Series: OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War II

OSS in Action The Pacific and the Far East

Catoctin Mountain Park, Prince William Forest Park GOV NPS

Although the most publicized achievements of the OSS occurred in Europe and North Africa, Donovan’s organization also contributed to the war against Japan in the Far East. That contribution was mainly in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI), which American veterans of the CBI often call the “forgotten war” of World War II. But it was an important war and one in which the OSS made significant achievements. In the beginning, after the Japanese had pushed through most of Southeast Asia, they were finally stopped at the border of India. With the Burma Road severed, the Americans turned to an airlift and astonishingly supplied the Chinese by making thousands of flights “over the Hump,” across the Himalaya Mountains. OSS-led guerrillas, 10,000 Kachin tribesmen, helped undermine Japanese control in Burma, and the OSS established contact with other resistance movements in Thailand and Indochina. Most importantly, the fighting in China itself tied down the bulk of the Japanese Army throughout the war. Most of the members of OSS Special Operations, Operational Groups, and Communications, and many in Secret Intelligence, who served in the Far East had obtained at least part of their training at Training Camps A, B, or C in Catoctin Mountain Park and Prince William Forest Park.

OSS Director William J. Donovan had a long and strong interest in the Far East, dating back to his prize-winning senior thesis at Columbia on Japan’s emergence as a world power. In the interwar years, he made several trips to Asia, and a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Donovan established an office in Honolulu for liaison with the Army and Navy in the Pacific.¹ Within three months, he dispatched a representative to China to “improvise an underground apparatus.”²Donovan hoped his organization would play an important role in the war against the Japanese Empire.

General MacArthur Snubs the OSS

OSS tried but failed to gain significant access to the island-fighting war in the Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur, commander in the Southwestern Pacific, would have nothing to do with the OSS. He sneered at Donovan’s offers of assistance, insisting on exclusive control of all forces under his command and holding Donovan’s collection of amateurs in disdain. Whether MacArthur’s 1942 decision was made for practical or personal reasons, or both, it effectively excluded the OSS for most of the war.³ Donovan was not even able to outflank MacArthur, at least initially. In April 1943, the OSS chief sent an agent to try to convince Vice-Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey, whose naval forces assisted MacArthur, to allow OSS into the Southwest Pacific Area. But Halsey was not persuaded and finally told the man to “Get the hell out of here!”⁴

In the winter of 1944-1945, some OSS personnel, most of them trained in the National Parks in Maryland and Virginia, were sent to the Philippines as MacArthur’s forces landed first on Leyte and subsequently on the main island of Luzon. Some of these may have been with MacArthur’s authorization, others perhaps not. Delivered at night by submarines, they were deployed under the authority of Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. Army First Lieutenant Donald V. Jamison, a Native American, was put ashore on Luna, La Unión, in the Philippines in the fall of 1944. An OSS Special Operations officer, undoubtedly trained at the SO camps at Areas B and A, the 22-year-old Jamison was directed to engage in reconnaissance and demolition work behind Japanese lines. Later recalling the fierce battles in the Philippines, he said that he had first learned guerrilla skills as a boy on the Rincon Indian Reservation near San Diego. His father was a Seneca-Cayuga Indian from upstate New York, but his mother was a member of the Luiseno Band of Mission Indians in California. There he learned marksmanship, riding, and hunting in the wild. Recruited and trained in World War II first by the Army and then by the OSS, he was landed by submarine in the Philippines. He worked with Filipino resistance groups to hinder Japanese lines of communication and supply and impede the enemy’s opposition to the landings and advance of the U.S. Army. Afterwards, Jamison received several medals from the Philippine government and began a lifelong friendship with Ferdinand Marcos, a wartime guerrilla leader, who later became President of the Philippines.⁵

Admiral Nimitz Welcomes OSS Frogmen

In the Pacific Ocean Area, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the theater commander and commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, was less rigid than General MacArthur, although he too was reluctant, at least initially, to include the OSS. In 1943, Donovan offered OSS personnel for espionage, sabotage and “black propaganda” against Japan and its outposts in the Pacific, but neither Nimitz nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was interested.⁶ The next year in April 1944, when Donovan met with Nimitz at Pearl Harbor and showed him the list of the OSS’s specially trained units, the only group that interested the admiral was one from the Maritime Unit. Nimitz told Donovan, “I can use your swimmers.”⁷

The OSS operational swimmers, or “frogmen,” were part of the Maritime Unit that Donovan had established in 1942 with its training facilities first at Area A and then Area D on the Potomac River, and finally in the Bahamas and off California. Navy veteran and deep sea diver, John P. Spence from Tennessee, had been recruited by the OSS in 1942 for training in small boat handling and underwater demolition. He underwent SO paramilitary training at Area B and then combat swimming and demolition training at Area D. He remained at D as an OSS/MU instructor through the end of 1943. Spence was subsequently sent to the Bahamas where he trained frogmen for deployment in the Pacific. He is recognized by the OSS and by the Navy as “one of the first combat swimmers in the United States,” and in 2001, the Naval Academy celebrated him as “the last surviving member of the original five OSS combat swimmers.”⁸

When OSS established its West Coast schools in California in 1944 to prepare members from the various branches, SI, SO, MO, and MU, for service in the Far East, Marine Lieutenant Elmer (“Pinky”) Harris, the Washington State alumnus from Ketchikan, Alaska who was one of the original SO instructors at Areas B and A, was assigned temporarily as an instructor at the Underwater Swimming School at Catalina Island near Los Angeles. An able instructor, regardless of the subject, Harris had taught paramilitary techniques at Area B, then parachute skills at Area A before being sent in SO units to North Africa and Corsica. Afterwards, in early 1944, he was transferred to Brindisi, Italy to establish a parachute training school. Following medical treatment in the United States for severe abdominal pains, Harris was sent as an underwater demolitions instructor to the OSS school at Catalina Island in the summer of 1944.⁹

The OSS Maritime Unit had developed splayed, rubber swim fins for its swimmers and adopted a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, SCUBA, invented by Dr. Christian Lambertsen, who subsequently joined OSS. Donovan lent OSS Maritime Unit Group A to the Navy’s Underwater Demolitions Team Number Ten (UDT-10), and the two teams served together in the Pacific with Nimitz’s approval in 1944 and 1945. The OSS frogmen of MU-Group A, trained by John Spence, Elmer Harris, and others, participated jointly with Navy UDT-10 in pre-landing inspections and obstacle destruction in more than half a dozen Japanese held islands.¹⁰

