantly, were in the forefront 

of new approaches to intelligence operations and unconventional warfare. 

Donovan’s vision of unconventional warfare, encouraged by the British, was 

broad and bold. He wanted to carry the war to the enemy right away and behind their 

lines in weak spots in occupied territory. Initially, he planned a combined centralized 

intelligence and subversive operations agency that would include more than gathering 

and coordinating intelligence and staging guerrilla and commando operations behind 

enemy lines. It would also use information and technology, especially radio, as weapons. 

Foreign radio broadcasts would be beamed at Allied, neutral, and enemy-occupied 

countries with news of the positive efforts and achievements of the Allies and negative, 

disinformation (“black propaganda”) to undermine the morale of the enemy forces and 

civilian population. Donovan lost the positive propaganda entity in a bureaucratic battle 

to the Office of War Information, but he kept the black propaganda aspect, which became 

the domain of OSS Morale Operations Branch (MO). The centralized gathering and 

analysis came from the spies of the Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) and the rings of local 

agents they would recruit and run, and from one of Donovan’s primary innovations, the 

Research and Analysis Branch (R&A), the scholars and others who used the foreign 

language newspapers, economic and political reports, and other published material in the 

Library of Congress as well as material obtained from agents overseas to provide 

comprehensive assessments of key industrial, political, and military targets for Allied 

bombers, commandos, or saboteurs. 

The concept of deploying commandos, saboteurs, and guerrilla leaders behind 

enemy lines assumed organizational form in the Special Operations Branch and the 

Operational Groups. Despite considerable support from President Roosevelt and a 
562 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

number of influential friends among economic, political, and social elites, Donovan had 

his enemies. The Wall Street lawyer and his organization of amateur soldiers, spies, and 

intelligence analysts, raised hackles among professionals in established and competing 

agencies, including especially the Military Intelligence Service, the Office of Naval 

Intelligence, the FBI and the State Department. Donovan had originally envisioned the 

agency providing primarily centralized strategic intelligence to various clients from the 

President himself to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), to particular military and civilian 

departments. He also hoped to have saboteurs and guerrilla leaders, and British type 

military commando units which he daringly hoped he would sometimes be able to lead 

personally on raids. But while the President and occasionally the JCS valued the 

intelligence that SI and especially R&A provided during the war, it became clear by 1943 

that what some military theater commanders wanted more from OSS was tactical 

intelligence about the enemy forces deployed against them that could be used 

immediately. That involved running rings of agents near the battle zone. The U.S military 

developed its own commando-like units—Army Ranger units, Navy Underwater 

Demolition Teams, and Marine Raider battalions, primarily for short-range penetrations, 

spearheading advances. The armed services limited Donovan’s Special Operations and 

Operational Groups mainly to deep penetration, working with partisan resistance groups 

far behind enemy lines. Thus, the missions Donovan’s organization had originally 

conceived of and trained for were altered somewhat during the course of the war. 

OSS training also evolved, but much more slowly. Training methods for these 

paramilitary forces came originally from the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) 

forces, which provided instructors, manuals, equipment and the aura of having already 

conducted operations behind enemy lines. The first American special operations 

instructors were trained at British SOE’s secret Camp X at Oshawa, near Toronto, which 

one of them referred to as the “Oshawa School of Mayhem and Murder.”6

 They, like 

most of Donovan’s uniformed personnel, were citizen soldiers at that time rather than 

career soldiers, often they were reserve officers. Some were military police officers, some 

civilian law enforcement officers, some, particularly in the case of demolitions 

instructors, were engineering officers. The influence of the law enforcement 

officers/instructors quickly waned as it became clear that their orientation had been 

towards apprehending law breakers, while the OSS/SO curriculum was designed to teach 

trainees how to create damage and avoid being caught by local police or military forces. 

The British emphasis, carried over to OSS, on extreme secrecy and the “cloak and 

dagger” aspects of training, also seem to have become less important as time went on, 

and although not abandoned, they were de-emphasized in contrast to the increasing 

importance on practical techniques of accomplishing the mission whether espionage, 

sabotage, commando operations or guerrilla leadership. 

Charismatic and visionary, William J. Donovan, more than anyone else, was 

responsible for creating America’s first central intelligence agency, and through his 

Special Operations teams and Operational Groups, he was a major progenitor of the 

Special Forces. Yet, he was an abysmal administrator. Uninterested and perhaps unable 

to manage a growing organization that had so many different missions and branches, 

 

6

 George H. White, Diary, 1942, quoted in John C. McWilliams, “Covert Connections: The FBN, the OSS, 

and the CIA,” The Historian, 53.4 (Summer 1991): 665. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 563

Donovan frequently fled to the war zones and left the daily management to others. He 

built the organization by recruiting intelligent, able, and innovative people and then 

largely letting them find places for themselves. The branches essentially operated 

autonomously. “I ended up disliking Donovan,” recalled H. Stuart Hughes, Harvard 

trained historian and grandson of 1916 Presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes, 

who worked in Research and Analysis Branch. “He was, I think, responsible for a certain 

wild style of administration and the sense that everything was chaotic. I remember that 

Sherman Kent [Yale historian and head of European Division of R&A] at some point had 

been reading Shakespeare. He found the passage, ‘Confusion now has made his 

masterpiece.’ He laughed and said, ‘That’s us!’”7 

 It was in response to such a haphazard arrangement and the problems of building 

a training program at the same time that OSS itself was evolving that the Schools and 

Training (S&T) Branch was formed in the winter of 1942-1943. The S&T Branch spent 

the rest of the war seeking to coordinate and to the best of its ability to standardize at 

least some of the training policies among the schools and training camps of the various 

operational branches—especially the often competing Secret Intelligence and Special 

Operations branches. S&T never did completely control them, and the branches remained 

the dominant influences on their trainees throughout the war. Indeed, they remained more 

attuned to evolving developments in the war due to their own agents in the combat zones. 

Although Schools and Training Branch had official authority over the instructional 

program, including the training schools, the curriculum, written and visual teaching 

materials, and the staff and instructors at the training camps, most of the staff and 

instructors came from the operational branches. Their loyalty remained with their 

branches, and most of them sought to be assigned overseas. It was not until near the end 

of the war that Schools and Training Branch obtained authority over the training camps 

that the various operational branches had established overseas, and even there, S&T had 

difficulty imposing its will. In practice, Schools and Training Branch served more as a 

managerial agency—overseeing and allocating among the training camps—than the key 

instructional agency. As instruction became less general and more specialized, it derived 

largely from the operational branches themselves. Overseas, the training camps were 

dominated by their regional detachments. 

The trend in instruction over the course of the war moved from more generalized 

training in the early days, when it was unclear how individual recruits would ultimately 

be used, toward more specific training aimed at particular types or locations of missions. 

Because of the pressure to produce agents, the basic courses in both SI and SO were three 

to four weeks of intensive training. Graduates then went on to advanced and more 

specialized courses.8

 Yet attempts by SI and SO to tailor training of individual students to 

their future missions, were generally fruitless, in part because the area “desks” at OSS 

headquarters often did not know the missions of particular individuals in advance. So 

there always remained general aspects to the training. They deliberately included the kind 

of physical and intellectual demands designed to test the individuals and weed out those 

 

7

 H. Stuart Hughes, oral history interview conducted by Barry Katz, 10 May 1997, p. 13, in OSS Oral 

History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 2, National Archives II. 

8

 “Outlines of Courses at All U.S. Training Areas,” December 1943, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, 

Box 158, Folder 1723, National Archives II. 
564 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

unsuited either physically or emotionally for the demands of operations behind enemy 

lines. These physical and mental demands were also designed to create in those who 

graduated as members of the OSS operational branches, a sense of self-confidence, élan, 

and belief in themselves, their ability, and the mission of their elite organization. The 

OSS paramilitary training, as in other elite military organizations—rangers, paratroopers, 

Marines—was in part designed to impart the proud, can-do spirit of an extraordinary 

organization. 

Aggressive physical toughening had greater emphasis in the paramilitary training 

camps than in the more subtle training schools of Secret Intelligence, CounterIntelligence, and Morale Operations. The men and women of the latter three branches 

were often older and civilians, in contrast to the trainees in SO, OG, and CB who were 

required to have be in the armed services. All of the branches learned some basic aspects 

of the others’ skills, but the training that occurred in the two National Parks, was 

primarily geared to SO, OG, and “Commo” work. (The Communications Branch was a 

technical service, and its training course for its own personnel, required a mastery of 

OSS’s specialized equipment, codes, and high-speed wireless transmission. It course for 

its personnel generally lasted three months.9

) In addition to the physical toughening, the 

training courses at the two National Parks included a mastery of weapons. Most of the 

military recruits had already received basic training in the armed services. OSS trainees 

had to achieve a level of proficiency far beyond the standard Army training. They had to 

learn to operate and maintain not only a variety of standard American weapons but also 

various weapons from Allied or enemy countries. They learned to use specialized OSS 

weaponry—knives, grenades, pistols, rifle and submachine guns, some with silencers. To 

bolster their confidence, overcome combat fear, and simply give them skills to survive in 

the war’s killing zones, they learned quick and effective means of pistol shooting (the 

“instinctive” method of firing off pairs of shots from the hip) as well as a hundred ways 

of disabling an enemy in unarmed combat using jiu-jitsu, kick-boxing, karate, and other 

forms of martial arts. 

The OSS schools taught other skills as well. For sabotage, the students learned 

about various forms of explosives, including the new malleable but stable and highly 

explosive “plastic” compounds. They studied how to use such demolitions to destroy, 

railroad tracks, trains, bridges, tunnels, supply depots, industrial plants. For intelligence 

gathering, they gained knowledge about how to identify enemy units by their particular 

insignia, what to look for in military or industrial facilities. They were taught how to 

obtain and direct rings of indigenous agents. For guerrilla leadership, they learned how 

to recruit and work with local guerrilla resistance groups, how to train, lead, and supply 

them. SO and OG trainees practiced raids against simulated enemy outposts, power plants 

or bridges. The students were taught how to create miniature cameras out of matchboxes, 

how to sketch particular facilities, how to operate one of the wireless, radio/telegraph sets 

carried in what looked like a regular suitcase. They learned learn how to maintain cover 

even if captured, how to resist interrogation, and, if necessary, how to break the coated 

cyanide pill (the “L” for lethal pill they carried) in their mouth before revealing the 

names and locations of other agents or other vital information. “They gave us three [kinds 

of] pills,” said George Maddock, a member of an OSS team that jumped into southern 

 

9

 “Outlines of Courses at All U.S. Training Areas,” December 1943, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, 

Box 158, Folder 1723, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 565

France in 1933, “one to give us energy, one to wake us up, and another one to kill us in 

case we were captured.”10 

Organizationally, the OSS personnel who ran the training camps were divided 

into two staffs: one for administration and maintenance of the camp and the other for 

instruction. A commanding officer was put in overall charge of the camp, but he dealt 

almost as an equal with the chief instructor. As with the vast majority of uniformed 

personnel in Donovan’s hastily built organization, most of the men who staffed the 

paramilitary camps, as well as the OSS recruits who trained there, had previously been 

civilians. Donovan and his chief subordinates were successful business and professional 

people, and they recruited men and women who showed initiative, imagination, 

intelligence and adaptability, people who could think imaginatively, “outside the box.” 

They also wanted people who were reliable, and so they frequently counted upon 

personal connections and background for recruiting, particularly those who would 

become commissioned officers. This personal network contributed to the OSS’s 

reputation for being filled with socialites, of being “Oh-So-Social.” Although there was 

some truth to this as, the presence of Vanderbilts, Morgans, Whitneys, Mellons, and the 

like in the upper ranks attested, the vast majority of men and women who worked for the 

OSS came from the college-educated middle class. Some of the rank and file, especially 

those recruited from among the draftees and volunteers in the enlisted ranks of the 

military, came from the high-school educated, working class. What most of them had in 

common was that they scored high on intelligence tests and had already showed 

considerable ability and initiative. Many of them were adept in at least one foreign 

language. Those in the Communications Branch generally had some prior radio or 

telegraphy experience, a good number were short-wave radio hobbyists, known as 

“Hams.” With a few exceptions, most of the members of the OSS were not career 

military people. Even those in uniform in Special Operations, Operational Groups, and 

the Maritime Unit had generally been civilians who had became part of the armed forces 

only because of the war. On the whole, the regular military establishment was leery of 

Donovan and what it considered his free-wheeling, improvised group of amateurs. With 

its quasi-civilian status and its notorious lack of attention in its military branches to 

standard Army protocol and discipline, the OSS was indeed a most unmilitary military. 

Although the training camps at Areas A, B, and C, at Catoctin Mountain Park and 

Prince William Forest Park were organized as military detachments and were filled with 

uniformed personnel, both staff and trainees, they were most unmilitary in their decorum. 

There was no saluting or marching and few distinctions between officers and enlisted 

men. An atmosphere of informality and individual self-responsibility rather than 

ceremony and formal discipline pervaded the OSS and the training camps as well. The 

uniforms, weaponry, munitions, and tactical problems may have been military, but the 

emphasis was not on following orders but on individual skill, initiative, and imagination 

to achieve success in the mission. 

 

10 George Maddock, newspaper interview in 2007, reprinted in OSS Society Digest, Number 1918, 2 

December 2007, osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 2 December 2007. 
566 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

Critiques of Training 

 Initially, Donovan’s organization received advice, teaching aids, equipment, and 

even some instructors, from the United Kingdom, but it had its differences with its British 

counterparts. These differences involved both the OSS’s organization, which included 

both intelligence and special operations, and in its goal, which was only to defeat the 

Axis, not to restore the British Empire. OSS had its own American missions and style. It 

was geared toward Americans not Englishmen, as the informality and lack of military 

discipline illustrated. Starting with the British model, the Americans gradually developed 

their own training system, evolving both by plan and by trial and error, primarily learning 

by doing. It was a new organization feeling its way along. In general, its training was 

effective in one of its major goals: preparing agents psychologically, physically and to 

respond rapidly and appropriately to unpredictable situations. Nevertheless, there were 

issues that needed to be resolved. 

 As the OSS expanded during the rapid American mobilization of 1942-43, it 

faced the fact that some of the recruits who volunteered for overseas operations proved to 

be unfit for the physical and emotional demands. An elite organization, emphasizing 

heroism and hazardous duty attracted volunteers who craved the excitement and glory. 

But some of such volunteers lacked the emotional stability or the physical stamina for 

dangerous service behind enemy lines. Instructors tried to identify and weed out such 

characters and many trainees were dismissed and sent back to their armed forces. But 

some of the unstable got through training and were dispatched overseas before their 

unsuitability was discovered. Consequently, Donovan’s office in 1944 initiated a major 

new psychological program to assess candidates for overseas duty even before they began 

their training. 

 The psychological assessment program, as it ultimately evolved, proved 

remarkably effective. In 1942 and 1943, many OSS recruits had found the interviews 

with psychologists perplexing and even a waste of time. As one student reported in 1942, 

he and the other students at Area B were “somewhat bewildered and made uncomfortable 

by our interviews with the psychological staff. The questionnaires given out by these men 

seemed pointless and naïve to us all.”11 Two years later, a radio-operator recruit had the 

same kind of senselessness after being interviewed for less than a minute in the 

psychologist’s darkened tent in Area A. The psychologist waived a little pencil flashlight 

around, “asked a few things: where you were born, what you’re interested in, and various 

others things. One question he asked me: `Why do you wear your sideburns so long?’ I 

said, ‘I didn’t know they were that long.’ That was the end of it....It was strange, a little 

disorienting.”12

 

By 1944, the OSS had expanded and perfected its assessment techniques. It 

established an Assessment Center, Station S, in a country estate in Fairfax County, 

 

11 Unidentified trainee [signature page missing] to Lt. Col. P.G. Strong, 15 August 1942, subject: operation 

of SA/G [SO] schools, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 161, Folder 1754, National Archives II. 

