Located at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in western Maryland, not far from the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, Camp Ritchie was surrounded by woods and lakes. On rainy days, of which there were many, the surroundings could be bleak, isolated, and forlorn. But when the sky cleared and the forest and waterways shimmered with streaks of sunlight, it was easy to understand why at the turn of the nineteenth century the region had attracted the well-heeled of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., to lake resorts to escape the summer heat.
In 1926, the Maryland National Guard had selected the site for its summer encampment, purchasing 638 acres with two lakes. The camp was named in honor of the state governor, Albert C. Ritchie, and over the next decade buildings were constructed using local fieldstone. On either side of a headquarters building, two block-long kitchen facilities were built. A parade field, pistol range, and machine gun range were also completed.
In 1940, the year before the U.S. entered the war, General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, became concerned about the poor state of intelligence training in the army. In spring 1941, he sent a group of officers to England to study military intelligence training and operations in the British army. As a result of their report, the recommendation was made to create a centralized location for the training of interrogators, interpreters, and translators, all of whom the U.S. Army would need in event of war.
The matter remained under consideration through the second half of 1941, as divergent views were exchanged at the highest levels. Secretary of War Henry Stimson had shut down the U.S. State Department’s cryptanalytic office years earlier, when he was Secretary of State, saying, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” A Pentagon conference on military intelligence was scheduled for December 8, but the meeting was canceled when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7. Once the country was at war in the Pacific and in Europe, it was no longer a question of whether centralized intelligence training was necessary, but rather how quickly it could begin. On January 22, 1942, Stimson, who had rapidly reversed his opinion about intelligence gathering, wrote a directive stating that “demands have disclosed a crying need for the enlargement of training in combat intelligence.”
On June 19, 1942, the U.S. Army leased Camp Ritchie from the state of Maryland for a dollar a year, to open the first facility for centralized intelligence training in the history of the U.S. military. Eighteen miles from the nearest city—Hagerstown, Maryland, population 32,500—and seventy miles from Washington, D.C., Camp Ritchie’s remote setting made it ideal for the type of secret training that would take place here, yet still easy to reach from the Pentagon. The army spent five million dollars completely redoing the facilities, building two-story barracks, classrooms, a hospital and clinic, a new headquarters, and administrative buildings.
A camp theater was constructed for propaganda training sessions, which would one day include mock Nazi rallies with a Hitler look-alike, Harry Kahn, a German Jewish immigrant with a fake toothbrush mustache who became a professional mime after the war. For instruction in conducting raids and house searches while avoiding enemy booby traps, an authentic-looking German village was built; its façades resembled the back lot of a Hollywood movie studio. This was all done even before the first students arrived, with a level of security second only to that given to the development of the atomic bomb at the Manhattan Project, which started that same summer in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Camp Ritchie barracks, winter 1944. (NARA)
The importance the army placed on Camp Ritchie’s mission was exemplified by the choice of its first commanding officer: Colonel Charles Y. Banfill of the Army Air Corps. Banfill, who had been serving as assistant chief of staff for the Military Intelligence Corps in Washington, D.C., was the brother-in-law of his boss: Major General George V. Strong, chief of Military Intelligence. Owing to his support in Washington, Banfill had the authority to transfer to Camp Ritchie any army personnel possessing knowledge of a foreign language. The search for such persons was assisted by Pentagon keypunch operators, who inputted data and sorted through tens of thousands of punch cards to find soldiers whose records indicated foreign language fluency, a process that led to certain qualified men receiving orders to report to Camp Ritchie.
A training demonstration of Nazi hysteria. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)
The first eight-week class at Camp Ritchie graduated thirty-three German-speaking students in October 1942 from a course called Interrogation of Prisoners of War (IPW). Thereafter, the classes became much larger, and a new one started each month. The thirty-four classes that followed graduated on average five hundred students per month.
Some graduates from the early classes were rushed overseas to participate in the British-American invasion of North Africa in late 1942. In an August 1943 letter to the Camp Ritchie commandant, Major General Terry Allen, commander of the First Infantry Division, described the “particularly outstanding” work by the IPW teams assigned to his units in the North Africa campaign. Through their interrogation of German prisoners, Allen said, “new antitank intelligence” had been developed that helped defeat Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The IPW teams had furnished infantry commanders with “overlays which showed them practical routes that might not have otherwise been ascertained. . . . All of this was done on a scale which had never before been attempted.”
On August 25, 1943, Werner joined the Eleventh Class at Camp Ritchie as a member of a course designated IPW-Ge (Interrogation of Prisoners of War–German). The Eleventh Class also had students enrolled in courses for Italian interrogators (IPW-It), photo interpreters (PI), and terrain intelligence (TI). There was no foreign language requirement for the latter two courses, whose graduates learned to interpret aerial photographs and terrain maps, rather than conduct prisoner interrogations.
