79 Years Ago: A Doomed WWII Spy Mission
An eyewitness account, a young Kissinger cameo and an American twist, plus book picks
Nearly 80 years ago, on December 16, 1944, Hitler launched the surprise Ardennes Offensive inside the dense freezing forests of Eastern Belgium. Many have heard of the bloody Battle of the Bulge that ensued, but few know about a doomed spy mission that Hitler cooked up: German commandos who could speak English posed as American troops behind the US lines, where they were to wreak havoc and secure depots and bridges in advance of the main assault.
I thought I knew pretty much all there was to know about this doomed if not comical mission. Most of those English-speaking soldiers were far from ideal commandos and never a threat apart from the panic they caused. Many had been sailors, waiters, students, and even civilians. Few spoke good enough English to fool anyone. The planning and training were slapdash, the mission desperate, its chances slim. Most who got caught were shot by firing squad or worse.
But then I got an email from someone who was there — and showed me yet more twists in this wild war story.
Not the Usual Players
Some years ago, John M. Gunn (sadly now deceased), then emeritus professor of economics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, wrote me with his eyewitness account of one of those English-speaking German commandos. But as Gunn told it, the man didn’t seem one of those “hastily recruited, unsophisticated men that you depict as having been typical of the group. He was sophisticated and polished.”
In the Battle of the Bulge, Gunn was a young Army medic in the 84th Infantry Division, serving in a field hospital near the front. The division had dug in amid bitter combat. Corporal Gunn’s job was to receive wounded from the fighting. As Gunn told me:
The weather was dreadful. It was the coldest winter in Europe in half a century... The ground was frozen down several inches, with several inches of snow on top of that. To dig a slit trench or a fox hole required chopping through several inches of ice. The sky was overcast heavily, so that air support was impossible.
Then, on the 24th of December, Christmas Eve, the morning broke cold and crystal clear. Soon the sky was covered with aircraft: bombers, fighter escorts, German fighters on the attack.
Gunn said he saw over 3,000 airplanes within an hour and multiple dog fights. More than a dozen aircraft went down, US and British bombers and fighter planes from both sides. Over the next couple days, several dozen Allied airmen came through Gunn’s field hospital with wounds or injuries from parachuting out of their shot-up aircraft.
I was assisting my platoon commander, Lt. Benedict A. Biasini, in treating a first lieutenant who had injured his ankle in parachuting to the ground. Lt. Biasini was a fine young officer and fine surgeon, just out of medical school.
But then Gunn noticed that Biasini was stalling.
I was surprised. That was so unlike him. I didn’t understand.
Then he caught my eye and with eye signals indicated I should step away from our makeshift operating table...
He said quietly, “Corporal Gunn, without telling anyone what you are doing, go up to company headquarters, call division, and ask them to send a counter-intelligence team down here.”
The problem was, Gunn and his surgeon didn’t have weapons with them. As Gunn explained:
The Geneva Convention provides immunity to medical personnel, who may wear red crosses on their helmets and on their sleeves, with large red crosses over our tents or buildings commandeered as aid stations, but in exchange we must never be armed.
At the same time, many of the wounded or ill soldiers coming through their station were still carrying arms. Gunn and his medical team were required to take them away, to company headquarters nearby. But they always had a few dozen weapons and considerable ammunition piled up there. So Biasini instructed Gunn:
“Then get a carbine, put a cartridge in the chamber, and come back and without letting this man see you take a position behind him. Do not let him move.”
Gunn had no idea what prompted Biasini to first suspect the man on the litter, but he recalled that the wounded “lieutenant” had protested vehemently when they took away his standard officers-issue .45 — this may have been a clue to Biasini. Plus, they had heard “stories of German spies penetrating their lines by several means, including parachuting during dogfights.”
Back at the field hospital, as Gunn waited hidden in the shadows with his carbine, two enlisted men arrived from division headquarters. Without speaking, Gunn signaled to them that he was the person who’d called for them. He pointed to the wounded man on the litter.
This more junior enlisted man took over the interrogation. The wounded “lieutenant” was good. His “papers” all were in good order. His English was flawless, with no hint of an accent. His story was comprehensive and well-integrated. He was “from Chicago,” a graduate of New Trier High School. He had been in college when he volunteered for service and was chosen for flight training.
But his interrogator also was good. Many of his questions I am sure were ones that personnel in counterintelligence were taught early on. They were such things as
“Sing us your high school fight song.”
“Who is the Cubs’ left fielder?”
“Who is Benny Goodman’s girl singer?”
As this interview proceeded, I watched the man on the litter grow increasingly anxious.
But then, smoothly, and without changing his pitch or pace or tone or anything whatever about his voice, the junior counterintelligence man asked a question — in German.
The “lieutenant” started to answer, caught himself, but not in time. There could be no doubt now. The game was up.
He jumped up and tried to run...
