Operation Jedburgh
The operation Jedburgh was a covert operation of the Allies during the Second World War. It began in March 1943 and was the first real collaboration between the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), the French Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA) and the exiled military of the Netherlands and Belgium . The aim was to small groups of agents with parachutes infiltrate behind the German lines in France, Belgium and the Netherlands to support the armed resistance and the D-Day and the invasion of the allied forces to Germany to prepare. Opponent's plans were to be spied on, communication and supply channels were to be destroyed by acts of sabotage , and staged guerrilla wars were to weaken the armies of the Third Reich . In addition to appearances in Europe, there were also some in Asia against Japan .
The men in this special unit called themselves "Jeds". Operation Jedburgh is considered to be the forerunner of today's special forces.
Surname
There are many legends about the origin of the name "Operation Jedburgh". One of the most popular opinions is that the name derives from the border town of Jedburgh in the Scottish Highlands . In the late Middle Ages , it was notorious for smuggling and raiding by the Border Reivers gang .
Other theories claim that it came from a town in South Africa that played a role during the Boer Wars against the British, that the name was derived from the radios (Jed-Sets) used by the teams in the operations , or from the French translation for the D-Day: "J-Jour". Perhaps, however, it was simply chosen quite randomly from a list of code names for missions.
Captain Ike's secret paramilitary army
Operation Jedburgh was the first real collaboration between the OSS Special Operations Department and the Special Operations Executive. The latter worked with the London-based military units of the governments-in-exile from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Since the SOE did not have the resources for a large-scale war of aggression at the time, the British only had 23 Handley Page Halifax bombers at their disposal, the OSS's experience was used for psychological warfare . With sea blockades and constant bombing raids alone, Nazi Germany could not be forced to surrender . So it was decided to destabilize the empire from within before moving on to D-Day and the final battle. To this end, they relied on the cooperation of civil resistance groups from the occupied territories and trained suitable people who had fled the National Socialists from their home countries to England to be secret agents .
Operation Jedburgh was under the command of the Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces of Europe , General Dwight D. Eisenhower . A Jedburgh team usually consisted of three people. One of the officers was of British, American or French descent and the other was of the nationality of the country in which the mission was to take place. One member of the team was always a radio operator, using the communication device commonly referred to as the "Jed-Set" to contact the Special Forces headquarters . This could be of any Allied nationality. Sometimes larger groups were also sent.
American soldiers trained for the mission months before D-Day received the appeal:
“Wanted: Volunteers for immediate deployment abroad. Knowledge of French or another European language preferred; Willingness and ability to qualify as a skydiver necessary; Probability of dangerous use guaranteed. "
Men who signed up for the mysterious assignment only learned after a series of physical and psychological tests that they were going to be assigned to a secret organization they had never heard of before.
education
The Jeds chose “Surprise, kill, disappear” as the motto. The training of the paramilitary unit consisted of three months of tough intensive training. This included training in parachuting , amphibious operations , skiing , mountaineering , radio operations , Morse code , small arms , navigation , hand-to-hand combat , explosives and espionage tactics as well as extensive foreign language instruction.
The base was in the Milton Hall mansion , not far from the city of Peterborough , in the east of England and not, as is often assumed, somewhere in the Scottish Highlands.
A total of 286 "Jeds" were trained for their work. Of these, 83 were Americans, 90 British, 103 French, five Dutch and five Belgian. With parachutes, 93 teams should land in France and eight in the Netherlands. From there they were supposed to prepare for D-Day with the help of the local resistance groups.
equipment
The personal equipment of a "Jed" included an M1 carbine and a Colt M1911 automatic pistol for each man . In addition, a sleeping bag , a food and medipack , binoculars , a map of the corresponding area printed on silk , as well as sabotage equipment and some useful little things with which one could gain the trust of the resistance groups or support them.
In addition to their B Mk II radio, radio operators had silk handkerchiefs on which 500 phrases were noted for communication exchange. These have been replaced by four-digit codes to save transmission time. One-time passcodes - one-time pads - were used to encrypt the message. The code names of the individual teams were usually given names. To confuse the German secret service, the teams were later given all sorts of names, such as medicines, makes of cars and other things.
During its operations, the team wore the normal military uniform so that no conclusions could be drawn about the connection with the secret service organization. In addition, they were entitled to a certain degree of protection through international agreements , even if, as here, they operated behind enemy lines. According to Adolf Hitler's command , all members of the Allied forces who were behind German lines were still at risk of torture and execution if captured. However, the missions were never completely legal and approved in all respects.
Use behind the front lines
France
In order not to alert the Germans to the exact date of the invasion plans, the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces of Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, did not allow the Jedburgh teams over occupied France until the night of June 5 to 6, 1944 to jump off.