Some students, especially those who had been out of school for a while, found the studies arduous. Unexcused absences and tardiness were not allowed. The washout rate varied from class to class, but at times was as high as 40 percent. Those who failed to make the grade were sent back without fanfare to their original units.
Throughout the camp and in areas like the chow halls and PX, a cacophony of foreign languages filled the air: French, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, Dutch, and others identifiable only to native speakers. It wasn’t uncommon to find persons conversant in several languages. One such student was Sergeant Hugh Nibley, a thirty-three-year-old native of Portland, Oregon, who had been a Mormon missionary and had served as a professor of ancient history at Pomona College; he spoke sixteen languages and claimed a familiarity with twice as many.
The training center became a foreign enclave, complete with intellectuals, writers, artists, filmmakers, teachers, and students. Many of these unlikely soldiers were older than the typical GI about to be sent to war. Some of them clearly despised military drills, but they made up for it by being motivated, intelligent, and creative. The barracks and chow halls were alive with discussions of politics, history, and the arts, discourse more typical of a university campus than an army camp. Even the food served to the students was atypical. The camp’s head cook had been the chef at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, and he oversaw the preparation of what Werner and the other veteran soldiers declared to be the finest chow in the army.
Werner was assigned to a large barracks full of predominantly German Jewish immigrant soldiers, which felt like a homecoming. They had much in common, including close calls escaping from the Nazis and leaving loved ones behind in occupied Europe. Now they were U.S. soldiers being trained in special skills so they could go back and do their part to defeat Hitler. To a man, they couldn’t wait for that opportunity.
His large IPW class formed into groups of thirty or so for classroom instruction—all of it in German. In the field, they broke into smaller teams. They went to class seven days straight, with every eighth day off. Evenings were often filled with hours of study and practice.
The IPW students and their instructors we
re not the only ones who spoke German. So did a company of support troops, who, for the sake of authenticity, often wore uniforms from captured German prisoners in North Africa. These troops put on demonstrations at the firing ranges using enemy rifles, pistols, mortars, hand grenades, artillery, and machine guns, so the students would become familiar with the sound, range, and effect of German gunfire.
One exam tested the students’ immersion in the details of the German military. Each student was given a clipboard with the numbers 1 to 50 preprinted on a sheet beside corresponding descriptions, such as #4, Technische Nothilfe badge (Technical Emergency Corps), and #9, AT rifle scope. They had to find and identify the items in a field over which hundreds of parts of uniforms, weapons, and other German army items had been scattered about.
Werner, who in Berlin had grown so bored with school that he quit after the eighth grade, found himself once again listening to teachers lecturing in German. But this time around, he paid rapt attention.
Everyone agreed that the most challenging course was Order of Battle (OB), which covered the structure of the German army. By definition, “order of battle” was meant to include “all known information of the enemy.” The course did not cover the German navy (Kriegsmarine) or air force (Luftwaffe), because IPW teams were trained to interrogate only enemy soldiers captured during ground operations. For all the divisions and other units likely to be encountered in Europe, the students had to learn unit designations, terms and abbreviations, their arsenal of weapons, the nature of their supply system, and their chain of command.
The army had conducted a wide search to bring qualified individuals to teach at Camp Ritchie. Given the uniqueness of the training, recent graduates who excelled in the course work were often assigned to the faculty. Werner’s OB instructor was one of them. Captain Herbert Cohn, a 1929 graduate of the University of Heidelberg and a German Jewish immigrant, had graduated in the Second Class. Having become an expert on the German army, he lectured about units ranging in size from armies (one hundred thousand men) to divisions (fifteen thousand) to regiments (five thousand), their makeup and hierarchy, and the quality of their soldiers and leaders.
The primer for the OB course was German Order of Battle, a classified study of the German army prepared by the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department. Much of the information in the courses, however, had to be committed to memory, as most of the materials, including classroom notes, could not be taken with them in case they were captured. Overseas, the leader of each IPW team was given a numbered copy of the OB book, nicknamed “The Red Book,” which had on its title page a stern warning: “This document must not fall into enemy hands.”
Living with Hitler’s military organization by day, Werner sometimes found himself dreaming of it at night, which was far better than awakening in the middle of the night bathed in sweat after a nightmare about his family, whom he had still not heard any more from, in mortal danger. During his waking hours, his head was crammed with names, dates, ranks, insignias, units—all nature of information about the German army from top to bottom.
German Order of Battle excerpts:
2. Armed Forces High Command (OKW).
HITLER is the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces (Oberster Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht). His deputy as such is Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm KEITEL, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command. KEITEL is responsible for the smooth functioning of the High Command and sees to it that HITLER’S orders are carried out, but he has comparatively little to do with major decisions or policy.