12 Arthur (“Art’) Reinhardt, interview at Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., by the author 14 

December 2004. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 567

Virginia. There recruits were held and observed through a series of written and verbal 

tests and practical field exercises. Over a three day period, the potential agents for 

dangerous overseas missions were observed as they worked, played, talked and went 

through three dozen lifelike situation tests. In the last twenty months of the war, OSS 

teams of leading psychologists and psychiatrists, using radical methods and working in 

secrecy, developed a novel and successful method for assessing personalities and 

predicting an individual’s performance on the kind of unpredictable situations 

prospective agents would face in the field. They employed simulations and situational 

exercises to identify and evaluate knowledge, behavioral traits, skills, competencies and 

weaknesses. According to an OSS report, the assessment program succeeded in 

“screening out the 15-20% who were obviously unfit.”

13 The evaluation teams learned 

that beyond the specific skills and training, what makes an effective saboteur in France, 

an able spy in Germany, a good commando in Burma, a reliable undercover radio 

operator in China was a secure, capable, intelligent and creative person who can deal 

effectively with uncertainty and considerable stress. The effectiveness of the OSS’s 

predictability with reasonable accuracy based on their assessment performance charts 

contributed to the success of the OSS. It also contributed to the postwar publication of the 

technique and its adoption by other government agencies as well as a number of 

corporations. It is still being used today.14 

There were other gaps and difficulties along the way, some of which were quickly 

addressed and some of which were not so readily resolved. Francis (“Frank”) Mills, a 

major in the field artillery, arrived at the OSS training camps outside the nation’s capital 

in 1943 and could mainly recall the self-defense and silent killing instruction by the 

famous British expert, Colonel Fairbairn. All OSS trainees who saw him remembered the 

extraordinary skills of that otherwise unassuming, bespectacled, older Englishman. Mills 

said his group did not receive any training in intelligence gathering activity. “We were in 

special operations, fighting with the sympathetic forces behind enemy lines. We knew 

that,” he said. “[But] we were given very marginal, almost no real training in how 

guerrillas were supposed to operate. So, we were given what little training the Army or 

OSS had to offer.”15 Erasmus (“Ras”) Kloman, who entered OSS as a Princeton graduate 

and a young lieutenant, recalled a number of problems in Special Operations training in 

 

13 “History of Schools and Training, OSS, Part I: Chronology and Administration, June 1942 – October 

1945,” p. 42, typescript, n.d. [apparently written in 1947], copy delivered by W.J. Morgan, who had been 

with OSS Schools and Training Branch during World War II, to Col. E.B. Whisner, 7 January 1949, OSS 

Records (RG 226), Entry 176, Box 2, Folder 12, National Archives II. The report, p. 39, stated that a 

surprising number of “psycho-neurotics” was found. 

14 “Spotting the Talent,” Financial Express, 16 October 2005, reprinted in OSS Society Digest, Number 

1172, 17 October 2005, osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 17 October 2005; Office of Strategic 

Services, War Report of the OSS (New York: Walker and Co., 1976), 238-241; reprint of the original 

typescript report prepared by the Strategic Services Unit of the War Department in 1947 (hereinafter OSS, 

War Report of the OSS); “A Good Man Is Hard to Find: The O.S.S. Learned How, with New Selection 

Methods that May Well Serve Industry,” Fortune (1946): 92-95, 217-223; OSS Assessment Staff, 

Assessment of Men: Selection of Personnel for the Office of Strategic Services (New York: Rinehart, 1948). 

15 Francis (“Frank”) Mills, oral history interview conducted by Maochun Yu, 19 November 1996, p. 2, OSS 

Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II. 
568 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

the winter of 1943-44. Most importantly, it was never clear what his mission would be, 

and thus the training could not be matched to it. At first based on his knowledge of 

French, he was assigned to training as a SO agent who would be parachuted into 

occupied France. But that assignment was changed to SO in Yugoslavia. When he 

actually arrived overseas, he was sent neither to Yugoslavia or France but was given a 

series of administrative assignments in Egypt, Algeria, and Italy. A lot of his training in 

particular skills, for example a couple of days of Morse code, half a day of lock-picking 

instruction, he considered too brief to be adequate. He considered it “a little bit of this 

and a little bit of that in case it might come in handy someday.”16 

In fact, a major complaint by many trainees and indeed by officials in the Schools 

and Training Branch, was that neither the students nor S&T knew, particularly in 1942-

43, what kind of mission the operational branches and their regional desks had planned 

for particular students. Thus it was not clear to the students how any given topic related 

to their future mission, if at all, and the instructors at did not know either. (This was not 

true, of course, for the foreign trainees, the Yugoslavs, Norwegians, Thais, and Koreans, 

for example, who knew they would be infiltrated back into their home countries.) One 

response by Schools and Training was to establish a more generic form of training for the 

American trainees. Although Kloman was rescheduled to be sent to Yugoslavia, he had 

never been given instruction in Serbo-Croatian languages, nor had he been briefed on the 

political and military situations in that country. His superiors said that everything would 

become clear when he reached the Yugoslav desk in Cairo. “I supposed,” he wrote later, 

“it was assumed I would pick this up once I went abroad.”17 Very much concerned about 

this problem, Schools and Training Branch did seek to link the regional desks in 

particular OSS operational branches—especially Special Operations, Secret Intelligence, 

Operational Groups—with particular individuals and groups of students, the better to gear 

their instruction toward their ultimate missions for OSS. Another problem, albeit one that 

conflicted with the desire for secrecy, was that especially in the early years, students were 

ignorant about the overall organization of the OSS and its various and sometimes 

competing branches.18 Schools and Training Branch did later add an introductory course 

to give students a sense of where they fit in the larger organization and how the different 

branches could compliment and work in support of each other. 

OSS tried to make the training as realistic as possible, despite the fact that the 

exact situations agents would face in the field could not always be foreseen, and in any 

event, many of those situations could not be adequately duplicated in the camps. Firing at 

a cardboard target was not the same as shooting at an enemy who was trying to kill you. 

Instructors tried to increase the realism by using live ammunition and explosives. They 

designed a rigorous obstacle course with small explosives set off by trip wires. They 

forced students to crawl under barbed wire with machine gun bullets zipping over their 

heads. Fairbairn built a mystery, pistol house, or “house of horrors” as it was called by 

 

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

Naval Institute Press, 2005), 10, 14. 

17 Ibid., 13; Erasmus Kloman, telephone interview with the author, 24 January 2005. In fact, his assignment 

was changed, and he was never sent to Yugoslavia. 

18 Kloman, Assignment Algiers, 13-14. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 569

the students, at Areas A and B. Students would be awakened in the middle of the night, 

given a pistol and ordered to kick in the door to the mystery house and rush though its 

darkened rooms and corridors, responding instantly and accurately with their Colt .45 to 

suddenly illuminated enemy mannequins and pop-up silhouettes of German soldiers. In 

addition, Fairbairn, who had mastered jujitsu, judo, knife-fighting, taught awed trainees 

what one of them recalled were “100 Ways to Kill a Person without Firing a Shot.”19

 The most frequent complaint of the students was of being “held” too long after 

completing their training. When they graduated, they were at their peak of enthusiasm 

and self-confidence and ready for their mission overseas, but OSS then confronted the 

problems of obtaining space on ships and planes going abroad. Priorities were lost among 

a welter of inter-service rivalries, bureaucratic confusion and the overall demands of 

logistics upon an already overburdened global transportation system supplying America’s 

armed forces. The new graduates were frustrated by the endless delays, and their 

enthusiasm and readiness eroded the longer they remained unassigned after graduation. 

Schools and Training officials tried to remedy this by sending them to additional courses, 

if there was space for them, or letting them go on leave, but sometimes they were kept in 

camps that were not at full capacity at the time. 

Making Training Realistic 

 Few of the OSS instructors in the Stateside training camps had any actual combat 

experience, at least until late in the war, and this was worrisome. As an espionage or 

morale operations student at Area A complained after graduation in 1942, “with the 

exception of Capt. White [from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics], no single instructor had 

any major experience with undercover work. Consequently, the lectures seemed rather 

lifeless. As a graduate of this course, I still have no idea of how to deal with ‘black 

market’ operations, false entry, financial operations, or any of the present day operational 

problems.”20 To ameliorate this inexperience, several instructors were sent to Great 

Britain in the early fall of 1942 to gain firsthand experience at the British schools staffed 

by instructors, some of whom had worked behind enemy lines. Lieutenant Frank 

Gleason, a demolitions instructor at Area B in Catoctin, attended an industrial sabotage 

school in England for two months and learned how to blow up steam turbines, power 

plants, and factories. “When I left, I was a trained terrorist,” he recalled in 2005, “but in a 

worthy cause!”21

 

19 George Maddock, newspaper interview 2007, reprinted in OSS Society Digest, Number 1918, 2 

December 2007, osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 2 December 2007. 

20 See, for example, the complaint by an unidentified trainee [signature page missing] to Lt. Col. 

P[hilip].G. Strong, [head of Special Operations Branch],15 August 1942, subject: operation of SA/G [SO] 

schools, p. 2, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 161, Folder 1754, National Archives II. 

21 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 31 January 2005. 
570 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

Initial American instructors subsequently gained combat experience in the field, 

but they seldom returned to the United States as instructors. Some who had been overseas 

at British schools, like Frank Gleason and Charles Parkin in late 1942, or combat 

veterans, like Carl Eifler and Allen Richter from Detachment 101 in Burma in 1944, did 

give guest lectures upon their return.22 It should be noted that most of the U.S. Army’s 

officer instructors in the first years of the war lacked combat experience, although some 

of the old-time NCOs had seen combat in World War I. 

In place of the general lack of experience by instructors, OSS sought, as the war 

went on, to incorporate lessons its agents derived from experience in the field and apply 

them to the curriculum in the training schools. But generally the field agents were too 

busy to write reports on recommendations for further training back home. Operational 

branch officers declined S&T’s requests for copies of reports from overseas units as 

breaches of security and useless extra work.23 This was a slow process for S&T, and 

apparently the lessons could be implemented into the curriculum more rapidly by the 

operational branches themselves (agents’ field experiences relayed directly via branch 

headquarters to instructors) than by the more pedagogically oriented and centralized 

Schools and Training Branch. The training at the stateside camps was seen as a form of 

basic and mid-level advanced OSS training. For more advanced, specialized training, 

including instruction from veterans of the combat theaters, OSS first relied upon British 

SOE schools, and subsequently on overseas training schools established by the OSS 

operational branches themselves. SO and SI, for example, set up schools in North Africa, 

Italy, England, and China. In 1944, Schools and Training Branch was given official 

authority over these overseas OSS schools, and it then sought to coordinate OSS training 

at home and abroad. Some members of OSS in England and in China argued by late 1944 

that S&T’s role in the United States be limited to assessment screening and providing 

general indoctrination and basic military training. They argued that recruits would benefit 

from then being sent to specialized finishing schools overseas where they would be 

immersed in conditions in that theater of operations and brought into direct contact with 

operatives from the field.24 This was not adopted, although Schools and Training did 

 

22 “One afternoon of tremendous benefit to the group [of students] was that spent with a man recently 

returned from the field, who reported on his own activities and personal experiences interestingly and in 

detail. His talk and his answers to their questions were of real value in helping the men to picture the 

situations they may encounter, and the operations they may undertake. The group was enthusiastic over the 

opportunity to hear him, and their reaction certainly was evidence of the desirability of bringing in a man 

with actual field experience whenever possible.” “Student” to Kenneth Baker [chief, Schools and Training 

Branch], 8 December 1942, p. 2, a three-page typed report by an anonymous student, in Appendix III, Part 

Two of the History [of Schools and Training Branch], OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 158, Folder 

1722, National Archives II. 

23 Capt. W.B. Kantack, reports officer, SO, to Lt. Bane, 16 March 1945, subject: reports requirements of

Schools and Training [in response to request from Mr. William R. Stewart, Assistant Intelligence Officer, 

S&T], OSS Records (RG 226), Directors Office Files, microfilm M1642, Roll 63, Frames 663-664, 

National Archives II. 

24 See the recommendations of Maj. Arthur Goldberg, head of the SI Labor Desk in Europe, “Report on an 

Hour with Major Goldberg,” pp. 3-4, in “Interviews with Returned Men,” OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 

161, Box 2, Folder 31. In April 1945 S&T in China made a similar suggestion, ending, “It cannot be said 

that advanced training in the U.S. is a waste of time, but there is little doubt but that the U.S. training staffs 

could accomplish infinitely more if operating here.” OSS Theater Reports, S & T Branch Excerpts, China
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 571

assume organizational responsibility for the overseas training schools that the operational 

branches had established. 

OSS, like the Regular Army, was developing new curricula and training manuals 

to meet the new forms of warfare and to use the new weapons, munitions, and equipment, 

such as plastic explosives, a variety of weapons with silencers, bazookas, suitcase-size 

wireless transmitters and receivers. The OSS syllabuses and manuals were clear about the 

initial aims and methods of training in Special Operations and Communications in the 

training areas in Prince William Forest Park and Catoctin Mountain Park. The initial part 

of the training was to provide both physical conditioning as well as a sense of selfconfidence and spirit in the organization and its purpose. It was also designed to weed out 

the unfit. For those who remained, it was to provide them with elementary skills in most 

of the areas they would need, plus advanced skills in their specialization. OSS did modify 

and adapt the curriculum in light of what its operatives learned in the field in the combat 

zones. 

 “The overall layout of training by OSS was really good,” concluded Allen R. 

Richter, who was part of the initial Detachment 101 communications contingent. “When 

we got overseas to Assam [India], we followed the same ideas. We would get our recruits 

and keep them together, but separated from the others, which meant they would sleep, eat 

and train there in their own little compounds. The advantage of that would be that 

everyone was doing their own thing, and not mixing demolition with radio and other 

activities--specialization. We copied Area C overseas.” Richter recalled that at least from 

1942 to late 1944 when he returned to the United States, the specialized training program 

of Detachment 101had been influenced by the Communications Branch back home and 

its training school at Area C, not by Schools and Training Branch, the umbrella training 

organization of OSS. “We had nothing to do with Schools and Training [Branch],” in 

India, Richter concluded.25

Problems of Schools and Training Branch 

 Back home, the Schools and Training Branch suffered its own problems. 

“Someone recently likened Schools and Training to an island of ignorance with darkness 

on both sides of it,” bemoaned the new chief of S&T in October 1943, Lieutenant 

Colonel Henson L. Robinson. “We are trying to run a group of schools without knowing 

anything about the number of students we must train, the type of missions our students 

will have, or what happens to them after they get to their eventual destinations.”26 In a 

 

Theater, 30 April 1945, p. 10, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 159, Folder 1729, both in National

Archives II. 

25 Allen R. Richter, telephone interview with the author, 25 March 2005. 

26 Lt. Col. H.L. Robinson, Executive, Schools and Training Branch, October 1943, “Schools and Training,”

p. 12, a 14-page typed report, included in Appendix IV, Part Three of the History [of Schools and Training 

Branch], OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 158, Folder 1723, National Archives II. 
572 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

lengthy report, Colonel Robinson included some examples of what led to S&T’s 

frustration: 

 We are suddenly informed by one of the [Operational] Branches that next 

Monday there will be 80 students to be trained for a very special mission; who 

must be kept segregated in a separate area; who will have to have special training 

in demolitions along with some other subjects that have not yet been decided 

upon; and a request that we rig up some models of various power plants, etc., for 

these students to play with. 

