PART TWO—RESISTANCE

A Route Nationale twists and winds, climbs and dips, through the Department of the Creuse, almost in the geographical center of France. There are few villages along the way, fewer houses. Most of the Creuse is forest land, mountainous, with steep ravines.

In the first week of August, 1944, a German convoy of some 80 vehicles rolled hesitantly along this Route Nationale. Like all German convoys in that disastrous summer, it was a curious amalgam of men and vehicles. There were some 600 people in the convoy: SS troops; miliciens, the hated French Gestapo, escaping with their wives; some foreign Todt workers; a couple of companies of infantry who had been doing guard duty in the south; a few Luftwaffe ground troops. Besides the German army trucks, there were Delahayes and Citroens, civilian cars impressed from the French. The gasoline was ersatz, most of the motors were in poor condition. The convoy proceeded slowly, by fits and starts.

A few hundred miles to the north, Patton had broken through. Rennes was falling, some said, and Le Mans was in danger. The Route Nationale was one of the main routes from east to west, from the south, which might become a huge trap, to Germany. The convoy was bound for the shelter of the West Wall.

The Creuse was maquis country. The people in the convoy knew the maquis, and they hated and feared it, but now they were not afraid. Only two weeks before, three divisions of the Wehrmacht had attacked the strong Creuse maquis. With the loss of some 600 men, they had scattered the maquis of the Creuse, beaten it, disorganized it, chivvied it out of existence. A general had published an official order to the effect that the Creuse maquis had ceased to exist. The German landsers grinned at the French. “Maquis Creuse kaput,” they would say, drawing their fingers across their throats. The French said nothing.

The SS oberleutnant in charge of the convoy was not afraid, as he sat in the lead vehicle. He got a crumpled, black-tobaccoed Gauloise cigarette out of his pocket. As he bent down to light it, shielding the flame of his lighter with his hand, he was shot through the head at close range. A bazooka projectile ripped through the truck, stopping it and the convoy. Twelve men in the back jumped out. Six pounds of plastic high explosive, wrapped in a woman’s black stocking, exploded in the midst of them, killing three and wounding or stunning the rest. The convoy, like all stopped convoys, had closed up on itself. Down 300 yards of its length, murder was in progress. The convoy had been stopped in a deep and narrow ravine, heavily wooded on either side. Some of the infantrymen tried to find cover in the shallow ditch at the side of the road, and to fire back. But they could only fire wildly, at the sound. They were exposed, and many of them were killed. Others tried to clamber up the steep banks, or hid under the trucks.

Twelve minutes later, there was a sharp whistle, and the firing ceased abruptly. When at last the convoy moved off, 42 Germans and 8 miliciens were left dead by the side of the road. How many were wounded and died later could not be known.

That night, at a large farmhouse, eight miles off the main road, there was much drinking of wine and shaking of hands and kissing of cheeks. Thirty-eight men, and one beetle-browed vielle mère who wanted to kill herself a dirty Boche, had taken part in the raid. The only casualty was a sixteen-year-old boy who had got a piece of shrapnel in the shoulder. Although he never revealed the fact, and in later months proudly showed the wound he had got fighting the sal boche, he had wounded himself. It was the first grenade he had ever thrown, and he had not thrown it far enough.

One of the 38 men who had taken part in the raid was different from the rest. He was tall and light-haired, and he spoke execrable French. The first part of the evening, while the others had been drinking down the red wine and laughing, he had spent laboriously working out a message and tapping it out on a radio, and he had to work hard to catch up with the gaiety of the others. He wore an American uniform, with an American flag on the shoulder, and on his collar the silver bar of a lieutenant and the crossed rifles of the infantry.

This man had been parachuted into France by OSS to help the resistance. He had been trained in Fort Benning, and the chances were that he had seen action in Africa or Italy before he had volunteered to perform for OSS “a hazardous mission behind the enemy lines.” OSS parachuted men like him all over Europe, and in Burma and Siam and China. Although Hitler had threatened to execute him as an agent if he were caught, he never thought of himself as an agent. Sometimes in areas very heavily held by the enemy, he was forced to wear civilian clothes, but far more often he was in uniform until he was overrun by the advancing regular armies. He thought of himself as a soldier, and in fact, he was a soldier.

