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Bradley Hart

It's November, 1942. The Allies are about to take a major step on the long road to Berlin, but this invasion will not take place in Normandy. It will be on the beaches of North Africa. On November 8th, 1942, Operation Torch will begin landing more than 100,000 Allied troops. Why North Africa? The United States wanted to strike Germany first, but, at this point, America was not yet ready to launch a full scale attack into Europe. But if the Allies could drive the Axis out of North Africa, Europe might be next. The operation is launched. General Dwight D. Eisenhower will lead as Supreme Allied Commander, and General George S. Patton will lead the Western Task Force, moving an entire fleet from the east coast of the United States more than 4,000 miles to North Africa, a journey crossing right through the ongoing battle of the Atlantic. But there's another complication too. The region the Allies are about to attack is controlled by the Vichy French who are Nazi collaborators after the fall of France. Will the Vichy French greet the Allies as liberators or invaders? William Donovan's OSS is there to find out. Codenamed the 12 Apostles or the 12 Vice Consuls, this group of amateur spies is working together to gather intelligence about the local resistance and its possible intentions. We'll be looking at the intelligence background of Operation Torch, the reasons the Allies are moving into North Africa to begin with, and the deep ambiguities underlying this unique campaign of the war. I'm joined now by Pete Crean, vice president of Education and Access here at the National World War II Museum. Let's talk about Operation Torch. There are OSS agents already on the ground before Operation Torch is actually launched. What are they doing here?

Pete Crean

They're actually doing quite a bit, and you kind of need to back up a little bit in that a year before Torch, they're still the coordinator of information, and so we're new at the game. One of the first things is the OSS has to establish itself and make a name for itself, and, in order to do that, Bill Donovan winds up meeting with the British, and they divide up the world. But the key for the OSS was that they got supremacy in North Africa. Another piece of that is that the Americans really upset our allies a year before. 1941, they establish an agreement with the French to allow US goods and food to come into North Africa. Of course, that upset the Brits quite a bit, but what it did was allowed us to send in people to technically diplomatically oversee the transfer of those goods, and the key being that they came into North African ports. And so what they do is they send in the guys that were to be known as the 12 Apostles that were to oversee this, and what they're really doing is they're spying. The most important thing they're doing is that they're keeping an eye and establishing relationships with the French military and French diplomatic concerns in North Africa, and they're also keeping an eye on the Germans, the German Armistice Commission, who is really just a cover for the Gestapo. They're collecting that information, but then they're going to start doing things like looking at when the Americans are going to come into North Africa, how do you try to keep the French military from getting completely involved? How do you keep the French Navy, that is still viable, out of the fray? You know, how do you set the stage for the Americans? So they're going to set up radio networks across North Africa. They're going to start working with French military leaders and speaking with them to try to establish a coup that would kick off at the same time that the landings would come in, that then the French would wind up coming over on our side with limited results. So they're doing a lot of different things at that time, but they're also trying to establish themselves.

Bradley Hart

And you mentioned this phenomenon of trying to arrange essentially coups at the local level to correspond with the landings themselves. And it kind of sort of works. I mean, there's some success, but what really happens here after the Torch landings take place? How successful is this?

Pete Crean

Well, to be honest, they're really not successful. They saw this as a large scale operation that would be executed on a lower level. There is a French general named Giraud who actually had been captured by the Germans, actually escaped, made it to Vichy France. He has enough regard among the French that everyone thinks that the French military, if Giraud appears in North Africa and says, "You know, Vichy French soldiers, "turn and fight for me," that that's going to happen. We pay a lot of money for those days because we're essentially bribing and buying off French officers, senior French officers. What winds up happening is, when we land, Giraud turns up in Gibraltar the next day and then tells Eisenhower that, "Hey, this is French North Africa. "The entire operation needs to be under my command." Eisenhower is of course not interested in turning his command over to a French general. It's absolutely ridiculous, and Giraud is too late to the game to begin with. But there's another influential French senior officer, Admiral Darlan, who is there because his son has polio, and he is visiting his son in the hospital in North Africa when the Americans land. And Darlan is very, he's part of the Vichy regime. He is pro-Nazi, and it causes big problems. But even though we have paid all of this money to bribe these French officers and try to set up what we think is going to be a major coup, they don't show up.