 Or, we are told a large group of Japanese, Thailanders, or Balkans 

[Yugoslavs] may be expected week after next and must be put in a separate area. 

A group now in process of formation is a good illustration. After various 

meetings, in none of which was any representative of Schools and Training 

included, a plan was evolved. Somebody was to recruit a hundred officers and 

fifty wireless operators. Operational Groups agreed to furnish some of their 

officers to give the group a short course in demolitions and small arms. 

Communications agreed to furnish some [telegraph] key sets and a few instructors 

to train the wireless operators. Quite by accident, later, we were told that we 

might expect to have 150 people suddenly dumped on our hands and it was up to 

us to find some place to put them. We tentatively agreed that, if and when the plan 

matured, we would put the group in Area F. Without further warning or advance 

notice, about 120 officers and men arrived at Area F, bag and baggage....The 

camp commander suddenly was confronted with the necessity of feeding and 

housing 120 people for whom he had drawn no rations or prepared any 

accommodations. He complained, justly, and we complained vociferously....So 

far we have received nothing.27

 Schools and Training wanted to be involved from the inception of plans that could 

involve its training camps. Its leadership also desired reports on the successes or failures 

of the former trainees in actual operations abroad or lectures by returning field veterans to 

instructors in the training camps in the United States so that training could be adjusted 

and improved to reflect actual conditions in the field.28 Since it could not obtain such 

branch reports, S&T sought similar information on its own, conducting a series of 

interviews with OSS operatives returning from overseas in 1944-1945.29 These 

individuals had numerous suggestions for S&T’s instructors. In 1949, the CIA 

 

27 Ibid. 

28 Ibid., 13. 

29 OSS, Schools and Training Branch, “Interviews with Returned Men,” fall 1944 to spring 1945, in OSS 

Records (RG 226), Entry 161, Box 2, Folder 31; and Lt. Arthur Simon, Area “K” [England], to Maj. Ezra 

Shine, Chief, S&T Branch [in England], 24 May 1945, subject: summary and analysis of deprocessing 

interviews [of men from the 13 teams parachuted into Germany between January and April 1945 and their 

assessments and recommendations regarding their training and its relationship to their missions] , plus the 

transcripts of the interviews with the team members, all in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 158, 

Folder 26, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 573

summarized a number of them as it built its own training program, modeled largely on 

that of the OSS. Many of the returning OSS veterans in 1944-1945, had contended that 

OSS as a whole and the training schools in particular put too much emphasis on what 

Major Peter Dewey, returning from France before his assignment to Indochina, called 

“too much ‘cloak and dagger’ creepiness in the training.” Dewey advised that the training 

“approach should be more matter-of-fact.”30 A number of the field veterans complained 

that there was too little training in observing and reporting compared to cover and 

security. “Discipline, power of observation, military perspicacity, and common sense are 

the sine qua non of life behind the lines,” reported an SI agent from Greece.”31 Different 

agents sometime offered opposite views of the same issue. One SO instructor in Ceylon 

declared “natives being trained as [special operations] operatives must be treated with 

friendliness and respect. There is no other way.” But an SI agent from a neutral European 

country stated flatly “Never trust a man the first time,” and the chief organizer of a 

sabotage team warned that “friendly elements in the police can supply information of 

great value, but in nine out of ten cases the friendly policeman is a dangerous agent 

provocateur.”32 Despite S&T’s efforts, the operational branches continued throughout the 

war to view the Schools and Training Branch merely as a support unit to provide 

instruction facilities for them as needed. Although S&T was given some additional 

authority, the operational branches remained predominant in operations and in the 

training of their agents throughout the war. 

Value of OSS Training 

 Many of the American agents overseas attributed their success at least in part to 

the value of what they had learned at the OSS training camps in the United States. They 

credited their achievements to the physical training, specific skills and techniques, and 

the self-confidence and faith in themselves and the organization, and the value of their 

 

30 Maj. Peter Dewey quoted in Deane W. Starrett, Chief, Training Materials and Research Section [of CIA]

to Col. [E.B.] Whisner, Deputy Chief, TRS, 16 May 1949, subject: wartime recommendations for the 

training of personnel in OSS, p. 16, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 161, Box 2, Folder 32, National 

Archives II. A Major Caskey from SI service in Greece and Turkey, p. 13, echoed that and contended that 

too much stress on security even at RTU-11 tended to make the student overly conscious of his cover.” On 

arriving in the field, he would be conspicuous by his secrecy.” Lt. George Demas from the Far East, p. 22, 

agreed that “being too tight-lipped, etc. tends to attract attention.” The summaries in the 1949 report were 

made by Donald C. Baker at the request of W.J. Morgan, who had served in OSS S&T Branch in WWII, 

and were taken from a series of interviews by Sgt. J.C. Gibbs of S&T with returning field personnel from 

SI, SO, MO, and MU during 1944 and 1945. 

31 Quotation from an unidentified Greek SI officer, ibid., p. 21; for similar complaints about the need for 

more training on observation and reporting, see “John__” SI, Greece, p. 16, “Dorothy C.__” SI, Turkey, p. 

17, and Huntington Bliss, cable officer, Bari, Italy, p. 20. 

32 Quotations from Ray F. Kauffman, SO Ceylon, ibid., p. 17; and “Mr. X” stationed in a “neutral country,” 

p. 8; and “chief organizer of a sabotage group,” p. 9. Emphasis in the original. 
574 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

mission. Not surprisingly, those who stayed in the armed forces or later joined the CIA 

continued to draw upon and replicate techniques from the OSS training camps. 

Major General John K. (“Jack”) Singlaub who as a young Jedburgh had trained at 

Areas B and F and then SOE schools in Britain, served with distinction in France and 

China, and after the war wound up his career by commanding all U.S. Army troops in 

South Korea, reflected in 1996 on what he had learned in his OSS training. “These were 

individual skills that are perhaps useful but are most important for training the state of 

mind or attitude, developing an aggressiveness and confidence in one’s ability to use 

weapons,” he said. “One of the most important aspects of the training was that it gave 

you complete confidence.” By the time he and his colleagues jumped into France in 1944, 

Singlaub said, “we had complete confidence that we could survive if we had a weapon. 

We were good. I mean, we hit targets in very dimly lighted places.... We were taught this 

`instinctive fire’.... [All of] that gave you an ability to concentrate on your mission, and 

not worry about your personal safety. That’s really a great psychological advantage. I 

used that later in training my units when I was a battalion commander and later, a Battle 

Group commander.”33

 After the war, Robert R. Kehoe was employed by the CIA’s Office of Training 

and Education. The young New Jersey native had been a Jedburgh team radio operator in 

France after completing Commo training at Area C and SO training at Area B, and SOE 

instruction in Britain. “The experience at Area B-2 was a great morale builder,” he said 

later, “and when we departed in mid-December [1943], we were in top physical 

condition.”34 He incorporated much of OSS training for the CIA. 

Relating his personal experiences in a postwar memoir, Lieutenant Jerry Sage, 

who had spent more than two years in German POW camps after being captured in North 

Africa in February 1943, emphasized the importance of what he had learned in the OSS 

training camps, particularly Area B, where he learned while also instructing. Using 

techniques he learned at the OSS training school, he had escaped half a dozen times, but 

each time was recaptured in Germany. One of Sage’s most stressful moments and one in 

which, he said, his OSS training came to his rescue occurred in spring 1944, when he was 

brought back to Stalag Luft III after having been caught and beaten by the Gestapo. He 

was soon confronted by the irate camp commandant, a rather old colonel, under pressure 

from his Air Force superiors and the Gestapo to prevent any more escapes. As Sage 

recalled, Kommandant von Lindeiner went into a rage and pulled his pistol out of its 

holster, his hands shaking. “I’d learned from Dan Fairbairn that nobody is dangerous who 

just tells you to put your hands up and holds his pistol firmly on you,” Sage wrote later. 

“You can finally trick him and get close enough to disarm him in a number of ways. I 

knew how to do that.... I stood up slowly, fixed him with my eyes, and walked very 

gently toward him—with no threat and no bombast. Very quietly and calmly I said, ‘Be 

 

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

October 1996, pp. 8, 13-14, OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 4, National 

Archives II. Asked if there were any areas of training that proved inadequate, General Singlaub replied in 

1996, “I can’t think of any area [of training] that showed up at being deficient. There may be some, but I 

can’t think of any.” 

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

of the American Intelligence Profession, OSS 60th Anniversary Issue (June 2002): 104. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 575

reasonable.’ This was in my poor German but he understood me. ‘You would never 

forgive yourself, if you killed an unarmed man like this.’” It worked, the tension of the 

moment was broken, and the commandant went back to his office.35

At Stalag Luft III, where he was part of the plan for what became known as the 

“Great Escape,” rumors spread in1944 that the Nazis might kill the POWs if the Allies 

reached Germany. The senior American officer asked Sage to train a hand-picked group 

of men to try to seize the camp if the Germans started such an operation, or at least to 

avoid being killed without a fight. Sage drew upon Fairbairn’s instructions on “silent 

killing,” the dispatching of sentries with knives, other instruments, or bare hands, to train 

a selected group of his fellow prisoners to take over the POW camp in case the Germans 

started “liquidation proceedings.” That did not happen, but Sage did escape successfully 

in January 1945 from a German POW camp in Poland, returning home via the Ukraine 

and Egypt.36 

OSS training was equally effective in the Far East according to many veterans 

who served there. After a tour of duty as a demolitions instructor at Area B from 1942 to 

early 1943, Lieutenant Frank Gleason, SO, was sent to China. There he helped instruct 

Chinese commandos and he personally helped impede a Japanese advance by blowing up 

bridges and several warehouses of stored weapons and munitions to keep them from 

falling into enemy hands. After a successful postwar career in the Army Corps of 

Engineers, he retired as a full colonel. Asked how effective OSS training had been in 

China, Gleason asserted, “It was very effective. We blew those bridges. We did it with 

what we learned in our training here and in England. In China, we had classes where I 

taught Chinese how to destroy mechanical equipment. Joe Lazarsky used it against 

Japanese in China and with [Ray] Peers in the jungles of Burma. I felt fully 

prepared....Most of the students who graduated from the OSS training camps in 

Maryland and Virginia thought highly of their preparation there.”37

 Lazarsky, who later spent a career with the CIA, concurred in regard to OSS 

training. “The training in weaponry and demolitions was effective. So was building selfconfidence and the ability to get things done.” Lazarsky had also used such training to 

prepare indigenous agents in the Far East. “It was very effective [training],” he said. “If 

you debrief a Thai agent, they would tell you that. Even after the war, they would say 

thank you. [One of them said] `You know what you and Leo [Karwaski] taught me about 

demolitions—we could not have gotten that anywhere else.’”38 

“Training is not spectacular work,” Schools and Training Branch acknowledged 

in its typewritten history. “It means doing a sound teaching job, adjusting sights to fit 

circumstances, and keeping right on doing it.” Certainly there were some brilliant 

instructors who spiced the programs with their personalities and operating experiences, 

“but the bulk of the work was done by hundreds of lesser known instructors and 

 

35 Jerry Sage, Sage (Wayne, Pa.: Miles Standish Press, 1985), 207-208.

36 Ibid., 305, 327, 431. 

37 Frank A. Gleason, Jr., telephone interview with the author, 9 February 2007. 

38 Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interview with the author, 11 February 2007. 
576 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

administrators who stuck to the grind, class after class.”39 Operating like the OSS itself 

which was created in haste and without American precedent and which was impelled 

with a tremendous drive for speed, production, and results, the Schools and Training 

Branch sometimes appeared confused and indecisive, as S&T acknowledged. Yet, 

training areas and programs were indeed developed almost overnight to fit the evolving 

needs of Donovan’s organization and other wartime developments. To meet suddenly 

increased quotas, the capacity of training areas was from time to time doubled in size, 

sometimes by putting new sub-camps into operation, sometimes with the creation of “tent 

cities” to accommodate additional students. Yet, Schools and Training also admitted that 

“only toward the end of World War II was OSS beginning to approach the kind of 

training that was really adequate for the complex and hazardous operations carried out by 

OSS personnel.”40

Size of the OSS and the Task of Training 

At its peak in December 1944, OSS included 12,974 uniformed and civilian 

personnel worldwide. This included nearly 8,500 men and 4,500 women; approximately 

7,500 of these (including 900 women) served overseas.

41 Intelligence branches composed 

26.8 per cent (3,484 persons) of the total. Operations, including the OGs, made up 23.7 

per cent of the total. Miscellaneous units comprised 22.8 per cent. For some reason, the 

Communications Branch was listed within the Miscellaneous Category. It was the largest 

segment of that category. Communications Branch personnel on December 31, 1944, 

numbered 1,728 persons and represented 13.2 per cent of total OSS personnel. 

 

39 “History of Schools and Training, OSS, Part I: Chronology and Administration, June 1942 – October 

1945,” p. 53, typescript, n.d. [apparently written in 1947], copy delivered by W.J. Morgan, who had been 

with OSS Schools and Training Branch during World War II, to Col. E.B. Whisner, 7 January 1949, OSS 

Records (RG 226), Entry 176, Box 2, Folder 12, National Archives II. 

40 “OSS Training Branch, Chapter VI (History),” p. 1, typescript n.d. [1946-1947?], recommendations for 

“the Training Section of a secret intelligence agency in time of war,” OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 176, 

Box 2, Folder 14, National Archives II. 

41 “Strategic Services, Office of (OSS),” W. Thomas Smith, Jr., Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence 

Agency (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 220. Smith provides a rounded off figure of 13,000 as the 1944 

peak strength of the OSS. The precise peak figure of 12,974 in December 1944 is listed and compared with 

other months since October, October 1944 being, according to the report, “the first month in which total 

figures were available” for “OSS the world over....” Louis M. Ream [OSS deputy director for 

administrative services, including personnel] to Col. G. Edward Buxton [deputy director of OSS and 

Donovan’s right hand man], memorandum, 18 January 1945, [no subject line, but the topic is Ream’s 

concern with the fact that although on 23 October 1944 Donovan had promised Harold D. Smith, head of 

the Bureau of the Budget, an immediate 5 per cent reduction in the total OSS personnel complement, 

resulting in a reduction of about 600 persons, in fact there had been an increase rather than a decrease in 

OSS personnel from 12,740 in October to 12,974 in December, due primarily to delays in terminating 

military and civilian personnel from overseas, but, as Ream emphasized, “it is very necessary that General 

Donovan’s promise to Mr. Smith be kept. ”OSS Wash-Dir-Op-266, #55, “Liquidation of OSS,” copy in 

CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 46, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 577

Administrative Services [support services: including Research and Development, to 

Security, Special Funds, Medical Services, Procurement, as well as other branches, 

including Schools and Training] comprised 16.5 per cent of the OSS.42 Of the nearly 

13,000 members of the OSS, approximately 4,000 were civilians and some 9,000 were 

uniformed personnel.43

In summarizing Schools and Training’s achievements, the branch’s postwar 

history emphasized the numbers that the organization had handled in the last two years of 

the war. Between January 1944 and the end of the war, the Assessment Stations screened 

and evaluated 5,300 candidates, the Basic Espionage Schools graduated more than 1,800 

operatives, and the Advanced School at RTU-11 (“the Farm”) graduated 800 men and 

women; the Special Operations Schools trained 1,027 men.

