17 accounts found for “OSS”
Grenadier Heinrich Severloh, 1st Company, 726th Infantry Regiment
Stationed at strongpoint WN62 on the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach, nineteen-year-old German Grenadier Heinrich Severloh fired an estimated 12,000 rifle rounds...
Soldiers of the 853rd Engineer Aviation Battalion (HMT Rohna)
On November 26, 1943, a German guided missile sank the troop transport HMT Rohna off Algeria, killing 1,015 American soldiers — the largest loss of American tro...
Captain Taylor Fellers & Company A, 116th Infantry
On the morning of June 6, 1944, a small Virginia town of 3,200 people sent its sons to Omaha Beach. Nineteen of them died in the first fifteen minutes of the as...
23rd Headquarters Special Troops (Ghost Army)
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops — known as the Ghost Army — was a unit of artists, actors, set designers, and sound engineers who used inflatable tanks, fa...
Rotmistrz Witold Pilecki, Polish Secret Army / Home Army
In September 1940, Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki deliberately got himself arrested by the Nazis to be transported to Auschwitz, where he spent nearly th...
Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
At 56 years old, arthritic, and walking with a wooden cane, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. — son of the 26th President — was the only general officer ...
Irena Sendler ("Jolanta"), Polish Social Worker, Żegota operative
Operating as "Jolanta," Polish social worker Irena Sendler smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto in suitcases, crates, toolboxes, and under pi...
588th Night Bomber Regiment (Night Witches), Major Marina Raskova
The 588th Night Bomber Regiment — all female — flew obsolete Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes on night bombing raids against German positions. They cut their engines ne...
Joachim Rønneberg and the six-man Gunnerside team, SOE/Kompani Linge
In February 1943, six Norwegian saboteurs trained by British SOE parachuted into the mountains of Telemark, skied for days in Arctic conditions to reach the Vem...
442nd Regimental Combat Team; Senator Daniel Inouye (Company E)
While their families were confined in American internment camps under Executive Order 9066, Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team becam...
Fritz Kolbe ("George Wood"), German Foreign Ministry; Allen Dulles, OSS Bern
In August 1943, German Foreign Office official Fritz Kolbe walked unannounced into the British legation in Bern and offered to hand over top secret Nazi communi...
Virginia Hall, SOE "Marie" / OSS Operative
A Baltimore-born woman with a prosthetic leg she named "Cuthbert" organized the most effective SOE resistance networks in occupied France, evading the Gestapo f...
Second Lieutenant Simo Häyhä, Finnish Army, Kollaa Front
Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä accumulated over 500 confirmed kills during the Winter War of 1939–1940, operating in temperatures below minus 40 degrees Celsius. He ...
Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski, Otriad Bielski, Naliboki Forest
Three Jewish brothers — Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski — fled to the Naliboki Forest in occupied Belarus in 1942 and organized a partisan group that ultimately s...
Corporal Desmond T. Doss, Company B, 307th Infantry Regiment
Corporal Desmond Doss refused to carry a weapon on religious grounds, was assigned to a combat unit anyway, and then — over the course of one nightmarish battle...
Sophie Scholl (b. May 9, 1921 – d. February 22, 1943) and Hans Scholl, White Rose
On February 18, 1943, Munich university student Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets by shoving a stack off a balcony....
Raoul Wallenberg, First Secretary, Swedish Legation Budapest
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944 with a brief to protect Hungarian Jews. He personally invented the Schutzpass protective pass...