Bradley Hart

There's some colorful characters in OSS and other intelligence services in North Africa. Who really stands out to you as maybe the most interesting character or characters in all this?

Pete Crean

Oh, absolutely. You could make a movie out of any one of the 12 apostles, but I think really, for me, there are two main characters that you really need to know about. The first is William Eddy.

Bradley Hart

One of the key agents in North Africa was a man named William Eddy, sometimes referred to as the Lawrence of America, a play on the nickname Lawrence of Arabia.

Pete Crean

Eddy was a Marine Lieutenant Colonel decorated at Belleau Wood, Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, Purple Heart, serious leg wound in World War I that becomes infected. So he's got a limp for the rest of his life. He teaches at Princeton in the interwar years, but when he sees that war is on the horizon again, even though he is too old and in no kind of shape to be doing this, he comes back in and is assigned as the Attache in the Cairo Embassy. The key with him is he speaks fluent French and Arabic, and with the cover of the embassy and diplomatic papers, he has access to people all across Northern Africa, and basically the OSS uses him to manage their espionage and sabotage operations in North Africa. He was also the point man to try to win over the French generals and admirals. You know, he was the one that also was brought back to brief Patton and Eisenhower and the senior Generals. One of the stories that I love is when there was concern about how effective the OSS really was going to be and what their plan was gonna be, they have Eddy come back to brief Patton and Truscott and the other planners, and Eddy puts on his Marine uniform wearing his full medals, and the quote from Patton was, "Well, the son of a bitch "has definitely been shot at enough." and, of course, Patton's book that brings him on up. The other big personality is a guy named Robert Murphy. Murphy is a diplomat, career diplomat in the State Department. He was actually in Paris when France fell in 1940, and so then winds up staying on with the Vichy portfolio and winds up also in North Africa. He became the Consul General in Algiers, but really Roosevelt used him as his own personal spy. He was the one that actually negotiated the 1941 agreement that allowed the US food stuffs and commercial goods to come into North Africa but really controlled the 12 Apostles. He's the classic case. He was the one that in October of 1942, Murphy snuck General Mark Clark into Algiers, a farmhouse near Algiers, for a meeting with Giraud and Giraud's man, a general, a guy named General Mast, who then promised to unite all of North Africa in a revolt. Didn't turn out, but, you know, it doesn't get more cloak and dagger than your diplomat in Algiers sneaking an American General into occupied land and then getting him back on out again for a clandestine meeting. That's the kind of people that were running things there. One of the other kind of crazy stories that gives a good idea of what the OSS was doing in the run up to Operation Torch was they realized very quickly there was probably the best airfield in the region was Lyautey. It was up the Sebou River. The problem is that the Sebou River has, even at high tide, only about 17 1/2 feet of clearance. So you couldn't really bring a warship up and drop what ultimately wound up being US Army Rangers to take this airfield. And they knew they needed to take the airfields quickly so that they could establish air dominance. The OSS had identified a resistance member who had already been imprisoned and let go by the Vichy French the year before, a guy named Renee Malavergne, and Malavergne had been the port pilot, you know, ship pilot at Port Lyautey, and, of course, Malavergne is being watched by Vichy there. He's being watched by the Germans. The OSS gets the idea and the order to sneak him out. They put a whole cover on all of this. They link up with him. He is put in the back seat of a car driven by two OSS operatives, a guy named Gordon Brown and another guy named Frank Holcomb. The two of them traveling under diplomatic passports, the 12 Apostles again, drive a Chevy with a trailer. So this trailer is basically the size of a goat trailer, and it's got these two giant fuel cans on the back of it, and they wedge Malavergne in there and toss over a tarp over on top of him, almost asphyxiating the man in the process, and then try to drive him through the Rif Mountains to get on out of there. They get stopped at the border. There are five checkpoints to get between French Morocco and Spanish Morocco, and at the very first checkpoint, the guard actually taps on the can, says, "Hey, what's in here?" And he's like, "Oh, just empty gas cans." "Okay." And they have a guard dog with them, and the dog is a pointer and points to the trailer, and it's only going to be a moment of time before the Spanish guards turn around and actually get tipped off that there's something wrong with this trailer. And after Brown tried to throw rocks at the dog to get the dog to get away from it, he enticed him with a can of ham. And when the Spanish guards came out and saw him feeding the dog, they actually thanked him for taking care of their dog. And so he winds up sailing through that. They then sneak him into Eddy's, his house, and sneak him out to Gibraltar on a boat, and they get him on boat into Gibraltar, and he's flown to Great Britain thinking he's going to get a great reception from the Americans, only to find that George Marshall has gotten word from Eddy that they've snuck this riverboat pilot that the Germans are going to be definitely noticing that he's missing, and Marshall is not happy about it, sends a wire to Eisenhower saying, "What the hell are you doing? "Did you know about this?" Eisenhower, of course, is not pleased because of course they're worried that his disappearance is going to tip off the Germans as to where the landing is going to come. They finally found out that Patton had approved it back in Washington. Bill Donovan was also not pleased because he knows everyone's trying to kill the OSS, and if the mission winds up being a failure because the OSS tipped it off by sneaking this guy out, it's the end of the organization. So that's a good example of the kind of crazy stuff that these guys are doing, and a lot of them are taking decisions like that, you know, with the possibilities, major possibilities of things going well or bad, making the decisions on their own.

