Oss Red Group 2: A Fisherman Goes to War

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to:

Mary Campbell Boak

who caused it to happen.

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Chan Bates, Raf Hirtz, the late Hob Miller, Gubb Prout, and Bob Vernon — wartime comrades who were all most generous in sharing their records and recollections of our adventures.

My thanks also to the Barlows, Chiles, and Spauldings for their help in critiquing the early drafts. Hats off to Dale Seeds for his informed answers to abstruse questions on how airplanes worked in those days.

Finally, and especially, I am indebted to Jack Harney and David Holly who invested many hours in line-by-line editorial scrutiny. The remaining shortcomings are all my fault.

Contents

DEDICATION

Acknowledgments

Preface

Foreword

Chapter 1:

A Fisherman Goes to War (1940-1943)

Chapter 2:

From Ski Troops to the OSS (1943-1944)

Chapter 3. Discovering OSS:

Washington, Casablanca, Algiers (January-June 1944)

Chapter 4:

Training in England (June-August 1944)

Chapter 5:

Behind Enemy Lines in France (September 1944)

Chapter 6:

From Europe to California (September 1944-January 1945)

Chapter 7:

Crossing the Pacific (January-April 1945)

Chapter 8:

Traveling the Ledo Road (April 1945)

Chapter 9:

Training the Chinese Commando (April-June 1945)

Chapter 10:

Operation BLUEBERRY — Behind Japanese Lines

Chapter 11:

Last Days of the War (August-September 1945)

Chapter 12:

Homeward Bound (1945-1946)

Epilogue

Preface

General William Bill Donovan’s WorldWarII Office of Strategic Services was one of our military’s significant inventions of the last century. The Cloaks and Daggers and secret inks and all manner of other clever tools to fool the unwary enemy captured the imaginations of untold Americans, even though most of us were unaware of them while they were being employed. And they live on in their postwar reconstitution, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Far less well remembered are the wartime fighting forces of the OSS, whose combat contributions were at least as important as the cloaks and the daggers. Carefully recruited and rigorously trained, they were readied for insertion behind enemy lines to train, support, and fight alongside partisan or guerilla forces in our U.S. Theaters of Operation. Typically they were air-dropped along with their own supplies and battle gear, prepared for ground combat action behind the enemy’s prepared defenses. As such they were able to disrupt foreign troop supply and command and communications lines, causing havoc to both offensive and defensive troop movements to and from their combat lines. They were, long before the term came into general use, important force multipliers for our regular battle troops. Organized into self-contained operating units, they were dubbed Operations Groups. This Book, Red Group 2, is the story of how one such group came to be, and to be used, as seen through the eyes of its author, David Boak.

Originally intended as a few wartime sketches of the author’s wartime experiences, to be read only by family and friends, the story was driven by its own momentum to become a detailed record of how this one unusual student-citizen-soldier journeyed through a strange, unexpected world. The story follows him from his beloved fishing holes in pre-war New Jersey to the interior of China as the War approached its end. Along the way he trains as a ski-trooper, a small-arms expert, becomes an accomplished paratrooper and special weapons instructor and operator. He is deployed to North Africa, England, France, India, Burma and China, enduring long sea voyages, parachute drops in the dark, pitched battles, and even driving a balky truck loaded with ammunition over the Ledo road into China. There, the War’s final days brought Red Group 2 to an end, fittingly enough punctuated by one last fire-fight in concert with their Chinese irregulars, designed to confuse retreating Japanese troops.

As for the OSS and its cloaks and daggers, at War’s end it was disestablished— though its remains were soon to to be morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency . The OSS Operating Groups were disbanded as well, their need overtaken by our nation’s newer concerns brought on by the Cold War and Korea. Unfortunately in the eyes of this books author, their institutional memory fell into the discard heap as well. It was his hope that some of the lessons learned from our World War II experiences with guerillas and other irregular s forces might be brought to bear in against today’s unstructured warfare by radical terrorist insurgencies. The inheritors of wartime OSS operations and tactics, today’s various special forces within and/or closely allied to the individual armed services might indeed be benefitting from those earlier days.

