Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

  Picture in your mind the circumstances under which you might be using the pistol. Take as an example a raid on an enemy occupied house in darkness. Firstly, consider your approach. You will never walk boldly up to the house and stroll in as though you were paying a social call. On the contrary, your approach will be stealthy. You will be keyed up and excited, nervously alert for danger from whichever direction it may come. You will find yourself instinctively crouching; your body balanced on the balls of your feet in a position from which you can move swiftly in any direction. You make your entry into the house and start searching for the enemy moving along passages, perhaps up or down stairs, listening and feeling for any signs of danger. Suddenly, on turning a corner, you come face to face with the enemy. Without a second’s hesitation, you must fire and kill him before he has a chance to kill you.

  From this picture these facts are clear:

  a) You will always fire from the crouch position—you will never be in an upright position.

  b) You have no time to adopt any fancy stance when killing with speed.

  c) You have no time to use the sights.13

  The instructor would then go on to explain the instinctive pointing method of firing in which the operator learned to trust natural hand-eye coordination reflexes to hit the target instinctively:

  A natural crouch position, the body balanced on the balls of the feet and pressed forward over the forward foot; shoulders square to the target. The right hand, holding the pistol, is brought into the center of the body and reaches out toward the target until the arm is almost fully extended, in the natural pointing position. The barrel of the pistol is always parallel to the ground. In this position the right hand is turned slightly to the right to allow the barrel to point straight down the center of the line of sight.14

  Most of the time in training was spent in fire practices that developed and tested the individuals’ mastery of the instinctive pointing method under a variety of scenarios. They culminated in realistic missions in which students had to enter specially built houses and in almost complete darkness eliminate a number of targets that would pop up at them from unexpected angles. These houses were built with rough timber with realistic partitions to simulate doors, rooms, hallways, staircases, and so on. They were called “houses of horror” because of various “horror” devices such as seesaw flooring, and objects springing from the floor or dropping from ceilings that were installed to put trainees off balance and to strengthen their ability to handle the firearm and shoot efficiently under any circumstance.

  The man who brought to the OSS the novel way of using weapons with an aggressive mindset aimed at killing in close quarters was William E. Fairbairn, a British martial arts instructor who had introduced similar techniques to SOE and Commando training schools in Great Britain and Canada before transferring to the OSS in 1942. Fairbairn had spent his youth in the Shanghai Municipal Police, where he learned Judo, Kung Fu, and Jiu-Jitsu to survive close fights with some of the toughest criminals of the time. Eventually, he created his own close combat fighting style, which he called Defendu, and taught it for years to police officers in Shanghai. It was in a warehouse there that he created the first house of horror similar to those built years later for the OSS at the Prince William Forest and Catoctin Park training sites. In 1940, at the age of fifty-five, Fairbairn returned to England, received a commission as a captain in the British Army, and began teaching his special close combat techniques to the first recruits in the Commandos and SOE organizations. Fairbairn contributed to the invention of the commando knife, a lethal knife with a seven-and-a-half-inch-long stiletto blade. The OSS adopted a shorter and thinner version of it as the knife its agents carried in the field. In early 1942, Fairbairn was transferred to the SOE Special Training School 103 in Ontario, Canada, also known as Camp X, before coming to the OSS as a lieutenant colonel in October of 1943.15

  Fairbairn called what he practiced “gutter fighting” because it was fighting without rules. He made it a point to begin his course on close combat by telling the students that most of them had been taught to wrestle or box following Marquis of Queensberry rules that prohibited attacking certain parts of the opponents. Then, he continued with a statement like this:

  This, however, is WAR, not sport. Your aim is to kill your opponent as quickly as possible. A prisoner is generally a handicap and a source of danger, particularly if you are without weapons. So forget the Queensberry rules; forget the term “foul methods.” That may sound cruel but it is still more cruel to take longer than necessary to kill your opponent. Attack your opponent’s weakest points. He will attack yours if he gets a chance.16

  Fairbairn taught a few basic but effective techniques and had his students rehearse them over and over until they were fully proficient in executing them swiftly, without having to stop and think. He emphasized blows with the side of the hand, which when delivered properly could kill, temporarily paralyze, break bones, or badly hurt the opponent. He explained:

  To deliver them effectively the fingers must be together, thumb up, and the whole hand tensed. The blow is struck with the side of the hand, all the force being concentrated in one small area, i.e. approximately half-way between the base of the little finger and the wrist joint, or where the hand is broadest. If striking sideways, the back of the hand must be uppermost. No force can be obtained if the palm is uppermost. The effect of the blows is obtained by the speed with which they are delivered rather than by the weight behind them. They can be made from any position, whether the striker is on balance or not, and thus can be delivered more quickly than any other blow.17

  Fairbairn considered the primary job of the instructor to make his students attack-minded, and dangerously so. “Attack first and keep on attacking,” he urged his students. “Don’t stop just because an opponent is crippled. If you have broken his arm, for instance, that is only of value because it is then easier to kill.”18

  A final element that made the training of the OG and SO operators unique was the special importance that was placed on maintenance of morale, given the extreme hazards of their mission. The instructors made every effort throughout the training period to keep the aggressive spirit and confidence of the personnel at a high level. They kept the men steadily occupied either with training tasks or with organized group recreation. They used all means available to foster intimate friendship, mutual confidence, and team play among members of the group, and a strong feeling of trust between officers and men. The combat experience of the teams in the field showed the benefits of this aspect of the training. Teams composed of operators who had trained and bonded together were usually more effective in accomplishing the assigned mission and successful in surviving the experience behind enemy lines. Teams that came together in the last minute or included personnel who had not gone through team-forming experiences encountered difficulties and in extreme cases paid with their lives for their deficiencies.