The first Jedburgh team to parachute into France at night was the Hugh team. With a resistance group near Châteauroux , they were supposed to prepare Operation Overlord . Between June and December, 93 other Jedburgh teams followed and organized the liberation in 54 other metropolitan regions of France. The main task of the teams was to serve as liaison men between the Allied forces and the local people and to pass on their advice as well as strategic and leadership skills. Their greatest strength, however, lay in destroying the enemy's defenses and ammunition stores.
Netherlands
From September 1944 to April 1945 eight Jedburgh teams were active in the Netherlands. The first team, code-named "Dudley" landed a week before Operation Market Garden in the east of the Netherlands. The next four teams supported the Allied Air Forces in conducting Market Garden. After the failure of the liberation mission, a Jedburgh team went to the liberated south of the Netherlands and trained a group of former resistance fighters. In April 1945 the last two Dutch Jedburgh teams were deployed. The team called "Gambling" was a combined group of Jedburgh and Special Air Service (SAS). It was deployed in support of the Allied advance in the center of the Netherlands. The other team was deposed in the course of a liberation from the Westerbork concentration camp during the SAS operation “ Amherst ” over the northern Netherlands.
Despite the geographic difficulties of operating covertly in the flat and densely populated Netherlands, the Jedburgh teams were quite successful.
Other European countries
Other areas of activity of the Jedburgh teams were: Belgium , Norway , Italy , Yugoslavia , Greece , Poland , Czechoslovakia and the German Empire including Austria . Some Jedburgh teams were also deployed in Algeria .
losses
21 Jeds were killed during the operations.
Jedburghs in the Far East
The successful Jedburgh model was also adopted by the allies in the Southeast Asia Command (SEAC) from 1945 to liberate the areas occupied by Japan, including the former colony of French Indochina . Under the direction of Lord Mountbatten , 60 French Jedburghs and teams from the newly created Corps Léger d'Intervention (CLI = Light Intervention Corps ) were sent out. But American units of the OSS also took part. The Imperial Japanese Army was to be weakened with guerrilla tactics and the population's resistance to the Japanese occupiers increased. People groups who suffered particularly from the Japanese occupation and their auxiliary armies were particularly suitable for this. The "Jedburgh teams" trained thousands of the locals to become guerrilla fighters who were supposed to support the Allied forces when they marched into the occupied countries behind the Japanese lines.
Other areas of application were Burma, Thailand, India and China.
After the war
Many of the surviving American Jeds were given positions of responsibility in the US Army or the OSS successor, the CIA, after World War II . Examples include William Colby , who became a CIA director, Lucien Conein , a CIA liaison officer in Vietnam, General John K. Singlaub, and Colonel Aaron Bank , both in command of the United States Army Special Forces.
Among the French Jedburghs were Paul Aussaresses , later founder of the 11e RPC of the SDECE and counterinsurgency expert in French Algeria, Jean Sassi , who later served in the 11e RPC and pioneer of the conventional guerrilla commandos GCMA with Roger Trinquier during the First Indochina War and General Guy Le Borgne , commander of the 8th Marine Parachute Regiment of the French Army in Indochina, the 3rd Marine Parachute Regiment in Algeria and the 11th Parachute Division.
The unit of Operation Jedburgh is considered the forerunner of the special forces. The experience and techniques gained were adopted and are still part of the training program today.
literature
- Colin Beavan : Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America's First Shadow War. Penguin Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-14-311202-0 (English).
- Patrick K. O'Donnell: Operatives, Spies and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of World War II's OSS. Citadel, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8065-2798-7 (English).
- Benjamin F. Johnes: Eisenhower's Guerillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, and the Liberation of France. Oxford University Press Inc, 2016, ISBN 978-0-19-994208-4 (English).
- David W. Hogan Jr .: US Army Special Operations in World War II. Center of Military History - Department of the Army, Washington, DC 1992, (English, digitized online on the US Army website [PDF; 15.7 MB] )
Web links
- CIA - Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Legend of the Jedburghs (English)
- CIA - "1944: An Allied Team With the French Resistance" a memoir by OSS Jedburgh Robert R. Kehoe (English)
- CIA - OSS exhibition catalog of the CIA Museum (English)
- Codenames Operations of World War 2 - Operation Jedburgh (English)
- National Army Museum - Special Operations Executive (SOE )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Legend of the Jedburghs - Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved July 19, 2020 .
- ↑ The cards had to be stronger than paper, waterproof and tear-resistant. Usually the cards were not printed on real silk, but on rayon . These fabric cards are also called escape cards. In an emergency, the cloth could also be used for other purposes.
- ↑ Agent radio type 3 Mk.II, German Spy Museum
- ↑ Lucien Conein biography on Spartacus Educational (English)
- ↑ John K. Singlaub biography on Spartacus Educational (English)
- ↑ Aaron Bank biography on Encyclopaedia Britannica (English)
- ↑ Jean Sassi biography on Musée de la résistance 1940–1945 en Linge (French)
- ↑ Guy Le Borgne biography on Comité Départemental de Liaison des Associations d'Anciens Combattants du Rhône (French)