There are a lot of things I’m probably supposed to be doing in these final few hours before my first book—Ortiz’s War, which I co-authored with —comes out (sorry if I owe you an email, a text, or a draft…).

But on this Saturday night, as people who are not on deadline presumably hit the bars and enjoy some drinks with friends, I want to revisit a bar scene from a very different time (and, yes, share a story about the subject of Nick and my book, USMC Col. Peter J. Ortiz). It goes like this:

In a bar in Nazi-occupied France in the spring 1944, American Marine Peter Ortiz stood with his pistol pointed at a group of unarmed German officers. He proposed a toast.

Exactly what happened next—of who Ortiz made the Germans raise their glasses to, and what he did from there—is oft-debated and misrepresented. Did he make the German officers toast to the POTUS and the United States Marines? How many rounds did he order? Did he shoot?

Here’s what actually happened, according to Ortiz’s own recounting of the stunt a few years after WWII…

For more stories about Ortiz—the most battle-decorated member of America’s WWII forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services—you can order Ortiz’s War and/or ask your nearest library and bookshop to do the same.

If you order now, it should land this week, in time to raise a glass to the anniversary of the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944 and, of course, to Peter Ortiz.

With thanks,

Katie

p.s. Follow @ortizswarbook on Instagram for more stories about Ortiz and this slice of WWII history.

Alex is a big history buff. Let the record show that he named his German shepherd Donovan after Office of Strategic Services (OSS) director Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

This is his first book, which he wrote in his free time between combat deployments.

Although it’s fiction, he draws on his 20 years in Special Forces to inform the story—and it comes through. Think Indiana Jones meets Romancing the Stone, but with an ultra-global twist from a 21st-century special operator. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

And Alex’s WWII-related media recommendation?

The WWII Recommendation Project — ep#4

Alex Dekker’s 📚 rec: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Damien Lewis

Lewis’s bestselling 2014 nonfiction book chronicles the exploits of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE—Britain’s wartime espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance organization. Created in July 1940 to, in the words of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “set Europe ablaze,” SOE fought the Germans through unconventional warfare, including guerilla tactics behind enemy lines. It’s also worth noting the SOE had a major influence on OSS. The two organizations would work together during WWII, including to coordinate Operation Union, the secret inter-Allied mission that would send OSS Marine Peter Ortiz, along with SOE and BCRA counterparts, parachuting behind enemy lines into France in the first half of 1944, where Ortiz would meet and rescue my grandpa

Lewis’s book was originally titled Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII in the UK. The US edition was published as The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: How Churchill’s Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops. It inspired the 2024 fictional action film directed by Guy Ritchie. Here’s the trailer:

Who’s a WWII storyteller (e.g., an author, filmmaker, and/or scholar) whose WWII media recommendation you’d be curious to hear?

In Jan, I found a kindred spirit: a determined, nerdy-about-history descendant of USAAF airmen who served and sacrificed from the very cramped confines of B-24 Liberators and the skies of Europe. You can read more in her USA-Today-bestselling book, The Navigator’s Letter: The True Story of Two WWII Airmen, a Doomed Mission, and the Woman Who Bound Them Together.

As this week’s guest on The WWII Recommendation Project, Jan joins me to discuss WWII history and family history, and her process of writing about both. Her book brings us to Operation Tidal Wave, the U.S. Army Air Force’s costly August 1, 1943 low-level raid on the Ploiești oil refineries in Romania. It’s a story of brotherhood (quite literally—about her father and uncle, both B-24 navigators, told in their voices and perspectives through their letters). Without giving too much away, it also gets into the dangers these airmen faced, along with the POW experience.

A career paralegal, Jan researched, wrote, and published this book as a true labor of love, and it shows. And now for her rec:

The WWII Recommendation Project — ep#3

Jan Cress Dondi’s 🎥 rec: Memphis Belle

While the 1990 WWII drama is fictionalized, it was inspired by the real crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress by the same name who completed their 25-mission combat tour in May 1943. They became symbols of the Mighty Eighth’s daylight bombing campaign over Europe, and the movie has a great cast and very much leans into that.

Here’s the trailer:

Who’s a WWII storyteller (e.g., an author, filmmaker, and/or scholar) whose WWII media recommendation you’d be curious to hear?

