He participated in boxing, rowing, and track, and a football and was a quarterback while an undergraduate at Columbia. Ultimately, he became part of the nation's economic, political, and foreign policy elite. His intellectual ability, steady determination and fertile imagination had led him from a tough, working-class neighborhood in Buffalo to Niagara University and then via scholarship to Columbia College and Columbia Law School.
Despite his social position and his somewhat reserved, soft-spoken, fatherly manner, however, there was, in fact, an adventurous, daring, driving, and inspiring side to the man. He was a rather stocky, silver-gray haired, highly successful senior partner in a Wall Street law firm. Donovan led the Office of Strategic Services from 1942-1945.Īs a young man, Donovan had acquired the nickname "Wild Bill,” but in 1940, at age 57, however, he seemed anything but wild. 2 In the summer of 1940, one of the special envoys President Roosevelt sent to London to encourage the beleaguered British, to assess their ability to withstand the German onslaught, and to find out what London had learned and was doing about new methods of warfare, especially unconventional warfare, was a prominent New York lawyer and former war hero, William J. Like many others at the time, both Roosevelt and Churchill believed that Hitler’s shockingly swift military victories were due not simply to prowess of the German Army and its Blitzkrieg tactics, but also by the effective use of demoralizing propaganda and internal subversion by Nazi sympathizers called "fifth columnists,” who engaged in espionage and sabotage for the German military intelligence services. Roosevelt committed the United States to their aid, and then, when Britain was left standing alone against Germany, to all-out assistance-short of war-to the British under their new prime minister, Winston Churchill. 1įaced with the German onslaught against the western democracies, President Franklin D.
Not until mid-September 1940 was it clear that the Luftwaffe had failed, and Britain would remain an island bastion against the Nazis’ expanding empire. That summer German dictator Adolf Hitler launched a massive air offensive against Great Britain, and many believed that England would be the next to fall. Employing a new, highly mobile form of warfare called Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), Nazi Germany had quickly and brutally conquered Poland in 1939, then Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and finally France by the middle of 1940.
The origins of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) lay in the dark early days of World War II in Europe. Note: This article is excerpted from OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War II, by John Whiteclay Chambers II.
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