Operational swimming was a dangerous business. Three members of a five-man OSS/Navy frogman team were lost in one of their first Pacific missions, the exploration of the Japanese fortified island of Yap in the western Carolines in August 1944. In the middle of the night, the submarine USS Burrfish launched the swimmers in two rafts from about two miles out, but paddling in, the men found a reef a quarter mile from shore. While two men held the rafts at the reef, the other three swam in to reconnoiter. The three had not returned when dawn approached and their comrades, believing them captured, returned to the submarine which submerged and left. The Japanese had captured them and transferred them by ship to the Philippines, but they were never located by the Allies. All five members of the team were awarded the Silver Star Medal, the military’s third highest decoration for bravery, three of them posthumously.¹¹

Before going to Yap, the ill-fated swimming team had already explored the Japanese defenses on Peleliu, and the Navy chose that island as the target for the Marines invasion in mid-September 1944. Nineteen-year-old Marine Sergeant Patrick Finelli from Newton, Massachusetts, had already been trained in demolitions and booby traps when the OSS obtained him as an operational swimmer in the summer of 1944. Recruited in California, he may have been trained first by Lieutenant Elmer Harris at Catalina Island. Beginning on 12 September, three days before the scheduled invasion of Peleliu, dressed only in swim trunks, sneakers and leather gloves, young Finelli and other OSS and Navy swimmers spent several days setting off more than a thousand demolition charges to clear entryways through the coral reef. “It was hot, thirsty, itchy, and terrifying work,” Finelli recalled. “The Japanese had their own swimmers hiding explosives in the coral reefs.” While in shallow water close to the beach, the men were shot at from shore. Most of the work was done during the day, but the Americans made one dive on a moonlit night. “That’s about the most frightening thing I’ve ever done,” Finelli said. “Your every movement creates phosphorescence, and every time you rub up against something you think it may be a big fish that wants to eat you or a Jap swimmer who wants to kill you.” On the day of the invasion, 15th September 1944, the swimmers used demolitions on the reef and also on shore. Several Japanese, armed with knives and bayonets, made a suicidal banzai charge at them. In the knife fight, Finelli suffered a number of cuts but survived and was treated for his wounds a naval hospital in Hawaii. After the war, Finelli worked for Polaroid until his retirement in 1993, and he continued to swim regularly at 83 years of age.¹²

Over the next several months, the OSS swimmers, working jointly with the Navy’s UDT-10, participated several other important campaigns, including the seizure of Ulithi, the invasion of the Philippines at Leyte and Luzon. In all sixteen of the combat swimmers in the joint OSS/Navy team were killed in action.¹³ The OSS “frogmen,” plus the Navy’s Underwater Demolitions Teams along with two or three other naval special operations units of World War II, are officially recognized as the forerunners of today’s Navy SEALS.¹⁴

Reginald Spear: OSS Agent Extraordinaire

One of the most extraordinary OSS Officers to serve in the Pacific, as an operational swimmer as well as a secret agent, was Reginald G. (“Reg”) Spear, a precocious young inventor and bold adventurer from California. After OSS training, Lieutenant Spear eagerly went on missions including frogman operations against Japanese fortified islands, penetrating a prisoner of war camp in the Philippines, and searching behind enemy lines in China for a missing espionage agent. Some of his missions were ordered personally by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Although born and raised in California, Spear was descended from a prominent family in England and Canada.¹⁵ At 18, Spear enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army. His high test scores and technical ability led to his being sent to Officers’ Candidate School at the Army Ordnance facility at Aberdeen, Maryland. In 1943, as a second lieutenant in the Ordnance Corps, he was recruited by the OSS, and then underwent training at Area F, the former Congressional Country Club, and RTU-11 (“the Farm”); he concluded his OSS training at Area B at Catoctin Mountain Park in January and February 1944.¹⁶His British and Canadian connections—Winston Churchill knew of his family—and his own talent and abilities led young Spear to be summoned several times to meet with President Franklin Roosevelt, sometimes at “Shangri-La,” the Presidential retreat at Catoctin Mountain Park. Roosevelt sent him on secret missions to work with the U.S. Navy and the British in the Pacific and in Asia.¹⁷ “I had a reputation,” Spear recalled. “They sent me for intelligence in the Pacific to work between the Americans and the British.”¹⁸ After his training concluded at Area B, the 20-year-old Spear and a fellow OSS Army officer arrived at Nimitz’s headquarters in Hawaii. The Admiral thought they should be in Navy uniforms if they were going to work for him. So he made them naval lieutenants. But according to Spear, Edward Layton, Nimitz’s intelligence chief, said, “If this young man gets caught by the Japanese in his activities, they will cut his head off. However, if he has an extremely high rank for someone so young, then they will believe that he must be someone special and treat him with more consideration.” So they gave Spear a naval captain’s uniform, equal in rank to an Army colonel, with eagles on his lapels.¹⁹

President Roosevelt swore Spear to secrecy about the missions he gave him, and Spear has maintained his silence on those to the present day.²⁰ But Spear was willing to discuss operations he undertook for Nimitz. In late summer 1944, following training in operational swimming off Maui, Spear made a clandestine inspection of Japanese occupied island of Peleliu, long before the planned invasion. A submarine put him ashore one night, and from native residents and from his own observations, he learned that the Japanese had heavily fortified the island with tunnels, caves, and concealed weapons bunkers. Spear returned with this information and its implication that it would be a very difficult assault.²¹ But the invasion of Peliliu proceeded on schedule, nevertheless, and the Americans suffered more than 7,000 casualties, making Pelilu one of the costliest invasions in the Pacific, foreshadowing the dug-in defenses and high casualties the following year on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. ²²

Spear also took part in a nighttime reconnaissance of Yap. The first mission to Yap in August, which had cost the lives of three swimmers, failed to produce useful intelligence. This time, the submarine commander hove to only a mile out, and Spear and his entire team paddled all the way to shore. They were soon discovered by a couple of Japanese sentries. But when one of the sentries used his rifle for a stranglehold and broke the trachea of a captive swimmer, the other Americans quickly killed the sentries with barehanded techniques Dan Fairbairn had taught them. Stacking the Japanese uniforms neatly in a pile and shoving the corpses into the outgoing tide so it would look like suicide, the OSS team moved out and surveyed the small island’s defenses. Well before dawn, they returned to their injured comrade and paddled back to the submarine. The pharmacist mate could not save the wounded frogman, who subsequently died and was buried at sea.²³ Nimitz canceled the invasion of Yap as unnecessary, and the bypassed island remained a harmless, isolated Japanese outpost until the end of the war.