Bradley Hart

I mean, it does very much sound like a movie, as you said. You know, I think one thing to keep in mind for our audience is, you know, this is OSS really experiencing some growing pains, I think you could say. I mean, this is really the first time that a lot of this is being done in the course of the war, and OSS will get much better at it, but it has really mixed success during Torch. What, in your mind, is the ultimate significance of OSS's work during Operation Torch?

Pete Crean

So the OSS promised a lot as they approached the operation. Of course, they promised this large scale revolt that never really did happen. What they did do was coordinated amazing intelligence. You know, they actually had operatives driving the major road networks and timing how long it was going to take to get from one point to another. Remember, not many Americans even had maps of North Africa at the time, and these are the only Americans that are in North Africa, and they're making maps, they're taking pictures, they're collecting soil samples. They've really established relationships with the key resistance members. They had a lot of operatives that were actually tracking Vichy French military movements. They're following around the Germans in North Africa, and they're feeding all of this back. And when it was all over, George Marshall actually sent a letter to Bill Donovan and explained that, as much as Marshall did this, kind of apologizing, he said, "You know, I regret that your coordination "with the joint chiefs of staff was so difficult." And basically it sent a message to Donovan that, "Okay, you guys actually did do a good job, "and the intelligence that they provided was valuable, "and Army G2 is not going to bother you anymore "about collecting and doing sabotage overseas." The intelligence value of what they came up with was significant.

Bradley Hart

On the day of the Operation Torch landings, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses the French people by radio. Speaking in French, he appeals directly to the local Vichy soldiers and civilians, urging them not to resist and to greet the landing American and British troops as liberators.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Vive la France eternelle!  

Bradley Hart

But many of the Vichy garrisons do resist, as do some French warships. After days of confusion, missteps, and ultimately some high level diplomacy, the Allies declare victory. The city of Casablanca surrenders before a full scale assault could take place. But despite the swift victory, many view the operation as clumsy and too reliant on false assumptions about how the resistance might react. I'm joined again on the podcast by Michael Bell, executive director of the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy here at the National World War II Museum. Mike, thanks for being with us again.

Mike Bell

Great to be here.

Bradley Hart

I'm also joined by John Curatola, senior historian here at the museum and the author of "Armies Afloat." John, thanks for being here.

John Curatola

Thanks for the invite.

