It's My Country Too

by Jerri Bell, Tracy Crow

  Senior OSS officers recommended her for the Legion of Merit for her “unusual coolness and clear thinking” during the incident. The War Department, failing to understand the risk of her actions and the courage she displayed, downgraded the award to the Army Commendation Ribbon. The Army posthumously upgraded her award to the Legion of Merit on June 1, 2016.

  Czech left the Army and the OSS at the rank of major; she married an Air Force officer and earned a master’s degree in chemistry. She died on January 21, 2016.

  The following excerpt is transcribed from a September 2006 oral history at the Women in Military Service for America Foundation; Col. Jane Maliszewski, USA (Ret.), interviewed Rader.

  I was in X-2. That was counterintelligence. That’s what they recruited me for.

  When I got there [when she reported to OSS headquarters], ’cause I was in uniform, they . . . gave me a jumpsuit, said, “Don’t bring anything with you except your clothes, there’s no IDs, nothing.” They gave you a name, and said, “This is you, and don’t ever tell anybody who you are.”

  [The OSS sends Captain Czech to a two-week school. They give her a jumpsuit and a fake name and tell her not to bring identification. She is driven to the school with four men in a car with blacked-out windows. Men and women train together.]

  We were all dressed alike, in jumpsuits. . . . It was sort of a nice house . . . and that’s the way we trained. They showed me how to take a gun apart and put it together—like I needed that!—and they showed you how to shoot a machine gun; I needed that [she says sarcastically]. . . . They taught us stuff about the intelligence in Germany and Japan, and what we were supposed to do, and the things that you have to look out for, so somebody doesn’t recognize you as an American, like how you smoke a cigarette, which—I never smoked—how you eat, all your mannerisms and all, you’ve got to watch all that. . . . Never did figure out where the school was. One guy was a Marine sergeant, one a naval officer . . . that was the class. We were all being trained for different areas. I never saw them again in my life.

  [After training, she reports to Fort Dix and then travels with Army nurses on a ship to Glasgow. She has orders to Warsaw, via Salzburg; her colleague Agnes is destined for Czechoslovakia.]

  I didn’t go to Warsaw right away. We went to Salzburg . . . we went to the office every day. . . . It was a different way of life.

  We were doing research. Corrections. We read magazines, anything you might pick up in newspapers, and filing. . . . Then we were scheduled to go to . . . Salzburg. So we went to France first, and it was just like a tour. . . . We report to the embassies, we were not in any unit. Agnes and I were in it by ourselves, and we were attached to headquarters, because they had to put the military [people] somewhere, but they had no control over us. Nobody did. That was the beauty of it, nobody did. We were on our own schedule.

  So we went to France. We left our stuff there. . . . I went to Switzerland, went skiing. . . . There was Agnes, and me, and a civilian girl. . . . And there was an enlisted man . . . he knew French.

  [In Salzburg, OSS gives her a command car and Jeep trailer and picks up a GI to be their driver.]

  He was out the night before, and he had a hangover that was terrible, and he could barely make it! So we started out with this entourage, just us, down the highway, and they just kept saying, “Don’t ever pick anybody up”—see, there were a lot of these Germans running around, and young people in American uniforms, and a lot of kids got killed because they picked them up. So we go down the highway, and this kid’s getting sicker and sicker, so we had to stop, I remember stopping somewhere—we were still in France—and there was a woman out there who had water in a pump, so we almost gave him a bath, sobered him up. And there was a question, “Who’s going to drive?” This kid can’t drive. You drive, Agnes. No, Stephanie’s not going to drive. And [a third woman, name indistinguishable] isn’t going to drive, so we’re back to that kid again. We went for a while . . . we had a destination, we were supposed to get pretty far, but we were loitering with this kid not doing too well, and then he got us in a ditch. I thought, Now that’s dandy, we’re going to park here all night! We could hear this noise—whooping and hollering and singing and yelling—I said, “I think that sounds like a bunch of Americans.” They were coming toward Paris. And I guess they stopped. They got out there, and they got that old car out of the hole and off they went, they gave us some gas, even.