Nighttime reconnaissance on Japanese-fortified islands was dangerous enough but walking into a Japanese internment camp for Allied prisoners of war in broad daylight, as Spear would do in December 1944, called for even steadier nerves. Only a few weeks before MacArthur’s forces were scheduled to land on Luzon, the Allies feared that the Japanese might massacre POWs and other internees rather than let them be liberated and possibly testify about war crimes. In mid-December, Japanese guards had indeed murdered nearly 150 Americans at a POW camp on Palawan, crowding them into woodcovered, air-raid ditches, pouring and igniting gasoline, and killing most of the prisoners.²⁴ Spear’s assignment on Luzon was to determine the possibilities of an impending massacre of the civilian and military prisoners at the Santo Tomas facility in Manila and whether the prisoners were fit enough to assist an attempt to liberate the camp by American paratroopers and Filipino guerrillas.²⁵

On the night of 4 December 1944, shortly before MacArthur’s forces began to land on Luzon, Spear paddled ashore from an American submarine to learn about the conditions of the prisoners at Santo Tomas²⁶ The spy’s cover was to pose as a junior assistant mining engineer from Canada working for a British-run, Filipino company in Luzon that was mining gold the Japanese wanted. There was a problem in the mine and the British manager was one of the internees at Santo Tomas. The American labels in Spear’s civilian seersucker suit had been replaced by ones from Victoria, Canada. He carried falsified identification cards and he wore a red armband that indicated that he was a friendly civilian authorized to visit the camp. When Spear arrived at the entrance, he found the guards at the gate busy with a large number of Filipino women. Spear joined the line and when he reached the gate, a harried Japanese guard looked quickly at his identification, glanced at his red armband, and then peered into Spear’s bag, which contained a packet of rice and twelve packs of cigarettes. “The guard reached in and took them all,” Spear said. “I argued with him. I got two packs back and went into the camp.”²⁷ There were three thousand American and other internees and prisoners of war in the camp. Because of his red armband, Spear was allowed to walk unhampered over to their area. For forty-five minutes, he talked with members of the POW executive, committee, including the mining company manager, and was able to get answers to the questions he had been given. Now he had to get that information back to the OSS.

The nearest clandestine radio station was deep in the rugged mountains north of Manila in a guerrilla hideout called “Victory Hill” operated by Filipinos and some American servicemen who had escaped when the U.S. forces in the Philippines surrendered in May 1942. Spear took a train to a town at the base of the mountains. From there, two guerrillas accompanied him on the long hike up the mountain, first along a narrow trail, then sloshing two miles up a shallow river, and finally up another trail until, behind some large boulders, they reached the guerrillas’ camp. Arriving around midnight, Spear was so exhausted that he laid down and fell asleep. In the morning, he wrote out his report on the POW camp. He went through the list of questions, including the key ones. Was it believed that the Japanese would murder the prisoners? Answer: No. Was the condition of the prisoners critical? Answer: Yes. The radio operator sent them out immediately.²⁸

His mission accomplished, Spear and his guide walked back down the mountain and from town, he was taken by truck to the coast where the submarine was supposed to wait for him. Spear was a little late. The submarine was not there. Its skipper had been unwilling to remain any longer. “We radioed the sub, and it came back, but farther up the coast,” Spear said. “I had to run three or four miles up the beach to reach it.”²⁹ Two months later, the prisoners at Santo Tomas POW camp were successfully rescued on 16 February 1945 by the U.S. Army and Filipino guerrillas.³⁰

Later in 1945, Reginald Spear was sent on a secret mission behind Japanese lines in northern China. A Chinese businessman in New York City, Dr. Konrad Hsu, an authority and an entrepreneur in radio technology, had been selling equipment to the British clandestine services in China and India, and the British wanted to recruit him and tap the influential Hsu clan in northern China as an agent network. The British Secret Intelligence Service initially planned to run the operation using one of the Canadian government’s communications networks rather than those of the British or Americans, perhaps to deceive the Chinese spy network. In the end, however, SIS needed thefinancing that only Donovan’s organization could provide. But although OSS funded the “Oyster” project (code-named after Konrad Hsu’s fondness for shellfish), SIS alone coordinated the operation and maintained direct contact with Hsu in regard to it.³¹ Reg Spear was called when one of SIS’s Chinese contacts lost contact with his wife, who was serving as a top British agent. “They sent me into China to find her,” he explained.³² And he did find her.³³ Once again, mission accomplished.

For his extraordinary service during World War II, Reginald Spear was awarded the Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, and the Legion of Merit.³⁴

China-Burma-India Theater (CBI): The “Forgotten” War

In the Far East, World War II began in 1937 with the Japanese invasion of China. Over the new few years, Tokyo expanded its control over most of the urban-industrial areas of the coast and along the main rivers. The occupied areas of China were forced to supply Japan with foodstuffs, raw materials, and industrial goods. Beginning in December 1941, when Japan attacked America, British, and Dutch territories, Tokyo rapidly extended its empire south and west in the Pacific and through Southeast Asia to the India-Burma border. Despite these widespread conquests and their subsequent defense against counterassaults launched by Anglo-American forces, the bulk of the Japanese Army remained engaged in China throughout the war.

The Western Allies gave priority to defeating Nazi Germany. The campaign against Japan received fewer resources. There Roosevelt’s strategy emphasized islandhopping Army and Navy offensives through the Pacific toward the Japanese home islands. He viewed China’s main role as tying down and grinding up as many Japanese Army divisions as possible, as the Soviet Union did to the German Amy. That would result in fewer Japanese soldiers to fight the Americans in the Pacific.³⁵ The United States would supply China with loans, weapons, material, and advisers, but not many American troops. There was considerable fighting in China, but it usually saw the Chinese on the defensive.³⁶ For most of the war, the Chinese were reluctant to suffer the heavy casualties generated by offensive operations. Primarily through conscription of young peasants, the Chinese maintained armies totaling between three and four million men. Inadequately supplied, trained, and led, they still, by their very presence, tied down about 1.2 million Japanese troops.³⁷

Even in areas still under Chinese control, power remained fragmented. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government had to contend with various personal factions, regional warlords, and Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) and his band of communists.³⁸ The communist forces had sought refuge in the mountains of the North, but like Chiang’s government had spies everywhere. Jockeying for position while the Americans defeated Japan in the Pacific, both Chiang and Mao sought primarily to strengthen their forces for their inevitable postwar struggle for control of China.