Bradley Hart

We're in North Africa now where the allies are going on the offensive in Europe. Mike, let's start with you. I mean, what's the thinking behind Operation Torch? Why North Africa, and what's going on here?

Mike Bell

Yeah, so initially we decided Germany first would be our priority, and, of course, the American chiefs, joint chiefs, but particularly the American Army, really favored a direct approach. You know, the British view was, "Hey, you Americans, "you know, you're rapidly mobilizing. "You're just not ready." You had Churchill wanting to secure North Africa and the Mediterranean, which would preserve the lifeline to the British Empire but also would, you know, protect Egypt, the Suez, relieve his Eighth Army fighting in Egypt, and Stalin, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet premier is demanding a second front. And so, you know, FDR's view was, you know, when American forces are committed, they needed to be committed, he thought, into combat in 1942. The American people, you know, really can't go years without offensive operations. He also thought they needed to be decisive when they were committed. The American chiefs really were a bit opposed to this. They were actually thinking, "Maybe we should focus "on operations in the Pacific instead." But along the way were other things they eyed, you know, for instance, major elements of the French fleet. If we could bring those, you know, we're still in the Battle of the Atlantic. How do we either secure those or prevent the Nazis from securing those? There also were reports that the Germans were gonna build submarine bases in French North Africa which would present a really huge problem for the Battle of the Atlantic. And then this idea that on the bulge of Africa, air bases from there could attack Brazil, and if the Germans could use that, you know, it'd be a very difficult time for the Allies. And so those kind of combinations swayed the thinking in Roosevelt's mind. The real challenge though was could you bring the Vichy French forces onto the Allied side without fighting. You know, there was some intel that suggested that they will welcome us as liberators and that the Vichy forces would join us. On the other hand, you know, the American forces needed to be plussed up with British forces, and there was a concern that if the French detected that British forces were in there, as they had done at Dakar, you know, they would oppose those, and so there's a lot of kind of questionable assumptions about the operation itself as we get ready to launch it.

John Curatola

And keeping in mind that most of these American formations that are going ashore, their training in amphibious operations is slim to none. I mean, there are some that do get some training in the UK, and there certainly are some that get it in the United States, but it isn't in depth, it isn't like months and months and months of training in preparation for this thing called amphibious assault.

Mike Bell

I think Torch in some ways is an incredible learning environment because, you see, you know, what would've happened if we'd tried to land in France instead of against the Vichy forces at that time, you know, how dangerous could that have been? I think you start to see the wisdom of FDR's decision to go in there, and, you know, we're going into kind of these disperse into, you know, Casablanca, into Algiers, into Iran. Ultimately, though, the French colony in Tunisia will open up and allow the Nazis to reinforce, and that'll cause a problem. We're fortunate though. The French forces that do resist, within a couple of days, Admiral Darlan, who's the vice premier in Vichy, will issue orders for them to cease fire, which we were able to exploit then, bring those French units into our Allied command, attempt to continue the attack into Tunisia. But a lot of that is kind of luck of the draw. You can't say that the intel has prepared us completely for what we encounter in North Africa. I think in many ways we're fortunate.

Bradley Hart

What was the intelligence gathered prior to Torch, overly optimistic, or what was it saying about the Vichy forces that perhaps didn't turn out to be true?

Mike Bell

So, there's a, particularly in the coordinator of information that'll become the OSS, their view is that, in a lot of ways shaped by British intelligence, the idea is that ultimately they will welcome the American forces, that there will be some resistance, but it'll be local and brief. On the other hand, it was interesting, the French had really conveyed to our diplomatic team that we have an armistice with Germany, that we have to defend all of our territory, and that our honor requires us to defend that. And it's interesting, you know, despite knowing that, we'd kind of defaulted on the side that, you know, once they realized we're Americans, they won't, you know, do anything about that. One of the challenges though is we didn't have a French officer, General Giraud, initially, with enough status that everyone would take his orders, and that was another Intel assumption. You know, the idea was he would be sufficient stature that the forces there would take his orders. Ultimately we needed Admiral Darlan, who was not only commander of the French Navy, but was the deputy premier under Marshall Petain, had enough authority to actually bring about the ceasefire, but it's interesting, the kind of assumptions on which we'd built the assault.

