Need to Know by Nicholas Reynolds

Author:Nicholas Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Preparing for Overlord

The coming Allied invasion of Europe demanded everyone’s full attention. Each of OSS London’s fourteen branches supported the preparations to the best of its ability: the academics in Research & Analysis prepared background papers for the army and studied the effects of strategic bombing; the propagandists in Morale Operations devised ways to undermine the enemy’s will to fight; the gadgeteers in Research & Development outfitted spies about to deploy to the continent; the counterspies in X-2 planned operations to protect Allied forces from German spies after D-day.49 First among equals were, not surprisingly, Donovan’s warriors in Special Operations (SO), followed at a good distance by the spies in Secret Intelligence (SI).

In early 1943, SO embarked on the journey it would take in tandem with SOE. OSS officers came to London to learn how SOE operated and configure SO London for combined operations.50 In March they were invited to observe “Spartan,” a field exercise in England that included a test of a novel concept “for dropping behind enemy lines, in cooperation with an Allied invasion of the Continent, small parties of officers and men to raise and arm the civilian population to carry out guerrilla activities against the enemy’s lines of communication.”51 Spartan would spawn a flagship of British-American-French cooperation in special operations.52 Under the randomly assigned codename “Jedburgh,” SOE and SO/London would jointly recruit, train, and equip three-man teams, each made up of one European officer, one British or American officer, and an enlisted radio operator, for insertion into France, Belgium, and Holland.

The next, bureaucratically intricate steps were to market the concept to the various American and British chains of command. In April, Bruce cabled Donovan asking him to buy into the initiative.53 In the fall, SO and SOE stepped up liaison with the Gaullist Free French, especially their intelligence Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), while OSS officers scoured army bases in the United States for soldiers who spoke foreign languages and were willing to volunteer for dangerous work overseas. OSS subjected the volunteers to pseudoscientific screening and preliminary training before allowing anyone to cross the Atlantic. Lt. Roger Hall was “tested morning, noon, afternoon and most of the night. . . . We filled in blanks, picked numbers, chose pictures, pulled levers, pushed buttons, and wrote page after page.”54 Even the irreverent Hall had to admit that the process seemed to work; apart from a few “goofs, misfits, and glory-seekers,” once they were screened and put to work, the commandos would fly high.55

In January 1944, an SOE/SO headquarters intended to coordinate “the activities of resistance groups in Northwest Europe with the actions of Allied invasion forces,” took its place under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), which was commanded by General Eisenhower.56 In February, the Jedburghs began three months of intense training at SOE facilities. Teams were formed and sabotage targets—primarily roads, railways, and telephone lines—selected. The principal goal was to impede the movement of German forces, especially those that might attack the beachhead in the days after the initial landing.

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