(light music) (soft gentle music) - So many people don't know what we did because nothing was ever written down.

- Right.

- If it was written down or typed, it was shredded.

When we left England in July 1945, each crew of 10 was taken into a private room with a lieutenant colonel.

And raise your right hand, and they had a Bible on the table.

And they said, "You'll not talk about, speak to anybody about anything, give them a hint of what you did for 40 years."

The repercussions were, "Would you like to spend the rest of your life in Leavenworth?"

(audience laughing) "Or be shot?"

(dramatic music) - As we know, the government tends to classify information for reasons I can understand and some that I can't always comprehend.

In this case, the end of the war in 1945, this is classified information into the next century.

So for 60 years, into the 21st century, that's all classified information.

And I think it's important now, this many years removed, that we'd spotlight these stories before they're forgotten, because if you break down the things that we commonly know about World War II, the D-Day landings and the liberations, understand that before any of those things could happen, the very first thing that could happen were these forces going in behind enemy lines, before the big invasions to set the stage for eventual success.

(dramatic music) - It was really bad, you know?

People were hungry.

Things around the whole world were just in depression, and every country was the same.

Even with Hitler, as bad as he was, he was doing the same thing President Roosevelt was doing.

He was starting to get things going, manufacturing, putting people back to work.

Hitler was doing the same thing but in the wrong way.

It was so sad to see people standing in food lines, waiting for a bowl of soup.

Some people are doing that today.

I used to go to Holman Field when they were flying Ford Tri-Motor airplanes.

And I was hanging around there, and we were really, really poor.

But I had saved money from selling newspapers, and I had $10 in my pocket.

And I got a ride in a Ford Tri-Motor around St. Paul, Minneapolis.

And it took about a 30-minute ride, and it made me so enthusiastic.

I thought, "When I get older, I'm gonna fly."

(chuckles) I was 17 years old in high school at Harding High School in St. Paul, and a couple of us were talking.

And so, one day, I just got on the streetcar, went over to the Minneapolis National Guard building, and told 'em I wanted to sign up.

I wanted to be in the Army Air Corps.

And they said, "You're too young.

You can go in the Marines or be in the Navy."

And I thought, "No, I wanna fly."

So I took the test and passed the test at that time.

And then said they would call me when I was 18 years old, and they did.

So it worked out really well for me.

- Okay Al, let it go.

(bright music) - The O.S.S.

is the Office of Strategic Service, and there was only two bosses of the O.S.S, President Roosevelt and General Donovan.

- President Roosevelt, FDR, when the war breaks out in Europe, is trying to gather as much intelligence as he can to make informed decisions.

And he's not happy with the results he's getting.

It's an incomplete picture, it's an unclear picture.

He turns to a friend, a trusted colleague, a World War I decorated veteran, Bill Donovan.

And through executive order, charges Bill Donovan to travel.

And what he does is he travels and takes the temperature of Europe, essentially, to gauge what's going on in Europe.

At this point, 1941, when he's deployed to do this survey, this traveling around the continent of Europe, France has fallen.

It's July of 1941.

England is teetering.

FDR wants to get a sense of what are the Nazis have to do now that they've taken over France.

How likely is England to stay in the war itself?

How stable are those conditions so that he can make informed decisions for the American public.

So he turns to his friend, Bill Donovan, charges him with a position to coordinate the intelligence efforts of the country and bring back and report back to FDR what he finds.

That's the start of O.S.S., meaning Bill Donovan is deployed to Europe in July of 1941.

Certainly, December of 1941, we have an incredible intelligence disaster failure with Japan, further proving the point that as a country, we're just not prepared to monitor situations as we need to.

Intelligence is critical at this juncture.

It failed dramatically in Pearl Harbor with the Japanese attack, which was not really anticipated by many.

- I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

(rapid drumming) - It was quite an occasion.

We were sworn to secrecy for everything that we did.

We were told not to talk to anybody about what we did, what went on, or any incident that we knew of.

- [Interviewer] How did you end up working with that agency?

How did that come about?

- Well, that come about 'cause in April of 1944, President Roosevelt abolished all flight training.

They had enough pilots they figured to finish the war and win it.

We were then recruited into the O.S.S.

Went to school, so like 12 hours a day learning languages and learning how to eat European style, how to smoke European style.

Your actions of what you do is so critical that if you make an error, you're dead.

- Operation Carpetbagger was this clandestine secret effort to fortify the French resistance.

And it's done in a very secretive kind of way.

It's not done the way that other military operations are done, meaning, you have one aircraft.

That one aircraft just probably would B-24.

That aircraft has been retrofitted to support this mission specifically.

This one aircraft is traveling by itself.

It's unaccompanied by any fighter aircraft at all.

So it's a solo flight of one airplane at night at a very low altitude.