  So we made it to Luxembourg. Luxembourg wasn’t expecting three women. There weren’t too many women out there floating around. So Agnes and I—I don’t know where the French girl went—we went to a convent! . . . And off we went the next day, back on the road with that guy again, though he was sober by now. . . . We got as far as Nuremberg. . . . We were sticking to the main roads. You don’t go off of them, and you don’t pick anybody up. . . . The bridges were out. The superhighways were built for landing [airplanes]. We saw a lot of these makeshift airplanes, from the air they look like airplanes, but some of them were dummies.

  [She describes some incidents from her temporary assignment in Salzburg, and then the colleague for whom she works in the embassy in Warsaw.]

  [The other OSS agent, a man,] worked directly for the ambassador. . . . They were going to send him into Warsaw, working for the ambassador. . . . And Chad knew him from times before, he worked for him, so his cover was easy. And my cover was, I was his secretary. So we were together. Now, Chad could speak French, and Italian, and English, but he couldn’t speak Polish. So I did. He got there a little before I did . . . we were at the Polonia Hotel. He had a room across the hall, and that was our office, technically, because there were no offices or anything like that [because of the bombing] . . . it was terrible, terrible.

  I had two passports, a civilian passport and a military passport, and I had a military ID, and a civilian ID. So when I was assigned to go to Warsaw, I had to leave that. I had to change clothes, and I had my civilian clothes with me. So when I got to Berlin, I checked into the Embassy again, and I got some gals there, they kept my stuff, and I changed clothes, and I was a civilian! I used the same name—and then when I traveled, I traveled from then on as a civilian. But that’s not too healthy, you know, when you’re a “double.”

  We flew in a C-47 . . . he flew us around that city. It was unbelievable. You can’t even imagine. You looked and every house in the whole area, down to the basement. . . . The Germans were blowing it up street by street. And the question was, Why is this hotel Polonia still standing? And they said it was [Gestapo] headquarters. And they were managing to save that for last, but they had to leave so fast that they didn’t get to blow it up. All the Embassy people were in there—one floor was American and another was French, and so forth. . . . It was beyond belief. The piles of stuff . . . the women . . . there were no men! They [the women] were tearing down buildings, and moving bricks, and you didn’t get close to anybody because you didn’t know if he was a Russian, a German, or what have you, so you had to be careful. And never answer anybody if he asked you the time, because the next thing you knew, you didn’t have a watch! [Laughs.] It was unbelievable.

  [Rader is in Warsaw about a year.]

  There was no reason to be coming home, then all of sudden we got orders for me to go, because back here they decided they didn’t need the OSS, and they shut it down and said bring everybody back, bang. When I got back, I was not even OSS, I was USS—United States Service—they even dropped the name. It was 1946. I could have stayed in, and I could have gone back to my job, or get married. I decided to heck with all of this, I’d get married. And that’s why I got out. There was a lot of confusion going on [the OSS/CIA reorganization], and I missed it all because I was in Poland. Agnes [came] back . . . she never got to Czechoslovakia. She got into CIA, and they sent her to Czechoslovakia. She stayed in CIA and she met somebody in the CIA and got married and that was the end of her career too.

  Jeanne Holm

  (1921–2010)