But he quickly discovered two things. His ankle was broken, he could neither run nor walk on it. And Gunn stood about ten feet away with a carbine pointed at his heart.
The two counterintelligence men produced handcuffs, cuffed the German spy, and took him away in their jeep.
It could be that the commando was acting alone, with special orders. Gunn never learned what happened, but he was sure that ankle received first-class medical treatment and the man possibly a firing squad.
“For all I know,” Gunn added dryly, “he became an American citizen and a prosperous community leader — in Chicago, his ‘hometown.’”
Afterward, Gunn realized that he recognized the senior interrogator. He was Fritz Kraemer, a young German American historian who’d given lectures around their division. And the junior man?
The other was a private first class whose identity was unknown to me at the time, and whose name would have meant nothing if I had known it, but whose voice is one that once you have heard you will never forget...
I did not realize it was Henry Kissinger until years later, when I discovered he was a private first class in the five-person counterintelligence unit of division headquarters.
Historian Fritz Kraemer later became a civilian advisor to the US military. During WWII, he had recruited young fellow expat, future US Secretary of State, and notorious power player (and likely war criminal) Henry Kissinger for counterintelligence duty and served as his mentor. At that time, the two German Americans operated as part of a team of frontline intelligence detectives, sniffing out clues to the enemy’s plans.
This wasn’t the first time I encountered a young Kissinger in my novel research. In an earlier post titled “Plunder and Corruption in US-Occupied Germany,” Kissinger appears one year later, in 1945, still a counterintelligence man but now ruling over the US-occupied German town of Bensheim and surrounding county from a lavish villa and a posh Mercedes sedan, reportedly enjoying multiple affairs and extravagant dinner parties. The guy was just getting started.
Another Doomed Mission — with an American Twist
This doomed German spy mission near the end of World War II has obsessed me, mostly because it proved so desperate, nearly farcical — and so deadly — that it could’ve been a Coen Brothers dark comedy. To me, as a language geek, this mission reveals all the traps involving linguistic and cultural differences in spy operations. And more than that, it speaks loads about the utter absurdity and insanity of war.
It features in my novel The Losing Role as well as my nonfiction Kindle Single Sitting Ducks. But just when I thought I had finished writing about this, the story found me again — this time from a uniquely American angle.
Acting on a tip from a friend, I had the honor of interviewing an elderly American, loved and respected in his community (and also now deceased), who had a secret to tell me.
In the fall of 1944, he revealed, he was called up to take part in a US intelligence mission that turned the tables on the enemy impersonator ruse. A simple soldier but with knowledge of German via Yiddish, this man was sent on a frightening recon patrol behind the lines — disguised as German soldiers. They somehow ended up far inside Nazi Germany, in bomb-ravaged Cologne.
My contact may have had some details mixed up in his old age, though one thing was clear — the emotions he expressed to me lay bare horrid memories. In war, you sometimes have to kill innocents to survive, and he was no different. It plagued him in old age. But I’ll ever know the whole truth. At the time of my contact’s mission, Army intelligence had told him never to speak of his duty for a good fifty years, for it would remain classified. So despite speaking to me, my contact wished to remain anonymous, the details of his mission kept blurred. I searched for records of such missions nevertheless but only found dead ends.
Fiction allows a writer to mine deeper truths, however. So this story inspired me to write the novel Under False Flags, in which the insanity of war is stripped down to two opposing soldiers who are each sent on a suicidal mission during the Battle of the Bulge of 1944.
Random Book Picks
Here are a couple novels I’ve read and enjoyed recently or in the distant past and in no particular order…
The Gallery by John Horne Burns was a successful first novel in 1947 but went unknown until re-released in 2013. Author Burns, by most accounts troubled and alcoholic, died relatively young. The Gallery has been touted as a WWII novel but it’s more a series of character vignettes, of various soldiers and locals behind the lines in North Africa and Italy. The author served there and knew his story. I read this for research and found it oddly compelling as it gives great insight into the true mindset of the WWII era. You’ll find no Greatest Generation-style accounts here. It’s surprisingly dark, and Burns clearly put all he had into this work. It's got great language and writing and captures a sad and tragic time.
Set amid a rapidly expiring East Germany in 1990, Winter Work (2022) by Dan Fesperman is another smart and vivid tale from a master of the espionage genre. The story took me back to my young self living in Germany that same year when so much change was in the air, along with retribution, renewal and deception. Fesperman depicted that in-between world so well, with everyone desperate for a new angle. And for setting, who could forget those long-closed Cold War “ghost stations” on the Berlin U-Bahn lines among so many other gems.
Please consider pre-ordering my new novel: Lines of Deception.
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Remember: 79 years later, wherever you are in life, you are likely having far better holidays than most people had in the dead of winter of 1944/45.
Happy Holidays to all of you, and Happy New Year. 🎉🍾
See you in January.