John Curatola

And as you pointed out, you know, this is an ambiguous environment with regard to the enemy. And, matter of fact, FDR and Ike put out radio transmissions to the French forces reminding them that we are brothers in arms, and do you remember what happened in the first World War? And of course some of the tactical commanders were a little bit upset about this because they feel like it's tipping their hand with regard to the amphibious assault piece on this. But, again, it speaks to this ambiguous environment, and what's gonna happen when we get ashore? So there's that confusion piece about this as well that commanders have to kind of question what's going on, you know, and that ship to shore movement, they're gonna lose a large number of the landing craft as they're moving ashore, and there's a lot of confusion once they get ashore. There's poor communications, there's poor beach support teams, and there's a soldier who says, "If we had landed up against "any kind of significant resistance, "this would've ended in disaster." And Patton actually echoes that same sentiment after the operation itself. We also do a couple of landings up on the northern edge of Africa up in Algeria. There's an Eastern Task Force, and then there's a Central Task Force, and the operations there go against light or negligible resistance as well, but just getting from ship to shore has its own problems. Eastern Task Force, they have a 104 landing craft, and they wreck like 90 of 'em, you know, in one area. So, again, what you're seeing here is the United States Army and Navy on a steep learning curve with regard to advanced assault.

Mike Bell

You know, a couple things that I think are important about Torch, though, you know, particularly if you look at, you know, Patton's task force that leave, you know, Virginia and actually assault North Africa. You know, the German assumption was because the Battle of Atlantic had gone so well for them that there's no way that the Allies could actually mount such an expedition, and this is really the first time you see long range expeditionary operations from the United States against hostile adversaries, which are kind of part and parcel of what the US military does today. But the, you know, it's really a German intel failure on that part, you know, where they don't think it's possible, and so there is a degree of strategic surprise about this as well.

John Curatola

There is a real concern as Patton's flotilla's moving across the Atlantic, that it's going to be intercepted by German U-boats. And fortunately, during that transition, German U-boats are called to a different location, and so the flotilla moves unmolested, but that's a real concern over whether or not we're gonna be able to power project, and so, again, we were power projecting an entire amphibious flotilla from the east coast of the United States across U-Boat-infested waters, all the way to North Africa. And that's, in 1942, we're already doing that.

Mike Bell

What's interesting to notice though, is during this time of the war, the British are driving strategy. The Americans have their say, but the British really have the authority, I'll use that term, over their newbies that are coming into this fight. But what's interesting, as the war in the Mediterranean progresses, that relationship starts to shift, and the Americans gain the upper hand. By '44 and '45, we're in the driver's seat, and the British are now taking the backseat to the desires of the Americans in terms of grand strategy,

Bradley Hart

Mike, what's the common view in Washington about what's going on in North Africa?

Mike Bell

You know, I think it's exemplified in many ways by the Humphrey Bogart film "Casablanca." If you see, you know, "Casablanca," which will be, you know, actually previewed in the White House while Torch is going on, there's this sense that there's German agents everywhere. You know, there's a few loyal Frenchmen, but there's others are quislings that are under Nazi domination. I think it fits well with this kind of sense in many ways influenced by British intelligence services, the British organization in New York, by their ties with what becomes the OSS, the OSS really had seen that the State Department's diplomatic relations with Vichy shouldn't be condoned, that they really needed to push policy in a different direction. The French armistice with Germany was really collaboration rather than, you know, armistice requirements, and so I think that film kind of sums up appearance versus reality, if you will, probably really reflects, you know, what we would see from the OSS veterans than say from State Department or much more traditional parts of the US government.

Bradley Hart

For more on the complexity of America's spy operation during this period, we're joined again by Mary Kathryn Barbier. Mary Kathryn, thanks again for being here.

