Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II's OSS [Hardcover]

Patrick K. O'Donnell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2004

The battles of World War II were won not only by the soldiers on the front lines, and not only by the generals and admirals, but also by the shadow warriors whose work is captured for the first time in "Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs." Thanks to the interviews and narrative skills of Patrick O'Donnell and to recent declassifications, an entire chapter of history can now be revealed. A hidden war -- a war of espionage, intrigue, and sabotage -- played out across the occupied territories of Europe, deep inside enemy lines. Supply lines were disrupted; crucial intelligence was obtained and relayed back to the Allies; resistance movements were organized. Sometimes, impromptu combat erupted; more often, the killing was silent and targeted. The full story of the Office of Strategic Services -- OSS, precursor to the CIA -- is a dramatic final chapter on one of history's most important conflicts.

In a world made unrecognizable by the restrictions placed on the CIA today, OSS played fast and loose. Legendary chief "Wild Bill" Donovan created a formidable organization in short order, recruiting not only the best and brightest, but also the most fearless. His agents, both men and women, relied on guile, sex appeal, brains, and sheer guts to operate behind the lines, often in disguise, always in secret.

Patrick O'Donnell, called "the next Studs Terkel" by bestselling author Hampton Sides, has made it his life's mission to capture untold stories of World War II before the last of its veterans passes away. He has succeeded in extracting stories from the toughest of men, the most elite of soldiers, and, now, the most secretive of all: the men and women of OSS. From former CIA director WilliamColby, who parachuted into Norway to sever rail lines, to Virginia Hall, who disguised herself as a milkmaid, joined the French Resistance, and became one of Germany's most wanted figures, the stories of OSS are worthy of great fiction. Yet the stories in this book are all true, carefully verified by O'Donnell's painstaking research.

The agents of OSS did not earn public acclaim. There were no highly publicized medal ceremonies. But the full story of OSS reveals crucial work in espionage and sabotage, work that paved the way for the Allied invasions and disrupted the Axis defenses. "Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs" proves that the hidden war was among the most dramatic and important elements of World War II.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

No longer satisfied with gentlemanly intelligence gathering, with the advent of WWII the United States changed its espionage policy and opted for more daring tactics like decoding secret messages and detonating exploding cigars. Under the guidance of decorated WWI hero William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the Office of Special Services, the CIA’s predecessor, assembled a motley assortment of agents who set the stage for the Allied armies’ most important missions, like the invasion of North Africa and the storming of Normandy. Through first person narratives from a slew of OSS operatives, O’Donnell explores the thrilling world of spying before satellites and computer hacking boxed agents into cubicles. The WWII OSS hauled hardened criminals out of jail to burgle enemy embassies and culled spies from the Free French who fled to England and North Africa. The sophisticated seductress "Cynthia" used her sex appeal to gather ciphers for breaking Polish, Italian and Vichy codes from high-ranking military men. Elsewhere, Virginia Hall supplied the French Resistance with arms and continually sabotaged the Gestapo while limping with a wooden-leg. The book also chronicles psychological operations by the Allied "Sauerkraut agents" who demoralized German troops by spreading rumors of defeat, disease and desperation. The chapter on the OSS’ covert weapons, like exploding baseballs and umbrella pistols, vividly recalls 007’s pre-mission encounters with "Q." This book is far more than a simple historical survey and reads like a satisfying cloak and dagger yarn, making it a good choice both history and mystery buffs.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

O'Donnell, author of two books on U.S. elite units in World War II's European and Pacific theaters, turns to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and as in his previous books, writes from the perspective of the men--and in the OSS, some women--on the front lines. For the OSS, those lines were largely in German-occupied Europe, where operatives gathered intelligence and provided weapons, communications, and leadership to a wide variety of resistance organizations. The danger from the ruthless and frequently effective German forces was great, particularly for the local personnel. So, too, was the risk of being caught in factional quarrels in France and Italy and outright fratricidal slaughter in the Balkans. O'Donnell doesn't denigrate the OSS as do some other historians, who prefer other agencies and services that had turf fights with it throughout the war. Instead, he argues persuasively that the OSS made both material and psychological impacts on European resistance and, through it, on the Germans. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First edition. edition (March 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074323572X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743235723
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #739,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Combat historian Patrick K. O'Donnell has authored seven critically acclaimed books which recount the epic stories of America's troops in World War II, the Korean War, and the current conflict in Iraq. His bestseller Beyond Valor, which tells the gripping tales of U.S. WWII Ranger and Airborne veterans, won the William E. Colby Award for Outstanding Military History. His other books include Into the Rising Sun; Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs; We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder With the Marines Who Took Fallujah; The Brenner Assignment: The Untold Story of the Most Daring Spy Mission of WWII; They Dared Return; and Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean War's Greatest Untold Story - The Epic Stand Of The Marines Of George Company, which is his most recent work.

Reviewers from media outlets as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Jerusalem Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, C-SPAN, and National Public Radio (NPR) have hailed his publications. In addition, his books have been Main or Alternate selections of the Book-of-the-Month, History, and Military History Book-Clubs.

O'Donnell has appeared as a guest on countless television and radio shows on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and other networks. He served as a war correspondent for Men's Journal and Fox News, reporting on the conflict in Iraq from the perspective of the Marines on the ground. He has also written for Military History Quarterly (MHQ) and WWII Magazine and is a frequent contributor to a variety of nationally recognized blogs.