With the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI) designated as of secondary importance and thus not receiving comparatively few Americans troops, Donovan believed it was ripe for unconventional warfare. With the Japanese empire overextended, the OSS would seek to harness the latent opposition to the conquerors. Much of the areas to be contested in the CBI, particularly in Southeast Asia, were either sparsely populated or actual jungle, and this, together with thinly spread occupation forces, made the situation conducive for guerrilla warfare by indigenous groups, organized, armed, and directed by the OSS.³⁹ Donovan found some grudging acceptance from Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, the top American commander in the China-Burma-India Theater. A crusty old soldier, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell had the unenviable task seeking to get Chiang Kai-shek to use the support the United States was providing for offensive action against the Japanese instead of allowing it to be dispersed through corruption or rivalries or stockpiled for postwar use.⁴⁰

Detachment 101: OSS Success in Burma

In the dark days of early 1942, as the Japanese drove back the Allies everywhere, Donovan sought out Stilwell about a role for the OSS in the Far East. The result was OSS Detachment 101, the first composite SO/SI group, which ultimately proved to be one of the greatest successes of Donovan’s organization. Its activities in Japanese-occupied Burma between 1942 and 1945, resembled, perhaps more than those of any other OSS detachment, the mission and capability of the modern Special Forces of the U.S. Army.⁴¹ It is often cited as the first unit in U.S. military history created specifically for conducting unconventional warfare operations behind enemy lines.⁴²

Detachment 101 began in April 1942 with Major (later lieutenant colonel) Carl Eifler and two dozen men. A barrel-chested, no-nonsense, law enforcement and reserve Army officer, Eifler was the son of an oil field worker in Los Angeles. A high school dropout, he served in the Army as a private, then later worked for the Los Angeles Police Department and subsequently the U.S. Customs Service, doing undercover work to catch smugglers on the Mexican border. In 1940, he was appointed chief Customs Inspector in Hawaii. He had become a reserve Army officer, and was called to active duty in 1941. He first commanded a company in the 35th Infantry Regiment in Honolulu and after the Pearl Harbor attack, a military police unit guarding enemy alien detainees in Hawaii. Six-feet, two-inches tall and weighing 250 pounds, Eifler was an imposing figure in his early forties. Strong as a bull, he had a bellowing voice, gruff demeanor, and fierce temper. His energy and enthusiasm had impressed Stilwell who responded to Donovan’s request by recommending Eifler to head the unit being sent to him in the China-Burma-India Theater.⁴³ The rest of the cadre was quickly chosen, mainly through personal acquaintance. From the 35th Regiment, Eifler picked his First Sergeant, Vincent Curl, a tall Midwesterner, and his executive officer, Captain John Coughlin, a West Pointer. Coughlin chose several others he knew and trusted, including Lieutenant William R. (“Ray”) Peers, an infantry officer and a UCLA and ROTC graduate. At Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., Eifler and Coughlin were guests of General M.B. Halsey and his wife. Mrs. Halsey, later called the “Mother of 101,” took an interest in the fledgling detachment and recommended several promising recruits, including Lieutenant Floyd R. Frazee, who had been a jeweler and was worked with small tools; and Jack C. (“Jack”) Pamplin, a civilian attorney, who subsequently volunteered for the Army was made a sergeant and was assigned “detached duty” to Eifler’s Detachment 101. While in Washington Eifler also recruited four other lieutenants, Bill Wilkinson, Frank Devlin, Harry Little, and Phillip Huston, plus Sergeant Allan Richter and some other sergeants, and a Chinese American named Chun Ming.⁴⁴

The initial group of Detachment 101 was split into two sections for training. Eight men went to SOE’s Camp X outside Toronto. That section included Eifler and most of the other officers, Coughlin, Devlin, Frazee, plus Sergeant Curl, Chun Ming, and a man from Donovan’s headquarters identified only as “Ben.” They trained for two weeks under British instructors at Camp X. Meanwhile, at OSS Area B at Catoctin Mountain Park, nearly a dozen other members of Detachment 101 went through two weeks training under American instructors headed by Charles Parkin. The Catoctin trainees included a couple of Detachment 101’s officers, including Lieutenant William (“Ray”) Peers, plus nine sergeants. Among the sergeants, many of whom would later become officers, were Vincent Curl, John C. (“Jack”) Pamplin, Irby E. Moree, George T. Hemming, and Donald Eng. Allen Richter was off buying radio equipment in New York City, but augmenting the trainees was an officer who was not a member of Detachment 101, Lieutenant Nichol Smith, who would be sent to France and subsequently to Thailand, This was apparently the first group to be trained at Area B.⁴⁵

Reunited after their separation at the two camps, Eifler’s two dozen men departed from Norfolk, Virginia in May and arrived in India in July 1942. The original objective of the group had been to conduct intelligence and paramilitary operations in China, but when Stilwell flew down from Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital in Chungking (Chongqing), he directed Eifler to set up a base in northern India, learn how to operate in the jungle, and penetrate Japanese occupied Burma. Stilwell had only minimal resources, and he needed help in preparing a campaign to retake the Burma Road, the main overland supply route across the mountains to China. Meanwhile, supplies were being airlifted from Assam, India to Kunming, China by hundreds of transport planes flying through the mountain passes of the Himalayas (over “The Hump” as it was called).⁴⁶ The Japanese were attacking the transport planes from their airbase at Myitkyina (pronounced “MITCH-in-aw”) in northern Burma. Go in behind enemy lines and blow up the road and railroad bridges that enable the Japanese to supply the Myitkyina airbase, Stilwell ordered. A man of few words and short temper, “Vinegar Joe” allegedly dismissed the Detachment 101 commander by stating, “Eifler I don’t want to see you again until I hear a boom from Burma.”⁴⁷

Detachment 101 would ultimately give him those “booms.” After a shaky start, it established itself as “the most effective tactical combat force in the OSS.”⁴⁸ But first it faced formidable obstacles in the Burmese tropical jungles and the victorious Japanese Army. Northern Burma, an area larger than New England, contained rugged hills, mountains and thick, largely unexplored jungle. Movement on the ground was torturously slow, trails had to be cut through the thick vines and underbrush. For much of the year, the weather was a major impediment. In the spring temperatures soared above 100 degrees with high humidity. The summer brought torrential rains of the Monsoon, producing rot and rust. Diseases—malaria, dysentery, cholera—were rampant.⁴⁹ Ubiquitous mosquitoes, blood-sucking leeches, and deadly snakes were constant hazards. Nicol Smith, an Area B graduate who would stop at Detachment 101 Headquarters on his way to China with a contingent of Free Thais, recalled being awakened at night by the deep roar of a tiger and the high-pitched shrieks of gibbons and of finding a coiled and angry King Cobra under the table.⁵⁰

Without combat experience and with only their prior training, the initial group set up a secret base in and old tea plantation near Nazira in northern Assam, India just across the border from Burma. They recruited and trained some Anglo-Burmese and native Burmese to serve as intelligence agents, radio operators, and saboteurs. At the Detachment 101 training school at the secret base, American and native instructors offered at minimum a basic three-month course before the agents went into the field. As in the United States, longer training was required for more specialized skills such as radio operation.