  Women’s Army Corps/U.S
. Air Force

  Jeanne Holm, from Portland, Oregon, began her military career in the WAAC in 1942 and continued with the WAC in 1943. She commanded a WAC basic training company; the WAC training regiment at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia; and the 106th WAC Hospital Company at Newton D. Baker General Hospital in West Virginia. She left active duty in 1946 to attend college and was recalled to active duty in 1948. In 1949 she transferred to the U.S. Air Force, where she served in Germany as assistant director for Plans and Operations at the 7200th Air Force Depot Wing and War Plans Officer for the 85th Air Depot Wing during the Berlin airlift. After subsequent tours in Washington DC and Europe, she was appointed Women’s Air Force director in 1965. During her appointment, which was extended twice, she updated women’s policies, doubled the number of women in the Air Force, and expanded their opportunities. She became the first woman general officer in the Air Force when promoted to brigadier general in 1971, and in 1973 became the first woman promoted to major general. She retired in 1975 and went on to serve as President Gerald Ford’s special assistant in the Office of Women’s Programs. She wrote two comprehensive, scholarly histories of women’s contributions to the American armed forces in the twentieth century: Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution (1982, updated in 1994) and In Defense of a Nation: Servicewomen in World War II (1998). Mary Jo Binker, then the director of the Oral History Program of the Women’s Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, interviewed Holm in January 2003. The following is excerpted from the interview. Binker’s questions have been edited for length and narrative flow.

  I flew over to Europe with a group of Air Force officers. I knew nothing about the Air Force. And I met these nice Air Force officers who were on this plane. And they—we talked about where they were going. They were all going to this little base called Erding Air Force Base, a depot in Germany. When I got off the plane, I went . . . to ask Headquarters U.S. Air Force over there about an assignment.

  They said, “Where would you like to go?”

  Well, I’d never been asked that before. So I said, “Well, how about Erding?”

  So they said, “Fine. There’s a seat—” [on] a DC-3, we call them gooney birds, “—and they’re taking off from the airport out here tomorrow morning, get on it.”

  The next day I got up at the air base, got on this gooney bird and flew down to Erding Air Depot, and that was the start of my Air Force career.

  They had no idea what to do with me. I just arrived there as a captain, and a fairly senior captain at that point. There were about five women officers who [were called WAF at the time]. I was the senior captain. But there were also about three or four nurses there who were in the medical facility. Then there was a detachment of enlisted women there of about 100 women who were assigned, and all these women were assigned to various places throughout the base.

  And when I arrived fresh out of the Army, they had no idea what to do with me. I had not even been in the Army Air Corps, whereas the rest—most of these women had served in the Army Air Corps. . . . I didn’t even know the terminology within the Air Force, so I was really a neophyte. But they were very nice. They said, “Well, do you have any idea what you’d like to do?”

  I was being interviewed by a lieutenant colonel in headquarters in the base. And this was a depot, the largest and the only—actually the only Air Force depot in Europe, which serviced all the U.S. Air Force activities in Europe, in terms of supplies and maintenance, aircraft maintenance, and all of this. Huge facility. So they said, “Would you like to go in supply or maintenance, we’d be happy to train you?”

  Well, that sound[ed] interesting.

  [He] said also, “We have a job—a war plans officer job, would you be interested in that?”

  “Oh, that sounds interesting. Yes, I’d like that.” That’s . . . how I became a war plans officer. It [wasn’t the] Cold War yet. This was during the occupation [of Germany], and the Berlin airlift was on. And at this point in time of course we were beginning to think that we might go to war, because the Russians—the USSR was making moves against the U.S. forces in Berlin. And they had closed off the City of Berlin. And the only way into Berlin at that point was by air. And the U.S. Air Force and our—what became our NATO allies, the British and the French also were flying in the Berlin airlift, but it was mostly U.S. Air Force. And we provided most of the supplies that—from Erding Air Depot. It went into Berlin and serviced and maintained all the aircraft that were flying in the Berlin airlift.

  Well, this was a very exciting time. And Germany itself was a rubble. Erding Air Depot was right outside of Munich. The City of Munich was 98 percent rubble. All of the cities of any magnitude in Germany were destroyed, Austria as well. A few of the cities were still standing, but most of them were destroyed. Also when the SS troops were evacuating areas, they destroyed all the bridges on the autobahns. So it just shut everything down. There were no airlines. There were no airports. The only thing[s] running were the trains, and the trucks that were provided by the occupation forces. And Germany was just destroyed, barely eking out an existence. And we were there at that time.

  And the black market was rife. It was rife with all kinds of illegal operations, but it was the only—only economy that was really working.