It is only natural to think of any man who goes behind the enemy lines as a spy, a doubtful creature with shifty eyes and a slouch hat. There were spies in the war, spies in the old Mata Hari–E. Phillips Oppenheim sense. OSS sent many of them behind the lines, and they did very useful work; in Billy, we have described such a spy. Where information is his primary mission, a man in enemy country in civilian clothes can quite obviously perform a more useful function than a man in uniform. But if all the men whom OSS sent into occupied territory were agents, they certainly included some of the most peculiar agents in history. It would have done the American soldiers who worked for OSS in Burma and China little good to get into civilian clothes—nothing on earth would have made them look even faintly Oriental. But because vast stretches of the area behind the Jap lines were held very thinly if at all, these men were able on occasion, with the help of the native resistance, to give the Japanese a great deal of trouble.

The same thing was true in Europe. In France, in certain areas, if you were careful and had a guide who knew the back roads, it was possible to travel upwards of a hundred miles in a civilian car sporting a large American flag. OSS parachuted men into France and Norway and Italy and Yugoslavia who didn’t speak a word of the language, and had never been in the country before. Even so they were often able to make themselves highly useful.

There was, for example, the paratrooper major who was jumped into France in a combined American-French-British mission just after D-Day. The major was a huge man, a regular army officer, ham-fisted, bull-voiced, who spoke not a single word of French. The French thought he was wonderful—so big, so blond, so American. He was supposed to train the maquis, and somehow he did a first-rate job of it, with much shouting and gesturing and cursing. He loved a fight—he was that very rare soldier, a man who actually enjoys battle. He saw his job as a job of killing Germans, and kill Germans he did. Although they were able to communicate with him only in sign language, the men of the maquis loved him, and would follow the “commandant americain” anywhere. He did a job well worth doing in France, but if he was an agent, he was certainly not the Hollywood version.

Though no Mata Haris, these men who went behind the lines in uniform were apt to be odd types. Their eccentricities contributed much to the regular army assessment of OSS as “a bunch of screwballs.” There must be something intrinsically peculiar about the kind of man who volunteers for that kind of job, for a high proportion of the British who were dropped to the resistance were screwballs too. There was one English doctor who jumped with an Anglo-American mission soon after D-Day to look after the maquis sick and wounded. Like the American major, if he could be called an agent, he was certainly an unusual one. He had the sort of face that only England can produce—blue eyes, a thin nose, droopy blond moustaches, and a receding chin, the whole ensemble expressing the sort of assured lassitude which can be nothing but English. To top it all off, he wore a monocle. He had worn it all through the fighting in the desert, and he was damned if he would leave it behind now. In July, he and the rest of the mission were quartered in a little village in maquis country. He was enjoying a peaceful siesta one afternoon when he was suddenly awakened by loud cries of “Les boches,” and the unmistakable rapid fire of German machine guns.

He leapt from the bed, shoved his feet into his heavy ammunition boots, and ran out into the street stark naked. Naked he ran through heavy fire toward the end of the street, where the other members of the mission, in a Citroen car, were encouraging him with cries and gestures. Suddenly, halfway to the safety of the car, he stopped, clapped his hand to his forehead. He dashed back, into the house, emerged a moment later, ran still naked up the street, and jumped into the waiting car. The other members of the mission were naturally furious with him, but he was grinning happily. His beloved monocle was in his eye.

There are endless such tales of the essential oddness of the soldiers who went on special jobs in uniform behind the lines. There was, for example, the American soldier, an inveterate smoker, whom OSS dropped into occupied Greece. He did a fine job until he ran out of cigarettes. The partisans had virtually none. He knew there were cigarettes in a German-held town in the area. Finally he could stand it no longer. Still in uniform, he walked into the town to buy some. He was shot through the chest. Fortunately the partisans rescued him and he recovered.