I was unaware of this fascinating slice of wartime history until I read ’s latest book, G.I. G-Men: The Untold Story of the FBI’s Search for American Traitors, Collaborators, and Spies in World War II Europe. On today’s episode of The WWII Recommendation Project, Steve joins me to share more about his excellent 2026 book—and to recommend another piece of WWII-related media.

Steve is a U.S. Army veteran, defense journalist, and New York Times bestselling author of books that illuminate lesser-known aspects of World War II history in an incredibly richly reported way. G.I. G-Men is no exception.

I initially “met” him as a reader (I can’t think of a title that’d get my attention quicker than Escape from Paris: A True Story of Love and Resistance in Wartime France). More recently, I’ve gotten to know Steve through my Ortiz’s War co-author, . Steve also introduced Nick and me to a wonderful Paris-based writer and ace researcher who helped us with archival research for our book too, . As an aside, Ellen’s 2024 book Doctors At War—about courageous physicians in WWII France and their acts of resistance—merits its own episode (Ellen, this is my roundabout way of inviting you to come on!).

The WWII Recommendation Project — ep#2

Stephen Harding’s 📖 rec:

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo by then-Captain Ted W. Lawson (1943)

Lawson—one of the B-25 pilots who partook in the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Tokyo— published this memoir in 1943. Hollywood wasted no time making the film adaptation, which came out in 1944. Steve notes it’s also quite good. Here’s the movie trailer:

Who’s a WWII storyteller (e.g., an author, filmmaker, and/or scholar) whose WWII media recommendation you’d be curious to hear?

As a journalist, I tend to gravitate toward nonfiction accounts of WWII and the Holocaust (in part because I agree with Hanks’s point that certain 100-percent-true WWII stories sound so insane that “if you were going to put this in a fake movie, you wouldn't believe it.”). To be clear, though, I also have plenty of room on my shelves for historical fiction: I’m glancing at dog-eared copies of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale and John Hersey’s Hiroshima as I type. And while I do love a good documentary (watch this HBO one about WWII soldier-and-photographer Tony Vaccaro—you won’t regret it), I also consume plenty of fictional shows and movies about WWII: By ChatGPT’s estimate, I’ve spent no less than 33 hours watching Hanks’s fiction set between 1939-1945 alone…a roster that includes Saving Private Ryan, Greyhound, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Masters of the Air (most of which are based on books). I also just watched Letters From Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood’s 2006 war film) for the first time at a WWII collector/author’s recommendation. It won’t be the last.

Point being: As someone who basically learns and shares WWII history for a living, I feel grateful that there is, eight decades after the fact, appetite for Greatest Generation stories, both true and imagined. I also feel overwhelmed at how many excellent and important WWII books I’ve yet to read and shows and movies I’ve yet to watch. To help triage my ever-growing list, I’m enlisting the experts in my orbit—a mix of authors and historians who, like me, find aspects of WWII and Holocaust history worthy of revisiting again and again.

I’m kicking off The World War II Recommendation Project in conversation with a historian I’ve come to know well over the last few years: Nicholas Reynolds. Nick is, among many other things, co-author of Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, our nonfiction account of OSS Marine Col. Peter Ortiz that comes out from HarperCollins in August.

The WWII Recommendation Project — ep#1

Historian Nicholas Reynolds on Sink the Bismarck! and Why It Endures

The recommender: Nicholas Reynolds, Colonel USMC (Ret)

Dr. Nicholas Reynolds grew up in the shadow of World War II. Freshly minted PhD from Oxford University in hand, he joined the United States Marine Corps, serving as an infantry officer and then as a historian. He later served as a CIA officer, ending his career with a years-long stretch as the historian for the CIA Museum. In retirement, he teaches and writes. He is the New-York-Times bestselling author of the Hemingway biography Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy. The New Yorker named his book Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence among the best books of 2022. He and his wife, Becky, live outside Washington, DC with their Havanese.

The 🎥 rec:

Sink the Bismarck! tells the story of Nazi Germany’s most powerful battleship and British Royal Navy’s efforts to, well, sink it. The film came out in 1960 and remains a classic. Nick and I chatted right around the 85th anniversary of the sinking of the Bismarck on May 27 (you can read more in ).

Here’s the Sink The Bismarck! trailer:

Who’s a WWII storyteller (e.g., an author, filmmaker, and/or scholar) whose WWII media recommendation you’d be curious to hear?