Personally, I have always had the greatest respect for the men and women of the OSS and for those who continued their great tradition under the CIA. They dared to be different and therefore made enormous contributions to victory throughout the Globe.

(Signed)

Al Gray, Marine

29th Commandant

Foreword

A good friend sent me a partial bibliography listing books and articles about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the 13,000 or so men and women who made up that force. I recognized perhaps two dozen books on the subject. To my astonishment, these books were lost among literally hundreds of entries. Why then, would I want to add yet another book to this formidable pile?

First of all, my wife and a few friends had been after me for many years to write a World War II memoir. They believed my experience in OSS and the service that led up to it were, in some respects, unique and, therefore, worth recording.

A second and more compelling reason for attempting this work lay in the fact that one major element of OSS — the Operational Group Command — seemed to receive relatively scant attention, both in the Official History of OSS and in that other mountain of literature. For example, Colonel David K. E. Bruce’s OSS Against the Third Reich, a 250-page compilation of this senior OSS official’s World War II diaries, contains only the following brief acknowledgement of the existence of the Operational Groups:

Serge Obolenski [sic] told me he had just completed his fourteenth parachute jump. He has about 120 men and 20 officers, all qualified parachutists, in his Operational Groups, and they are anxious to get into action.

David K.E. Bruce, OSS Against the Third Reich, The Kent State University Press, 1991.

Every book on OSS I happened to have read or scanned seemed to focus on:

. the exciting and sometimes romanticized efforts of various kinds of OSS agents, particularly those operating in France

. the personality and achievements of General Wild Bill Donovan — the founder of OSS

. the participation of a number of individuals — from Arthur Scheslinger, Jr. to Julia Child and many others — who were to become celebrities later on

. the quagmire of jurisdictional disputes among intelligence and propaganda agencies at home and abroad during the formation and growth of OSS and its predecessor organization throughout the war years[1]

The Operational Groups, known as OG’s, were originally conceived as nuclei for guerrilla forces operating behind enemy lines. It is to the activities of one of those groups — Red Group 2 — that the bulk of my narrative relates:

"OG’s were authorized by the JCS directive of 23 December 1942…which provided that OSS should organize operational nuclei to be used in enemy and enemy-held terrritory. The OG’s were highly trained foreign-language speaking soldiers, skilled in the methods of sabotage and small arms, and trained parachutists, designed to be used in in small groups behind enemy lines to harrass the enemy.

"The OG Branch developed from the plans for guerrilla units with which Donovan and Goodfellow were concerned as early as December, 1941.

"In August 1942, shortly after the establishment of OSS, JCS…approved in principle the formation of guerrilla units and referred the preparation of detailed authorization to the JPWC [Joint Propaganda Warfare Committee] which [then] controlled OSS. However, attempts to decide the matter in JPWC failed….There seemed to be a deep-seated disapproval of the organization of independent military forces on the part of the War Department. [Emphasis mine] The Strategic Services Command was dissolved in December 1942. In the same month, consolidation of the OSS position under JCS and the definite placing of the military program for psychological warfare under OSS paved the way for what subsequently became the OG Branch. …OSS was to be responsible for the ‘organization and conduct of guerrilla warfare’, personnel for this purpose being limited to ‘organizers, fomenters and operational nuclei of guerrilla units’."

War Report of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) Vol. I. Published by Walker and Company, New York, 1976[2]

The primary mission of the OG’s, then, was to train, equip, and lead indigenous forces in combat behind enemy lines. This was accomplished by Operational Groups in both Europe and the Far East. It turned out that in the field, not just the OG’s but virtually every OSS man who got there wound up hooked up with partisans orchestrating guerrilla activities in places as varied as France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Norway, Burma, China, and Indo-China.