44 These figures did not 

include the trainees in 1942-1943, nor did they incorporate the numbers of trainees in the 

specialized groups over which Schools and Training had divided or little control, such as 

the training of military recruits for the Maritime Unit, the Operational Groups and the 

Communications Branch. S&T’s official historians concluded that “like the other 

branches of OSS, though falling far short of perfection, Schools and Training on the 

balance somehow accomplished a creditable task. Men were trained and sent against the 

enemy. Men did accomplish results that substantially contributed to the war effort.”45

CIA adopts OSS Training 

Effectiveness of the OSS training was confirmed by the fact that its successors, 

the CIA and Army Special Forces, adopted much of it. “The [Central Intelligence] 

 

42 Louis M. Ream, deputy director, administrative services, to Charles S. Cheston [second assistant director 

of OSS since March 1943], memorandum, 29 January 1945, pp. 2-3 [no subject line, but Ream provides 

some statistical analyses of OSS personnel strength between October and December 1944, and also a 

functional distribution by percentage and sometimes with actual numbers of personnel in various 

categories]. For a breakdown of personnel by geographical theaters of operation as well as branches and 

other functional categories, see the tables for March and April 1945 entitled simply “Summary” 

[presumably April 1945], also in OSS Wash-Dir-Op-266, #55, “Liquidation of OSS,” copy in CIA Records 

(RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 46, National Archives II. 

43 The figures given in May 1945 were 12,816 OSS personnel at that time, of which 8,939 were numbers of 

the armed forces. Of a total of 2,593 officers, 2, 192 had commissions in the Army or Army Air Corps; of a 

total of 6,346 enlisted personnel, 5,817 were serving on detached duty from the Army. A relatively few

service members were from the Navy or Marines. Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan to The Adjutant General, 

War Department, 15 May 1945, subject: recommendation for promotion [of Col. Millard P. Goodfellow], 

p. 3, copy in Papers of M. Preston Goodfellow, Box 2, Biographical Material Folder, Hoover Institution

Archives, Stanford, Calif. 

44 Quoted in “History of Schools and Training, OSS, Part I: Chronology and Administration, June 1942 – 

October 1945,” p. 52, typescript, n.d. [apparently written in 1947], copy delivered by W.J. Morgan, who 

had been with OSS Schools and Training Branch during World War II, to Col. E.B. Whisner, 7 January 

1949, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 176, Box 2, Folder 12, National Archives II. 

45 Quoted in ibid., 51, emphasis in the original. 
578 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

Agency picked it up almost 100 per cent,” explained Lazarsky, who subsequently spent 

twenty-five years with the CIA. “They took the manuals, instructional materials, and that 

right into the Agency. You know, the COI [Office of the Coordinator of Information] and 

the OSS started it from scratch. The Agency would have been foolish not to have adopted 

their training.”46 Indeed, William R. (“Ray”) Peers, who as a young lieutenant had trained 

at Area B in spring 1942 before leaving for the jungles of Burma as one of the early 

leaders of Detachment 101 in Burma, later served in Taiwan as chief of a CIA program 

for training Chinese agents to be infiltrated into mainland China, 1949-1951.47 

Although former OSSer Frank Wisner’s covert operations office was the driving 

force within CIA for its first few years as well as one of the main recruiters of former 

OSS SO personnel and OSS training methods, when former Army General Walter Bedell 

(“Beetle”) Smith became Director of Central Intelligence in 1950, he began to emphasize 

intelligence gathering and analysis. Smith established a relationship of confidence and 

trust with Truman similar to that of Donovan and Roosevelt. He quickly recruited former 

OSSers, some from Secret Intelligence but mostly from Research and Analysis to prepare 

the basis for what became the national intelligence estimate that the DCI would present to 

the President. Called back William Langer, former OSS chief of R&A, from Harvard, 

and Langer recruited a number of former OSS staffers to assist him. Ray Cline, had been 

a young Harvard graduate when OSS enlisted him in 1943 for R&A’s Current 

Intelligence office. In 1950, he became the CIA’s the first chief of the new Estimates 

Staff. The National Estimates Board members included several former OSSers: Langer; 

Calvin Hoover a Duke University expert on the Soviet Economy and a former member of 

OSS Secret Intelligence; Sherman Kent of Yale, who been with Langer at R&A; and a 

number of non-OSS veterans. Kent was reluctant to leave Yale to join the National 

Estimates Board, and Cline later recalled talking to him in 1950 at the temporary CIA 

headquarters in an old OSS building, across a scarred old wooden desk inherited from 

OSS. “I told him that so few people in the new CIA knew what intelligence analysis was 

all about and such threatening situations existed in the world that he was needed.” “I do 

not know whether this influenced him,” Cline said, “but he came, stayed, and [as 

Langer’s successor] built the National Intelligence Estimates into a significant element in 

decision-making.”48 General Smith also brought in as deputy director of CIA Allen 

Dulles, former OSS Secret Intelligence chief in Switzerland, who had resumed a law 

practice but also maintained his Washington connections. Dulles would replace Smith in 

1953 and serve as Director of Central Intelligence until 1961. 

 

46 Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interview with the author, 11 February 2007. Frank Gleason concurred. 

“They [the CIA] had to because of the sound training we had.” Frank A. Gleason, Jr., telephone interview 

with the author, 9 February 2007. 

47 Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 265n. Tom Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the 

CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 60, reports that Peers ran Western Enterprises, a CIA front 

organization in Taiwan, designed to help subvert Mao Tse-tung’s regime. 

48 Ray S. Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis 

Books, 1976), 109, 111, quotation on 122. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 579

For the indoctrination and initial training of field agents, CIA has continued to 

rely in part upon OSS paramilitary style training to evaluate recruits and build selfconfidence and élan as much as imparting usable skills. While the agency first relied 

upon Army bases, by the early 1950s it established its own top-secret, 10,000-acre 

paramilitary training facility at Camp Peary in the woods near Williamsburg, Virginia. It 

continues the rough and tumble type of OSS special operations training there to the 

present day. But unlike the exclusively male trainees at the rugged OSS Special 

Operations training camps in the National Parks in World War II, there are now women 

as well as men engaged in military-style training and simulated Special Operations 

exercises at the CIA’s “boot camp” that is known in agency variously as “The Farm” 

“Isolation,” and “Camp Swampy.”49 

Valerie Plame Wilson, a CIA covert operations officer, became famous when 

officials in the administration of President George W. Bush blew her cover after her 

diplomat husband challenged a key rationale they had put forward for the 2003 U.S. 

invasion of Iraq. She opened her best-selling 2007 memoir with a description of the 

paramilitary exercises she had participated in as a 22-year-old trainee for the CIA in 

1985. In the climactic field exercise, her team of three male and two female trainees, each 

carrying an eighty-pound backpack containing survival materials and ammunition and 

each toting an M-16 automatic rifle, spent a clammy late fall night practicing what she 

called “escape and evasion from an ostensible hostile force—our instructors.” At dawn, 

they linked up with another group of trainees at the designated landing zone, but soon 

found themselves under simulated attack by hostile forces. Magnesium flares exploded 

around them amidst the sound of machine gun fire and the noise of exploding artillery 

shells. Adrenaline flowing, M-16s blazing, they rushed to the helicopter, which whisked 

them off to safety.50 Earlier, Plame Wilson’s CIA training had included personality tests 

and stress tests, many of them derived from the OSS, an introductory course providing an 

overview of the organization, more tests and courses, and most appealing to the CIA 

students as to their OSS predecessors, talks by case officers about their direct experiences 

in the field. Without wartime pressures, CIA provided a much longer training period than 

OSS. After three months of introductory training, the future intelligence analysts and 

operational case officers were assigned as “interims” in various departments, after which 

they were sent to a three-month, military-style course at the “Farm.” It was tough and 

demanding and, according to Plame Wilson, although “the Agency clearly understood 

that we were rarely, if ever, going to be called upon to use these skills” the managers 

maintained the paramilitary course because it “forged an esprit de corps that would last 

throughout one’s career” and it provided yet another chance for the Agency to assess “a 

new employee’s strength of character, ability to work in a team, and dedication—all 

skills critical to success in the Agency, no matter what your career path.”51

 

49 “Peary, Camp,” W. Thomas Smith, Jr., Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: 

Facts on File, 2003), 183. 

50 Valerie Plame Wilson, Fair Game (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 1-2, 315. 

51 Her training courses continued in intelligence gathering and analysis before she was given her first 

assignment. Ibid., 12-27, quotation at 12. 
580 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

From the beginning, the CIA had also adopted the OSS’s communication system. 

“The agency kept on the OSS radio training and equipment,” Joseph Lazarsky stated 

firmly.52 But it was even more than that. Looking back on the antecedents of the Agency, 

Ray Cline declared in 1976 that “one of Donovan’s lasting achievements for central 

intelligence was securing the right of independent encrypted radio and cable 

communication with all of his field units.” This achievement of a separate and effective 

network, Cline concluded, was “essential for clandestine intelligence collection 

operations, and an indispensable precedent for building up the magnificent professional 

staff of communications operators, which later gave CIA the advantage of prompt, secure 

links to the field with regular staff communications or clandestine radio nets that neither 

the State Department nor the military agencies could rival.”53 Cline knew whereof he 

spoke, for in the course of his long career, he worked not simply for the OSS and CIA but 

also for the Pentagon and the State Department. 

OSS’s paramilitary operations behind enemy lines had impressed a number of 

influential U.S. military commanders, and their support, Cline surmised, was one of the 

key reasons why the OSS was able to maintain its separate communications network.54

One of those commanders was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander 

of the Allied Expeditionary Force, who in May 1945, with the defeat of Hitler’s regime, 

declared that the value of the OSS “has been so great that there should be no thought of 

its elimination.”55

 

Special Forces: Successor to the OSS 

Although the OSS was eliminated in October 1945, its legacy included the 

Army’s Special Forces as well as the CIA, and those Special Forces, know from the 

1960s through the 1990s as the “Green Berets,” also adopted many OSS training 

procedures. When the U.S. Army established in first Special Forces unit in 1952, it 

followed the training and traditions of the OSS Special Operations and Operational 

Groups. The commander of the first Special Forces unit, Colonel Aaron Bank, later 

celebrated as the “father of Special Forces,”56 had received his initial OSS training at 

 

52 Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interview with the author, 11 February 2007. 

53 Cline, Secret Spies and Scholars, 67. It could be added that Donovan’s decision was validated as there 

were no known compromises of the OSS Communications Branch system, in contrast to the penetration of 

numerous other coding and communications systems. Arthur Reinhardt, email to the author, 27 June 2007. 

54 Cline, Secret Spies and Scholars, 67-68. 

55 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to War Department, 26 May 1945, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (RG 

218), Admiral Leahy’s Files, Box 9, Folder 54, quoted in Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors: O.S.S. 

and the Origins of the C.I.A. (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 307. 

56 “SWCS Dedicates Bank Hall: Building Named for ‘Father of Special Forces,’” press release from the 

John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, reprinted in OSS Society Digest, Number 1291, 1 

March 2006, osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed, 1 March 2006. On November 21, 2005, the JFK 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 581

Areas F and B, before serving in France, Germany, and Indochina. In 1952, much of 

Bank’s initial cadre was composed of former OSSers, including Jack Shannon, Caesar 

Civetella, and Herbert Brucker, and they prepared the training curriculum for the first 

Special Forces Group, which was established at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.57

Like OSS paramilitary training, initial training of the Army’s Special Forces 

emphasized self-confidence and élan as well as individual skills with weapons, 

demolitions, field craft5, and at least rudimentary ability with communication equipment 

and medical treatment. There were also courses in organization of resistance movements 

and operation of their networks, agent training to include espionage and sabotage, 

guerrilla warfare, codes and radio communication, survival, instinctive pistol firing, and 

the Fairbairn method of hand-to-hand combat and silent killing. Although many of the 

initial recruits came from the Rangers which were being deactivated, more than fifty 

came from OSS veterans. Most of the training was done at Fort Bragg and its satellite, 

Camp Mackall, with its woods and swamps. But the final extensive field exercise 

simulating clandestine operations behind enemy lines was held in Chattahoochee 

National Forest in the Appalachian Mountains of northern Georgia. Banks and the other 

former OSS officers used the mountainous timberlands of the U.S. Forest Service just as 

the OSS had used the forests of the National Park Service in World War II.58

 

Drawing on the legacy of elite Army units, including the Rangers, Paratroopers, 

and various Army Raider units, the U.S. Army’s Special Forces today also embrace the 

aura of the OSS’s combat teams. Their tough, hard-boiled, daredevil self-image was 

augmented by ultra-demanding physical training, thriving on danger, and achievements in 

the field. Through the daredevils of Donovan’s Special Operations teams and Operational 

Groups, OSS is widely recognized as a forerunner and an ancestor of today’s Special 

Forces, indeed, some of the OSS emblems are incorporated into insignia worn by troops 

in today’s Special Operations Command.59

 

Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, dedicated the former Special Operations 

Academic Facility as Colonel Aaron Bank Hall after a man known as the “father of Special Forces.” 

57 Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (Novato, Calif.; Presidio Press, 

1986), 172-174. 

58 Ibid., 175-185; and Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., U.S. Army Special Warfare, Its Origins: Psychological and 

Unconventional Warfare, 1941-1952 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1982), 150-

151. 

59 The issue of lineage of the Army’s Special Forces has been made more complicated and confusing by the

various reorganizations and designations in the U.S. Army as well as the decision, unjustified in the opinion 

of many Special Forces veterans, by the Army’s Center of Military History to designate the U.S.-Canadian 

1

st Special Force (the “Devil’s Brigade”), which served in Italy and southern France, as the forerunner of 

Army Special Forces. www.Army.mil/cmh//lineage/branches/sf. A number of authoritative sources 

disagree with the decision of the Army’s Center of Military History and cite OSS’s SO and OG combat 

units as direct ancestor of the Army’s Special Forces. See, for example, Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., U.S. Army 

Special Warfare: Its Origins: Psychological and Unconventional Warfare, 1941-1952 (Washington, D.C.: 

National Defense University Press, 1982; rev. ed., University Press of Kansas, 2005), 23-25; Aaron Bank, 

From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of the Special Forces (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), 205-

206; Gordon L. Rottman, The U.S. Army Special Forces, 1952-1984 (Osprey, 1985); Charles Simpson, 

Inside the Green Berets: The First Thirty Years: A History of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (Novato, 

Calif.: Presidio Press, 1983); and Mike Yard, “OGs Get to Tell Their Story,” OSS Society Digest, Number 
582 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

 

Achievements of the OSS 

 The reputation of the OSS rested in part on its accomplishments and in part on the 

aura of “Wild Bill” Donovan himself, who President Eisenhower eulogized as “the last 

hero.”60 But in part the organization’s reputation derived from the legend it created after 

the war. It was a romantic legend emphasizing individualism, innovation, heroism, and 

glamour. In keeping with traditional American images, the tale focused on amateur 

adventurers bent on excitement, glory, and victory in a crusade for law and order, justice 

and democracy. Although it may have irked many professionals in the armed forces and 

the old line government intelligence bureaus, the legend of the OSS helped establish a 

cult of romanticism about secret agents that contributed to popular support for dark arts 

of espionage and special operations for decades afterwards. Both the OSS and later the 

CIA helped to foster that image for their own purposes. But that meant that controversies 

over the CIA’s clandestine activities would sometimes lead to disputes over the nature of 

the OSS and its relationship to the CIA.61

 

 

1317, 30 March 2006, accessed 30 March 2006. Paddock and Bank credit OSS as more representative than 

ranger, paratrooper or the “Devil’s Brigade,” of the kind and range of actions conducted by today’s Special 

Forces. Furthermore, the Special Forces themselves have informally adopted OSS and its combat units such 

as Special Operations, Operational Groups, Detachment 101, and Maritime Unit, as among the 

predecessors of today’s Special Forces. See, for example, the websites of the U.S. Army’s John F. 

Kennedy Special Warfare Museum at Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, N.C., at www.soc.mil/swcs/museum, and 

the semi-official Airborne and Special Operations Museum, Fayetteville, N.C., at www.asomf.org/museum. 