In World War II history—and, frankly, world history—this day is a big deal.

On June 6, 1944, remembered as “D-Day,” an estimated 156,000 British, Canadian, and American troops began landing on the beaches of Normandy by air and sea. The goal? To break through the heavily fortified French coast and open a Western front critical to liberating France. The Allied invasion, codenamed Operation Neptune, was the largest amphibious assault in military history. General Eisenhower meant what he wrote in his order-of-the-day distributed to Allied Expeditionary Forces soldiers, sailors, and airmen hours before they began storming Normandy’s beaches: “Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.”

Today, on the 82nd anniversary of the opening day of the Battle of Normandy—which set off the larger campaign to liberate Europe—I’m thinking of the enormous bloodshed and sacrifice.

I’m thinking of those who carried out some of the most dangerous missions. (See: The 4 most dangerous missions American troops carried out 80 years ago on D-Day)

I’m thinking of how less than 0.5 percent of Americans who served in World War II are with us today, making it all the more important to listen to D-Day veterans like Corporal Joe Picard who are. (See: Kevin Maurer’s Atlantic piece, The Last of the D-Day Vets)

I’m thinking of the scars that those who survived D-Day—and the battles directly before and after—lived with. (See: ’s ). And of the haunting photos that Tony Vaccaro—an inimitable artist and infantryman who landed in Normandy in the summer of 1944—captured. (See: A soldier who photographed World War II in Europe describes 6 of his photos that reveal the ‘insanity of war’)

I’m thinking of all that had to happen behind-the-scenes—and of the brave men, women, and children who risked (and, in too many cases, lost) their lives to help make the Allied invasion successful. See: 3 unsung World War II woman spies who helped make D-Day an Allied victory.

I’m thinking of what the arrival of the Allies en masse on June 6, 1944 represented to all who were living under the occupation. To add some perspective:

After midnight on May 6, 1944, USAAF 2nd Lt. Murray Simon, was flying a secret OSS mission delivering supplies to the French Underground when Nazis shot his B-24 out of the sky.

2nd Lt. Simon was my mother’s father. A 23-year-old Jewish pilot from New York City, he was the last to parachute out of his flaming plane. Separated from his crew, he ran from the crash site and eventually hid by the side of a country road in Roanne, France. As gendarmerie went door-to-door looking for the downed American airmen, a French Resistant, Dr. Jacques Madjar, found my grandpa in a ditch by the side and told him, in English, “do not be afraid.”

Dr. Madjar and his pregnant wife hid my grandpa in their home in Roanne with their nine-month-old daughter, fed him their last two eggs, and sneaked in a local Maquis chief to smuggle my grandpa out (See here for more of that story).

Dr. Madjar was a Bulgarian-born immigrant to France who’d served as a doctor in the French Army and escaped from the north earlier in the war. While he’d married a Catholic and forged a baptism certificate, he was Jewish. And he had a secret radio. Point being: Each time he lived to see another day was a not-so-small miracle.

Looking at my grandpa—the American pilot who’d leapt from his B-24 just before it exploded—Dr. Madjar kept asking, in decent English, a single question:

When would the Allies be coming?

My grandpa, of course, had no clue. The timing of the rumored Allied invasion was far, far above his pay grade.

But at a certain point, he determined that his helper—this audacious, deeply courageous doctor who had spent years resisting the occupation—needed an answer, if only an estimate.

“One month,” my grandpa offered.

That was on May 6, 1944. His guesstimate would turn out to be the best prediction of his life. D-Day was exactly one month later.

When Dr. Madjar said goodbye to my grandpa, the expectation was that the doctor would immediately dispose of all of the evidence, including his insignia, flight pants, and silk escape map. But Dr. Madjar held onto the incriminating items, keeping them for “after the invasion,” which could not come soon enough.

Dr. Madjar’s moxie comes through once again when, 27 years after their first encounter, my grandpa stepped off a train in Roanne to reunite with his wartime helpers. The petite Frenchman, now middle-aged, was standing at the platform smiling and vigorously waving my grandpa’s silk escape map, which he’d indeed held onto.

I’m heading to France late next month, and I’m thinking of all those who have defended the nation’s democratic values of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”—82 years ago, and ever since.