Those bombing groups of about eight people on those B-24s are hoping and praying, right, that those French resistance fighters that are creating the pathway for them to identify where to drop those supplies are intact, that they haven't been overrun, that the Nazis haven't converted them, haven't figured out what's going on so that they're met with friendly forces as opposed to flying into a trap essentially, because if they fly into that trap, there's no support.

There's one aircraft.

And so the chances that these men were taking to fortify the French resistance was enormous.

- When we dropped some supplies in the container that held 300 pounds with a bumper on the bottom and a parachute on the top so it wouldn't break things up, there might be dynamite to blow up railroad tracks, blow up a telephone pole, and it might be a bazooka, it might be a pistol.

We had throw away pistols that held seven shots, just made out of sheet metal, and you'd throw it away when you get done.

And then we had .38 caliber pens, believe it or not.

Now, when we dropped those to the patriots, they could walk up to a German soldier and ask 'em a question and pull out that pen.

And as soon as they hit his body, the shell went off, they kill him and walk away.

Throw the pen away.

It was kind of a goofy thing but it worked.

Now, it sounds funny, but we dropped pigeons in like a Quaker Oats oatmeal box and have the small parachute on it with a barometric fuse that exploded the parachute on the box and dropped the pigeon safe on the ground to the Patriots so they could send messages back to England, to our base.

Believe it or not, those carrier pigeons made it back sometimes the day after we dropped them in Europe.

We only did that where radio communication was very poor, which in the mountain area, that was common.

All our buttons and the material were metal, and they were in two pieces.

And if you take one and cut it off and tip it over, it's a compass.

But it was amazing the little things that helped what we could have to do to survive.

(suspenseful music) - They did use B-24s.

They did retrofit them in order to accomplish their mission.

As I mentioned, they fly at night using just moonlight to navigate.

They would paint their aircraft black, because that was the most effective way to be unnoticed, not noticed by the Nazi forces.

Stealth, clandestine operations be quicken, quick out, fly to low altitude, and get on and out as fast as possible.

- The B-24 was a four-engine bomber, Pratt and Whitney engines, and it could go top speed was 303 miles an hour.

We never went that fast.

Most of our cruising speeds was on 180, 185 miles an hour.

The aircraft was built.

So I could walk really from my tail turret, all the way up to the pilot's place, up to the front of the ship where the nose gunner was sitting, standing up.

Everything was on the need-to-know basis.

And we would go out and get in the airplane, say at 10 o'clock at night, and turn the props and get the oil out of the bottom cylinders of the engines and climb in the airplane.

And we would have about maybe 30, 40 airplanes taken off.

And the supplies were already in that airplane.

But the people that loaded it never knew what was in it either.

The containers were like 300 pounds a piece.

They were big.

I could just barely reach around one of the containers, and they were about seven and a half feet long.

And they would hold many, many different things, everything from blood plasma to radios to bazookas to rifles and hand grenades and medicines of different kinds, shoes and socks, whatever the Patriots could use, because they lived in the mountains.

They didn't live in town.

- [Randal] Some 20,000 different canisters were dropped.

Those canisters are about five feet high.

they have individual containers or cells built into 'em with those supplies that I mentioned.

In England, there's a whole factory.

That's fascinating 'cause they have a menu of what, 400 items that they can choose from above what's being requested of the French forces.

So you have a whole factory of workers stuffing these containers to be dropped off.

So over the course of nine months, you have 2,000 missions, 20,000 canisters dropped with these essential materials that, one, is gonna aid the French fighters, but ultimately, the objective is to really aid the American forces that are about to invade.

- When we dropped our material, they scooted out and picked up the containers and went back up in the mountains again or the hills, wherever they could live, 'cause there was a lot of open space in Europe that nobody lived at all.

Some really bad country.

You had to be a real survivor to be one of those people.

I was the tail gunner, and I had the 250 caliber machine guns next to me.

Just like I'm sitting right now on my right and my left, we would test fire those as we went across the channel to make sure that they worked.

My responsibility was to inform the pilot when the airplane would come and attack us and give him the position that the plane was coming in at so he could do evasive action.

The pilot would give us training of flying the 24.

Each one of us could fly that airplane.

We got 10 hours of training, because whatever was on there was so expensive, secret, we didn't want the Germans to get ahold of anything else.

It was wired to blow up, if possible, after everybody bailed out.

It was really, really something different, I tell you.

Everything we did was different.

When we left the airport in England, all the radios were off.

You couldn't talk to anybody.

You couldn't communicate.

Like if we were in danger and we're gonna crash, we couldn't inform anybody.

We couldn't send out an SOS.

No way.

We were completely isolated.

When we took off, nobody knew where we went except I said the navigator and the pilot.

And of course, our control tower in England knew where we were.

That's all.

When we went out, like I said, it was a bad situation, but it couldn't be changed.

As if we broadcast and the Germans could find out where we were.

They could triangulize the standing operation of radio and know exactly where we were.

Other than that, they never knew where we were.

Sometimes, we hardly knew where we were.