On some of the OSS insignia being incorporated into today’s Special Forces and the U.S. Special 

Operations Command, see the story on the opening of an OSS Exhibit at the Airborne and Special 

Operations Museum in January 2008, reported in “Retired General [John K. Singlaub] to Speak on Career,” 

Fayetteville Observer, 24 January 2008, reprinted in OSS Society Digest, Number 1962, 26 January 2008, 

accessed 26 January 2008; and Troy Sacquety, “The Special Forces Patch: History and Origins, Veritas: 

Journal of Army Special Operations History, 3.3 (2007): 59-63. 

60 Otto C. Doering, New York City, interview with Anthony Cave Brown, 1 November 1977, quoted in 

Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 833. 

61 The romantic cult of Donovan and the daring men and women of the OSS, although it largely ignored the

laborious research and analysis which is such a major part of any major intelligence organization, was

maintained by the CIA among others as it contributed to that patrimony contributed to the legitimacy and 

mystique of the postwar central intelligence and covert operations agency. Significantly, periods of major 

public criticism and assaults upon the CIA in America such as in the 1970s, 1980s, and the first decade of 

the twenty-first century, often included disputes over the nature of its predecessor, the OSS, as well as the 

linkage in personnel and policies between the two. See, for example, the defense of the OSS amidst the

critiques of the CIA in the 1970s by Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First 

Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Ray S. Cline, Secret Spies 

and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books, 1976); and Thomas F. 

Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, 

Md.: University Publications of America, 1981, orig. ms. Classified secret, 1975), esp. v-vii, 402-415. For 

the evidence of the dichotomy amidst the controversy over the CIA today, see, for example, critiques of 

OSS in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence, 2nd ed. (New 

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003, orig. ed., 2002) 130-153; and Tom Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: 

The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 3-8; and a championing of the OSS by Patrick K. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 583

The deliberately crafted image of the OSS, like that of the dominant narrative of 

the American war effort itself, emphasized heroism, self-sacrifice and significant 

contributions to Allied victory. Understanding that the legend accentuated the 

achievements and minimized the problems in the organization, one can still appreciate 

the value and the historic role of the OSS. Although the military intelligence agencies and 

some other have remained skeptical of the glamorous history of the OSS, and while it is 

true that the Allies would have won the war without it, there is considerable evidence, as 

this and other studies have shown, that Allied victory was expedited and many Allied 

lives saved by the extraordinary efforts of the men and women of Donovan’s 

comparatively small but highly dynamic organization. Despite its brief existence, the 

OSS did have a lasting impact. 

Although the public has been fascinated by the spies and saboteurs, the real world 

probably has few “James Bond” characters. Instead, one of the most important an 

contributions of OSS was the unglamorous work of the men and women, studying and 

writing in the Research and Analysis Branch (R&A). They were little known by the 

public and unheralded by the media. It was a Donovan innovation, a group of civilians 

expert in particular areas, not working for any particular department, but rather gathering 

data on specific topics from as many sources as possible, analyzing this material, and 

generating strategic intelligence reports. They collected disparate scraps of information 

and tried to assemble them into a meaningful mosaic. Working primarily in Washington, 

D.C., the more than 900 scholars in this path-breaking unit, included many persons 

destined for future fame. Among them were Crane Brinton, Ralph Bunche, August 

Hecksher, H. Stuart Hughes, Charles Kindelberger, Herbert Marcuse, Walt Rostow, and 

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. They produced reports on everything from the state of enemy 

morale and weapons production to the most effective targets for Allied bombing attacks, 

such as the Nazis’ synthetic oil plants. The detailed reports R&A made of economic, 

geographic, strategic and political aspects in various countries not only proved valuable 

during the war but were still being used by intelligence officers of the U.S. Army,62 and 

undoubtedly the CIA as well, for years afterwards. Donovan’s R&A demonstrated that 

much valuable intelligence could be obtained from seemingly mundane published sources 

and how civilian scholars, working with libraries and other resources, could play an 

important role in obtaining, summarizing, and evaluating intelligence data. Despite the 

problems achieving inter- and even intra-agency cooperation and access to information, 

R&A’s Current Intelligence Office began the process of what would under CIA become 

the preparation of the centralized, summarized, regularly submitted National Intelligence 

Estimate. 

 

O’Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War 

II’s OSS (New York: Free Press, 2004), 311-314. 

62 Elbert G. (“Al”) O’Keefe, a retired lieutenant colonel from U.S. Army intelligence (G-2), told the author 

that both in Europe and in the Korean War, Army G-2 used estimates compiled by OSS’s Research and 

Analysis Branch. “They were good and still valuable,” declared O’Keefe, who as a professor soldier, said 

he did not otherwise think much of Donovan and his organization. Elbert G. (“Al”) O’Keefe, conversation 

with the author after a presentation on the OSS given by the author at Catoctin Mountain Park, Thurmont, 

Md., 17 November 2007. 
584 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

Spies and Intelligence 

OSS was denied direct access to the most important intelligence breakthroughs of 

the war—the American MAGIC and the British ULTRA decrypts of enemy coded 

wireless messages—and this limited OSS to less vital information. British Secret 

Intelligence Services (MI-6) dominated Anglo-American human espionage in Europe 

until 1944, when OSS’s Secret Intelligence Branch began to achieve independent results 

from its own spy handlers and the rings of indigenous agents. An exception was the OSS 

success in 1942 in Vichy French North Africa where because of French distrust of the 

British, it was the OSS which was able to establish an extensive network of agents there 

who not only provided vital information for the U.S. invasion in November but 

negotiated with the Vichy French to limit resistance to the American landings.63 By the 

last year of the war in Europe, SI officers and their agents, were able to provide accurate 

and useful Battle Zone intelligence. An Army G-2 staff member of the Joint Intelligence 

Committee of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, recalled that at the meetings of that bickering 

inter-service intelligence committee, “the Army and OSS both claimed a universal 

competence....The Army had no hesitation about contradicting an OSS political or 

economic estimate. OSS delighted to expose deficiencies in the Army’s order of battle 

[Army intelligence’s identification of the enemy units in the battle zone].”64

There were numerous instances where Army commanders were able to utilize 

effective OSS intelligence to supplement their own G-2 staff reports. OSS’s chief agent 

in occupied Rome, Peter Tompkins, provided information about an impending German 

counterattack on the Anzio beachhead that enabled Allied commanders to sustain their 

position against what was supposed to be a surprise attack. Most exemplary among the 

Allied commanders using and coordinating with the OSS was Lieutenant General 

Alexander M. Patch, head of the Seventh U.S. Army. Information from OSS agents 

helped convince him that he could risk initial landings in southern France with only three 

U.S. divisions and a small Allied airborne force. In Patch’s subsequent drive through the 

upper Rhone River Valley, intelligence from OSS revealed a hole in the German defenses 

that enabled his forces to race 150 miles around the enemy’s left flank. By pinpointing 

the location of the German commander’s only remaining armored division, OSS agents 

led to its destruction by Allied airpower and subsequently helped the Seventh Army push 

forward, later eliminate the Colmar pocket, and finally drive into Germany. In March 

1945, an OSS agent in a German uniform provided key tactical intelligence, the location 

of a German Panzer division, that allowed the Ninth U.S. Army to cross the Rhine River 

 

63 In December 1942, General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, paid special notice to the 

importance of OSS’s assistance in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, OSS, War Report of the 

OSS (Office of Strategic Services), Vol. 2, The Overseas Targets (New York: Walker Pub. Co., 1976; 

declassified version of the 1947 official history of the OSS), 18. 

64 Ludwell Lee Montague, “The Origins of the National Intelligence Estimate,” p. 66, offprint of an article 

from an unidentified journal, indicating that the text was an address given by “the late Dr. Montague, a 

retired member of the Board of National Estimates, at the first meeting of the Intelligence Forum, 11 May 

1971.” Copy in the CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 12, Folder 99, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 585

at a location where there was little chance of a counterattack by German armored 

forces.65

 OSS’s Secret Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Branches proved effective in 

both Europe and Asia. In China, although hampered by Chiang Kai-shek’s own 

spymaster, Dai Li, and the Chinese intelligence and surveillance system, OSS’s Secret 

Intelligence Branch produced significant results by the last year of the war there. It was 

responsible for identifying a high percentage of the targets attacked by the bombers and 

fighter-bombers of General Claire Chennault’s Army Air Forces, and relaying 

information from its coast watchers to Admiral William Halsey’s fleet that led to the 

destruction of significant amounts of Japanese shipping. 

In Europe, Secret Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence was also effective. OSS’s 

X-2 Branch that handled counter-intelligence and counter-espionage seems to have been 

more effective than the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps in ferreting out enemy agents 

planted behind advancing American armies. The most spectacular achievement of OSS 

Secret Intelligence, however, was certainly the accomplishments of Allen Dulles in 

Switzerland. Dulles obtained some of the best human intelligence coups of the war 

through his top level contacts within the German foreign ministry, general staff, and 

military intelligence agencies in Berlin, most importantly career foreign service officer 

and anti-Nazi, Fritz Kolbe who had been rebuffed by the British. Dulles’s contacts with 

disaffected Germans provided much valuable economic, political, and strategic 

information. The topics included the location where the V-1 and V-2 rockets were being 

developed, the spying of the Albanian valet to the British ambassador to Turkey, who as 

“Cicero” was selling secrets to the Nazis, foreknowledge of the German generals’ 

conspiracy against Hitler in 1944, and solicitations to Dulles that eventually led to a 

negotiated German Army surrender in Italy a week before the Nazi regime capitulated in 

Berlin. In regard to Dulles’s main German agent, Fritz Kolbe, Richard Helms, retired 

Director of Central Intelligence, wrote in a memoir published in 2003 that “Kolbe’s 

information is now recognized as the very best produced by any Allied agent in World 

War II.”66

 

Although Donovan championed centralized intelligence and authorized the 

scholars and spies to make it work, his own combative nature led him to take special 

interest in the paramilitary teams fighting behind enemy lines. Driving by his sometimes 

misguided sense of the demands of personal honor and perhaps also by a thrill of danger, 

Donovan went ashore in American landings on Sicily, Anzio, and Normandy, and 

recklessly flew in an inspection tour deep inside Japanese-occupied Burma. He envied his 

paramilitary forces, hailed their accomplishments, and sought to make sure that they were 

well trained, equipped, and supplied. Donovan took a personal interest in the 

development of special weapons, explosives, and espionage devices and materials 

developed by various support offices to service different branches of OSS. The most 

noted was the Research and Development Branch under chemist Stanley P. Lovell, who 

 

65 “Office of Strategic Services,” George J.A. O’Toole, The Encyclopedia of American Intelligence and 

Espionage: From the Revolutionary War to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 1988), 339. 

66 Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency 

(New York: Random House, 2003), 37. 
586 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

Donovan liked to call his “Professor Moriarity.” Some of the projects were ludicrous—

the idea of bats carrying small incendiary bombs over Tokyo, for example. But others 

were so effective they continued to be used, in different forms, to the present day: 

magnetic limpet mines, self-contained underwater breathing devices, waterproof watches, 

swim fins, small mines shaped like insignificant camel, donkey or horse droppings (later 

in the Vietnam War, the CIA adopted the idea and used simulated tiger droppings to 

conceal small, fist-sized sensitizer/transmitters to signal enemy movements along jungle 

trails). The “Liberator” pistol, a cheap one-shot .45 caliber pistol, designed for killing a 

sentry or other solitary individual and obtaining his weapon, was distributed by the OSS 

behind Japanese lines in China. Later during the Cold War, they were distributed by CIA 

in the Congo, and a 9mm version went to anti-communist tribesmen in the mountains of 

Laos and Vietnam.67 

Other development offices had their successes as well as problems: producing 

forged passports and identity papers and paraphernalia for spies, some of which passed 

inspection and some of which did not; as well as matchbox cameras and various 

mechanisms for hiding secret messages. In those days when electronics was based on the 

vacuum tube and home radios were sizable pieces of furniture, OSS Communications 

Branch developed some extraordinary pieces of equipment. Among these were the 

famous “suitcase radio,” the SSTR-1, a portable transmitter-receiver and power supply 

that could be packed into a suitcase or three small packages, which became the standard 

equipment for OSS field agents behind enemy lines around the globe. A small, shorterrange wireless set, the SSTR-3, could be carried in a briefcase. These wireless telegraphy 

transmitter/receivers proved highly effective, when they were not damaged in the aerial 

drop, as too often happened. OSS also developed and deployed in the last year of the war, 

a small, hand-held radio communicator, which enabled an agent on the ground to 

communicate by voice with a plane circulating high over the area in a very high 

frequency system, codenamed “Joan-Eleanor,” which could not be detected by enemy 

direction finding equipment. 

For the protection of its agents who frequently worked in stealth, OSS created 

effective silent, flashless pistols and even submachine guns, so the agents could fire 

without betraying their position. Seeking to impress President Roosevelt with the OSS’s 

latest invention, Donovan once sneaked one of the new silenced .22 caliber pistols into 

the Oval Office in a shoulder holster while carrying a small bag of sand. While the Chief 

Executive was dictating to his secretary and looking away, Donovan pulled out the 

weapon and fired an entire, ten-round clip into the bag of sand in the corner without the 

President hearing a sound. With his handkerchief around the still hot barrel, Donovan 

handed the pistol to the President and explained that he had just fired ten bullets into the 

bag of sand. Shocked, the wide-eyed President quickly composed himself, then inspected 

the weapon, thanked Donovan for the new gun and offered his congratulations to its 

 

67 John W. Brunner, OSS Weapons, 2nd ed. (Williamstown, N.J.: Phillips Publications, 2005), 2-12, and 

Toni L. Hiley, curator, CIA Museum, interview with the author, 14 January 2005. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 587

developers. Then regaining his sense of humor, he joked, “Bill, you’re the only black 

Republican I’ll ever allow in my office with a weapon like this!”68 

OSS and the Multiplier Effect 

The OSS itself particularly hailed the work of the daring, action-oriented 

paramilitary teams organizing, training, supplying, and directing indigenous resistance 

groups behind enemy lines. These were the Special Operations teams or two or three 

agents and the Operational Group sections, usually of ten to twenty men each, sent in 

when more substantial, self-sustaining units were needed. The Operational Group 

sections, somewhat like commando units, were generally ethnic, foreign-speaking 

Americans drawn from the ranks of the wartime Army of citizen-soldiers. It was one of 

Donovan’s great insights that from America’s multiethnic population, he could recruit 

commando-like units familiar with the language and cultural of countries occupied by the 

Nazis. While the SO teams were more oriented toward liaison with local Resistance, the 

OG detachments were combat units themselves and were more oriented toward direct 

combat engagements in guerrilla warfare. Both SO and OG, however, engaged in 

sabotage and subversion usually in coordination with indigenous resistance groups. In 

total, about 1,500 members of Special Operations teams and Operational Group 

detachments were infiltrated behind enemy lines.69 Most of the SO and OG personnel 

were trained at Area F and also either Area A or B. Their missions would not have been 

possible without the clandestine radio-operators of the OSS Communications (“Commo”) 

Branch, who kept their teams in contact with their base stations, sometimes under the 

most adverse conditions. Most of these combat radio operators, like Robert Kehoe, Spiro 

Cappony, and Art Reinhardt, had been trained at Area C. As Major Frank Mills later 

wrote of the radio operators who had accompanied the Jedburgh teams from Europe to 

the Far East in 1945, “These radio operators provided the essential communications link 

between the operational teams and the supporting base, and they were not only superb 

radio operators, but were some of the best combat soldiers we had in France and 

China.”70

Paramilitary teams demonstrated what would later be called a “multiplier effect.” 