Detachment 101: Communications in the Jungle

With agents being infiltrated over thousands of square miles of mountainous jungles, Detachment 101 faced the problem of establishing a communications network. In the signal unit, Donald Eng and Allen R. Richter solved the problem. Eng had been at Area B, but Richter, alone among the two dozen, had been at neither Area B nor Camp X. Instead, while the paramilitary training was going on, Richter, who had been in the communications industry, had been assigned to purchase radio supplies directly from stores in New York City. By the time the others had graduated from the training schools, Richter had assembled the materials—tubes, wires, another components—that they would need.⁵¹

From the OSS base at Nazira, the target area, Myitkyina airfield was 150 air miles away by air or 400 miles by land. Richter and Eng set up a base station at Nazira, but what was needed were relatively lightweight portable wireless radios that the agents could carry and that could transmit and receive messages over the mountains. The two of them designed a prototype by December 1942; it weighed 50 pounds including the battery and carrying case. The transmitter was a straightforward crystal oscillator and amplifier, usually a pair of 6V6s; radio tubes depended on what they had on hand; the receiver was a three-tube regenerative design using assorted materials. They built the containers for the prototype radios out of materials they scrounged from local airports. “We used the aluminum belly skins from crashed planes,” Richter recalled. “It still needed to be put into something strong, yet lightweight, so it could be carried. The manager of the tea plantation came to the rescue by supplying us with boards used to make wooden apple crates. It worked out fine.”⁵² “We called it the Burma Radio,” Richter said proudly, “and it could transmit 1,500 miles!”⁵³

The forerunner of the OSS SSTR-1, “suitcase radio,” it made Detachment 101 self-sufficient. Natives and Americans were trained how to use it, but one of the complaints that instructor Jack Pamplin had when he returned to Washington was that although most of the “commo” operators being sent from Area C were fast enough, they were not adequately trained in how to repair and maintain the equipment in the harsh jungle environment. “Stress [the] fact that a fast operator is not necessarily a good one,” Pamplin advised OSS “commo” instructors, “for the Far East, a resourceful operator is the ideal.”⁵⁴ At the same time, the chief of the OSS Communications Branch, Colonel Lawrence (“Larry”) Lowman, praised the work of the “commo” men in Burma for their innovation and for the delivery of intelligence and other information even in the most adverse conditions. “Our work has, we believe, played a unique, successful and important part in the realization of the overall OSS objectives in this war.”⁵⁵

Detachment 101: Taking on the Japanese in Burma

Beginning early in 1943, Detachment 101 made a series of long-range penetrations deep into the jungle in Japanese occupied North Burma by airdrop, the first airdrops made by the OSS. One of these teams blew up the railway leading to Myitkyina in eighteen places, but one member of the team was killed by a Japanese patrol, another captured, and in a premature explosion, a Burmese saboteur blew up himself as well as a bridge.⁵⁶ Soon the detachment became more proficient. In August 1943, the “Knothead” mission, commanded by now Captain Vincent Curl, assisted by now Lieutenant Jack Pamplin, dropped into the upper Hukawng Valley, less than a hundred miles from the Japanese airfield. By the end of 1943, OSS had six such permanent, if mobile, bases in the North Burma area, one of them positioned an agent atop a hill only ten miles from the Myitkyina and overlooking and reporting on activity at the airfield. Each base was staffed by a combat nucleus of eight or ten Americans. These Detachment 101 teams learned the region and recruited indigenous people as guides, spies, and guerrillas.

The OSS teams also served the 10th Air Force, rescuing downed aviators and providing detailed locations of targets that the Japanese had carefully hidden in the jungle: key bridges built just under the river surface, munitions and petroleum depots covered by camouflage netting or the jungle canopy, and underground bunker and aircraft hangers.⁵⁷ By the end of 1943, 80 percent of 10th Air Force’s targets in the area resulted from OSS information.⁵⁸ “The target designation by our men has been most accurate, and the Air Force [pilots] are finding these targets without ever seeing them,” Peers reported. “We receive a message that four furlongs from X road junction along the Kamaing Road, 60 yards in, there is a group of 300 Japs and 15 supply bashas, these all in the jungle. This is given to the Air Force who plot it and designate it by aerial photo. Their flights go over and thoroughly bomb and strafe this area, and as a result, huge clouds of black billowy smoke issue forth, showing the presence of petrol and various other stores. The Japs know that these cannot be seen from the air and know they must be designated by somebody on the ground, and as a consequence, our people are very much sought after by the armed forces of the Mikado. However, not only do we designate the targets, but we also give them [the Air Force] their results. The best one we have had thus far is one target designated southeast of Kamaing in which 30 cart loads of dead Japs were hauled away.”⁵⁹

Crucial to the success of Detachment 101’s missions was the recruitment, organization, arming and direction of indigenous agents and guerrillas. In Northern Burma, the OSS recruited primarily Kachins (“Kah-CHINs”), fiercely proud and able mountain people. They despised the Japanese invaders, and the Americans drew on that hated. Some OSS officers, like Jack Pamplin explained that the Kachins’ loyalty to the OSS reflected the fact that the Americans treated them with respect, unlike their previous overlords, the British.⁶⁰ Others, like Carl Eifler believed that the OSS purchased their loyalty by supplying with what they wanted: food, weapons, medicine, silver coins, and opium.⁶¹ Whatever the reasons, the OSS was able to mobilize eleven thousand guerrillas, whom they called the “Kachin Rangers.”⁶²

Small, wiry tribesmen who were natural hunters, Kachins served as guides, spies, and warriors. They could follow invisible tracks through the jungle or across towering mountains. In keeping with tradition and for hacking through the jungle and other purposes, each warrior carried a long curved sword called a dah. But they now also learned to use the weapons the Americans supplied: rifles, submachine guns, and grenades. They had their own aggressive way of fighting the Japanese. When Stilwell expressed skepticism to one Kachin tribal leader about how many Japanese he had killed. The Kachin emptied a bamboo tube he carried and out spilled a pile of human ears. “Count them and divide by two,” he told the startled general.⁶³

The Kachins showed the Americans how to survive in the jungle and how to surprise and kill the enemy there. They constructed home-made booby-traps with trip wires and crossbows. OSS in Washington devised a diabolic anti-personnel device, a small hollow spike topped with a .30-caliber rifle cartridge and a pressure detonator. The device was buried below the surface on a trail used by the enemy; when stepped upon, it fired the bullet straight up through the foot and possibly the rest of the body.⁶⁴ The Kachins also used dagger-sharp, pointed bamboo sticks several feet long, called panji, which they implanted at an angle in the jungle undergrowth on either side of a trail where they planed an ambush. When the Kachins, using submachine guns supplied by the Americans, attacked the front and rear of a column, the Japanese soldiers in the middle would dive for cover, impaling themselves on the deadly, spear-like panji.

