1/10/2024 0 Comments Mist survival trainer vo.191There he learned marksmanship, riding, and hunting in the wild. 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. 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. 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. Jamison, a Native American, was put ashore on Luna, La Unión, in the Philippines in the fall of 1944. Delivered at night by submarines, they were deployed under the authority of Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Some of these may have been with MacArthur’s authorization, others perhaps not. 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. But Halsey was not persuaded and finally told the man to “Get the hell out of here!” 4 (“Bull”) Halsey, whose naval forces assisted MacArthur, to allow OSS into the Southwest Pacific Area. In April 1943, the OSS chief sent an agent to try to convince Vice-Admiral William F. 3 Donovan was not even able to outflank MacArthur, at least initially. Whether MacArthur’s 1942 decision was made for practical or personal reasons, or both, it effectively excluded the OSS for most of the war. 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. General Douglas MacArthur, commander in the Southwestern Pacific, would have nothing to do with the OSS. OSS tried but failed to gain significant access to the island-fighting war in the Pacific. 1 Within three months, he dispatched a representative to China to “improvise an underground apparatus.” 2 Donovan hoped his organization would play an important role in the war against the Japanese Empire. 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. 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. 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. Most importantly, the fighting in China itself tied down the bulk of the Japanese Army throughout the war. 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. 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. In the beginning, after the Japanese had pushed through most of Southeast Asia, they were finally stopped at the border of India. But it was an important war and one in which the OSS made significant achievements. 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. 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.
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