  We were allowed to barter with the things that we were able to buy, mainly cigarettes, coffee, those kinds of things. The medium of exchange essentially was cigarettes, and candy bars, but cigarettes mostly. We had what we called funny money. It was occupation currency. We were not allowed to use American money. We had to use these scrip, it was called, money. And initially we were not even allowed to use German money. But the Germans were just now going into a new—a new currency system from the Reichsmarks to the Deutschmark. And so there was a lot of growing pains at this point. And of course the Air Force itself was going through growing pains.

  The Air Force itself was going through a very confused period, having just broken away from the Army. And many of the ways they were doing things were Army ways of doing things, but they didn’t like that. And they were trying to establish their own identity—their own organizational concepts. And this was all in the process at the time I arrived there. And so I was on the . . . bottom floor of the new organization of the United States Air Force. In addition to being war plans officer, I was always—also doing manpower officer, doing manpower officer work, working with manpower documents.

  [Binker asks Holm to tell her about war planning.]

  Well, that was kind of Mickey Mouse, really, because the truth of the matter was that the Air Force at the local levels didn’t really know much about war planning. The Army had usually done base defense planning, the Air Force was flying airplanes, they thought in terms of airplanes, rather than in terms of base defense, and that kind of thing. They didn’t quite know how to cope with this yet. And so when I was offered this job, the job entailed my going to an office that was right inside—to get to it I had to go through the wing commander’s office.

  The wing commander’s office had a bookcase that had to be pulled back, a secret bookcase, that I had to pull back. I had to go there before he got to work in the morning, go in, and only his secretary, and the executive officer knew why I was there. I would go in, pull this bookcase back, and I had this huge set of keys to this great big vault door. It was not—it was not a combination lock, it was keys. And so I would open this huge vault, go in there, close that, and the door, and then the bookcase would close. And there was a light over my door, when I worked in there, a set of lights. The red light was—meant that the commander’s office was closed, and I could not leave. And when the green light was on, I could go and come as I pleased.

  So I would go into this little office, little bitty office with a large set of files and a big safe, for which I had the combination and one window, and large desk and a table where I can draw maps, and work with these war plans. And very little had actually been done on these war plans before. And so I just dove into them, and got copies—got out copies of the t
op—and I was cleared for top secret. So I had all these—all these top secret documents were in my office, in my—my big safe. So I would get these top secrets documents out that came from our higher headquarters in Wiesbaden, and from the local Army headquarters. And I would go through those and pick out those portions that were assigned—made assignments to this depot, and this wing, to accomplish in the event of war. I pulled those out, the material out of those and inserted them in the Erding document war plans. And then I would go visit the various organizations on the base, and tell them what—show them their portion of this war plan, the things that they were to do in the event that the USSR decided to attack us.

  [Binker suggests that the threat of a Soviet attack is an ever-present reality for Holm and the Air Force.]

  It was daily. I got out and drove all around all the local roads to find [out] if we were attacked. You see, this depot was the closest base to the Russian lines. So we were the most vulnerable, and certainly the most important target for them. There were fighter bases there, but they were on the other side of Munich. We were between the fighter bases, and the border with the USSR. But when all this was set up, we didn’t know that the USSR was going to become a threat. And it wasn’t until the Berlin airlift that we really realized that we could go to war again, and that’s when things began to heat up. And so I was at the very beginning of the planning for this—this possible war effort with the USSR.

  Ruth M. Anderson

  (1943–)

  U.S. Air Force

  Ruth M. (Ellis) Anderson served in the Air Force as an intelligence officer and became the first woman in the Air Force appointed to the post of defense attaché at a United States Embassy abroad. Her three-year appointment to the U.S. embassy in Budapest, Hungary, coincided with the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the establishment of Hungary as a free nation. She also served as chief negotiator in bilateral agreements with NATO nations concerning ground-launched cruise missiles in 1979–83; and in 1986–87 she was deputy director of the Multinational Programs Office, Strategic Defense Initiative in the Office of Secretary of Defense. The following excerpts are from her 1999 memoir Barbed Wire for Sale, which she wrote with her husband, J. M. Anderson.