Mary Kathryn Barbier

Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Bradley Hart

Could you briefly explain the situation with Vichy France? A lot of our listeners may not be familiar with what happens with France after June of 1940.

Mary Kathryn Barbier

Because Germany was engaged elsewhere other than just in France, there was an agreement that France would be divided. German forces would occupy the northern half, and then the southern part of France would be under the control of a French government established in Vichy, so it was referred to as Vichy France, and they would cooperate with the Germans. And so you had to have permission to cross the line between occupied France and Vichy France. Vichy France still controlled, to a large extent, French colonies, and there was a question about how strong that control was, what the colonies would do if Allied forces landed there, and then you also have the Free French Army under de Gaulle that was situated initially in the UK. De Gaulle didn't have the support of everybody, but their intention... against Vichy France, and then when you think about North Africa and the French colonies, are those colonies gonna side with Vichy France? Are they gonna go with the Free French? Are they gonna support the Allied landing? It's this very fluid situation about what it's gonna look like when that invasion happens. And, add to that, the complexity of the fact that there's still a French Navy out there, and the Allies don't want the Germans to get control of that French Navy, but the French don't want to turn their navy over to the Allies, and so there is an attack and the sinking of part of the French fleet. So French sailors get killed. That doesn't improve relations between the British and the French.

Bradley Hart

We should say that it's the British who sink the French fleet.

Mary Kathryn Barbier

Yes.

Bradley Hart

So to some extent we could say there's almost three French factions in this period. There's occupied France. There's Vichy France. There's the Free French Army under de Gaulle which is really based out of London here. So a complicated situation the Allies are planning to land into in North Africa. Seems like the kind of situation where intelligence is gonna be really key.

Mary Kathryn Barbier

We have to understand that Donovan, first as director of COI and then subsequently as director of the OSS, was initially given responsibility for subversive operations in North Africa. What that meant, to some extent, is that when the Torch landings began in November of 1942, OSS-recruited guerilla forces sprang into action to assist the landing force. And so this guerilla force was recruited and armed by the OSS several months prior to the landings. These men represented part of a new dimension in the field of American military operations that included guerilla activities, extensive espionage and intelligence work, as well as conducting secret negotiations to create pro-Allied factions in either enemy or neutral countries. And so part of what OSS did was to try and persuade pro-Vichy forces not to oppose the landings, to actually help with the landings, and they were also supposed to gauge the level of commitment that those Vichy French forces had to the overall French position at this point in the war. The OSS also maintained links with disaffected officers in the Vichy French army in North Africa. It was their job to build on political disaffection in the French Army and to persuade French forces in North Africa not to resist the landings, which was by far, one could argue, their most important task. Hands down, when it comes to purely collecting military intelligence, the OSS was stellar. They did excellent work. They were less successful engaging what the Vichy French army forces would do once the landing started. The message that they sent is, "They're on our side. "They're not going going to oppose. "Everything is," can I use the phrase, "hunky dory." And it was not.

Bradley Hart

So why do you think OSS's assessment is so off effectively? Is it wishful thinking? Is it mirror imaging, a term we use in the intelligence community today? What do you think goes wrong here for them?

Mary Kathryn Barbier

I will say, in terms of opinion, perhaps to some extent wishful thinking. One of the things that comes to mind is preconceived notions of the other side, the enemy side, behaving the way you would, and it doesn't always play out that way. For Vichy France, Vichy government's in power. Why? Because of the Germans. They wouldn't be in power without the German support, and they have German support because they've agreed to cooperate and collaborate and had proved themselves to be loyal partners. Even if they're the youngest brother, or the younger brother, they're still the brother and the partner, and that didn't reflect necessarily how the French people writ large felt. You've got some French very much buy into and enjoy the power of, whether it's being in the German-supported French police force or whatever. So there's, again, I'll use the term tension between the French who buy into the Vichy government and its position and the power and what it wants because the Germans have allowed them to do certain things that they might not have been able to do in the past, and the French who oppose the Vichy government, who are resisting the Germans. But, as we know, it's a complicated story. France has a complicated history. All countries have a complicated history. And sometimes, we know this in real life, and it happens in the intelligence world as well, that people will tell you what they think you want to hear not necessarily what they think or what they intend to do. That could have colored their conclusions about what the French army in North Africa would do.