An expert on WWII espionage, special operations, and counter-insurgency on the modern battlefield, the historian has helped with production or writing for numerous documentaries produced by the BBC, the History Channel, and Fox News.

He also provided historical consulting for DreamWorks' award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers, as well as for the billion-dollar Medal of Honor game franchise.

His skills have even been tapped by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). For the agency, the historian worked on modern weapons systems for urban warfare, looked at historical counter-insurgency, and researched and analyzed German technology from WWII and how it can be applied to the modern battlefield.

Dedicated to preserving the stories of combat veterans for generations to come, O'Donnell founded the Drop Zone (www.thedropzone.org). The award-winning web site contains many of the 4,000 oral history interviews O'Donnell has personally conducted over the past twenty years with American combat veterans and their adversaries.

O'Donnell not only writes about combat--he's experienced it firsthand. He served as the only civilian combat historian to spend three months in Iraq documenting the experiences of troops in battle. He literally fought with a Marine rifle platoon in Fallujah, surviving several ambushes and once dragging a mortally wounded Marine from battle (www.wewereone.com).

Because he believes in experiencing the places and people he writes about firsthand, O'Donnell has travelled to nearly all of the battlefields of North America and many of the WWII battlefields in Northern Europe. In addition, each one of his books contains scores, if not hundreds, of oral history interviews he has personally conducted, combined with years of archival research (The Brenner Assignment, for instance, took 10,000 documents to produce.)

His websites include:

www.patrickkodonnell.com
www.givemetomorrowbook.com
www.theydaredreturn.com
www.thedropzone.org
www.brennerassignment.com
www.wewereone.com
www.facebook.com/patrickkodonnell

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, if a bit superficial, July 9, 2004

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II's OSS (Hardcover)

Patrick O'Donnell has now written three of these books. Each is a collection of oral histories from World War 2, the first following elite units in Europe, the second covering the same ground in the Pacific. This third volume is a collection of oral histories covering the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, in Europe.

The format is simple. The author collects the histories into a coherent narrative, provides some context, and pads the narrative with some text. The result is a recounting of various campaigns or actions from the ground level, right at the tip of the bayonet.

The difficulty, such as it is, comes from the context. There's nowhere near enough of it. The author (as noted elsewhere) speaks in this book as if the OSS did all or most of the infiltration into France and Germany during WW2, only briefly mentioning the French and British infiltrations that were more prevalent. The author focuses on the American forces, as he did in the previous two books, but here it's a bit more egregious. For one thing, the intelligence world is somewhat murky and indistinct, and its effect on the larger campaigns in the war is, to say the least, controversial. Given that we're not sure how much effect these actions had on the campaigns, the author's presentation is problematic. He tends to take whatever a spy says about the effect of an intelligence coup at face value, and expects the reader to do likewise. This is a bit much, at times.

Other than that, the book does feel a bit incomplete. One reviewer made an unfavorable comparison with M.R.D. Foot's SOE in France (which by the way should never have been allowed to go out of print); this comparison is unfair, as Foot's book was written in the Sixties, and the author had unprecedented access to classified documents and was allowed to interview a great number of people who were then alive. Though it was a great success, Foot's book cause such a controversy that critics succeeded in blocking publications of any further books by Foot or anyone else. O'Donnell's book is nowhere near as comprehensive, and couldn't be, given the differences in the way they were written.

This is a good book, if you understand it's limitations and gee-whiz-look-what-we-did attitude. I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A GRAND SLAM IN STORYTELLING, March 18, 2004

By 

Stephen Haas (Mercer Island, Washington USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II's OSS (Hardcover)

I bought the book and couldn't put it down after reading it straight through over the weekend. So much of O'Donnell's book contains new information on OSS and WWII. O'Donnell does a masterful job capturing OSS's most important missions and the incredible exploits of these men and women agents most of them untold until now. The narrative style of this book combined with oral history, allows it to read like some of Ambrose's classics like D-Day or Citizen Soldiers. O'Donnell has changed his style compared to his other books yet he still allows the voices of these incredible spies and Special Forces troops to speak

I was really stunned with what OSS did during the war: everything from creating the first SEALS; to blowing up bridges in Greece; to operation CROSS a team of 100 ex-German POWs trained to kill or kidnap Hitler. Some of the best chapters revolve around Greece and the Balkans which have hardly been touched by most historians. Also entertaining was the chapter revolving around spy gadgets created in OSS labs. OSS made everything from umbrella guns to cigarettes that were .22 caliber pistols to something called the "Truth Drug." The missions into Germany itself made my hair stand up in the back of head, especially, the stories from Jewish-American veterans that went back facing almost certain death if they were captured.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book is Great, April 4, 2004

By 

Mike Horn (Tampa, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II's OSS (Hardcover)

Pat O'Donnell has done it again. I read this book from cover to cover in just one day, and I think it's his best work yet. The stories of these real American heroes, told in their own words, really shows the emotions these men and women felt, and the hardships they endured 60 years ago. Most have maintained their vow of silence that long, both out of respect for the work that they did, but also because of some of the bad memories these experiences evoked. Pat O'Donnell got these heroes (no other way to describe them) to open up and relive some of their adventures and missions. The way that Mr. O'Donnell interwove their stories into his book made me wish that I had heard these stories first-hand, or even lived the adventure with them. Mr. O'Donnell has definitely succeeded in his mission to pull us into their world. I can't wait for the next book in his series.