Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

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  The timing of the review was fortunate for the OSS because a number of its activities at the operational level were beginning to bear fruit. The secret network of agents outside the Western Hemisphere was expanding and the volume of intelligence doubled and trebled each month from agents placed in a number of neutral or Axis-leaning countries, such as Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, or Vichy France. Studies and reports from the Research and Analysis branch and services from the Field Photographic and Presentation branch were receiving wider distribution and higher value recognition. A number of special operations missions launched in 1942 had attracted attention in the highest circles. The first members of Detachment 101 were recruited, trained, and dispatched to Burma to support the military operations in the China-India-Burma Theater. Two professional explorers and OSS operatives, Captain Ilia Tolstoy and Lieutenant Brooke Dolan, scouted across Tibet from India to China in a reconnaissance mission. They carried a letter from President Roosevelt to the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, which was the first such document exchanged between these two heads of state.35

  However, the recognition of the value that individual components of the OSS provided was not sufficient. The new organization had to demonstrate that it created synergies and provided a greater value by coordinating the contributions of its individual branches in support of military strategy and operations. The test came during the planning and execution of Operation Torch, the US-led Allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942. Since the creation of the COI, Donovan had paid special attention to establishing a presence in the French colonies of North Africa that had remained under the control of the Vichy government. The fact that the United States continued to maintain diplomatic and trade relations with the Vichy government had allowed the placement under diplomatic cover of a number of intelligence operatives who had worked diligently to develop their networks of informants in key cities across North Africa, including Tangier, Algiers, Casablanca, Oran, and Tunis.

  In December 1941, Donovan sent Colonel William A. Eddy under the cover of Naval attaché to Tangier to coordinate all the field activities and the reporting to Washington and to the Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) established in Gibraltar under the leadership of General Eisenhower. By the time the Torch landings began on November 8, 1942, all the branches of the OSS were actively involved and supporting the operation. They had provided comprehensive reports on the target areas complete with maps, port installation diagrams, beach conditions, order of battle of the French forces, and information about local and tribal leaders.36 OSS agents who had been in North Africa for more than a year prior to the invasion accompanied the three task forces that landed in Morocco and Algeria. A clandestine intelligence radio network on the ground provided Eisenhower and his staff with fresh intelligence from the main target areas of attack as the task forces approached. OSS had organized cells of resistance among the local Arab tribes as well as French military and civilians disaffected with the collaborationist stance of Vichy. A number of guerrilla activities had been planned to be carried out on the eve of the landings, including seizing airfields and radio stations, cutting telephone lines to the French coastal batteries, and lighting flares on the beaches to indicate the landing spots. In the end, the AFHQ did not provide the green light for most of the actions out of concern that they might cause the French to go on alert prematurely thus robbing the Allies of the element of surprise.37

  The strong performance of the OSS in the days leading up to and during the execution of Operation Torch and the recognition by Eisenhower and other US field commanders of its strong intelligence collection and reporting capabilities in support of the landings helped break the stalemate within the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the future of the organization. General McNarney and Admiral Horne concluded their inquiry into the OSS operations with findings in its favor. Based on their report, the JCS issued directive 155/4/D on December 23, 1942, which designated OSS as the JCS agency charged outside the Western Hemisphere with “the planning, development, coordination and execution of the military program for psychological warfare,” and with “the compilation of such political, psychological, sociological and economic information as may be required by military operations.” In the field of intelligence, it placed OSS on a par with the Military Intelligence Service of the Army and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Directive 155/4/D gave OSS the authority to operate in the fields of sabotage, espionage and counter-espionage in enemy-occupied or controlled territory, guerrilla warfare, underground groups on enemy-occupied or controlled territory and foreign nationality groups in the United States.38

  The directive firmly established OSS by providing it for the first time a definitive charter and eliminating the barriers in its lines of authority to the JCS. In a letter to Donovan sent on the same date that the directive was issued, General George C. Marshall, the US Army chief of staff, wrote, “I regret that after voluntarily coming under the jurisdiction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff your organization has not had smoother sailing. Nevertheless, it has rendered invaluable service, particularly with reference to the North African Campaign. I am hopeful that the new Office of Strategic Services’ directive will eliminate most, if not all, of your difficulties.”39

  The immediate effect of the directive was a rapid expansion of OSS, both in personnel and in the operations it carried out. As they began planning irregular warfare activities and special operations, Donovan and his team realized that the OSS was a newcomer in a field where friends and foe had played for years. They quickly set out to study the experience accumulated in the early years of the war and inject it into the new organization.