OSS had dispatched less than 200 agents in France, and according to Donovan, they 

armed and organized more than 20,000 men and women in the local Resistance.71 Other 

 

68 As related by Donovan the next day to Stanley P. Lovell, head of OSS’s Research and Development 

Branch, and included in Lovell’s memoir, Of Spies & Stratagems (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 

1963), 40-41. 

69 Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars, 67. 

70 Francis B. Mills with John W. Brunner, OSS Special Operations in China (Williamstown, N.J.: Phillips 

Publications, 2002), 20. 

71 Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan to Joint Chiefs of Staff, February 1945, reprinted in Mills with Brunner, 

OSS Special Operations in China, 442-446. 
588 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

small groups of agents in Italy, Greece, and the Balkans played similar roles. A few 

Americans, two or three in a Special Operations team or a dozen or so in an Operational 

Group detachment, were inserted behind enemy lines, and then trained, supplied and 

directed local resistance groups numbering hundreds, even thousands. In the 

Mediterranean and in Europe, these paramilitary OSS teams infiltrated and fought with 

distinction in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Italy, Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia, 

Hungary, France, the Low Countries, and Norway. There they organized, supplied, and 

directed local partisan bands in hit and run raids and in destroying key bridges, railroad 

lines, and tunnels to impede German efforts.72 In 1944 following the Allied landings in 

France, they were particularly active in seeking to block or delay hundreds of thousands 

of German reinforcements from trying to drive back the Allied liberators. In addition to 

seriously interfering with the sending of German reinforcements, these OSS teams also 

rescued more than a thousand downed Allied fliers, who were then able to continue in the 

air war against the Axis. 

The accomplishments of the Special Operations teams and Operational Groups in 

the European and Mediterranean theaters ranged from Serge Obolensky’s inducing the 

surrender of a 300,000-man Italian garrison on Sardinia, to the multinational Jedburgh 

and SO teams that helped impede German reinforcements to the Normandy invasion area 

and then directed the French maquis in protecting the exposed right flank of Gen. George 

Patton’s Third Army as it rushed across northern France. The chief of Army Intelligence 

(G-2) in the European Theater of Operations estimated such actions may have saved the 

lives of as many as twelve thousand Allied soldiers, and reported to Supreme Allied 

Headquarters, “You can be satisfied that the OSS has already paid for its budget in this 

theater.”73 Throughout the European and Mediterranean Theater, the OSS paramilitary 

operations included both SO teams and Operational Groups, and their effectiveness was 

certainly disproportionate to their small size. Small teams totaling 200 Greek-Americans, 

led by officers like Jim Kellis and Johnny Athens, inflicted 1,400 casualties on German 

units while suffering only 25 casualties themselves. They destroyed key bridges, halting 

Turkish chrome shipments to Germany, cut railroad lines, severed communications links, 

and tied down large numbers of German units in Greece for a year and a half. In 

southern France, a French-speaking American OG team led by Roy Rickerson blew up 

bridges and railroad viaducts and blocked the Rhone River canal and with his dozen 

troops and a hundred Resistance fighters, forced the surrender of a contingent of 3,800 

German soldiers. Aaron Bank and his team armed and directed some 3,000 French 

 

72 See, for example, regarding OSS/SO in Italy, “Company D [2677th Regiment OSS (Provisional)] —

Semi Monthly Reports,” September 1944 through February 1945; and Reports of SO under HQ Company 

D, 5th Army Detachment; 8th Army Detachment, and SO Maritime Detachment [all in Italy], April to May 

1945, all in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 177, Folder 1886, and decoded copies of W/T 

messages to and from agents in the field, in Folder 1884, National Archives II. For SO in France, see Will 

Irwin, The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944 (New York: Public 

Affairs Press, 2005); and Colin Beavan, Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America’s First Shadow War

(New York: Viking, 2006). 

73 Quoted in “Office of Strategic Services,” George J.A. O’Toole, The Encyclopedia of American 

Intelligence and Espionage: From the Revolutionary War to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 1988), 

338. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 589

maquis against the Germans supply lines. William Colby parachuted with white-clad OG 

team into the snow-covered mountains to destroy a key railroad line in Norway. Actor 

turned Marine and SO officer Sterling Hayden skippered supply vessels past German 

patrol boats to deliver much needed supplies to the partisans in Yugoslavia. Teams of 

Italian Americans, many on missions organized by Albert Materazzi, helped the Italian 

Resistance cause enough problems in northern Italy that the Germans had to dispatch 

several divisions from the frontlines to try to suppress them. 

Because of their location behind enemy lines, the SOs and OGs also became 

involved in sending intelligence information, particularly tactical information, especially 

concerning German troop and supply movements and vulnerable transportation targets 

(although unpredictable flying conditions, coordination, and the Army Air Corps’ own 

priorities, often made it difficult to get fighter-bombers to the target in time—or to obtain 

supplies on schedule74). A number of women agents were used by the OSS, as well as by 

local Resistance movements, particularly as spies and liaison personnel. The most 

celebrated American woman SO agent was Virginia Hall, the “limping lady” with the 

artificial limb, feared and hunted by the Gestapo, who provided valuable information for 

the Allied invasion and also organized and trained three battalions, several thousand 

resistance fighters, in the maquis for guerrilla warfare in support of the Allies. In 1945, 

she became the only civilian woman in the war to be awarded the Distinguished Service 

Cross, America’s highest medal for bravery after the Medal of Honor. 

Assessing the OSS 

Although many in the Regular Army were skeptical, General Eisenhower and his 

top assistants came to understand the value of the OSS. A report by one of Eisenhower’s 

trusted subordinates, Brigadier General Benjamin F. Caffey, in the U.S. Army’s 

Operations Division in early 1945 concluded after a study of coordination of Resistance 

movements throughout Europe by the OSS and SOE that “Resistance Groups, alone, 

 

74 This problem with the Air Force and lack of OSS’s own planes was also a problem in OSS activities in 

Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean Theater, see Geoffrey M.T. Jones, comments in Gli Americani e 

la Guerra de Liberazione in Italia: Office of Strategic Service(O.S.S.) e la Resistenza/ The Americans and 

the War of Liberation in Italy: Office of Strategic Services(O.S.S.) and the Resistance (Venice: Institute of 

the History of the Resistance, 1995), p. 203. I am indebted to one of the Italian participants in the 

conference from which this book is drawn (and a former member of the Resistance and OSS’s Cayuga and 

Rochester Missions), Piero Boni of Rome, father of my good friend, Silvia Boni, for providing me with a 

copy of this book In Italy, the OSS did not have the use of a specially designated unit of the U.S. Army Air 

Force, unlike the OSS in northern Europe which was served by a unit of the 8th U.S. Air Force known as 

the “Carpetbaggers” which flew black-painted, specially modified B-24 Liberators delivering OSS supplies 

and personnel. However, even in northern Europe, OSS teams often had difficulty obtaining sorties of 

fighter-bombers to attack targets they identified. In China, combat radio operator Arthur Reinhardt 

acknowledged similar difficulties because the calls had to go through the Chinese Army headquarters and 

then the 14th U.S. Air Force with its own scarce resources, by which time it was “hoped the target hadn’t 

vanished.” According to Reinhardt, “Initially the close support missions were flown by P-40’s. The pilots 

were gutsy, flew in low, sometimes with flaps down and bombed and strafed. Later on (although I observed 

little), the P-40’s were replaced by P-51’s, which were faster and better armed, but the pilots were a

different breed and did not get down low.” Arthur Reinhardt, email to the author, 24 February 2007. 
590 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

cannot win a campaign or a battle, but they are capable of rendering important assistance 

to regular forces.” This, Caffey said, included forcing the enemy to deploy large numbers 

of troops to protect lines of communications and supply, disrupting the flow of vital 

supplies and information to the enemy by destroying his lines of communication and 

supply, and alerting advancing forces to hidden defenses such as gun emplacements and 

minefields, and also freeing advancing conventional troops from the need to clear up 

pockets of resistance. General Caffey, like other regular officers, criticized the lack of 

experienced, career officers among the unconventional units, but his overall assessment 

was positive. “While OSS and SOE are hampered by poor staff work, their personnel in 

the field have done remarkably well,” His conclusion was that “They deserve credit and 

appreciation for their fine work...This method of warfare is a vast potential in obtaining 

military strategical and tactical objectives. No commander should ignore this potential.”75 

In occupied France and elsewhere, the sight of armed and uniformed American 

soldiers deep in enemy occupied territory lifted the spirits of the villagers and swelled the 

ranks of the Resistance, especially when parachuted loads of weapons and other supplies 

began to follow. Ralph Ingersoll, a member of the staff of General Omar Bradley, 

commander of U.S. forces in the Normandy invasion, concluded that the German 

commanders had to assign at least half a dozen divisions to counter the maquis during the 

invasion. “The [OSS led] French Resistance was worth at least a score of divisions to us, 

maybe more.”76 German generals in France and Italy were quite concerned with the 

 

75 Brig. Gen. B.F. Caffey, U.S.A., chief, SP[ Special Operations] Ops S/Sec., G-3, “Resistance Movements 

in Occupied Countries,” OPD 334.8 TS, Case #325, “top secret,” pp. 2, 5, in a 5-page typescript report, 

undated [c. early1945, before the end of the war in Europe in May 1945], copy from the papers of Dr. E.P. 

Lilly, former JCS historian, located in the CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas F. Troy Files, Box 4, Folder 30, 

National Archives II. Brigadier General Benjamin Franklin Caffey, Jr., was a graduate of the University of 

Michigan Law School, who became an Army officer in World War I, served in France, and became a 

lifelong friend of Dwight Eisenhower’s beginning in the 1930s in the Philippines. In World War II, Colonel 

Caffey had led the 39th Regimental Combat Team in the capture of Algiers, then was made brigadier 

general and assistant commander of the 34th (“Red Bull”) Infantry Division in Italy. Serving in its advance 

through Italy, he was twice injured and except for those disabling occurrences, Caffey would have become, 

according to Eisenhower, a major general and a division commander. The second injury, badly frozen feet, 

led to his assignment in an important staff position in the Allied Force Headquarters, Mediterranean in 

early 1945, which is probably when he wrote this report. After the war, Eisenhower appointed Caffey to the 

Operations Division of the General Staff. See Dwight D. Eisenhower, Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, 

ed. Alfred D. Chandler, et al., 21 vols. (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970-2007), 

2:687n; 2: 1293; 11:237; and 14:430n. 

76 Ralph Ingersoll, Top Secret (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 181-183. In contrast, John Keegan, The 

Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990), belittles the impact of the French Resistance and contends 

that their entire contribution was barely equal to a single Allied division. A 1991 Army study of the 

relationship of 11 Jedburgh Teams to Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group in its rapid drive across eastern 

France from Paris to Nancy in August 1944, concluded that despite the courage and daring of the Jed 

teams, they were “only marginally significant” in that Army’s offensive that month largely because the

Army was advancing so rapidly, its staffs were overwhelmed with data, and the commanders were not 

familiar with nor receptive to such groups operating behind enemy lines. At the same time, the author 

acknowledges that the Jedburgh special operations teams in 1944 were an innovative idea but one that 

because of technical problems and lack of receptiveness by Army commanders was an idea ahead of its 

time. Samuel J. Lewis, Jedburgh Team Operations in Support of the 12th Amy Group, August 1944 (Ft. 

Leavenworth, Kans.: Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1991), 65-

66. On the other hand, Stewart King, son of Donald King of the OSS, who served with the 36th Infantry 

Division during attacks in the Vosges (south of the 12th Army Group) in November 1944, “while there is a 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 591

seriousness of having to face not only the Allied armies in their front but increasingly 

assertive and effective Resistance forces in their rear.77 General George C. Marshall, U.S. 

Army Chief of Staff, declared flatly that “The Resistance surpassed all our expectations, 

and it was they who, in delaying the arrival of German reinforcements and in preventing 

the regrouping of enemy divisions in the interior, assured the success of our landings.”78

“Without their great assistance,” General Eisenhower concluded, “the liberation of 

France and the defeat of the enemy in western Europe would have consumed a much 

longer period of time and meant greater losses to ourselves.”79 

In Southeast Asia, the most widely heralded OSS operations were conducted by 

its famous OSS Detachment 101 in Burma. Led by men trained at Areas B and X, it 

conducted some of the organization’s most difficult and most successful operations. By 

the end of the war, 700 Americans, who served in Detachment 101, headed first by Carl 

Eifler and later William Ray Peers, had mobilized, trained, supplied, and directed more 

than 10,000 Kachin tribesmen. The number of Americans in Detachment 101 who 

actually parachuted into the Burmese mountain jungles to lead those 10,000 Kachins 

numbered less than 200. They harassed the Japanese Army’s lines of communication and 

supply, thus helping to protect the American construction of the new Burma Road.80

They severed enemy supply lines, targeted camouflaged supply depots for American 

bombers, rescued downed fliers81 and forced the Japanese to maintain large numbers of 

troops to try to protect their lines of communication and supply. Ultimately, as in Europe, 

 

lot of information in the declassified OSS files [e.g. RG 226, Entry 190], much of the communication 

between the SSS forward teams that my father served on and the intelligence sections of the divisions (and 

later armies) they served with was informal and thus only recorded elliptically. OSS was one of many 

sources that intelligence staffs used.” Stewart King, “Re: How Did OSS Help U.S. Soldiers in Combat?” 

OSS Society Digest Number 1539, 13 January 2007, ossociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 13 January 

2007. Concerning another action by OSS, see Robert G. Gutjahr, The Role of Jedburgh Teams in Operation 

Market Garden (Ft. Leavenworth, Kans.: Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff 

College, 1990), which examines what Gutjahr considers the understandable failure of the two Jed teams to 

blow up the assigned bridge as simply part of the overall failure of British Geneneral Bernard Law 

Montgomery’s complex plan, Operation Market Garden, to get across the lower Rhine in September 1944. 

77 On German Field Marshals Gerd von Rundstedt and Walther Model in France, see Irwin, The Jedburghs, 

240-241; on Field Marshal Albert Kesselring in Italy, see, Kesselring: A Soldier’s Record (New York : 

William Morrow, 1954), 272. 

78 Gen. George C. Marshall quoted in Blake Ehrlich, Resistance: France, 1940-1945 (Boston: Little, 

Brown, 1965), 194. 

79 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 296. 

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

Guerrilla Force (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 220. 

81 In a letter to the head of the U.S. Army Air Forces in April 1945, Donovan said more than 200 downed 

American aviators had been rescued from the jungles by OSS personnel and that the 10th U.S. Air Force 

had received 90 per cent of its target intelligence in 1944 from OSS units. William J. Donovan to General 

[H.H. “Hap”] Arnold, 6 April 1945, pp. 1-2, OSS Records (RG 226), Directors Office Files, Microfilm 

M1642, Roll 21, Frames 107-108, National Archives II. 
592 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

the OSS-led resistance groups provided major assistance to advancing Allied armies, this 

time American, British, and Chinese armies pushing the Japanese out of Burma.82 

Concerning the relationship of OSS Detachment 101 and the U.S. Army, Toni L. 