Among the OSSers who witnessed such an ambush was Lieutenant John C. Hooker, Jr., from Atlanta, Georgia. Hooker had trained at Areas A and F in 1944, and taken part in Maritime Unit raids along the Arakan coast of southern Burma, before being assigned briefly to Detachment 101 in early 1945. For several weeks, Hooker participated in airdrop supply missions, and then in March1945, he jumped near Lashio and spent nearly three weeks with a field team and their native guerrillas. As the Kachins prepared an ambush, Hooker watched them cut and plant “panji” stakes along side. Then, Kachin teams with British Bren submachine guns hid themselves at each end of a 200 yard stretch of trail. “The action was quick,” Hooker recalled. “The Japanese platoon-size force of about fifty men entered the site, and in five minutes all were dead. The advanced guard of the element was picked off by Kachin snipers a half mile south of the ambush. When the smoke cleared I had emptied both twenty round magazines of my gun. The [Kachin] Rangers went among the dead clipping off ears….Each man had a bamboo tube on a cord slung around his neck where he stored his trophies.”⁶⁵

Donovan Lands behind Enemy Lines

Both Donovan and Eifler were strong-willed, self-assured, competitive men, who enjoyed the thrill of danger. Eifler did not take criticism easily, so when on a visit to Detachment 101 Headquarters in December 1943, the OSS chief chastised him about ambiguities in his operational reports, Eifler bristled and replied with a challenge: “Would the General like to go behind the lines and see for himself?” Donovan paused, smiled tightly and snapped, “When do we leave?” “First thing in the morning, sir,” Eifler replied.⁶⁶

The trip in a small unarmed, unescorted plane would carry the two men 150 air miles behind Japanese lines. Normally senior officers were not sent behind enemy lines for fear of their being captured and tortured to provide high-level information. In accepting Eifler’s challenge and indulging his own sense of honor and adventure, Donovan, who knew many of the highest operational plans and secret intelligence sources of the Allies including the breaking of the Japanese and German codes, was taking an enormous and unjustified risk. His capture by the Japanese would have been a disaster for the Allies.

The night before the flight, Donovan shared quarters with Lieutenant Colonel Nicol Smith, a former author who had trained with Ray Peers at Area B, served in France, and was currently escorting a group of Free Thais to China. Smith wondered why the OSS director was risking so much. “General, aren’t you risking your life?” Smith asked at last. “Everything is a risk,” Donovan replied. “My boys are risking their lives every day.” Years later, one of his biographers, Richard Dunlop asked Donovan the same question, and the general told him that he had been carrying an L pill, one of OSS’s lethal cyanide tablets⁶⁷ In the morning, Donovan asked Smith to hold his wallet and identification papers until he returned. “If anything goes wrong, it’ll be just as well if I’m incognito,” Donovan explained. “That’s an understatement, General,” Smith replied.⁶⁸ After breakfast, Donovan at first refused the parachute Eifler offered. “I’ll ride the plane down if we crash,” he said. “I can’t afford to be captured.” To which the boastful Eifler retorted, “General, if we land within fifteen feet of the enemy, I will bring you back. Please put on your chute.”⁶⁹

With both wearing parachutes, Eifler flew the little two-seat plane over the dense jungle, past Japanese outposts, and in about two hours landed at the short camouflaged airstrip of OSS camp Knothead, on the opposite side of a mountain range from Myitkyina airfield. On the ground, Donovan spent several hours talking with Captain Vincent Curl and his men and, through an interpreter, some of the Kachin. The visit over, Donovan and Eifler left in a hair-raising takeoff, as the little plane, overloaded by a combination of new fuel and the burly Eifler and Donovan, each weighing over 200 pounds, barely cleared a gap in the trees at the end of the airstrip. Elated, Donovan returned to Nazira in a jubilant mood, but Lieutenant Colonel John Coughlin, executive officer of Detachment 101, who had been away, pulled him aside and demanded: “General, what were you thinking about to go in there with Carl?” Donovan replied simply, “I had to.” “You should have considered more things than your damned honor,” Coughlin snapped. “If I’d been there, I would have reminded you of every one of them.”⁷⁰ Subsequently, citing medical reasons, Donovan sent Eifler back to the United States and replaced him with Lieutenant Colonel Ray Peers.⁷¹ The burly Eifler returned to Washington in 1944 a legend as a successful jungle commander and the “deadliest colonel.” He gave lectures at OSS training camps in the United States and then was given a series of important assignments by Donovan for missions, including training teams of Korean and American saboteurs to be sent into Korea and Japan itself, but the war ended before Eifler’s teams, trained in the United States, could be deployed to the Far East.⁷²

Detachment 101: Driving Back the Japanese

Beginning in 1944, Detachment 101 went beyond intelligence gathering, sabotage, and harassment of the enemy to provide direct assistance to a major Allied offensive to capture Myitkyina airfield and drive the Japanese out of Burma. The main Anglo-American offensive included Merrill’s American “Marauders” and the Wingate’s British “Chindits” but their received valuable assistance from the OSS and their Kachin tribesmen. The few hundred Americans and their indigenous guerrillas ambushed enemy troops, severed their lines of communication and supply, undermined Japanese resources and morale, and provided scouts to guide the spearheads of the attack,”⁷³ Under Peers command, Lieutenant Vincent Curl’s team in the jungle and other field units began to organize attack groups of Kachins to coordinate with the conventional forces. Kachins also were assigned to provide intelligence about Japanese deployments and to guide and assist the advancing columns of Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill. By April 1944, Peers reported to Donovan that the collection of intelligence had been surpassed by the “sharp increase in the actual combat functions of our patrols.”⁷⁴

Among those leading such combat-oriented Kachin patrols was Lieutenant Joseph E. Lazarsky from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The former sergeant and demolitions instructor at Area B had graduated from OCS and been sent to China in 1943, but after six months there, he was summoned by Peers to Burma. Lazarsky speaks modestly and in short and somewhat elliptical sentences when he describes his role. “A plane got shot down. Ray Peers got left with no one to take over the drops into the jungle….I taught some Americans how to run a drop into the jungle. We dropped throughout Burma, 45 agents—Anglo-Burmese, Kachin….Once in the Burma jungles, we tied up with the Kachins. I had demolitions. I recruited Kachins and was made commander of the 1st Kachin Battalion. I had seven Americans and five Britishers with me. My sergeant major was a top Kachin. He spoke English. He had been in the Kachin Rifles in the British Army. But earlier in the war, before I got there, he had been captured by the Japanese, who tortured him to try to make him talk. They gave him the hot water treatment. They poured scalding hot water down his throat. He lost his voice almost completely. Only a whisper. We were going to lay an ambush, and he and I discussed it. We ambushed the Japanese at Lashio and many other places in Burma.”⁷⁵