General Donovan distinguished OSS operations from those of Rangers and other special forces by noting that the former were designed to operate behind enemy lines, while the latter operated in front of those lines.

It seemed to me, then, that at least some part of the OG story ought be told in some detail. With one exception, I had not seen it anywhere in print. The exception is an unpublished manuscript by one Captain Raf Hirtz. In less than fifty pages of lean, unvarnished prose, Raf, my immediate superior in China, describes three OG operations in which he participated — two in France, one in China. I was with him on two of those three affairs.

Another thing that startled me in reviewing World War II literature was the general absence of much of a picture of those events as seen through eyes of ordinary cannon fodder — the enlisted men and women who made up the vast majority of the twelve million or so in our uniformed armed forces during that war.

These recollections have mostly to do with the activities of a single OG in both France and China, and also recount experiences with the 10th Mountain Division prior to my recruitment into OSS. My account is strictly from the viewpoint of an enlisted man and may demonstrate that the fog of war is especially thick from that perspective.

Chapter 1:

A Fisherman Goes to War

 (1940-1943)

During those years, World War II progressed as follows:

September 1, 1939: Germany invades

Poland; Britain and France declare War. 1940: Italy enters the war, siding with Germany; Germany invades the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

June 22, 1940: France falls to Germany; battle of Britain begins; Germans invade Eastern Europe.

June 22, 1941: Germany invades the Soviet Union.

December 7, 1941: Japanese attack Pearl Harbor; US declares war on Axis powers; eventually 70 nations become involved in conflict; Japanese invade East Indies, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Southeast Asia.

April-August 1942: US fleet victorious in battles of Coral Sea and Midway; Japanese driven from Solomon Islands and New Guinea; Japanese cut Burma Road; Chiang Kai-shek victorious over the Japanese at Changsha, China.

October 22, 1942: Rommel defeated at El Alemein.

November 8, 1942: US forces in Casablanca and Algiers defeat Germans.

January 1943: Soviets defeat Germans at Stalingrad.

May 1943: Japanese forces flee Aleutians: Axis armies surrender in North Africa.

In the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, it never occurred to me that I would soon leave the tranquility of rural North Jersey and academe to pursue a life that led inexorably to a strange military outfit operating behind enemy lines in both France and China. The war in Europe was remote and seemed unlikely to disturb those golden days.

I was fifteen when I heard the first shot in anger — possibly a bluff. On that particular day, shortly after dawn, a fishing buddy and I were crouching against the rock-lined reservoir embankment when we were startled by the whine of a bullet ricocheting off stone, followed almost at once by the flat crack of a rifle shot. Terrified, we scrambled pell-mell to the top of the embankment and down into the swamp behind. We were poaching in the guarded, off-limits East Orange water supply. There, we caught Eastern Chain Pickerel so big their tails would brush the pavement when we suspended them from the handlebars on our bike-ride home. In the swamp, we had doused ourselves with Woodsman’s Fly Dope — a potion you’d think strong enough to repel a bear. But the stuff was no match for the dense clouds of Jersey mosquitos that swarmed over us, dimming the sun. Accordingly, we were decked out like bee-keepers as we high-tailed it out of there.

During those halcyon high school days, I recall a great sense of detachment about Europe’s turmoil. Ah, yes, we joined in the scorn of Chamberlain as being wimpish with his peace for our time, and there was the underlying attitude of let’s you and him fight. But we were still in our protected world.

When Poland was invaded in 1939, my main memory was of one of the endless dictionary battles waged with my father at the dinner table — were the Poles Pollocks or Pollacks? There was a lot of schmaltz about the Warsaw Concerto — but whether we were conscious of it when Warsaw fell in the fall, or whether the drama was only made apparent to us by some much later documentary, I cannot recall.

By late spring of 1940, a weeping French teacher had made France’s fate abundantly clear to us, but an earnest civics teacher’s efforts to raise our consciousness about the implications for the United States of those distant events had little impact.

