Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  Chevrier reiterated what Bardet had said when he and Colby had first met—what the resistance needed above all else were arms and ammunition. By now, Giry had received a new radio from London. Team Bruce, together with Chevrier, picked the best drop zones, generally secluded fields and pastures in the countryside. Giry would radio the coordinates of the location together with some innocuous code phrase, such as “Le vin est rouge” (The wine is red). Every evening the men of Team Bruce would listen to the BBC news broadcast to France, paying special attention to the messages personnels that followed the program’s theme, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. If they heard the code phrase, they knew that the drop was to be that night at that particular location. During the first two weeks of operation, Team Bruce coordinated more than a dozen drops, which provided thousands of rifles and carbines, machine guns, and bazookas to resistance fighters. Donkeyman doubled and then tripled in size. “Straight fighting job ahead,” Team Bruce reported to London on August 21. “Sabotage platoon changed to heavy weapons.”36

  As Patton’s Third Army advanced relentlessly toward the Third Reich, tens of thousands of German soldiers were on the move south of the Loire River in an effort to reach the fatherland ahead of the Allied armies. Only a shallow river separated the Americans and as many as 100,000 enemy soldiers. Patton was not concerned. “Forget this goddamned business of worrying about our flanks,” he told his staff. “Some goddamned fool once said that flanks must be secured and since then sons-of-bitches all over the world have been going crazy guarding their flanks.” When the commander of his southernmost unit expressed concern about the tens of thousands of Wehrmacht across the Loire, Patton advised, “Just ignore ’em.” Patton was not as foolhardy as it seemed. The Allied code-breaking operation Ultra had revealed that the Germans south of the Loire had strict orders to extricate themselves from France as quickly as possible in order to defend their homeland.37

  Patton may not have been worried about his right flank, but his superior, General Bradley, now commander of the Twelfth Army Group, was. In an effort to slow Patton’s advance, the Wehrmacht was employing Germans who spoke perfect, Americanized English. They would talk their way into Allied camps and once there, shoot officers, blow up ammunition dumps, and in general create havoc. At Bradley’s direction, Third Army intelligence sent word to Donkeyman that it needed assistance, and Colby and Favel made their way through German lines to find out exactly what the US forces required. Colby carried no identification papers, only a cyanide pill. At the first American outpost he and Favel encountered, he announced that he was Major Colby of the OSS. For his efforts, he was handcuffed and taken to headquarters. The officer in charge asked him where he had trained. “Fort Benning,” Colby replied. Where was the post office, the laundry, the theater? When the correct answers were forthcoming, the handcuffs came off and the conversations began. Colby’s interrogator was Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, a man who would later partner with Colby in Vietnam. Eventually, the Jeds were forwarded to Patton’s headquarters, where they provided as much information as they could on enemy troop movements and promised more intelligence as well as maquis harassing actions to prevent a German attack on the Third Army’s flank.38

  Upon their return to the field, Colby and Favel had Giry radio London, asking that their region be given priority for air drops. With additional arms and equipment in hand, the maquis stepped up its attacks. On August 26, Giry reported to London: “Americans contacted and coordinating. Giving information, holding towns and acting local security. Auxerre, Avallon, Joigny, held by FFI. . . . Continually attacking groups of retreating Germans.” Typical was an operation in which US troops, the maquis, and Team Bruce cooperated in assaulting a column of 1,500 German troops making its way from Montargis to Auxerre. The force was too formidable for the resistance fighters to handle alone, so Colby asked the nearest American units to help. C Troop of the 2nd United States Cavalry led the assault. As the American tanks smashed the enemy formation, the FFI lingered on the edges, picking off stragglers and providing intelligence. There was another reason, Colby recalled, for American troops to take the lead. If the Germans believed that they were dealing with the FFI, whose captured members they had systematically tortured and executed in the past, they would fight to the finish rather than surrender. When the firing stopped, only a handful of the enemy had survived, and the resistance had captured a large cache of arms, ammunition, and fuel.39