OSS and its indigenous guerrillas went behind hit and run tactics to stand and fight engagements against regular troops in the final Allied campaigns against the Japanese in Burma in 1944 and 1945. Under Peers, Detachment 101 expanded the recruitment and training of the Kachins, and it organized them into virtually a small Army, nearly 10,000 tribesmen in ten battalions directed by officers like Lazarsky, Pamplin, and Curl. Through the use of mobilized indigenous guerrilla forces and the provision of combat assistance as well as intelligence information to the spearheads of advancing conventional forces Detachment 101 was instrumental in the first major Allied military success in North Burma, the defeat of an elite Japanese division and the capture of Myitkyina airfield in August 1944. The role continued as additional Allied conventional troops pressed forward to capture Bhamo and Lashio.⁷⁶

In the attack on Lashio, the key to the Burma Road, Lazarsky, of the 1st Kachin Battalion, led off, attacking Japanese infantry and motorized columns on the Burma Road itself. The Japanese chased him with infantry, artillery and tanks. Although withdrawing, he continued to ambush his pursuers. When Lazarsky reached his re-supply airfield, his unit dug in and beat the Japanese back in a three day battle.⁷⁷ The heaviest prolonged fighting by Detachment 101, and some of the heaviest fighting in all of Burma, was done by the 3rd Kachin Battalion. Among junior officers was Lieutenant Roger Hilsman, a West Pointer, who had arrived with Merrill’s Marauders, been wounded, and subsequently joined Detachment 101.⁷⁸ At Lawksawk, facing a thousand Japanese in a fortified position, the 3rd Kachin Battalion of roughly equal size surrounded the field fortifications. The Kachins first attacked directly amidst withering enemy fire and hurt but did not overcome the enemy. The OSS called in air support, but although the fighter bombers damaged the fortifications and inflicted many casualties, the Japanese remained entrenched if still surrounded. Finally in desperation, the Japanese defenders counterattacked in a banzai charge against one segment of the Kachin line, 700 Japanese soldiers against 400 Kachin Rangers and Hilsman and the other American officers. But showing extraordinary discipline and courage, the Katchin tribesmen from their positions in the jungle withstood repeated charges over several hours by the Japanese soldiers, and the Kachins eventually gained a costly but important victory in the siege at Lawkswak.⁷⁹ The campaign to reopen the Burma Road was complete with the capture of Lashio in March 1945. Thereafter, the OSS unit and its guerrilla battalions attacked scattered enemy forces in eastern Burma and sought to block the flight of the Japanese into Thailand. The Japanese Army in Burma surrendered in Rangoon on 28 August 1945.

Detachment 101 amply demonstrated the possibilities of unconventional warfare that Donovan advocated and the multiplier effect of innovative, energetic, well-trained special operations leaders. It had begun with only two dozen Americans in 1942 and part of 1943 before the dramatic expansion of 1944 and 1945. Even at its peak strength, Detachment 101 had only 131 officers and 558 enlisted men, with 120 Americans serving out in the jungles at any given time. A dramatic multiplier, they mobilized, armed, supplied, and directed an indigenous guerrilla force of 10,000 men. They played an important role in defeating the Japanese in Burma.⁸⁰ In addition to their role as guides, rescuers, intelligent agents, and guerrillas, the men of Detachment 101 killed 5,500 Japanese soldiers, killed or seriously wounded and estimated 10,000 other Japanese soldiers; blew up 51 bridges, derailed 9 trains, destroyed or captured 277 trucks or other vehicles, and demolished 2,000 tons of ammunition, gasoline or other Japanese supplies.⁸¹ The cost was 27 Americans, 338 indigenous guerrillas, and 40 native espionage agents killed.⁸²

Early in the final campaign, Carl Eifler told instructors at Areas A, E, and F that the most important part of OSS training was to inspire students with the organization’s mission and the need for flexibility and innovation to achieve it. He stressed the importance of “aggressiveness and a driving energy to get the OSS’s job done.” Given the current urgent demand for men in the field, Eifler explained in July 1944, “the selection of the right men for the jobs, aggressive men with drive and determination, is more important than the training we can give them.” Peers, who had succeeded him as Detachment 101 commander, disagreed with the latter part. While Eifler did not consider providing trainees with background knowledge of a country, its society, politics, and culture, to be very important, Peer saw it as essential and recommended increased background, a kind of area studies, be provided by to American trainees in OSS schools in the United States.⁸³

For its heroic and effective action in clearing northern Burma, Detachment 101 received a Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation. The citation, issued by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as Army Chief of Staff in 1946, represented particularly high praise from the head of the Regular Army: “The courage and fighting spirit displayed by the officers and men of Service Unit Detachment No. 101, Office of Strategic Services, in this successful offensive action against overwhelming enemy strength, reflect the highest traditions of the armed forces of the United States.”⁸⁴

OSS Detachment 404 Raids the South Burma Coast

While OSS Detachment 101 fought in the mountainous jungles of northern Burma, OSS’s Arakan Field Unit of Detachment 404 sent its nearly 200 OG, SI, and MU personnel on more than three dozen missions from 1944 to 1945 on raids along the mangrove filled Arakan coast of southern Burma.⁸⁵ Detachment 404 was headquartered in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as was the Allies’ Southeast Asia Command under British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, with which it coordinated its actions. With eventually 595 personnel in Ceylon Detachment 404 was responsible for OSS operations the southern Burma coast, Thailand, southern French Indochina (Cambodia and southern Vietnam), Malaya and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Headed first by Col. Richard P. Heppner, Detachment 404 included not simply the Arakan Field Unit, but personnel from most of the OSS branches. Its Research and Analysis Unit, responsible for finding information about industrial targets for bombing in Japanese occupied countries in its region, was headed by Cora Du Bois, a specialist in Southeast Asia, who had bean an instructor at Sarah Lawrence College with degrees in anthropology from Columbia and the University of California when the OSS recruited her.⁸⁶