Bradley Hart

A number of intelligence agents and operatives took part in the planning and execution of Operation Torch on both the American and the British sides. One of them was Ian Fleming. You might know him as the creator of one of the most famous fictional spies of all time, James Bond, but Fleming's own intelligence career was far from fictitious. Fleming later said that James Bond was quote, "a compound of all the secret agents and commando types "I met during the war." Some of the original James Bond novels even suggest that Agent 007 himself was a World War II veteran. And another British spy would also become a literary icon of the 20th century, a man named Roald Dahl. I'm joined again by Nick Reynolds. Thanks again for being on the podcast.

Nick Reynolds

It's my pleasure to be here.

Bradley Hart

I want to talk about two of the British agents in this period who names will likely be familiar to many in our audience: the first being Ian Fleming, of course, the author of the James Bond novels; the second being Roald Dahl, who also is working for the British in this period. What are Fleming and Dahl, two very different types of agents in a lot of ways, what are they up to in this period?

Nick Reynolds

Well, they're both similar in that they like the ladies a lot! They're famous for that, even during the war, probably Dahl more than Fleming, who was no shrinking violet. And so Fleming is in the wavy navy as the British call it. So if you're a reservist, your stripes on your uniform, not a straight line, but they're a wavy line, so everyone will know that the officer, the commander coming to speak to you, is not a regular but a reservist. And he's had a checkered career before the war, never really found good direction in life. Tried his hand at journalism, being a stockbroker, and then he winds up being Admiral Godfrey's aide and coming over to Washington in that capacity and sort of being detailed to tell Donovan what to do. You know, we've got these memos. So he makes a go of it. Roald Dahl is a Royal Air Force officer. He's been a fighter pilot in East Africa, you know, acquitted himself well but started to suffer from we would probably these days say PTSD. After a while the strain got to be too much of, we can only imagine the huge strain of just flying a spitfire is gotta be, on the one hand, exhilarating, but also, you know, every nerve is firing in your brain, and eventually, so he's kind of invalided out. He has these blackout headaches, and so they make him kind of the assistant air attache in Washington, and he's kind of, he's sort of like Fleming and Stevenson. Basically his job is to drum up support for the British, do little favors for Americans, to gather little bits of information here and there. So I don't know how much he has to do with Donovan. We think of Fleming and Donovan in the same sentence. Roald Dahl is more of a presence in Washington throughout much of the war.

Bradley Hart

In 1943, after Operation Torch, Ian Fleming helped devise a deception plan to fool the Nazis into believing the Allies' next target would be further to the east, in the Balkans. Called Operation Mincemeat, the plot involved planting fake orders on a dead body, drifting the body out to sea in the hopes that it would be recovered ultimately by the Nazis. The plan worked. The Nazis moved troops to the east while the real landing would take place on the island of Sicily. After the war, Ian Fleming would go on to write iconic James Bond novels like "Casino Royale," "Live and Let Die," "Diamonds are Forever," and "Goldfinger." He died in 1964, and so far more than 20 movies have been made from his Bond novels and characters. Roald Dahl would go on to become an author too, creating iconic characters you know like Willy Wonka, Matilda, and Fantastic Mr. Fox. He also had a career as a screenwriter and even wrote the 1967 James Bond movie, "You Only Live Twice." Roald Dahl died in 1990, but his legacy today is complicated by a series of antisemitic remarks for which the Dahl family has issued an apology. In our final episode of this season, we'll talk about the OSS agents who dropped behind enemy lines before D-Day, and a military deception plan of astonishing proportions. Be sure to subscribe to "The Secret World War 2" wherever you get your podcasts to get our latest episodes when they come out, and check out our website for additional resources for each episode, reading lists featuring the work of our experts, and links to videos and oral histories from the collections here at the National World War II Museum.