These men who went behind the lines in uniform were soldiers. Their first training had been army training, and their battle experience, if they had any, had been at the front, in regular, standardized warfare. OSS on the whole did a pretty good job of retraining them, of impressing upon them the fact that guerrilla warfare is something very different from the warfare of the front lines.

The job of training them, however, was only the beginning. The main job, the really important one, was that of supporting these men once they got into the field. It was a far more difficult assignment than that of preparing them for the field. When a man goes behind the lines, alone, or with a small group, his only contact with headquarters is his radio, and that sometimes seems both to headquarters and the man on operations, an exceedingly tenuous and unsatisfactory contact. OSS was inevitably divided into two factions, which were frequently warring factions. One faction, the smaller, was the men behind the lines. The other was the men behind the desks.

It was only natural that the enlisted men and junior officers whom OSS recruited to do the main share of the dangerous jobs resented some of their superiors, civilians and civilians in uniform, who sat behind the desks. This is true in any military unit, but in OSS the gap was particularly wide. It was so wide because, whereas the great majority of the operational men had gone through the Army the hard way, and those who were commissioned had come up through the ranks, a very large proportion of the administrative officers in OSS had received direct commissions in the early days. They had bought uniforms, and put them on, and there they were, soldiers, just like that. Some of these men were excellent executives, and good soldiers, but the operational men often resented their higher rank, and delighted in repeating stories of their military faux pas.

There was, for example, the story of the OSS colonel who headed a delegation to visit General George Patton, with the object of persuading Patton to use an OSS unit in his Third Army.

“Listen,” Patton is said to have greeted him, “I’ve got French liaison in my army; I’ve got British liaison in my army; I’ve got military government in my army; I’ve got relief workers in my army. What I want is some soldiers. Now what the hell do you want?”

Bravely, and ably, the OSS colonel stated his case, with a persuasive emphasis on how OSS could fulfill a straight military role. Just as it seemed to the delegation that the colonel must succeed, Patton cast his eyes downward, stared fixedly at a point above the colonel’s shoes, and began to swear. All eyes followed the general’s and saw, with a sense of doom, what the general was swearing at: the colonel had his leggings on backward.

Partly as insurance against such untoward events, OSS brought in a number of West Pointers to militarize the higher echelons. They worked hard, but they did not completely fill the bill. Naturally they attempted to fit OSS into a strictly Army staff system. By its very nature, OSS defied any such organization, and the attempt met with abysmal failure.

None of this belies the fact that on the whole OSS desk men were capable, hard-working, and conscientious, dealing with a job which Americans had never tackled before. The fact that there was an unbridgeable gap between them and the OSS men behind the lines was an inevitable result of the fact that the two groups were different types of people, working on the same job from different ends.

For some reason which psychologists could perhaps explain, a man who volunteers to go on an extremely dangerous mission, alone, or with one or two helpers, is likely to be not only brave and resourceful, but somewhat vain. Most people do not volunteer to leap into German or Japanese territory during the time of war with Germany or Japan. Those who do are conscious that they are, in a word, “different.”

Once these men landed behind the lines, the “difference” took on outward symbols. They were alone, Americans, in a country full of French or Greeks, or Italians, or Chinese. They were treated with great respect. Sometimes, as captains or majors, they commanded thousands of men. At a word from them, American or British planes would come over to drop supplies for these men. They earned the love and respect which conquered people felt for the democracy called America.

Their uniforms, their size, their weapons, the flag on their shoulders, their very presence behind the lines set them apart and made them heroes to the men of the resistance force. Naturally, after a little of this life, some of the Americans behind the lines began to think of themselves as heroes too.

“Your orders are to report for training,” a captain at an OSS desk told one of the men who had parachuted into France as a member of an organization known by the code name “Jedburgh.”

“I don’t think I want any more training,” he replied.

The captain reminded him that he was in the Army, and subject to Army orders.

“Sir,” he answered, drawing himself up to his full height, “you seem to forget—I am a Jed.”

The man at the desk had to cope with these eccentricities born of experience behind the lines, and in addition he had the handicap of inexperience. Never having been in the field, he often failed to understand the peculiar shifting qualities of partisan warfare. He thought of it, naturally, as an ordered war, like his own existence in London, or Algiers, or Kunming, or the war between armies which he read about in his newspaper. When one of his men jumped into the field, he would conscientiously place a little pin on the map. A few days later, when the man sent a radio message from a place a hundred miles or more from the pin-point, he was perplexed.