3. Army High Command (OKH).
a. Field headquarters—Since December 1941, when von BRAUCHITSCH was dismissed as Commander in Chief of the Army (Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres) and HITLER took direct control of the Army, the field headquarters of the OKH has been virtually merged with that of the OKW. The functions of the two, however, have remained distinct, and there has been no personal union except at the top.
214TH INFANTRY DIVISION
Commander: Genlt. Max HORN (age 56)
Composition: Two infantry regiments (355th; 367th), one artillery regiment (214th), one mobile battalion, one engineering battalion, one signal battalion.
Homestation: Hanau (Ge).
Formed in the summer of 1939 with a high proportion of Landwehr personnel (older militia or home guard) later largely replaced by younger draftees. On the Saar front until December 1939. In southern Norway from May 1940. Since December 1941, one of its infantry regiments has been detached for service in northern Finland.
Such detailed information about German army units was useful not only for improving the questions they would be able to ask prisoners, Captain Cohn explained. It could also be used as a show of knowledge to impress prisoners; what the Americans already knew might prove unnerving. For instance, casually dropping the name of someone’s commanding officer could have a profound psychological effect on a prisoner being interrogated. If the Americans already knew this much, the prisoner might think, it wouldn’t hurt to answer a few questions more for a cigarette or a chocolate bar. This in turn could lead to the German giving away valuable tactical intel that might save American lives.
For these reasons, Cohn added, once they were in the field it would be their duty as interrogators to keep up to date on all the available information about the enemy.
As the days turned into weeks, Werner began to understand that he and the other German-born soldiers weren’t at Camp Ritchie just because they spoke the language. They also knew the culture and psyche of Germans better than anyone else—a deep, intimate knowledge born from the small details of their lives growing up in Germany. As children, they had gone to school and played sports with boys who were now soldiers in the German army. And as interrogators of German prisoners of war, they would be familiar with the workings of German minds, the habits of German life, and the influences of Nazi doctrine upon German soldiers and civilians alike. Their innate understanding of the enemy could not be taught to someone born in the U.S. and could make all the difference when it came to acquiring valuable tactical information from captured German soldiers.
During the course called German Army Organization, students studied wooden mock-ups of German armored tanks and vehicles. They learned the uniforms worn by German soldiers until they could take a quick look at someone who dashed in and out of the room and correctly identify the branch, rank, medals, ribbons, piping on a cap, any special training, and their participation in battles and campaigns.
In the Documents course, everyone was expected to be able to read German documents, including those in Gothic print or in the handwritten script called Sütterlin. At times, Werner found this course could be fun—as when the instructors handed out captured documents taken from actual German prisoners for students to read aloud. Occasionally, there was a letter to a wife or sweetheart at home evoking past moments of intimacy. These were delivered amid many guffaws and jokes. Students already proficient in German shorthand were singled out for a class in advanced reading of shorthand, just in case they came across such documents in the field.
In Terrain and Aerial Intelligence, the students learned how to draw a topographical map indicating distances and elevation. They also interpreted aerial photographs taken by the Army Air Corps and identified the features that were displayed in the photos. In a special room equipped with practice keys and headphones, they became proficient in sending and receiving Morse code transmissions. At the end of the course, every student was tested by transcribing messages sent by an instructor and answering them back.
Major Rex Applegate, a recognized authority on close combat with or without weapons, taught a course that he designed called Close Combat. He had written his own instructional manual, Kill or Be Killed, and the students paid careful attention to his lectures and demonstrations, knowing that his techniques—including the best method for garroting a sentry—might someday save their lives. Students also had to qualify on the firing range with their issued weapons, which meant several diff
erent models of rifles—first the M1, later the M1 carbine and M3—as well as a .45-caliber pistol, which all commissioned officers and enlisted interrogators carried as a sidearm. Instructions in shooting a tommy gun were also given to some classes.
On the morning of October 5, 1943, Werner was scheduled to begin a two-day field maneuver. Now a staff sergeant, thanks to his more than two years in the army, he had been assigned to lead a squad through the woods and over the 2,150-foot summit of nearby South Mountain using a compass and map. However, just as they were to leave, Werner was ordered into a truck with some other students for a ride into nearby Hagerstown to be sworn in as naturalized U.S. citizens. It was a short distance, but on a bumpy road in an army truck, it took an hour. In Hagerstown, they waited in the lobby of city hall for their names to be called.
When it was Werner’s turn, he entered an office and stepped up to a desk. An army clerk with a stack of documents sat before him. After verifying Werner’s identity, the clerk said all his papers seemed in order. He handed Werner a card containing a printed statement and told him to read it loud and clear. Though he had awaited this day for so long, Werner realized it was going to entail no more ceremony than his matter-of-fact swearing-in to the army.
“I hereby declare under oath that I absolutely and entirely renounce all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign state or sovereignty of which I have heretofore been a citizen. That I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That I will bear arms on behalf of the United States . . .”
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