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By Root 1770 0

and brilliant patriot by the name of William Donovan convinced his friend, President Franklin Roosevelt, that America needed a paramilitary arm that could operate behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and manage resistance forces. Donovan, a superb organizer and tough-minded individual who was awarded the Medal of Honor in World War I, formed an organization called the Office of the Coordinator of Information. This maverick organization was quickly stamped in the mold of its founder. Donovan, recalled to active service with the rank of colonel, set about to hire the brightest and the best. He carefully selected men and women from the armed forces as well as from civilian life—investment bankers, accountants, lawyers, actors, stuntmen, makeup artists, and photographers. Donovan trained them in parachuting, sabotage, silent killing, communications, and a host of behind-the-lines disciplines, including the recruitment and training of indigenous resistance forces. In 1942, the organization became known as the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, and Donovan was elevated to the rank of major general. The OSS set up operating bases in North Africa, England, India, Burma, and China.

In the European theater, three-man teams, assigned to an undertaking called the Jedburgh Project, left England at night and parachuted into occupied France, Norway, Belgium, and Holland. Behind German lines, they conducted the organization and training of resistance fighters, and managed the cross-Channel and cross–North Sea resupply of their partisans. Many Jedburghs who survived the war went on to serve as case officers and in the leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency, the successor to the OSS. There were many of them serving at the CIA well into the mid- and late 1970s, including the director of Central Intelligence, William Colby. During my own time at Langley, one of my division chiefs had been a Jedburgh and told some incredible stories. We “young hands,” fresh from combat in Vietnam, loved to encourage the Jedburghs to tell us stories of their operations. You don’t hear much about them, but they were among the greatest warriors of the Greatest Generation.

Some of the most spectacular OSS operations took place in Asia, specifically in Burma. There, OSS Detachment 101 organized the Kachin and Karen tribesmen into a force of fifteen thousand irregulars that killed many thousands of Japanese and wrecked their supply lines. American forces were stretched pretty thin in the Pacific and in Asia. One of our objectives was to keep China in the war. A great many Japanese divisions were engaged in the China and Burma theaters, much the same as the bulk of the German army was tied down by the Russians on the eastern front in Europe. Without the OSS irregulars, China may have been knocked out of the war, freeing those Japanese divisions to oppose our island-hopping campaign in the western Pacific. All this was accomplished with the relatively modest effort in men and material, an effort that was greatly appreciated by men like General Joe Stilwell, who commanded the China-Burma-India Theater.

Not all the irregular activity was undertaken by Donovan and the OSS. There were Army officers who, by inclination or necessity, became irregular-force leaders—men who worked with and fought alongside their partisans. Colonel Russell Volkmann, one of the architects of Army Special Forces, learned his trade on the job. Volkmann evaded capture by the Japanese on Bataan and took to the hills after the surrender of American forces in the Philippines. There he organized Filipino partisan groups in northern Luzon that by 1945 had grown to five divisions. Also in the Philippines, an Army reserve major named Wendell Fertig raised a partisan army that totaled twenty thousand irregular fighters by the end of the war. In keeping with the numbers under his command, Fertig informally promoted himself to the rank of general officer.

These behind-the-lines efforts were aided by two advantages that in one form or another still exist today in the SOF disciplines of foreign