The Secret War Report of the OSS [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION When I was engaged in collecting the material for Bodyguard of Lies, which was a history of strategy and stratagem for the invasion of France by Allied forces on 6th June 1944, I was conscious that there was a large gap in my research, one that could not be filled. Just as Bodyguard was published, however, it was filled, although it was too late to include any of the material in my volume. That gap was the War Report of the Office of Strategic Services, prepared under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt, in 1948, and kept securely under lock and key at the Central Intelligence Agency until its declassification in February 1976. I think now as I did when I was working on Bodyguard: the OSS official history was and is a vital and important document concerning the participation of the United States in one of the most secret aspects of World War II—the clandestine war with the ideologues of the Third Reich. This was not the account of the movements of great armies and vast air and sea fleets, nor of the immense clashes of arms that wrecked a continent. It is the history of what went on in the shadows to outwit and undermine the will of a mighty power —Germany—to impose its will on the rest of mankind. The secret war was as much a part of that vast conflict as it was of any other in history, except that this time, with ideologies sharpened and technology improved, its outcome was even more decisive than it was, shall we say, in the war waged against Europe by the Lord of Asia, Genghis Khan. Nor was the prosecution of the secret war of 1939-1945 any less bloody and violent than that of orthodox campaigning. General Sir Colin Gubbins, the chief of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which existed to set Europe ablaze, told me that per capita the secret war was bloodier than the Somme. The only difference was that the cries were muffled and, in many instances, the corpses were never found. The secret war of which OSS was part was largely the outcome of the dictum of Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain during the great conflict: Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he de-