Hiley, curator of the CIA Museum, likes to tell the story of what she calls “the two 

handshakes.” When the first battalion of the Army’s raider unit known as “Merrill’s 

Marauders,” penetrated into Burma in March 1944 and started working their way through 

the jungle, an OSS agent from Detachment 101 suddenly stepped out of the jungle onto 

their path and welcomed them. The two units then worked together as the OSS teams and 

their Kachin guerrillas guided the Army units through the jungle, while simultaneously 

protecting their flanks against surprise attacks from the Japanese. Hiley contends that the 

OSS’s successor, the CIA, and the Army are still working together. The CIA had its 

agents into Afghanistan seventeen days after the terrorist attacks on the United States on 

9/11/2001. A few days later, those agents greeted the first of the Army’s Special 

Operations teams when the soldiers arrived.83

 The success of one part of Detachment 101, 300 Americans and 3,200 native 

guerrillas, in the spring of 1945 against two Japanese divisions, killing 1,300 Japanese 

soldiers and routing 10,000 others while losing only 47 men, who earned a Presidential 

Distinguished Unit Citation for Detachment 101 in January 1946 from General 

Eisenhower, who was then Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.84

Only gradually did OSS expand its role in the Far East, but when it eventually 

obtained considerable success. There OSS agents also worked with indigenous groups to 

subvert Japan and to rescue hundreds of downed fliers behind Japanese lines in Burma, 

Thailand, Indochina and China itself.85 OSS missions into Thailand contributed to the 

overturning of its initially pro-Japanese government. Donovan’s organization got into 

China belatedly in the spring of 1943. The OSS was often defensive about its 

effectiveness in China, declaring, correctly, that its role there was delayed and restricted 

by internal squabbles within the multi-branch American mission there and most 

importantly by restraints imposed by Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of intelligence and secret 

 

82 In twelve months in 1944-1945, Detachment 101 was responsible for the deaths of an average of nearly 

200 Japanese soldiers per month in jungle ambushes in Burma. Donovan reported in April 1945 that an 

analysis of enemy casualties inflicted in the Northern Combat Area Command (NCAC) between 15 

October 1944 and 15 January 1945, by all ground troops in that area “reveals that Det. 101, with less than 

one per cent of total strength in NCAC, has inflicted 29 per cent of all casualties.” William J. Donovan to 

Gen. Marshall [Gen. George C. Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff], 6 April 1945, p. 2, in OSS Records 

(RG 226), Directors Office Files, Microfilm M1642, Roll 21, Frames 109-110, National Archives II. 

83 Toni L. Hiley, curator of the CIA Museum, Langley, Va., interview with the author while providing a 

personal tour of the exhibits, 14 January 2005. Indeed, the first American casualty in the war against Al 

Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001 was Mike Spann, a CIA Special Activities Division,

Ground Branch operative, who was working with U.S. Army troops there when he was killed. 

84 General Orders, War Department, Washington, D.C., 17 January 1946, by order of Gen. Dwight D. 

Eisenhower, Army Chief of Staff, reprinted in Peers and Brelis, Behind the Burma Road, 208-209. 

85 “Recent rescues have raised to well over 200 the number of Air Force personnel brought to safety by 

OSS units in Burma.” William J. Donovan to General Arnold [Gen. H.H. Arnold, Chief of Staff of U.S. 

Army Air Forces], 6 April 1945, p. 1, in OSS Records (RG 226), Directors Office Files, Microfilm M1642, 

Roll 21, Frames 107-108, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 593

police, Dai Li. Nevertheless, OSS Detachment 202 with headquarters in Kunming made 

increasingly contributions to Allied victory by helping the Chinese forces tie down 

hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, many of whom would otherwise have been 

sent to fight the Americans in the Pacific. OSS ran rings of agents who provided useful 

targeting information from behind Japanese lines for “Flying Tiger” General Claire 

Chennault’s 14th U.S. Air Force as well as Admiral Chester Nimitiz’s Pacific Fleet. 

Special Operations teams sabotaged railroads, bridges, tunnels and munitions 

warehouses. Frank Gleason’s team blew up 50,000 tons of weapons, munitions, and 

explosives to prevent them from falling into Japanese hands. Paul Cyr’s Chinese 

guerrillas destroyed a heavily guarded, vital railroad bridge across the Yangtze River that 

American bombers had been unable to take out. 

“There were fewer than 2,000 OSS people in China in 1945, and at least half of 

them were desk people rather than combat people and never got near the Japanese,” 

recalled John W. Brunner, a veteran of the Communications Branch in China in 1944-

1945. “But with less than a thousand combat personnel, we were officially credited with 

the killing of more than 12,000 Japanese.” The official report supports Brunner’s 

contention.86 The OSS transferred many of the successful SO and OG teams from Europe 

to China in 1945, and Arden Dow and Frank Gleason and others were training the first 

Chinese commandos, paratrooper units that had just begun combat missions when the 

war ended. With news of the emperor’s decision to surrender, SO teams flew or 

parachuted into Japanese-run POW camps in China, took control of them, and rescued 

thousands of military and civilian captives, including surviving fliers of the “Doolittle 

Raid” on Toyko, and General Jonathan Wainwright, who had been a prisoner of the 

Japanese since the capture of the Philippines in 1942. At the end of the war, OSS had 

been preparing espionage and paramilitary teams of Koreans and Japanese Americans to 

be infiltrated into Japan to assist the planned U.S. invasion of the home islands in 1946. 

In his official commendation of Donovan’s organization, the U.S. commander in China, 

Lieutenant General Albert Wedemeyer, praised the OSS personnel for the “outstanding 

performance of duty in their vital missions” and concluded that their achievements 

constituted “a record of extraordinary heroism, resourcefulness, initiative and effective 

operations against a ruthless enemy.”87

 

The much touted successes of the OSS with indigenous resistance groups became 

a major part of its legacy in the postwar world. Under former OSSer Frank Wisner and 

others, the CIA tried without success in the late 1940s and 1950s to apply the same 

techniques to building resistance groups in the Soviet Union, Communist China, and 

North Korea. Later in the 1960s, the methods were applied to wholly different strategic 

situations in other parts of the world, sometimes with disastrous results. Even some 

former OSSers asserted that the CIA’s emphasis on clandestine paramilitary action in the 

 

86 John W. Brunner, telephone interview with the author, 21 March 2005. The figures of 2,000 OSS 

personnel in China in 1945 being credited with direct responsibility for the killing of more than 12,000 

Japanese troops, are in General Orders No. 27, Headquarters, U.S. Forces, China Theater, by Order of 

General [Albert] Wedemeyer, 1 February 1946, reprinted in Mills with Brunner, OSS Special Operations in 

China, 431-432. 

87 General Orders No. 27, Headquarters, U.S. Forces, China Theater, by Order of General [Albert] 

Wedemeyer, 1 February 1946, reprinted in Mills with Brunner, OSS Special Operations in China, 431-432. 
594 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

postwar era as a part of the OSS legacy mismatched what in fact had been a unique 

experience of World War II, when the OSS like the western Allies received widespread, 

enthusiastic reception from groups seeking to overthrow the hated Axis conquerors.88

] 

Costs, Failures, and Accomplishments 

It remains unknown how many people were infiltrated or otherwise worked in 

enemy territory for the OSS in World War II. The Special Operations Branch reported 

that it infiltrated some 1,600 operatives. But comparable figures about the precise number 

of uniformed personnel in Operational Groups sent behind enemy lines or the number of 

men and women working as spies for the Secret Intelligence Branch have not been 

disclosed. Working behind enemy lines is hazardous work, and it took its toll, even 

though those total figures, if they include indigenous agents as well as Americans, may 

never be known.89

 

In all, Americans in the OSS suffered some 450 casualties. Of these, 143 were 

killed in the line of duty. More than 300 were wounded, including a handful who were 

captured and were not executed. These figures do not include a large and unknown 

number, probably in the hundreds, of foreign agents working in various capacities for the 

OSS who were killed or wounded.90

Despite numerous successes, the OSS paramilitary campaigns in the various 

theaters in World War II were not without their failures. Attempts to sustain infiltrated 

paramilitary missions in areas that were not overwhelmingly supportive of the Allies and 

where the Axis were in complete control such as Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and 

southern Serbia failed because the local population would not protect them, indeed 

invariably reported them to the enemy.91 When the Germans quickly crushed an uprising 

 

88 See, for example, Ray S. Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA

(Washington, D. C.: Acropolis Books, 1976), 76. 

89 Edward Hymoff, who worked for OSS and later became a war correspondent and author, notes that even 

calculating the numbers of people who served in or with OSS is difficult if not impossible cause it would 

have to take into account those who were assigned full-time, those assigned temporarily, as well as, even 

more difficult, those foreign partisans, guerrillas, and intelligence gatherers who were for various periods of 

time directly under the command of OSS officers of branches such as SO, OG, SI, MO, and X-2. Edward 

Hymoff, The OSS in World War II (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 340. 

90 Casualty figures from the following: OSS, War Report of the OSS, Overseas Targets, 220, which lists a 

10 per cent casualty rate as an average for SO/France and 7 per cent for SI/France; see also Cave Brown, 

The Last Her), 787-788; Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New 

York: Morrow, 1987), 203; Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs, 15. 

91 Brig. Gen. B.F. Caffey, U.S.A., chief, SP[ Special Operations] Ops S/Sec., G-3, “Resistance Movements 

in Occupied Countries,” OPD 334.8 TS, Case #325, “top secret,” p. 3, in a 5-page typescript report, 

undated [c. early1945, before the end of the war in Europe in May 1945], copy from the papers of Dr. E.P. 

Lilly, former JCS historian, located in the CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas F. Troy Files, Box 4, Folder 30, 

National Archives II. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 595

in Slovakia, Holt Green’s OSS team there was aided by many local people but was 

ultimately betrayed by others. The Gestapo captured, tortured and executed seventeen 

members of Green’s “Dawes” Mission at Mauthausen concentration camp.92

 

Mistakes, treachery, reprisals, bad luck can be lethal. Guerrilla warfare is neither a 

romantic pastime nor an inexpensive form of combat. Even in countries where the 

population overwhelmingly supported the Allies and overall the missions were 

successful, there were casualties. In France, 21 of 276 Jedburghs were killed in the 

summer of 1944. At least three teams were ambushed shortly after landing and most of 

the members killed. Jedburgh Team “Augustus” became trapped between fluid front lines 

in eastern France and when they ran into a German roadblock guarded by a Tiger tank, all 

three were killed, two Americans and a Frenchmen. In Italy, an entire detachment of 

Italian American OGs,13 men of the “Ginny” Mission, landed from PT boats to blow up 

an important railroad tunnel were betrayed by a fascist sympathizer and were lined up, 

executed, and buried in a mass grave. In China, Captain John Birch, an Air Corps 

intelligence officer, working for OSS was brutally murdered by Chinese Communists, 

and in Indochina, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Dewey, head of the OSS mission in Saigon, 

was killed in an ambush by Communist guerrillas, who apparently mistook him for a 

French officer. 

OSS achieved a great deal with a comparatively few people. Its successes were 

disproportionate to its numbers. Its secret intelligence and research and analysis did 

provide useful information, strategically and tactically, and revealed the limitations of 

traditionally departmentalized intelligence. It underscored that intelligence gathering and 

analysis were more than simply the domain of the military and that centralized analysis 

was a vital process in national security. In addition, its paramilitary agents in the field, 

possibly never more than two thousand Americans working deep behind enemy lines, 

also proved of considerable assistance to the Allied cause, particularly in providing target 

information, impeding lines of communication and supply and distracting and diverting 

enemy resources to try to find and destroy them. They did so far beyond their numbers 

because of the multiplier effect in generating, arming, and directing ultimately tens of 

thousands of indigenous forces. At its peak in December 1944, Donovan’s organization 

consisted of only 13,000 Americans. This was slightly less than one full-sized U.S. 

Infantry Division of 14,000 men, and the U.S. Army deployed 90 such infantry divisions, 

plus 16 armored divisions. The 13,000 in the OSS was but a handful compared to the 16 

million Americans in the armed forces in World War II. 

The fledgling organization won most of its battles overseas, but it lost its most 

important bureaucratic battles in Washington. Yet, although short-lived and 

comparatively small in size, the OSS did, in fact, leave a substantial legacy in many areas 

of American life. It had important impacts on the National Parks in which it trained. It 

was instrumental in the development of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces. And it was the 

forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. In that latter respect, OSS was the only 

one of the more than one hundred temporary “war agencies” that ultimately survived the 

postwar demobilization, albeit after a two-year hiatus, and reached independent status. 

 

 

92 Jim Downs, World War II: OSS Tragedy in Slovakia (Oceanside, Calif.: Liefrinck, 2002), 247-325. 
596 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

Relationship of the OSS and the National Park Service 

The OSS not only contributed to the eventual emergence of the CIA and Special 

Forces, its main institutional legacies, but it had an important impact upon the two 

National Parks, which provided a home for some of its most important training camps. 

The superintendents of the two parks—Ira B. Lykes at Prince William Forest Park and 

Garland B. (“Mike”) Williams at Catoctin Mountain Park—attested to the effects as they 

sought to preserve the parks while also benefiting in the long run from the military’s 

wartime occupation. During the war, the superintendents and their superiors worked 

assiduously with OSS training camp commanders to ensure that the military abided by 

the terms of the special permit that allowed them exclusive use of the property during the 

war. That meant ensuring respect for the National Park Service’s mission of preservation 

of the land and the resources and facilities that Congress had designated as worthy of 

maintaining in the public interest. But this mission had to be carried out in the 

extraordinary circumstances resulting from the U.S. declaration of war and America’s 

full scale mobilization in World War II. The War Department took over the two parks for 

OSS training purposes, brought firearms and explosives into the woods and declared the 

area to be off limits to the public for the duration of the war. 

It took considerable insight, judgment and tact as well as a keen sense of purpose 

for the civilian National Park Service to make the best of the dramatically changed 

situation when the users of the park were the U.S. Army and Marine Corps instead of 

charitable civilian organizations such as the Maryland League for Crippled Children, the 

Salvation Army, and the Boy and Girl Scouts of America. Yet, Lykes and Williams 

performed admirably in supervising the military use of the properties and seeking to 

ensure the preservation of their natural and historical resources. The two park managers 

built relationships of respect with the military camp commanders. They encouraged a 

positive and cooperative relationship between these government agencies, each 

recognizing that the other had a job to do in difficult times. The park managers filed 

complaints when violations of the permit became too frequent or egregious, such as the 

shooting of wildlife and the destruction of trees and historic stone fences. Yet, they could 

also be helpful to the military in dealing with the local authorities over issues about road 

use and the control of forest fires. Most importantly, unlike the military which was there 

only temporarily, the NPS took the long-term perspective on developments in the area 

that the National Park Service had been federally-mandated to preserve for the benefits of 

the American public. 

Legacy of the OSS in the Parks 

 

Despite all the firing of weapons, blasting of explosives, and digging of trenches 

and other emplacements that disrupted the area, the military also contributed to a number 

of lasting improvements in the two parks. As required by the NPS, the purely military 

structures were dismantled at the end of the war—the rifle ranges, pistol houses, mortar 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 597

and grenade ranges, demolitions areas, and munitions storage bunkers. A few old houses 

had been destroyed, some trees cut down, and at Catoctin some old stone fences had been 

ground up for gravel. But this had to be measured against the added value to the parks as 

a result of their wartime occupation. The 1,139 acres acquired at Prince William Forest 

Park by the War Department and the 288 acres acquired at Catoctin Mountain Park 

during the war helped to round off the two parks. At the end of the war, when the 

National Park Service resumed full control of the majority of acreage in the two parks, it 

also acquired the old CCC work camps, which had been the prewar property of the War 

Department, and which were improved during the war and deeded to the NPS afterwards 

by the War Department. Similarly, the OSS had winterized the cabins, dining halls, 

recreational halls and other facilities at the NPS’s group camps. It had erected some new 

buildings and other facilities that the NPS retained. Utility systems—electrical, water 

supply, sewerage and waste treatment—had been modernized and expanded, and during 

OSS occupancy, there had been some rearrangement and improvement of the interior 

road system. 

 The two National Parks experienced some other significant changes as a result of 

the wartime experience. Catoctin Mountain Park became internationally famous as the 

site of the Presidential Retreat, President Roosevelt’s Shangri-La, later renamed Camp 

David by President Eisenhower, and as the site of wartime meetings between Roosevelt 

and Churchill and subsequently many important international meetings, including the site 

for the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978.Although the 

majority of federal Recreational Demonstration Areas from the 1930s were turned over to 

the states after the war, Catoctin was retained by the U.S. Government in large part 

because of the Presidential Retreat created there. Because of its proximity to the nation’s 

capital, Prince William Forest Park was also retained by the federal government. 