If the message urgently requested supplies, he was likely to reply by ordering the man in the field to go back where he belonged. He was not always to understand that the reasons for the change in locale might range from a guerrilla colonel’s plans or whims to the unexpected appearance of a couple of German divisions.

His failure to understand the nature of partisan warfare was not the only reason why he sometimes disappointed the man in the field. OSS men in the field frequently became involved in matters which seemed simple to them, but which involved questions of high policy that only Supreme Headquarters could settle. The man at the desk was under the orders of Supreme Headquarters. He couldn’t argue with the high command.

When an OSS major in Norway reported that he and his 20 men were going to take and hold a town as a fort from which to waylay the withdrawing Germans, OSS checked with Supreme Headquarters. Supreme Headquarters said, “No.”

Doubtless there were good reasons. The Allies had not yet landed in Norway, and Supreme Headquarters probably wanted the underground to stay underground until the landings came. The resistance was never of much use as a fighting force unless its efforts could be integrated with the effort of an invading army. But whatever the reason, Supreme Headquarters had said, “No.” OSS passed it on to the major.

The major tried again. “I am here,” he said. “I know what I am doing. I know I can do it; the resistance wants me to do it and I intend to do it.”

That made OSS headquarters angry. “You have your orders. Disobedience will be subject to disciplinary action upon your return,” was the answer.

That made the major angry too. Relations between headquarters and the field were normal again.

Another cause for friction between the men in the field and those at the desks was the enormous quantity of messages from the field which went unanswered, or were answered weeks after they were sent. This was particularly so in France. Every man who came back from that country complained of it.

But this, too, was not the fault of the man at the desk. He was snowed under with messages and a good many of the messages which came in from the field seemed to the desk man unanswerable or ridiculous. Again, it was the unfortunate nature of this new type of warfare—that two men should look at the same problem from two entirely different worlds.

For example: In August, 1944, the German Army in southwestern France was a milling mob, racing to hold the western ports, racing north to try to cross the Loire east of Patton; fearful lest they lose all in a guerrilla war with the maquis before they could fight a standardized war with the Allies. And more than anything else they feared the fictional American column which, the BBC announced to the whole world, was advancing south of the Loire. It was the only lie which the BBC told during the war and it worked.

The little group of Americans in OSS who were with the maquis saw the situation and pleaded for help. They named targets; they told of German columns straggling along the roads; they begged for the air forces. A killing could be made. They were far too busy chasing Germans, or running from Germans, to know that far to the north, Patton had by-passed Paris and was heading for the Moselle. The war to them, as it is to every fighting soldier, was the piece of ground they stood on.

Back in London, the OSS man at the desk read their urgent messages for air support, picked up his newspaper to learn of the fall of Paris, noted on his map the obvious fact that every German soldier south of the Loire was hopelessly cut off by Patton’s break-through, laid the messages aside and went down the hall for a cup of coffee before turning to the dispatches from OSS teams ahead of Patton, along the Moselle. His was the larger, and in this instance, the correct point of view. But back in southern France, maquis colonels and their American aides watched an opportunity go by, and waited by their radios, and fumed.

But neither strained relations between desk and field nor occasional incompetence were to prevent OSS from doing a useful job in aid of the resistance in Europe and the Far East, nor American soldiers in OSS, who joined the resistance in occupied territory, from doing brave new things when America needed all it could get of both bravery and originality.