  The first engagements of SO and OG personnel against the enemy tested not only their skills and abilities but also the quality of their training. These engagements came against targets on French and Italian islands in the Mediterranean in preparation for and as part of the Allied landings in Sicily and mainland Italy in the fall of 1943.

  CHAPTER 4

  Special Operations in the Western Mediterranean

  In December 1942, the OSS consolidated all its assets in North Africa into a headquarters station in Algiers, known as Station X, under the command of Colonel William Eddy. It operated as an extension of the Allied Forces Headquarters Special Operations Office, or G-3. Between December 1942 and August 1943, Station X mounted several operations in enemy territory to prepare the way for the Allied invasions in Italy. The number and intensity of these operations increased after the invasions began, first in Sicily in August 1943 and then in southern Italy in September 1943.

  The first OSS mission inside Axis-occupied Europe was an infiltration of agents in the island of Corsica in mid-December 1942. Corsica had bee
n part of the French territories left under the control of the Vichy government according to the Franco-German armistice of 1940. After the Allied landings in French North Africa, Germany and Italy moved to occupy all of France. Eighty thousand Italian troops occupied Corsica to the deep resentment of the local population, which remained loyal to the French republic, despite its historical ties to the Italian mainland. The purpose of the OSS mission, code-named Pearl Harbor, was to collect intelligence on the Italian forces on the island and organize networks of resistance ready to take up arms against the occupiers when the invasion against Italy began.1

  The OSS entrusted the mission to Frederic Brown, code-named “Tommy,” an Algiers-based asset who had assisted Colonel Eddy in the preparations for Operation Torch.2 Brown was on friendly terms with the Algiers chiefs of the Deuxième Bureau (Second Bureau), the French military intelligence organization, who were also interested in sending their own mission to Corsica at the time. Brown used these connections to identify men for the mission team and mount the operation. The team leader was Roger de Saule, a senior intelligence officer in the French Air Force. Three Algiers-based Frenchmen born in Corsica would assist him as radio operators and liaison agents. They were the cousins Toussaint and Pierre Griffi and Laurent Preziosi. The Deuxième Bureau secured the use of the 1,600-ton Casabianca, the most modern submarine in the French Navy, which had arrived in Algiers in mid-November with its commander and full crew aboard after escaping capture from the Germans in Toulon. With three wireless sets, a million French francs, food, supplies, and false documents, the Pearl Harbor team headed for Corsica on December 11, 1942.

  There was no reception party to pinpoint the landing site, so when the submarine arrived near the coast on December 13, the captain surfaced to periscope depth and surveyed the littoral in daylight until he found a suitable beach in the bay of Chioni. Then he submerged and kept the vessel on the sea floor until nighttime. At 0100 hours on the night of December 14, the Casabianca resurfaced barely out of the water to avoid detection from Italian patrol boats and moved to within one mile offshore. Two French marines rowed a dinghy with the five OSS agents and a radio set ashore. When they returned, the submarine submerged again, planning to stay out of sight for the next twenty-four hours. It would resurface the following night to bring weapons and the rest of the equipment ashore. The OSS agents moved inland and established a few friendly contacts in the villages nearby.

  When they returned to the landing spot on the midnight of December 15, Pierre Griffi sent a message in Morse using his flashlight to the Casablanca, which was waiting offshore. The sea that night was choppy with large waves kicked up by the Libeccio, the strong wind that sweeps Corsica and Italy from the southwest. Close to the shore, the dinghy capsized, taking with it all the supplies, weapons, and radio equipment. Its three sailors swam to shore and had no way to return to the submarine, so they decided to stay with the Pearl Harbor team. They tried to signal the Casabianca but the waves were so high that the captain could not see the flashlight signals from shore. The situation forced Brown to swim for a perilous hour and a half to the submarine and communicate the situation to the skipper.

  Over the next few months, the Pearl Harbor team was able to create a number of nets inside the island. It communicated regularly by radio with Algiers sending information about the strength and morale of the Italian troops. On the night of February 6, 1943, the Casabianca returned to pick up the three sailors it had left behind and to deliver a cache of 450 submachine guns and 60,000 bullets. It was the first American supply of arms and ammunition to a European resistance movement in World War II. The two principal liaison agents, Toussaint Griffi and Laurent Preziosi, distributed these arms to their contacts and reported in March that they had two thousand people in the organization who were ready to fight.