However, as a result of the wartime occupation of the southern part of the park some 

5,000 acres appeared to become a fixture of the U.S. Marine Base at Quantico, for half a 

century. Only in 2003 did a mutually acceptable resolution divide the sector, providing 

nearly 3,400 acres for the Marines and 1,700 acres for the park. Meanwhile, in the 

postwar years, Prince William Forest Park had maintained a positive relationship with the 

U.S. Army. Superintendent Ira Lykes developing a cooperative arrangement with the 

Corps of Engineers at Fort Belvoir in which the combat engineering troops moved a 

number of their practice exercises to Prince William Forest Park and in the process 

constructed roads, dams, and bridges in the park at minimal expense to the National Park 

Service. 

OSS Veterans 

 The majority of OSSers, like other American veterans, came home to resume their 

life in postwar America, to complete their education, to get married, to get ahead, and to 

make up for the years they had given for their country. But they did not forget their 

wartime service, sense of common purpose, patriotic duty and achievement, and above 

all, the comradeship through good times and bad. Within a few years, they, like many 

other veterans, sought to resume those friendships and commemorate their achievements. 
598 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

There was a feisty, independent character to the OSS, and its veterans liked to reminisce 

about those days of service in the unorthodox, individualistic, innovative and generally 

anti-bureaucratic organization that Donovan had created. After the war, many of them 

became highly successful. 

What impressed the present author about the OSS veterans he interviewed for this 

study beyond the fact that they were highly intelligent, articulate, and accomplished was 

that they remained intellectually and often physically active, many of them through their 

80s and early 90s—some were auditing classes at nearby colleges, others doing volunteer 

work, teaching young people or aiding others. From their postwar resumés, it is clear that 

they remained a highly able, self-motivated, achievement-oriented, and very special 

group. They had become highly successful in business, law, academe, diplomacy, 

government, the military or intelligence work. Some became Presidential advisers, a 

number became U.S. ambassadors. Some remained in the Army, generally in 

engineering, infantry, military intelligence or Special Forces. Many of the 

communications people went into radio or television work in the private sector; others 

continued in government. A number of OSSers worked for the CIA in intelligence, 

special operations, communications, or the training. 

While Donovan and other former leaders of the organization sought to build the 

public memory of the OSS through a series of books, articles, and Hollywood films in the 

postwar era, other ex-OSSers held reunions and formed their own veterans’ societies. 

Their variety illustrated the continued influence of the different specialized units of the 

OSS. Veterans of the Burma campaign formed the Detachment 101 Society. Those who 

had served in the Communications Branch established the CommVets Association. Many 

members of the Secret Intelligence Branch joined the larger Association of Former 

Intelligence Officers. Those in Special Operations or Operational Groups could become 

members of the U.S. Army Special Forces Association. Members from any branch of 

OSS could also join the more broadly based OSS Society.93 Most of these groups held 

their annual meetings and other reunions in Washington, D.C., occasionally at the 

Congressional Country Club (the former Training Area F), which maintains an exhibit of 

photographs from its wartime occupation by the OSS. The CommVets have maintained a 

special interest in the site of the Communications School, Training Area C, in Prince 

William Forest Park, organizing a number of reunions and group visits to the old training 

camp and supporting the creation of an OSS exhibit in the Visitor Center at Prince 

William Forest Park. A wayside exhibit on the OSS is also planned at the site of former 

Training Camp B at Catoctin Mountain Park.

 

93 See, for example, OSS-101 Association at www.oss-101.com; OSS ComVets Association; Association 

of Foreign Intelligence Officers, www.afio.com; and the OSS Society at www.osssociety.org. The 

Operational Groups have their own website at www.ossog.org. The author wishes to thank especially, 

Arthur Reinhardt of the OSS Society and the ComVets Association and Charles T. Pinck, President of the

OSS Society, for their assistance. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 599

Commemorating the OSS 

Spies, saboteurs and other agent operatives work behind enemy lines, but there 

has always been a duality in clandestine activities between the murky world of espionage 

and the openly perilous environment of the special forces. That duality is generally 

reflected in different types of museums: there are those that exhibit the history of spies 

and those that feature the rowdy daredevils of various types of special operations. The 

aura of the OSS has proven attractive and useful to other institutions, not just its direct 

heirs, the CIA and the Special Forces. While the most visited exhibit featuring the OSS is 

in the privately-operated International Spy Museum, which opened in 2002 in 

Washington, D.C., the official memory of the OSS is maintained by a number of 

institutional museums. The Airborne and Special Operations Museum completed in 2000 

and the U.S. Army’s JFK Special Warfare Museum at Fort Bragg, both in Fayetteville, 

North Carolina, celebrate the OSS Special Operations teams and Operational Groups, as 

well as one of the predecessors of today’s Special Forces.94 The National Navy UDT-Seal 

Museum on North Hutchinson Island at Fort Pierce, Florida, commemorates the 

operational swimmers of the OSS Maritime Unit as a direct ancestor of today’s SEALS.95

The new National Museum of the Marine Corps that opened in 2006 on the Marine Base 

at Quantico, Virginia, includes a highly favorable reference to Marines like Peter Ortiz 

who served in the OSS: “Audacious Marines with icy nerves parachuted behind enemy 

lines in Europe with the Office of Strategic Services.”96

 

The CIA hails the OSS as its predecessor in its official publications, its website, 

and in its private museum at CIA headquarters. The museum is not open to the public, but 

a tour of the OSS exhibit and other aspects of the Agency’s history is part of the 

indoctrination of every new CIA recruit. In the white marble entrance hall to a main 

building at the CIA headquarters, one wall contains a bas-relief of Allen Dulles, OSS 

veteran and the Director of Central Intelligence who was responsible for the construction 

of the new CIA campus-like headquarters at Langley, Virginia. A few feet away from the 

bas-relief of Dulles is a display case with a book containing the names of CIA officers 

 

94 Websites of the International Spy Museum at www.spymuseum.org ; and U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy 

Special Warfare Museum at Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, N.C. at www.soc.mil/swcs/museum, and the Airborne 

and Special Operations Museum, Fayetteville, N.C. at www.asomf.org/museum. The latter, which became 

part of the U.S. Army’s museum system in 2005, includes references to the OSS in its regular exhibits, but 

established a special exhibit on the OSS in January 2008, which included materials from its own collection, 

plus artifacts loaned by the North Carolina Museum of History from the collection of George Hill, a 

member of a prominent North Carolina family, who served in the OSS’s Research and Development 

Branch. Exhibit reported in “Retired General [John K. Singlaub] to Speak on Career,” Fayetteville 

Observer, 24 January 2008, reprinted in OSS Society Digest, Number 1962, 26 January 2008, accessed 26 

January 2008. 

95 “Naval Special Warfare Heritage: Navy Seal History,” The National Navy UDT-Seal Museum, Fort 

Pierce, Florida, www.Navysealmuseum .com/heritage/history.php, accessed 26 January 2008. 

96 National Museum of the Marine Corps, World War II Gallery, “Global Developments,” 

www.usmcmuseum.org, accessed 26 January 2008. 
600 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

who lost their lives in the service of the nation. Etched into the white marble on the 

opposite wall are the names of 116 members of the OSS who were killed in the line of 

duty in World War II. Overlooking the names of the American dead in the entrance hall 

to the CIA headquarters, is a single statue, a life size, bronze figure of Major General 

William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan.97

Although the Central Intelligence Agency continued to draw upon the aura of 

Donovan and his glorious and successful citizen-spies, analysts, saboteurs and guerrilla 

leaders after World War II, OSS veterans, like many other Americans, differed over 

many of the CIA’s actions, for example, the use of paramilitary covert action to 

overthrow, popularly-elected, anti-American governments during the Cold War era. 

There had been considerable popular trust in the government and the military in the era of 

World War II, and much of it continued until the challenges of the late 1960s and early 

1970s. The OSS belief was that secret intelligence and covert operations could be 

combined for worthy purposes. In the era of prolonged U.S.-Soviet tensions termed the 

Cold War, when these were combined to overthrow or attempt to overthrow 

governments, some of them popularly-elected, some OSS veterans supported their use as 

a necessary aspect of the anti-communist containment policy. But other former OSSers 

contended that such actions ultimately hurt American interests and represented a 

distortion of the OSS legacy. It was, the latter argued, an entirely different strategic 

situation from World War II. The Second World War was a declared war of full national 

mobilization, and the Allies and OSS had been welcomed by the populations against 

hated Axis occupying forces and received great cooperation from the pubic and organized 

resistance groups.98 In more recent years, influenced by failed endeavors, fumbled 

coordination, bumbling spies, rogue agents, extra-legal actions, and even betrayals, many 

Americans have become more skeptical, even cynical. While the present study was being 

completed between 2005 and 2008, the discussion in the OSS Society’s electronic 

bulletin board and chat room as well as the author’s interviews with many OSS veterans 

 

97 The author expresses his appreciation to Ms. Toni L. Hiley, curator of the CIA museum, for a personal

tour 14 January 2005 of the displays, including the OSS Gallery, which opened in 2001 on the 60th

anniversary of the establishment of Donovan’s organization, the Cold War Gallery, Directorate of 

Intelligence Gallery and Directorate of Science and Technology Gallery. Although the CIA museum inside

the agency’s compound in Langley, Va., is closed to the public, the agency has an electronic virtual 

museum at www.cia.gov/about_cia/cia-museum/index-html, which provides a glimpse of the galleries. 

98 See, for example, R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence 

Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 367-383. The point about the different strategic 

situation was made forcefully by Ray S. Cline, veteran of OSS’s R&A Branch, who later served in high 

positions in both the intelligence and clandestine services divisions of the CIA, in Secrets, Spies, and 

Scholars, 75-76. An Army report in 1945 had emphasized the necessity of support for OSS covert 

operations teams by the local civilian population and indicated that where that had been lacking, Austria, 

Hungary, Bulgaria, and southern Serbia, OSS missions there had failed. Brig. Gen. B.F. Caffey, U.S.A.,

chief, SP[ Special Operations] Ops S/Sec., G-3, “Resistance Movements in Occupied Countries,” OPD 

334.8 TS, Case #325, “top secret,” p. 3, typescript report, undated [c. early1945, before the end of the war 

in Europe in May 1945], copy from the papers of Dr. E.P. Lilly, former JCS historian, located in the CIA 

Records (RG 263), Thomas F. Troy Files, Box 4, Folder 30, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 601

demonstrated the continuation of an ongoing division among OSS veterans over the 

foreign, national security, and intelligence policies of the United States.99 

Recently, there have also been some suggestions that the “war on terrorism” 

would be better conducted not by direct action, man-hunting teams of the American 

military’s Special Operations Command but in the long run by less glamorous missions 

which would establish security, encourage economic and political development and 

spread persuasive messages to win over the local population. By 2006, the Army was 

considering doing so by incorporating Special Forces with civil affairs, and psychological 

operations. But Max Boot, a senior analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, and some 

others, have gone further to suggest removing unconventional warfare from Special 

Operations Command and assigning it to a resurrected Office of Strategic Services. This 

new OSS could include Army Special Forces, civil affairs and psychological operations, 

plus the CIA’s Special Activities Division, consolidating, as Boot told a Congressional 

Committee, “all the key skill sets needed to wage the softer side of the war on terror” as 

well as having the ability to employ indigenous personnel from particular regions on a 

much larger scale than currently.100 Thus, the debate over the OSS and its legacy 

continues. 

 What remained in the National Parks when the last members of the OSS left the 

after World War II? There were no echoes of marching orders or other military 

commands. The noise of gunfire and demolitions explosions had long faded away. The 

softer sounds—the grunts accompanying jujitsu training and the quiet tapping of the 

telegraph key—had also vanished. Memories remained, of course, of the strenuous 

training exercises but also of the comradeship and the leisure time at the recreation hall or 

in neighboring towns and cities, and perhaps also a fond memory of outdoors and the 

stillness and beauty of the woods in the National Parks. The ever present emphasis on 

secrecy had prohibited trainees from revealing their true identity even to each other. They 

went by fictitious names, and they told local residents—and even their own friends and 

relatives—that they were just regular members of the armed services. The local people 

generally accepted that explanation which seemed plausible given the extensive number 

of military facilities in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, and the millions 

of young men in uniform in wartime America. 

Most dramatically, of course, the OSS occupation of those two National Parks 

during the war meant the closing off of their recreational lands and interior roads to the 

public for the duration. The press reported only that the two parks had been taken over 

 

99 As evidenced by comments by some OSS veterans on contemporary actions and issues in the OSS 

Society’s electronic bulletin board and chat room on the internet, osssociety@yahoogroups.com. This site 

is open to OSS veterans, their families and descendants and to other persons interested in the OSS, but 

applicants must be approved to have access. The author has had access since he began his research on this 

history in 2005. 

100 Max Boot, testimony before a House committee, reported in Jefferson Morris, “Analyst Says SOCOM 

Not Well Suited for Terror War,” Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, 30 June, 2006, p. 5, reprinted in OSS 

Society Digest, Number 1401, 16 July 2006, accessed 16 July 2006. Boot is the author, among other works, 

of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 

2002). Two candidates for the Republican nomination for President in 2008, Senator John McCain and Mitt 

Romney, also proposed recreating an OSS-like intelligence and operations agency. OSS Reborn by Charles

and Dan Pinck, “Glorious Amateurs: A New OSS,” www.ossreborn.com, accessed 25 January 2008. 
602 Chapter 11 Summary and Conclusion 

for the “war effort” and that the public was barred from entry. The nature of their 

contribution to the war effort was not disclosed. Those who drove to or by the park 

entrances would see them guarded by armed sentries and, of course, Army vehicles, 

especially closed Army trucks, were observed on the roads. It was rumored that the 

facilities were interning prisoners of war, which seemed plausible as there were German 

POW camps established in a number of rural areas. Although local residents around 

Catoctin National Park were not aware that the park was being used as an OSS training 

camp, preparing spies and saboteurs, they did observe that President Franklin Roosevelt 

was made a number of visits to the park. They assumed that he had established a secure, 

wartime retreat there, an assumption verified within weeks after the end of the war, when 

the press revealed the Presidential Retreat to the entire world. 

“Wild Bill” Donovan, visionary, charismatic leader, and incurable romantic, and 

the freewheeling OSS that he molded in his image—bold, innovative, “dashing, slightly 

madcap, and highly effective”—will undoubtedly always remain fascinating.101 It has 

only been in recent years, however, with the declassification of the OSS records 

beginning in the 1980s, the spate of books on the OSS, and in the 1990s, the fiftieth 

anniversary of the war effort and the celebration of the veterans as the “Greatest 

Generation,” that the people in and around Catoctin Mountain Park and Prince William 

Forest Park have begun to learn the full story of the OSS in the nearby National Parks. 

 Now it is hoped that they can also learn more specifically about the contributions 

of the two National Parks to the war effort. It is a fascinating story of spies, saboteurs, 

guerrilla leaders, and clandestine radio operators who began their rugged training in these 

formerly cheery campgrounds and who then went forth, sometimes deep into enemy 

territory, to a secret, shadow war to help defeat the Axis powers in World War II. It is a 

story well worth remembering and commemorating. 

 

101 Max Boot, “Why the OSS Succeeded and the CIA is Failing,” Los Angles Times, 22 July 2004. Boot 

argued that “Donovan’s high-powered recruits did impressive work, often utilizing connections that no 

humdrum bureaucrat could possibly have cultivated.”