  CHAPTER 2

  Irregular Warfare in the Early Years of World War II

  The Germans were the first to recognize that irregular warfare could provide a key strategic advantage in their military campaigns in the early years of World War II. In preparation for the invasion of Poland, the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization, created a special force of agents called Kampfen-Truppen (combat troops) or K-Truppen, to operate independently from regular troops. Some of them, dressed in civilian clothes and carrying only small arms and hand grenades on them, crossed the German-Polish border at the end of August 1939 and traveled deep inside Poland to the vicinity of industrial sites, mines, and others centers of strategic importance to the German war industry. When the invasion began at dawn on September 1, the K-Truppen moved swiftly to capture these objectives and hold them until regular units of the Wehrmacht relieved them. Other K-Truppen groups rode on the armored columns that thrust deep into Polish territory in the first hours of the invasion. They guarded key road junctions and bridges overrun by panzer units and protected them from Polish counter-attacks until the infantry caught up with them. The Abwehr disbanded the K-Truppen at the end of the Polish campaign but their contribution to the success of the blitzkrieg did not go unnoticed.1 In October 1939, the German Army General Staff approved the creation of a unit of special forces capable of operating unnoticed behind enemy lines and striking where least expected. To maintain its secrecy, the unit went by the name of Lehr und Bau Kompanie z.b.V. 800 (Special Duty Training and Construction Company No. 800).2 Its all-volunteer force began training intensively in sabotage, silent killing, and irregular warfare techniques at a camp on the shores of Queenzee, a lake near Brandenburg. For this reason, the unit became known as the Brandenburg Company, and its men as the Brandenburgers.

  Borrowing from the K-Truppen experience in Poland, the Brandenburgers’ mode of operation was to infiltrate deep into the enemy territory dressed in civilian clothes or even in military uniforms of their opponents. To avoid detection, they recruited people who spoke the language of the target country, knew its customs, and could live among its people without being noticed as foreigners. During the German offensive in the West in spring 1940, the Brandenburgers spearheaded the military strikes against targets in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. On the eve of the attack against Denmark on April 8
, Brandenburger units dressed in Danish Army uniforms crossed the border in the dark of night and seized principal road and railway bridges ahead of the Wehrmacht units that invaded in the morning. A month later, Brandenburgers in civilian clothes collaborated with Dutch Nazis to capture the main bridge over the Maas River in the town of Gennep, and secure a key gateway into Holland for the German Sixth Army. In Belgium, Brandenburgers disguised as civilians blended with refugees fleeing the advancing Germans. They penetrated deep behind the lines, captured bridges over the Meuse River, and prevented the Belgians from opening the levees and flooding the low-lying areas through which the German panzer units were advancing on their way to the key port of Antwerp.

  On May 14, 1940, Hitler congratulated personally the participants in these operations and ordered the expansion of the force to regiment strength. Volksdeutchen, ethnic Germans from Eastern and Central European countries, filled the ranks of the new Lehr-Regiment Brandenburg. Throughout the winter of 1940–1941, a number of Brandenburgers disguised as civilians crossed into Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia and took up employment in the local economy in and close to oil fields, railroad junctions, ports on the Danube River, electrical power stations, and other strategic objects. When the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia began in April 1941, they moved quickly to occupy these targets and act as guides for the regular troops pouring across the borders.

  The Brandenburgers were especially successful on the Russian front where they operated often hundreds of miles behind the Soviet lines dressed in the uniforms of the Red Army or NKVD, the Soviet secret police. One of their preferred tactics was to race ahead of the German troops in captured Soviet trucks and make contact with the Red Army rear guard units. Those Brandenburgers who spoke Russian fluently interacted with the Soviet soldiers; the rest pretended to be wounded and unable to communicate or from non-Russian speaking parts of the Soviet Union. As they retreated with the Red Army units, the Brandenburgers captured bridges and communication arteries and held them until they linked up with advancing German units.

  In one of the most daring uses of this tactic, a group of sixty-two Brandenburgers went into action in July 1942 as part of the German Army Group South’s drive toward the Caucasus oil fields. Their commanding officer was Baron Adrian von Foelkersam, the grandson of a Russian admiral, who could speak fluent Russian and had proven himself one of the most audacious officers in the Brandenburg regiment. Dressed in NKVD uniforms, the Brandenburgers infiltrated Soviet lines and made their way toward the oil fields in Maikop mingled in a retreating Red Army convoy. At Maikop, they earned the confidence of the unsuspecting NKVD general in charge of the area. For several days, they roamed unchecked and became familiar with the Soviet defensive positions around the city and the oil fields nearby. When the German troops closed in, the Brandenburgers, still in their NKVD disguise, disseminated panic and confusion among the defenders, countermanding genuine orders from the Soviet command and issuing contradicting orders of their own. On the morning of August 9, 1942, advance German troops arriving in Maikop encountered light resistance and found a large part of the oilfield installations intact thanks to the work of the Brandenburgers.

  The action in the Caucasus was the zenith of the Brandenburgers’ involvement in special operations. After the battle of Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht went into a defensive posture that did not favor the daring raids behind enemy lines for which the Brandenburgers had been distinguished. The German general staff increasingly used the Brandenburger units like regular infantry units to shore up gaps in the Eastern front. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi secret police apparatus, took the banner of special operations in 1943 when he created a new unit under the Schutzstaffel, or SS, for such operations. Under the command of Otto Skorzeny, the unit recruited a number of its members from the ranks of the Brandenburgers and borrowed heavily from their playbook. They earned fame in September 1943 when they rescued the deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop resort in Gran Sasso, to the great delight of Hitler. In the initial days of the German offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944, Skorzeny’s troops dressed in American uniforms and using American vehicles wreaked havoc in the American rear. They met their end during the Battle of the Bulge that followed, when the Americans hunted them down and shot them summarily for operating out of uniform, in violation of the international laws of warfare.