- The objective, of course, is to fly this aircraft at low altitude, drop off the supplies, and get out as fast as possible.

At the same time, thinking this through a little bit, if you fly to your destination, drop off your supplies, and then fly right back out, you just identified to the enemy where the drops are happening.

So the idea of you have to keep flying into enemy territory after making your drop just to not reveal where the actual resistance fighters are, so there's a lot of thought that goes into this.

And the more thought that goes into it, the more clear it is that the men that are flying these flights are doing so at enormous risk in aircraft that are painted black, that don't have markings on them, and those are not the kind of conditions that you wanna be taken prisoner under in Nazi Germany.

- We didn't lose a lot of men, because flying at night, the Germans weren't really afraid of a separate airplane flying all by itself, and they couldn't figure out where we were going because we would fly about four or five, six different dog legs on the way to our target.

So there was no direct heading where we're gonna drop the supplies.

Flying so low, they couldn't get enough fighter plane underneath us to shoot us down.

But the ground fire, sometimes, we get some rifle shots through the airplane.

The aluminum on a B-24 or a 17 was so thin.

Imagine that a paper matchbook, how thick it is.

A BB gun could shoot right through the side of the airplane.

No protection at all.

We didn't have any flack jackets or helmets or not a thing.

No ear protection for the noise, 'cause it was noisy as the devil.

I'm 100% deaf in my right ear, about 45% in my left ear.

Some missions were like only six, seven hours.

Some were 10, 11.

We had enough gas to last that long.

I've flown over as far as, so I could see Switzerland.

With all the lights on during the war, it looked like New York City.

I've flown as far as Russia.

I had Russian ID, everything for to be recognized there in case we had to stop over and get some gasoline or maybe lost an engine and couldn't make it back to England again.

There was one particular trip we made, and I didn't know where we were going when we left the airport in England.

But we ended up flying down the Danube River.

And it's a crooked river.

And we were flying like maybe 300 feet above the water on the river, and my pilot banked the airplane 90 degrees following the river, and I looked out and up, and there's a castle.

It's 500 feet above me.

At night, it scared me, I tell you, to look at something like that.

If we made a little error of 500 feet, we could have hit it.

My pilot was the greatest guy and so responsible, and he could handle that airplane.

When we come back and landed, he was such a good pilot.

You would never know the wheels hit the ground.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] Harry S. Truman, four months after taking oath as president, leads his country finally to victory and peace.

Mr. Truman and his cabinet meet an emergency session.

Former Secretary Hull is on hand as the president breaks the momentous news of Japan's surrender.

- I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government in reply to the message forwarded to that government by the Secretary of State on August 11th.

I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.

The proclamation of VJ Day must await upon the formal signing of the surrender terms by Japan.

- [Announcer] It's official, it's all over, it's total victory.

- We knew it right away that the war was over.

It really made us kind of happy.

And then things completely changed and we then switched over and dropped supplies for the prisoner of war camps, medicine and stuff and food and medical supplies and what have you.

- The O.S.S.

took root, took form in the summer of 1942.

It served the United States throughout World War II in a remarkable kinds of ways.

It then sunset fairly quickly after the war ended.

It was disbanded in September of 1945.

Disbanded for one thing, as I mentioned, the Donovan relationship with FDR, and Donovan was the genesis for O.S.S, right?

Obviously, FDR passes away in April of 1945.

So that connection, that bond is broken.

Truman is now in office.

Truman, when he is elevated to president, knows very little about what the actual military efforts are, including the atomic bomb.

And so this is news to him.

A number of these things, the O.S.S.

is probably another thing that he's not that familiar with, not as tied to it as FDR was.

Given that, and probably some political infighting is my impression.

It was sunset then in September of 1945.

So fairly short live, about three years, but three decisive years for the American military, and certainly, made better by the efforts of the men and women who served in the O.S.S.

- Our group of Carpetbagger, we formed a club, and we meet once a year someplace around the country.

We've even met in England, been on cruises together.

Been many, many states in the United States at Eddie Airfield, 'cause we're always welcome.

And all the people with us, the women, the children, they're so interested in what we did.

And they even, Air Force, lets us climb up in the airplanes.

I've sat with the women who have set up in the cockpits of Hueys and C130s and fighter planes and what have you.

Oh, I love to fly.

Oh, I think all of us were so enthused with what we could do.

And we were fighting the war to win it.

And we believed firmly what we were doing was helping somebody.

We never dropped a bomb.

Everything we did was humanitarian.

Even though it was a bombing mission, they called it a mission, but we never really meant to kill anybody.

It was fascinating and it made me feel good after the war when I was talking to other soldiers and people had been in the military, and they were so reluctant to talk about what they did because they killed people and they wanted to forget it.

I've volunteered for the VA system for 35 years, and I decided when I got discharged, a lot of people helped me when I was young.

And so I decided I would help other people.

So that was my game.

Yeah.

(light dramatic music) (film reel rolling)