What is surprising is how often these special ops failed, especially early in the war when they were learning the ropes. It is fairly interesting I know little of these operations, but the book has way more detail than I needed. This book limits itself to a brief history of the OSS founding and then to a lot of details about operations in the Mediterranean theater, in Italy, France, and the Balkans. The group had conflicts with Army and Navy intelligence and what would become special units, like the Rangers. This organization became the OSS (office of strategic services) which later became the CIA.
William Donovan created the idea of a special forces/spy agency, similar to ones used by the British, and sold the idea to the Roosevelt administration just prior to WWII. If you have a deep interest in World War II, though, this book will reward you and most likely fill in some gaps in your knowledge. But it results in a book which I wouldn't recommend to readers with a casual interest in history. There's certainly nothing wrong with that level of detail. Virtually every significant OSS commando, and resistance figures they meet, is given a little capsule biography if you then encounter the same name 3 pages later, you don't remember who it is, because you've been introduced to 10 more names in the interim.
However, to find these stories, the reader has to wade through a thick, confusing soup of names, dates, places, and various minutiae. Some of the stories of German brutality towards resistance fighters and civilians who aided the Allies are horrifying. Many of the stories here are interesting, and shed light on aspects of the War which are often ignored. This book is a history of those commando units. Those units- filled with immigrants to America from the countries involved, or descendants of immigrants, who still spoke their native tongue- did things like coordinate Allied forces with local resistance movements, arrange supply drops, rescue downed Allied pilots, and perform sabotage raids. The OSS is primarily known as a spy organization- the precursor to the CIA- that operated during World War II but they also operated commando units which operated behind enemy lines during the war, in places like Italy, Yugoslavia, and occupied France.
(Note: I received a free copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads.) They were the precursors to today's Special Forces operators.īased on declassified OSS records, personal collections, and oral histories of participants from both sides of the conflict, Donovan's Devils provides the most comprehensive account to date of the Operational Group activities, including a detailed narrative of the ill-fated Ginny mission, which resulted in the one of the OSS's gravest losses of the war. Their enemy showed them no mercy, and sometimes their closest friends betrayed them. They performed sabotage, organized native resistance, and rescued downed airmen, nurses, and prisoners of war. Organized into Operational Groups, they infiltrated into enemy territory by air or sea and operated for days, weeks, or months hundreds of miles from the closest Allied troops. Donovan's Devils tells the story of a different OSS, that of ordinary soldiers, recruited from among first- and second-generation immigrants, who volunteered for dangerous duty behind enemy lines and risked their lives in Italy, France, the Balkans, and elsewhere in Europe. As the "Oh So Social," it has also been portrayed as a club for the well-connected before, during, and after the war. The OSS-Office of Strategic Services-created under the command of William Donovan, has been celebrated for its cloak-and-dagger operations during World War II and as the precursor of the CIA.