As Americans and as soldiers, it was difficult at first for many of these men to adjust their minds to the kind of warfare in which they suddenly found themselves involved. The men parachuted into France by OSS were at first politely incredulous when the maquis chiefs told them the number of Germans they had killed. The number of German and French dead seemed too grotesquely out of proportion, and those who had seen action at the front had learned the tragic axiom that you can’t inffict casualties without receiving them. But when they had been on operations with the maquis they realized that this was indeed a very different form of warfare from any they had known before. The men of the resistance were undoubtedly optimistic when they claimed, as they invariably did, ratios of one or two dead Germans for every dead Frenchman. But the American soldiers learned that it was quite true that in real guerrilla operations, in real guerrilla country, well-planned and with the maximum of surprise, it was possible to kill 40 or 50 Germans for every maquis casualty. When, as occasionally happened, the maquis forgot they were guerrillas and tried to fight the sort of war the American soldiers had been used to, it was apt to be a tragically different story.

Guerrilla warfare is distinct from any other. In warfare between armies, a commander has two objectives. One is to destroy as many of the enemy as possible. Another is to take ground, and having taken it, to hold it. In guerrilla warfare, the second objective is omitted. A properly commanded guerrilla force never tries to hold ground. The whole technique of guerrilla warfare is bound up in the avoidance of open battle. It is a process of attrition rather than destruction of the enemy, and guerrillas should only seek battle when the advantage is overwhelmingly on their side, when the enemy is unprepared and temporarily incapable of effective counter-measures. The technique is a technique of hit and run, and the running is at least as important as the hitting.

The authors of this book, very early in their military careers, once heard an English officer who had been through Dunkirk give a lecture on “Withdrawal.” He gave high praise to the commander of his battalion, who had kept the unit together as a disciplined fighting body, although it was frequently in danger of being cut off by the Germans. As a body the battalion had fought through to Dunkirk, and almost a third of its members had escaped to England.

In passing, he mentioned another colonel, commander of a battalion, who had disgraced himself and the name of the British Army. Cut off by the enemy, he had issued the order, “Every man for himself.” He had, quite properly, been court-martialed.

Curiously, our officer remarked, more than three quarters of his men had sooner or later got themselves back to England.

It was the court-martialed colonel’s method of withdrawal which the maquis used, and used with quite phenomenal success.

When the OSS men who had been parachuted to the maquis met in bars in London after the campaign ended, they would make a certain cabalistic gesture with their arms, and then laugh loudly, to the bewilderment and irritation of everyone else. The gesture consisted of bringing the open palm of the left hand down sharply across the elbow joint of the right arm, causing the right forearm, palm rigidly extended, to fly smartly forward. This gesture, meaningless in the London bars, had a very real meaning in the French maquis. It was a universal visual shorthand for the court-martialed colonel’s “Every man for himself.” Its vocal equivalent was “Foutez le camp,” which can be roughly translated as “Get the hell out of here.” It was used by the maquis whenever things began to look “vraiment serieux,” and it was always followed by an enthusiastic mass exodus in all directions. It was surprisingly effective. What was an unfortunate German military commander to do when the men who a moment before had been slaughtering his troops from concealed positions in a most unsportsmanlike fashion, simply disappeared, not withdrawing in a proper and orderly fashion, but running like rabbits to all points of the compass? The Germans captured by the maquis complained readily of these unmilitary tactics, thereby delighting the French.

“Surprise—mitraillage—evanouissement” was the slogan; “Surprise—kill—vanish.”

Here is a specific example.

In April, two months before D-Day, a large and experienced maquis in the Department of the Ain was attacked in force, by two divisions, supported by artillery and armored cars. The French commander, warned as the maquis always were of the imminence of the attack, divided his command into combat groups of 17 men. These groups worked independently to ambush the Germans, to harry their communications, to surprise them, never to fight them openly. They were fighting on the “Surprise, mitraillage, evanouissement” theory of guerrilla warfare. “The Germans,” said Captain Owen Johnson, an OSS man who had been in France for many months, “could find no one in front of them to attack, and had astoundingly heavy losses by ambush.” In this one battle (and it was a battle repeated with minor variations throughout France), the maquis had 38 dead to a minimum of 500 Germans killed, over 700 wounded.

To the Germans, it was like fighting the Invisible Man.

Consider this form of warfare for a moment from the point of view of normal military tactics, from the German point of view.