What did capture our imagination was the gallant effort and early success of the Finns in resisting the Russians. Maybe the Finnish lady down the street organizing drives for food and clothes to be sent to Finland heightened our awareness of that unequal struggle.

But even the collapse of France and the near-destruction of the British Army at Dunkirk in the waning days of May and early days of June, 1940, did not ring any alarm bells. In all likelihood, my greater concern was about whether a new, weighted nymph I had tied would work on the trout under the dam at Twin Falls. In Britain, on the other hand, there was an enormous fear that invasion was imminent and, as it turned out, those fears resurfaced again and again even after the Allies stormed the Continent.[3]

In mid-June, 1940, Italy declared war and the Germans entered Paris. So what? The blitz was pummeling England and a lot of Brits and Germans seemed to be milling about in North Africa; but it seems to me that we paid more attention to the Italian defeat of Haile Selasse than to other events there.[4]

April 15, 1941, was more important to me than all that. All April 15ths in New Jersey were important because that was Opening Day of the trout fishing season. But it was about then that I learned that the Germans had invaded Greece, and the war was finally beginning to get my attention. In June, brother Bob was one of those early draftees hauled into the Army for a one-year hitch that was to extend nearly five years, and at about that time — when three German Army Groups were invading Russia — in our house we were having a debate about whether I should join an ROTC unit in college. Republicans were happily denouncing Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, for selling scrap metal to the Japanese; but when we cut off their iron and oil in July, I don’t believe anyone foresaw that she would attack U.S. territory a few months later. In fact, the standard joke when they announced the attack on Pearl Harbor was: Who’s she? Callous? Of course, but at the time neither the extent of the devastation of the Pacific fleet nor of the huge number of casualties was made public.

My father was certain that the United States would soon go to war. Might as well be ready for it… Thus began my ROTC involvement when I got to college. The two criteria for college in our household were simple: it must be cheap for obvious reasons, and it must be sufficiently far away to facilitate umbilical severance.

I wanted to be a forest ranger or maybe an architect, or possibly, a doctor…

Father: Doctor? Do you have an overwhelming desire to cure the sick?

Me: Well, not exactly…

Father: Then forget it.

So I selected North Carolina State University at Raleigh where they had a school of architecture and another in forestry. A year earlier, though, my other brother, Joe, had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He, like most folks who attended that school, fell in love with the place and persuaded me to try it. (I could always transfer to State in a year or two if I still was into the forestry or architectural kick, said he.) He knew, of course, that nobody left Chapel Hill after a year or two: you got hooked. I enrolled, therefore, at UNC.

But after high school and before heading for college, there was the usual need for a job and money so I, along with a guy named Ken Miller, spent the bulk of the summer leading to Pearl Harbor as a ragweed inspector for the City of Summit, New Jersey. Ken and I were paid the princely sum of $100 a month to be split between us, and we provided our own transportation — a convertible Oldsmobile given to my mother in 1930 as an anniversary present and which, accordingly, was named Annie. That job provided my first exposure to map-reading of a sort as we tried to lay out the most efficient routes to cover every single plot of ground in City Hall’s records.[5]

We also were exposed to the ways of power and justice when men of influence were involved. We had found a lush stand of ragweed on the estate of a mover and shaker in the breakfast cereal game. Our practice was to send a notice calling for the ragweed’s removal, and to revisit the site in two weeks. If the stuff was still there, we issued a citation. We complied with our instructions, rechecked the estate, and discovered that the ragweed still stood thriving beside one of the bridle paths. Accordingly, we issued the citation.

In due course, His Eminence, the breakfast cereal baron, made his entrance before a magistrate with his scowling chauffeur/general handy-man in tow. Ken and I testified, showing our log book records of date, time and place. The chauffeur testified that, at the first notice, he had inspected the grounds and had found no ragweed and had so reported to his boss. The boss confirmed the report and went on to opine indignantly that these two young men were probably making up records to meet some kind of quota or, worse, to cover up goofing off while being paid.