  As the lead tank battalion of the 4th Armored Division, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Abrams, drove east, Team Bruce had its maquis blow up one bridge after another, some to protect the Americans’ flank and some to cut off retreat by elements of the Wehrmacht that had been trapped. Much of the crucial intelligence that flowed into Colby’s camp and subsequently to the Third Army came from Peggy McKnight. On a typical outing, she bicycled some 40 kilometers from Gien past Briare and Cosne on the Loire, reporting back on bridges that had been destroyed, the location of enemy troops, and the state of the local resistance.40

  As the Germans retreated, the FFI was assigned an additional job by SHAEF. Chevrier, whom the Allies had officially recognized as the principal maquis leader in Yonne, and his men were to occupy and govern the liberated towns along the Germans’ escape route. On August 26, Chevrier’s forces rolled into the provincial capital of the neighboring department of Auxerre. All the while, Colby and Favel moved in and out of the colonel’s headquarters, advising, coordinating, supervising more air drops, and participating in an occasional firefight.41 The liberation of Yonne and the Loire was accompanied by one continuous celebration. Joyous crowds of villagers greeted the Jeds and the maquis. They were kissed by the women, hugged by the men, showered with flowers, and treated to an endless round of banquets featuring the local cuisine, gallons of wine, and tearful, patriotic speeches.

  In mid-August, French and American forces landed on France’s Mediterranean coast and began making their way up the Rhone Valley. Team Bruce played a key role, transmitting information on local conditions and enemy positions as these new forces and the Third Army linked up. By September 14, the drama had all but ended. “All Germans gone from whole area,” Team Bruce radioed London. “No further need of arms.” After the war, Roger Bardet would be arrested and convicted of treason. Bill Colby would be awarded the Bronze Star and eventually the Croix de Guerre for his actions in France.42

  On September 17, Team Bruce received orders to proceed to Paris and await further instructions. The Frenchmen could now use their real names. En route to the capital, Favel—that is, Camille LeLong—Colby, and Giry—Roger Villebois—took a slight detour so that Villebois could rendezvous with an old flame.

  Paris was a swirl of Allied uniforms and joyous civilians. The celebrations that had awaited Team Bruce in village after village in Yonne were going nonstop in France’s liberated capital. Colby managed to rendezvous with other surviving Jeds, including Robert Ansett, a fellow Columbia law student. Ansett had been part of a team that had captured fleeing French collaborators, some of whom were high-ranking officials of the now defunct Vichy regime. In the process, Ansett had come into possession of Vichy vice premier Pierre Laval’s black Cadillac. Just before boarding his flight to London, Ansett bestowed the luxurious auto on his friend as a Jedburgh legacy.

  In the midst of the partying, Bill found time to visit his father, Elbridge, who was then serving on the staff of General Courtney H. Hodges’s First Army.43 The colonel was immensely proud of his son’s exploits, and perhaps a bit envious. There was still more fighting to come, however, and the father said goodbye to his son with a mixture of anticipation and dread.

  Team Bruce was scheduled to drop into Alsace on the Franco-German border, but the Wehrmacht evacuated the area before the operation could be launched. Colby recalled that his one year of college German did not qualify him for a drop into the Reich—and so he repaired to London and requested assignment to China, where the war with Japan was still raging. It was not to be.44

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  A BRIDGE TOO FAR

  When Colby arrived in London in October 1944, it appeared that the war might be over by Christmas or shortly thereafter. Allied armies were driving across France and had penetrated into Belgium and the Netherlands. But the Reich’s disintegration was illusory. The führer was gathering his forces for a fight to the end. Soon the Germans had established a stable front and, unbeknownst to SHAEF, were preparing for a major counteroffensive that would eventually become known as the “Battle of the Bulge.” The Allies would survive that counterthrust, but it was a near thing. Eisenhower would resume the offensive, but Allied forces would not cross the bridge at Remagen into Germany until March 8, 1945. Meanwhile, the Red Army had swept into Finland, pushing some 150,000 German soldiers into Norway. The OSS was given the task of keeping those forces bottled up in Scandinavia so they would not become a factor in the final battle for Germany. A popular uprising in Norway, such as the one that had occurred in France, was not feasible. At one time, there had been some 350,000 German troops in the country. At its largest, the Norwegian Home Force had numbered 40,000, with only half being armed.1