Except in the later stages of the Battle of France, when the Germans were routed and utterly disorganized, the maquis existed and fought only in “maquis country,” which was country with plenty of cover. In the rolling pasture lands of the Charente or of Normandy, for example, there was no organized maquis; it was especially in hilly Brittany and the mountains and forests of the Massif Central that the maquis flourished. In maquis country they were unbeatable, literally unbeatable—the Germans never did work out tactics which could permanently defeat them. Since the maquis, when properly commanded, never tried to hold ground, there was no way to defeat them, short of exterminating all of them. The Germans tried extermination, but they never succeeded. They never succeeded because the exterminees vanished before they could be exterminated.

Forest fighting is in the opinion of some tacticians the most difficult form of fighting of all. The American soldiers who fought through the Hurtgen Forest on the Western Front would doubtless agree. The forest tends to level off the fire superiority of the stronger force; artillery, heavy mortars, air support, tanks, all become virtually ineffective in the forest, and the fighting reduces itself to a fight between rifle and rifle, machine gun and machine gun.

Guerrilla fighting is a special form of forest fighting. It is sound military doctrine that it requires a battalion, 800 men, to clear a wood a mile square of two determined platoons, say 100 men. Consider the dilemma of the Germans, the bulk of their forces committed to guarding the sea approaches, faced with thousands of square miles of woods and forest literally swarming with maquis. With all the ferocity of which the German is capable, they tried to cope with this threat to their rear. Then sent divisions against the maquis. The divisions would take the ground the maquis had held, but they would find no maquis there, and in taking this worthless ground they would lose hundreds of men. The Germans tried propaganda, and in persuading the owners of châteaux, particularly those owners who had collected a nice little nest egg during the occupation, that the maquis were bandits and gangsters, they had more success; especially as there was a small minority among the maquis who were bandits and gangsters. Finally, they tried terror—Oradour sur Glâne. A maquisard who was caught was lucky to have no more than his eyeballs gouged out. But as the weeks and months wore on, the maquis grew, and became better organized, and killed more and more Germans.

The Germans came eventually to admit their defeat, tacitly. Even before D-Day, whole vast sections of France were left under the control of the resistance.

The degree of freedom and organization in these areas often amazed the OSS men who jumped to the maquis. Trained to live exclusively in the woods, to kill sheep for food, to march long distances on foot, the OSS men were prepared to see a German behind every bush. Some of them who jumped in maquis country were almost chagrined to find transport available (in the form of somewhat eccentric charcoal-burning trucks—gazogenes), hospitals functioning for the maquis wounded, complete with X-ray and skilled surgeons, services of requisition and supply established, and whole large areas, including villages and the smaller towns, under maquis control.

The Germans, with their superior armament, could always re-enter these areas, and sooner or later they always did, but at enormous cost. Before any German attack, the maquis had plenty of warning; only a criminally inefficient maquis was ever caught by surprise. The Germans, on the other hand, were invariably surprised, invariably caught off balance. Toward the end, even when the Germans, forced to it by the tide of battle, retook an area, they never retook it totally, they never tried to hold it as conquerors. They took and held the main towns, and they tried to hold the important routes. These routes, along which the tired German convoys passed, would then become delightful shooting galleries for the maquisards. The Germans would be goaded into a fury, and they would make punitive expeditions into maquis territory, always with the same grim result; a few dead Frenchmen, hundreds of dead Germans.

All this added up to a form of warfare which, though far from new, was a vastly improved version of guerrilla warfare in former wars. France has been used in this chapter as an illustration of how this war of the resistance was fought only because it happens to have been the country most familiar to the authors of this book. Actually, guerrilla warfare on a grand scale was one of the most striking features of the war all over the world. Everywhere, the people within the countries conquered by the Axis fought with an amazing heroism and an even more amazing success against the invader.

In Italy, Kesselring declared Anti-Partisan Week throughout the areas of German occupation. Anti-Partisan Week, despite its familiar American ring, was an utterly ruthless campaign for the extermination of the Italian resistance. Even so, the Italian guerrillas, like the French, refused to be exterminated. They killed thousands of Germans, liberated cities as large as Milan, Venice, and Genoa before the Allies arrived, and constituted a permanent threat to the German rear and a thorn in the German side. The Germans were thrown out of most of Yugoslavia by the unaided efforts of the Yugoslav people, at a time when Russian troops were still hundreds of miles away. Greece, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, even ill-starred Poland; everywhere in Europe the resistance harried the Germans, killing hundreds of thousands of them, making life a thing of fear and misery for the rest.