The case was dismissed.

Ken and I, of course, revisited the estate once more, and the ragweed had been not chopped down but uprooted with not so much as stubble left as evidence. We could only surmise that the chauffeur, having ignored or forgotten the first notice, went out and tore the stuff up to cover his butt when the summons came. I don’t think our integrity had ever been so pointedly challenged before — and rarely since.[6]

Come fall, I took a train to Durham, North Carolina, and got on a bus to the University. I got off at the University bus stop with my single shoddy suitcase. [In those days, people thought nothing of shipping huge steamer trunks to distant destinations by Railway Express, and the one that had belonged to my Great Aunt would be waiting for me.]

I walked to the campus. It comprised one of the most forbidding sets of buildings I had ever seen — like the grim Victorian textile mill architecture of Fall River, Massachusetts, with ivy added. I was deeply disappointed. It turned out, of course, that I had arrived at Duke University, not Chapel Collitch. I got back to the bus stop and in due course went on up the road a piece to Chapel Hill.

And so it was, in the fall of 1941, and before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, I began my war. The formal reason for my being there was to begin the freshman year of the class of 1945. And, so I did, with boundless self-confidence and an ability to absorb a range of culture shocks — from the trivial Hey! instead of Hi! in casual greeting, to profoundly differing views of colored people and, of course, of the Civil War.

Although I did not know it, the defining reason for my being there was to begin my wartime experience.

I apply for Naval ROTC and am interviewed by a Lieutenant Commander. Reminded me of my father:

You’ve always had the ambition to join the Navy, haven’t you?

Well, no Sir: not exactly…

Crestfallen: Oh. But you don’t dislike the Navy, do you?

No, Sir.

I was sworn in and got a uniform. The prescribed shirts had stiff collars and cuffs requiring a collar stud and cuff links. I quickly learned to put the cuff links in before donning the shirt, then squeeze my hands through, leaving the links in place until laundry time.

Our Naval ROTC unit had a penchant for scheduling confusing courses very early in the morning. When wartime double daylight savings time came along, I found myself struggling to class in pitch darkness and, two-thirds asleep, taking star sights out of a basement classroom window. I wore the uniform over my pajamas on occasion. I sat there blinking back at the little signal light over the blackboard that, from the fall of ‘41 until the spring of ‘43, started my day with a fifteen minute drill in morse code.[7]

We learned about bourrelets and shell trajectories including counter-intuitive information — for example, if you fire a shell aimed at the horizon and simultaneously drop another overboard they’ll hit the surface at the same time — shades of Galileo. We learned about depth charges and the attendant problems of unintentionally blowing yourself out of the water, and we learned about torpedoes, although we were not yet informed that a great many of them malfunctioned early in the war. And there were drive trains and scuppers and scuttlebutts and lignum vitae propeller shaft bearings; protractors and Mercator projections and parallel rulers and compass rosettes. We dabbled in physics and astronomy and spherical trigonometry and maritime law; and we learned to march and salute and say sir a lot.

Down by the gymnasium we charged through a labyrinthian obstacle course. We swung along overhead ladders like so many great apes, clambered up cargo nets to high platforms and down again, and vaulted over formidable barriers. Finally, we cleared the big, deliberate mud puddle through a Tarzan maneuver involving a flying leap at a heavy, knotted rope hanging over the pit, with momentum and luck swinging us across. And, naturally, we learned to indoctrinate newcomers by tieing a thin black fish line to the lower end of the knotted rope, and pulling the rope aside when the victim was in mid leap while we hid in the bushes.

By the summer of 1942, six months or so after Pearl Harbor, there was no doubt in any of our minds that we were at war. Our country had already geared up for this war as for no other. Rationing was in effect; they stopped building private vehicles for the duration. For the duration was already a common term in those days. The whole country was a beehive of activity.

In each household, coffee tins of lard and bacon drippings in ice boxes (!) and the occasional refrigerator, were being chilled before they were turned in to help