When people learn I’m a journalist who often writes about World War II, I’ve come to expect at least one of the following responses:

1. “Oh, my [father/grandparent/Greatest Generation relative] served in [insert region or capacity].” This is usually followed by some variation of: “I wish I’d asked about it more while I had the chance.” (Side note: Ask your aging relatives and loved ones about their memories—and record their recollections while you still can. Don’t wait!)

2. You’ve seen Saving Private Ryan, right?

I appreciate both. This Memorial Day, as we honor U.S. military personnel who have died in service, I find myself reflecting on how WWII storytelling impacts our culture, and my recent TIME interview with Saving Private Ryan star Tom Hanks about the topic.

It has been 28 years since the iconic Spielberg-directed war film came out. But many people still so vividly remember Hanks’s portrayal of U.S. Army Captain John Miller leading his Rangers on a search for an American paratrooper whose three brothers had been killed in combat. While fictional, the depiction of what soldiers and civilians experienced on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 was historically authentic and incredibly visceral, raw, and humanizing.

Hanks and Spielberg have gone on to share many more World War II stories—with a similar blend of authenticity and drama—in the the acclaimed miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), The Pacific (2010), and Masters of the Air (2024). Point being: I’m hard pressed to think of many other storytellers on the planet who’ve illuminated Greatest Generation history with the scale and impact of Tom Hanks.

He and I spoke by Zoom about Memorial Day; America’s upcoming 250th; the Greyhound sequel; his connection to Abraham Lincoln (both genetically and on-screen); his philanthropic coffee brand Hanks for our Troops; and what makes him say ‘yes’ to projects these days. It somehow felt fitting that our conversation was on the anniversary of my grandfather’s World War II plane crash over France. Here’s a preview:

You can read more here and see the trailer of HISTORY’s World War II with Tom Hanks below. The first three episodes premiere in the U.S. today.

P.S. In a small-world coincidence, my Ortiz’s War co-author Nick Reynolds is featured in the series as one of the experts. See if you can spot him…

Share WWII Stories for the Record

In 1944, her son Marine Sgt. Charles Perry volunteered for an incredibly dangerous World War II jump into occupied France and never came back. He was 22.

Marine Sgt. Charles Robert Perry (1922-1944):

On August 1, 1944, Perry, who had hazel eyes and stood just under 5’7”, slipped through the rear door of a B-17 Flying Fortress bound for the Haute-Savoie region of southeastern France. He was one of seven OSS paratroopers making the jump into the French Alps on Operation Union II.

Union II was an OSS operation organized and led by OSS Marine Maj. Peter Ortiz in conjunction with a massive daylight supply drop codenamed Operation Buick to get supplies into the region. The key goal was to arm and mobilize the Free French “Bulle Battalion” (lead by prominent FFI officer Captain Jean Bulle) so they could sabotage the retreating Germans following the sweeping Allied invasions.

Around 3pm, 78 B-17s, escorted by Mustangs, flew over the dropzone. From the Flying Fortresses came not only the seven American agents, but also 864 containers of desperately needed weapons and supplies. The planes, dodging flak as best they could, dipped so low that, before the agents jumped, they could make out the faces of the elated members of the Maquis—and the cows and bonfires and beautiful countryside of the Col des Saisies—down below.

It was a thrilling scene on the ground as the Americans (six of them Marines, and one, Francis Coolidge, a USAAF officer) landed. Before they could so much as remove their chutes, French Resistants rushed to greet them with customary kisses on both cheeks, while others raced to collect the canisters.

But Sgt. Perry lay motionless.

When Perry exited his B-17, a steel cable attached to the plane was supposed to trigger his parachute. The cable seemingly snapped. Since he’d been jumping from less than 400 feet, there was no back-up.

The crew watched Sgt. Perry fall to his death. Fellow Union II member Sgt. Robert LaSalle also had a bad jump. His back and ankle were badly injured. The teams cleared the scene, carrying LaSalle to a safe house in the mountains for medical care and reconvening at a nearby ski chalet.

After dawn the next morning, Bulle’s Battalion and Ortiz’s Union II team (including a barely mobile LaSalle) returned to where Sgt. Perry fell to his death, determined to give him a proper funeral. A photographer in the Resistance, Raymond Bertrand, photographed the scene:

The Germans were surely looking for the men of Union II. But there they were, in uniform, standing at attention at their fallen comrade’s grave, covered in flowers. They laid Perry to rest in a casket with his parachute and a small American flag French women had quickly made overnight. Jean Bulle gave speech about the 22-year-old American who’d given his life for France.