  In December 1944, Gerry Miller, the OSS officer in charge of the Jedburghs, summoned Major Colby to his office. Would he be willing to take command of the OSS’s Norwegian Special Operations Group (NORSO)? Miller asked. A hundred Norwegian Americans had been operating in occupied Europe and were currently out of a job; OSS wanted to turn them into Jedburghs and then drop them into Norway to sabotage the Nordland Railway—the railway over which the German High Command was planning to transport 150,000 crack ski troops to the fatherland. Colby immediately accepted. He was bored, tired of waiting for the assignment to the China-India-Burma theater. As an afterthought, Miller asked, “Do you ski?” Colby assured him that he did; as captain of the Burlington, Vermont, ski team, he had traversed the Green Mountains, skiing down its slopes and then climbing back up them with his equipment strapped to his back (this was in the days before mechanized chair lifts). Colby had no idea at the time how valuable that experience would become.2

  Some of the NORSO volunteers were part of the larger Norwegian exile force that had fought alongside a dozen other exile units from Nazi-occupied countries. The Norwegians’ leader had been the colorful and audacious Colonel Serge Obolensky, who had served in the St. Petersburg Imperial Guards and was a personal friend of Wild Bill Donovan. Others were Norwegian Americans tapped by the OSS for sabotage work in Scandinavia; they had been training since 1943, but at the time of Colby’s appointment, they were resting and recuperating at Dalnaglar Castle, an ancient Scottish redoubt in the foothills of the Grampians. More than a hundred of the Norwegians and Norwegian Americans had volunteered, three times the number the operation would require. As with the Jedburghs, they would have to be weeded. They were all tough, hard men, tougher than he was, Colby would later remark. But they accepted his decisive, understated leadership. Some had gone through the course at Benning, but for those who had not, there was parachute training. On Saturday evenings, NORSO’s only time off, the trainees consumed vast quantities of single-malt whiskey. Colby thanked his stars that the nearest military police station was 50 miles away. Sometimes he drank with the men; sometimes he retired to peruse his copy of Seven Pillars.3

  By mid-January, Major Colby had chosen the thirty-five men who would make the long and perilous journey across Scandinavia to the far reaches of Norway. The Carpetbaggers could fly their blacked-out B-24s only during the full moon, when the planes could navigate by the light reflected off rivers and lakes. Bad weather postponed the first attempt. At February’s full moon, Miller and Colby dispatched an advance team under Captain Tom Sather. It included a skilled radioman, Borge Langeland, who would help to guide the B-24 to its destination. Just as the plane neared its drop zone, however, fog set in, and the team had to turn back. Only by jettisoning every piece of equipment, indeed, everything that was not bolted down, did the B-24 manage to make it back to Harrington, its home field in England. March’s full moon found NORSO desperate. With each passing day, more German troops were moving down the rail line from Narvik in the north to Trondheim, where they were transported by ship to the embattled Reich. Colby and his men had selected a drop site and were prepared to go when the Norwegian exile newspaper in London reported that the area had been occupied by German troops. With the help of Herbert Helgeson, a Norwegian resistance leader who had been smuggled out of Norway through Sweden, NORSO arranged for another drop site. Finally, on March 24, Gerry Miller drove out to Harrington to wish Colby and his men bon voyage.4

  Before climbing aboard the eight converted B-24s, Colby delivered a final briefing to his men. He reminded them that General Eisenhower had declared that the German forces in Norway must be kept bottled up; SHAEF had its eye on NORSO. Operation “Rype” (rype is Norwegian for ptarmigan, a bird whose feathers are white in the winter and brown in the summer, like the parkas of the NORSOs) was crucial to the success of the Allies’ final push against the Reich.