Nor was this true only in Europe. On the other side of the world, in the Philippines, China, Burma, the Japanese found the life of the conqueror no sinecure. It was in Burma, curiously enough, that OSS had its first great success in arming and leading the resistance. It was there, as will be later described, that 8,000 Kachin tribesmen, led by a handful of OSS men, killed some 5,600 Japs, with the loss of 15 Americans and some 70 Kachins.

It is easy to exaggerate the role of the resistance. The French are a people not without national vanity and many maquisards were reluctant to admit that the Allied armies had anything to do with the liberation of France. By and large, the resistance was actually only importantly successful when it was co-ordinated with the advance of great regular armies. Even so, generals on both sides of the world have paid tribute to its work. It was as if in this war a fourth dimension had been added to the three military dimensions—air, land, and water—of the last war. This fourth dimension is the fight behind the enemy’s own lines. This war has proved that the attack from within is an important complement of the attack from without.

It seems at first glance surprising that guerrilla warfare should first grow into real importance in this war of all wars; surprising that the warfare of the ragged civilian with a rifle should play an important part in a war of B-29’s and Tiger Tanks, of V-weapons and atom bombs. But it is surprising only at first glance.

Never before in the history of war have such vast areas containing so many millions upon millions of people been invaded and conquered. The desire for freedom, even the freedom to make a mess of things in their own way, is common to human beings all over the world, to Americans and Kachins, to Norwegians and Filipinos. In the millions of the conquered was found the manpower for the great armies of the resistance.

A man cannot fight, however, no matter how deep his love of liberty, with empty fists against automatic weapons. It was the chance of history that this war, which was to see the enslavement of so many, was also to see the possibility, by the grace of three recent inventions, of arming and organizing the millions to fight the invader.

Those three inventions are the plane, the parachute, and the radio. Without those three, resistance of the conquered would have continued to be the sporadic and futile thing it had been in the past, an angry gesture easily suppressed. With those three inventions, the resistance all over the world became a great secret weapon, thrust into the at first unwilling and unappreciative hands of the Allies, a weapon to which neither the Japanese nor the Germans ever found the whole answer.

The radio comes first. It is the first step. Without it the men of the resistance can never let their friends on the other side of the enemy lines know what they need or where to send it. They can never receive the orders and the information to guide them in their fight, to tell them what bridge to blow, what column to attack, when to fight and when to hide, so that their efforts may become part of the whole plan, rather than brave but meaningless forays.

The plane and parachute come next. Only by plane and parachute can the great masses of arms and equipment for guerrilla warfare reach the guerrillas. OSS dropped some 20,000 tons of arms and material to the resistance forces all over the world and the British dropped more. This is picayune compared to the tonnage of bombs dropped by the air force, but a good case could be made that ton for ton it contributed more to the downfall of the enemy.

There, at any rate, was the opportunity: the millions of men and women behind the Axis lines, with hatred in their hearts for the German or the Jap. Looking back, it seems difficult to believe that such an opportunity could be overlooked. And yet, by America, it very nearly was overlooked. Many people sensed the opportunity dimly, but there was no clear idea of how to exploit it. America had never fought her wars by means of shenanigans behind the lines. The West Pointers and Annapolis men who were to run the prodigious American war effort had been brought up in the tradition of slugging it out, toe to toe.

The Office of Strategic Services was, during the first year of our war, still fighting for existence. Even the men who ran it had no very clear idea of exactly what it was to do. But they sensed, and General Donovan sensed particularly, that there was a job to be done. Falteringly, fighting every inch of the way, with many false starts, OSS moved to exploit this new fourth dimension of warfare, this unacknowledged secret weapon, the resistance movement. What started almost as an afterthought, an added field for a civilian agency whose main functions lay elsewhere, became at the end of the war, an efficient exploitation of an enormous military opportunity.