  Their activities had attracted the attention of the Fascist secret police, the infamous Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo (OVRA), or Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. As a security precaution, Toussaint Griffi and Laurent Preziosi returned to Algiers on March 10, 1943, aboard the Casablanca. Roger de Saule handed over command of the networks to a newly assigned officer of the Deuxième Bureau, Paul Colona d’Istria, and returned to Algiers at the end of March. Pierre Griffi, the principal radio operator of Pearl Harbor, remained in Corsica and fell into the hands of OVRA on June 11. Although tortured atrociously, he did not reveal any information. The Fascists executed him in Bastia on August 18, 1943, just a few weeks before the liberation of Corsica.

  * * *

  The invasion of Sicily, known as Operation Husky, signaled the beginning of the Allied campaign in Italy. In the evening of July 9, 1943, eight task forces totaling three thousand ships and carrying 160,000 men—Americans, British, Canadians, and French—together with 14,000 vehicles, 600 tanks, and 1,800 guns began their way toward Sicily from ports in North Africa and Malta.3 The invasion began in the early hours of July 10 on a tragic note when paratrooper units of the British First Airborne and the American 82nd Airborne divisions suffered heavy casualties, mostly from friendly fire from naval vessels who took them for enemy troops. Nevertheless, bridgeheads were established and held firmly despite German counterattacks mainly in the American landing zone at Gela. During the first two days of the operation, eighty thousand men, seven thousand vehicles, and nine hundred guns came across the beaches in seemingly endless waves. General Eisenhower, observing the men and equipment streaming ashore, wrote to General Marshal, the US Army chief of staff, on July 12, 1943: “I must say that the sight of hundreds of vessels with landing craft everywhere, operating along the shoreline … was unforgettable.”4

  Only a few miles away from Eisenhower, the commanding officer of the German troops in Sicily, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, witnessed the same spectacle and found it equally unforgettable, albeit for different reasons.5 He recognized that the key to the Allies’ success was their ability to use their naval and air supremacy to create extremely flexible seaborne attack routes and supply lines. The deep-rooted weakness of the German political and military leaders, von Senger realized, was that they “could think only in terms of land operations, not in the three-dimensional terms of forces of all arms.”6

  Operation Husky was the first opportunity for the OSS to integrate its activities with those of military units in support of an operation. The OSS Italian branch, headed by Vincent Scamporino and Max Corvo, had wished to send missions in advance to collect intelligence about the enemy and to raise the local population in support of the Allies, but the Allied Forces Headquarters had ruled them out for fear that they would alert the enemy of the upcoming invasion. The OSS contingent that would participate in the operation, two officers and eight enlisted men, was assigned to the intelligence staff, G-2, of General George S. Patton’s Seventh Army headquarters, where they were met with an attitude that ranged from complete indifference to mild interest. Donovan, who was in the theater at the time, managed to go to Sicily on D-Day, but the OSS team was able to find transport from North Africa only four days later.

  Patton’s frontline units required short-range tactical or combat intelligence missions for which the OSS men were not suited. The OSS recruited locals who knew the terrain and could cross the lines unnoticed, but without any significant results. The frontline was so fluid that often the agents were overrun by advancing mechanized units before having had the opportunity to return and report their findings. Therefore, most of the OSS efforts in Sicily went to helping Army units with the interrogation of captured Italian soldiers. In the rear, the OSS team supported the Counter-Intelligence Corps and the Allied Military Government in establishing and maintaining order. To help the overstretched personnel, two officers and eight enlisted men from the Italian OGs arrived from the United States.7

  There was a lot of enthusiasm and desire to show what the OSS was capable of accomplishing at the time, driven from the top by Donovan himself. Combined with the lack
of experience for a number of the men, for whom the Sicilian campaign was the first exposure they had to military actions, it lead to amateurish actions and foul-ups. The official history of the OSS edited after the war was not very keen to such efforts: “This kind of heroics in what was a new business, and by men essentially amateurs, may be understandable but is in no way excusable. It is simply not professional behavior.”8

  One such operation involved Lieutenant Colonel Guido Pantaleoni, Special Operations chief, who traveled to Sicily from Washington in late July 1943. Pantaleoni was a forty-three-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer from New York connected to Donovan through the Paderewski Fund, a charity in support of the Polish people that his wife had set up in 1941 and for which Donovan had been one of the biggest fundraisers.9 Panteleoni did not have any prior military experience and was eager to use the action in Sicily to get some. As he explained to Max Corvo, “he was expected to lead the French show and he needed experience.”10

  Having just come from Washington and holding a senior position within the OSS, Panteleoni knew top-secret information, including, possibly, the fact that the Allies had broken the German Ultra Code and were reading their communications. Exposure in enemy territory, which could lead to his arrest and interrogation by the Abwehr, could compromise this information. Nevertheless, to gain experience he lead a mission, code-named San Fratello, of four enlisted men and two civilians across the frontlines to collect information about German fortifications on Mount Etna that had slowed down the advance of Patton’s Seventh Army.