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  The British began thinking about creating irregular warfare units for hit-and-run operations against the Germans as soon as the military campaigns of spring 1940 ended. On the evening of June 4, 1940, as the British Expeditionary Force evacuated the continent from Dunkirk, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, an aide to General Sir John Dill, chief of the Imperial General Staff, first captured the idea in a single handwritten page. In it, he described a concept to harass the Germans on the continent, inspired by several precedents in the history of warfare of the past two centuries.3

  In Napoleonic times, the Spaniards had fought the French occupation for years using small mobile units supported by the local population. They struck the French unexpectedly, fought small skirmishes, called guerrillas, or “little wars” in Spanish, and disappeared in the surrounding mountains or forests. Almost a century later, Afrikaans-speaking settlers in South Africa organized into military units they called Kommandos used similar tactics to fight against the British during the Boers Wars. Clarke, who was born in Johannesburg to British settlers there, was caught in the conflict as an infant when his family was trapped for over three months in the town of Ladysmith in the Province of Natal as the Boers laid siege to the British. During the 1936 Arab revolt against the British Mandate in Palestine, Clarke, a military intelligence officer by that time, saw firsthand guerrilla tactics the Arabs were using. They had learned them from the famous T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—some twenty years earlier during the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire.

  Clarke’s concept envisioned the creation of British military units to harass the Germans on the continent in a similar fashion. He called them Commandos, after the Afrikaans term. Clarke submitted his idea to Dill on June 5 who took it to Prime Minister Churchill the same day. The concept of commandos resonated immediately with Churchill who had experienced personally the conflict between the British and the Afrikaners in South Africa. When the Second Boers War started on October 1899, Churchill secured an assignment to South Africa as a war correspondent for the Morning Post. He was with British troops when they fell in an ambush organized by Boer Kommandos. Churchill was captured and sent to a prison camp in Pretoria but managed to escape and re-join the British ranks. He witnessed the British attack that broke through the Boer siege of Ladysmith on February 28, 1900, and relieved the British soldiers and civilians trapped there, among whom were an infant Clarke and his family.4

  As he read Clarke’s proposal in 1940, Churchill must have re-lived the speech of General George White, the garrison commander, to the inhabitants of Ladysmith thanking them for the fortitude with which they had endured the dangers and privations of the siege. They had passed through a most trying ordeal, White said, “but, thank God, we kept the flag flying.”5 Launching the commando force was a way for Churchill to keep the flag flying against the German onslaught. In a memo to the War Cabinet the next day, on June 6, 1940, Churchill wrote, “Enterprises must be prepared with specially trained troops of the hunter class who can develop a reign of terror down the enemy coast…. I look to the Chiefs of Staff to propose measures for ceaseless offensive against the whole German-occupied coastline, leaving a trail of German corpses behind.”6

  Clarke received the assignment to gather troops and organize a raid across the English Channel as soon as possible. He sent out a call for volunteers and within a few days assembled a force of 115 soldiers. With the French-German armistice due to go into effect in the morning of June 25, 1940, at 0035 hours, Clarke decided to conduct the raid the night before as a gesture to the Germans that the British intended to fight on. F
our motorboats carried the raiders to landing points along the French coast south of the port of Boulogne. The objective was to send parties inland to test the German coastal defenses and to capture prisoners for intelligence gathering purposes. The results were far from what Clarke had hoped to achieve. Two of the parties did not engage the enemy. A third one surprised two German sentries and killed them outright without collecting any information of intelligence value. The last party landed on a deserted beach off Boulogne and came under fire from a German patrol on bicycle who happened to be going by. They retreated hastily to the boat, where Clarke, who had gone along as an observer, somehow managed to be hit by a stray bullet that almost sheared his ear off. Each of the boats made their way back to England independently. One of them had a faulty compass and ended up approaching the wrong port. The port authorities left them waiting for hours on anchor while they verified the boat credentials. During that time, the raiders helped themselves to the rum stores of the boat. Once they were allowed ashore, wobbly and disheveled, they were arrested by the military police on suspicion that they were deserters.7

  Other similar operations attempted in the following months had equally unimpressive outcomes. Traditional military officers, who had criticized the idea of irregular and unconventional warfare from the beginning, tried to squash the commando concept arguing that regular troops could do the same missions and better. But Churchill insisted on developing the capability despite the resentment it had caused. On August 25, 1940, he wrote to Anthony Eden, the secretary of state for war:

  I hear that the whole position of the Commandos is being questioned. I thought therefore I might write to let you know how strongly I feel. There will certainly be many opportunities for minor operations, all of which will depend on surprise landings of lightly equipped, nimble forces accustomed to work like packs of hounds instead of being moved about in the ponderous manner which is appropriate to regular formations. For every reason, therefore, we must develop the storm troop, or Commando, idea.8