The Operational Group section of the Arakan Field Unit of Detachment 404 had trained at Areas F and A. Headed by Major Lloyd E. Peddicord from Dotham, Alabama, with Captain George H. Bright as its operations officer, the OG included 19-year-old Lieutenant John C. Hooker, Jr., from Atlanta, Georgia, and Lieutenant Louis A. O’Jibway, a full-blooded American Indian from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The entire team had trained at Areas F and A in the early summer of 1944.⁸⁷Subsequently, from December 1944 to February 1945, first from Ceylon and later from Akyab, Burma, they were transported in Maritime Unit fastboats. These were similar to Navy PT (Patrol Torpedo) boats but shorter and without torpedo tubes. From these fastboats, the OSS teams were put ashore in their rubber boats and searched the shoreline and nearby villages in advance combat scouting groups before the main units arrived by landing craft. On some of their nighttime reconnaissance trips, their mission was to determine if Japanese troops were in force on or near the beach. Sometimes they were. At Ramtree Island, on the night of 19 January 1945, Bright’s team killed two Japanese sentries on the beach, and enemy mortar shells soon started raining down on them. Bright, Hooker, and O’Jibway and their teams quickly paddled out to the waiting fast boats and sped away. The OSS men returned the next night in a 110-foot, heavily armed, British motor launch to a nearby river. Bright was in charge. Hooker’s team, armed with Browning Automatic Rifles and M-3 submachine guns, was scattered around the forward deck. With muffled engines, the launch moved up the narrowing river through the jungle. About 3 a.m. they reached an area so narrow the tree branches scrapped the sides of the boat. “Suddenly all hell broke loose. Unseen enemy were firing on the boat from both sides of the stream,” Hooker recalled. “Small cannon, possibly 37 millimeters, fired into the bow and twice more into mid ship. All aboard the boat opened fire, while the British guns [six Lewis machine guns] swept the sides of the river, and we concentrated on the areas where there were flashes. Putting the boat in reverse, we backed down the river. The stream was too narrow for us to turn around until we were about a mile down stream and out of range of the ambush.”⁸⁸ One of Hooker’s men was mortally wounded when a canon shell exploded in his face. He was the only married man in Hooker’s team. The first sergeant’s ear drums were burst by the blast. Captain Bright was hit in the chest by a rifle bullet. Several British gunners were hit and two other Americans suffered surface wounds from bullets and shrapnel. It took them five hours to get back to a hospital ship that was part of the British invasion force. Hooker, O’Jibway, and several of the others on the teams were later sent to fight first with Ray Peers in the Burma jungles and then to train and lead OSS OG Chinese commandoes against the Japanese in China.

Penetrating the Tangled Situation in Thailand

Situated between the British colonies of Burma and Malaya and the French colony of Indochina in 1941, Thailand (previously known as Siam), was the only independent nation in Southeast Asia at the outbreak of the war. The Bangkok government under Premier and Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram officially allied with Japan and declared war on Britain and the United States. The Japanese Army used the country as a springboard to invade the British colonies of Burma to the west and Malaya to the south. Because of Bangkok’s alliance, Tokyo kept only a small number of troops there and allowed Thailand to retain nominal independence.⁸⁹ While Great Britain reciprocated by declaring war on Thailand, the United States did not. Instead, the State Department chose to view Phibun’s as a puppet regime and Thailand as an occupied rather than a belligerent nation.⁹⁰

In Washington, officials at the Thai Legation rejected the Phibun government’s capitulation and collaboration with Japan. Members of the legation declared themselves to be “free Thais,” committed to continuing the struggle against the Japanese. Secretary of State Cordell Hull supported their position and referred them to Donovan’s organization.⁹¹ On 12 March 1942, the legation submitted a proposal to have a group of young Thai nationals in the United States trained and infiltrated into their homeland for subversive operations. Lieutenant Colonel Kharb Kunjara, the air attaché at the legation, met with Lieutenant Colonel Garland H. Williams of Special Operations, to arrange for the young Thai student volunteers to be trained, equipped and deployed by Donovan’s organization. The first group of thirteen Thais began OSS training on 12 June 1942, first SO training at Areas B and A, then radio training at Area C, followed by Parachute training at Fort Benning, and Maritime training at Areas A or D.⁹² The Free Thai legation, angry at the collaborations policies of the Phibun government, declared that the larger goal of these trainees was to penetrate “into Thailand proper to organize subversive works and to pave the way for the final push of the United Nations Armed Forces, to drive the Japanese back to their own little islands.”⁹³

Although Thailand had little if any strategic military importance to the U.S. War effort in Asia, and there were no major battles fought there, the OSS paid considerable attention to it and developed extensive operations there during the final year of the war. In some respects this was due to the OSS’s need for a significant role against Japan, but more influential was the U.S. political effort to avoid British imperial expansion into the country in the postwar era and to achieve an independent pro-American Thailand. The OSS mission in Thailand, taken in coordination with the State Department, was primarily a political mission of U.S. foreign policy.

Heading that mission was Captain Nicol Smith, formerly a successful author of adventure travelogues and who had pre-war experience living in the Far East as well as other areas around the world. Smith joined the OSS in early 1942 and trained with Ray Peers and the Detachment 101 group at Area B in April 1942.⁹⁴ After further SI training, Smith had been sent on an espionage mission to Vichy France. Returning in December 1942, he was assigned to equip and lead the first and second groups of OSS trained Thai nationals, 21 in all, to China for eventual clandestine deployment in Thailand.⁹⁵ The young Thais, who had been graduate students at Harvard, M.I.T. and other leading American universities, had completed their training by mid-January1943, as plans for the mission had evolved, and were in a holding area in or near Prince William Forest Park.⁹⁶ In March 1943, Smith and two OSS instructors from Area B, Frank Gleason and Joseph Lazarsky, took the new Thai agents to India and over the “Hump” to China.⁹⁷

From China, these agents were to be infiltrated to help what appeared by spring 1943 to be a growing anti-Japanese underground in Thailand, some of it encouraged by dissident members of the government in Bangkok. The primary Allied contact was Phibun’s main rival, the pre-war Finance Minister, Pridi Phanomyong. He, like most Thais, had opposed collaboration with the Japanese. Obstacles resulting from the frustratingly complex political situation in China precluded Smith from dispatching agents into Thailand until June 1944, but even then, two of the infiltrated agents were killed and six others captured and imprisoned.⁹⁸

Advances in Thailand

The next month, July 1944, with the Japanese being driven back in Burma and the Pacific, Pridi was finally able to topple the collaborationist Phibun government through political maneuvering. OSS parachuted two new Thai agents into their country. Although one was captured, the other, who had close family ties with Pridi, met the new head of the government. Shocked, the agent learned that not only was Pridi now head of the government, but he had long been and still was in fact the head of the underground and clandestinely leading the “Free Thai” movement within Thailand.⁹⁹ He had kept that subversive role secret in order to avoid repressive measures by the small, but well armed Japanese force in Thailand. Donovan met a Thai delegation in Ceylon in January 1945, and with Pridi’s approval, an OSS mission of two American officers, one from SI and the other from SO, soon arrived in Bangkok by seaplane and fast boat.¹⁰⁰ To counter British postwar claims based on the country’s alliance with the Japanese, Pridi suggested a Thai uprising supported by an invasion by two U.S. Army divisions. The Joint Chiefs of Staff did not want to divert such large numbers of troops, numbering up to 30,000, but under OSS prodding, they agreed to have Donovan’s organization arm the Thai underground and use them for intelligence gathering. Such efforts would enhance the U.S. foreign policy goal of an independent, pro-American Tha