  Silently, the thirty-five commandos boarded, and the giant planes took off into the clear midafternoon sky. The men had been divided into teams and supplied in a manner that would allow them to operate independently for forty days. Sitting in the bomb bay of his plane, Colby considered those he had trained. “Their names read like heroes from some Norse saga—Paulsen, Johansen, Iversen, Eliasen, Oistad,” he wrote in his memoir. Many had been stranded on Norwegian ships early in the war and then enlisted in the US Army. They were typically stoic—men of the sea and the frost. They were bred to endure and adapt. “Among this group,” Colby observed, “were men who could do anything from butchering a cow to fixing a motor with a piece of wire, or operating on a casualty with a jackknife.”5

  The round trip from the United Kingdom to northern Norway would stretch the range of the planes of the 801st Bombardment Group to the limit. It would be necessary to stop for refueling at Kinloss airfield on the bleak northeastern coast of Scotland facing across the North Sea to Scandinavia. The plan was for the Carpetbaggers to discharge their men and materiel over Lake Jaevsjo on the Norweigan-Swedish border, which, of course, was frozen over at the time. “The eight planes continued north, across the North Sea, over the stark fjords and the white mountains, then up the Norway-Sweden coast past Trondheim, Mansos—almost to the Arctic Circle,” Colby wrote. “Below, a faint mist was spreading, taking the sharpness off the rocks, but meaning trouble later.” Trouble, indeed. The mist turned into fog. Three of the planes were forced to turn back. One dropped its five-man team into neutral Sweden, where the paratroopers were confronted by local police and briefly interned. Four other planes, one of which carried Major Colby, also strayed over Sweden but then discovered their mistake. Shortly after midnight the lead aircraft spotted the bonfires on the frozen lake. “Paulsen and Aanonsen pulled up the trap door,” Colby related, “and I went through into the awful quiet that closes in when the engines recede. . . . Dimly, I counted the others slipping into the air—one, two, three—formation perfect, five seconds apart.” At 500 feet, the parachutists could see the bonfires clearly. Colby landed, rolled, gained his feet, and tucked away his chute. He could see a tall, heavily clad figure approaching. Pistol in hand, the NORSO leader offered the pass phrase: “Is the fishing good in this lake?” Instead of the required answer, “Yes, especially in the winter,” the man replied, “To tell you the truth, it’s no good at all.” Something kept Colby from shooting him. Fortunately, at that moment, Herbert Helgeson, the resistance liaison, appeared and vouched for the man and his companions, who had now moved out from the bonfire. The NORSO team, now fifteen in number, spent the night with their reception committee, trying to ward off the twenty-below-zero temperatures. Operation Rype was set to begin.6

  Colby and his men spent Palm Sunday scouring the area for the containers of arms, food, and explosives that had been dropped with them. The team had not supervised the packing of the parachutes for their supplies. They should have. The materiel was scatt
ered over a 36-mile area; some containers had not been chuted at all and had plunged deep into snow drifts. The work had to be done quickly; the arrival in the area of four-engine aircraft was sure to have been noticed, and German spotter planes would soon be roaming the area. The NORSO men gathered what they could and then, using their parachutes, built a tent camp in the woods, hoping to avoid detection by vacationing skiers and German patrols.

  According to its official orders, Operation Rype was to paralyze the relevant segments of the Norwegian rail service for as long as possible. The Nordland Railway was the only north-south transportation route; the country’s heavy snows rendered road travel impossible, and the Allies’ Eighth Air Force made air transport too risky for the German troops. As a consequence, every kilometer of the Nordland line was heavily guarded by either fixed encampments or patrols. Convinced that he did not have enough men and explosives to successfully complete the mission, Colby decided to wait for reinforcements. He learned through the group’s radio contact with London that the Liberators that had turned back would try again. As he had in France, Colby tuned in each night to the BBC and listened to the Norwegian personals to learn whether that was the night. On the sixth evening, word came that the Carpetbaggers, with their commando cargo, were on their way. Colby recalled that at the first sound of engines, the weather was perfectly clear; but then “in seconds[,] a mist out of Hamlet shrouded the lake.” The three aircraft pulled up and turned around for the trip home. Two made it; the other plane crashed in the Orkney Islands, killing all thirteen men aboard, including six NORSO volunteers.7