For a number of reasons, getting news of Perry’s death back to his family was complicated.

As I read the trail of paperwork and bureaucratically worded letters regarding Perry’s death, I cannot imagine what it was like to be Mrs. Eva Perry … to learn in fragmented installments that her son had died—and that across the ocean, in Nazi territory, there’d perhaps been a funeral.

Mrs. Perry was the matriarch of a big Catholic family from Needham, MA. Charles Perry had graduated from Needham High School, where he captained the baseball team. He worked as a clerk at a stationery store before he enlisted in the USMC in September 1941. Since he was 19 when he enlisted, his parents had to consent. His emergency contact was his mother. His brother Francis A. Perry was also a Marine paratrooper who’d been wounded in action during the war, and it seems that Charles had requested to be sent to paratrooper school following in his brother’s footsteps.

Here’s a 1948 form Mrs. Perry filled out:

And here’s a letter sent to her five years after her son’s death. Dated one day after Mother’s Day, it shares more about what happened:

Mrs. Perry died in July 1989, at 95.

Seeing a grieving mother’s correspondences as she tries to understand and make decisions about her son’s remains is, among other things, a reminder of how, for every service member deployed in combat, there’s a family back home making an extraordinary sacrifice, too.

I don’t think celebrating is the right word, but today please join me in remembering and honoring Mrs. Perry and all the mothers who endure the pain of losing a child brave enough to answer the call.

My grandpa was a 23-year-old from Queens, New York. His dog tags were etched with an “H” for Hebrew. Instead of dropping bombs, he and his crew of seven other USAAF airmen had volunteered to fly secret, moonlit missions dropping supplies to the French Resistance ahead of D-Day. They’d been warned that if they were shot down and caught by the Gestapo, they could be treated as spies, who, per Hitler’s orders, were to be tortured and executed.

With flak popping all around them, my grandpa ordered the crew to fight the fire and lighten the load. Surveying the damage, he steered the hulking plane toward the night’s dropzone, where a reception committee of French Resistants had been awaiting the aerial supply delivery (but were by no means expecting to meet the American flyers themselves). The hits kept coming. When it was clear there was no salvaging the flaming plane, Murray ordered everyone to bail out. “Go, go,” he shouted through the smoke. “I’ll be right behind you.” He counted seven chutes and jumped from the Liberator before it exploded midair.

Here’s a photo of my grandpa (who I never met but grew up very curious about)—along with the remains of his plane after it barreled into a forest in the French countryside:

And here’s where the story takes a fortunate turn: A series of incredibly courageous helpers in the French Resistance intercepted my grandpa, risking their own lives to help him. They hid him in their homes, disguised him in their clothes, fed him their last eggs, and smuggled him out of town in a story I’ve shared before in the pages of Marie Claire.

The Resistance connected my grandpa to OSS Marine Peter Ortiz, who, between sabotaging and spying on Nazis, had established a track record of aiding downed Allied airmen—and whose extraordinary life is the subject of Nick Reynolds’s and my new book Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France—and this uber-dramatic book trailer HarperCollins made:

The more I learned about Ortiz and the context in which he and my grandpa met in May 1944, the more insane it all sounded…

Ortiz was 6’2” with bright blue eyes and Hollywood good looks (he’d act in many of his OSS buddy John Ford’s films post war).

The 30-year-old Marine Corps major spoke English, French, German, Arabic, and Spanish.

He’d parachuted into France four months earlier, as part of a top-secret inter-Allied operation to arm and mobilize the Maquis before D-Day.

He wore his Marine uniform while spying, blowing up Axis infrastructure, and moving between Allied safe houses.

His father was a founding editor of Vogue Paris—a connection that inspired his cover as a Parisian dress designer that he used to eavesdrop on Germans.

He’d recently forced a pub full of Nazis to toast to FDR before slipping into a getaway car he had waiting outside.

By the time my grandpa connected with Ortiz, the Gestapo had a reward of more than half a million francs on his head.

I’ll save the details of their journey back to England for another post (and for the book).

It was the stuff of legends. And, it turns out, it was true.

Introducing Ortiz’s War, out on August 25 and available for pre-order today.

In my biased opinion, it’s a striking cover:

From the cockpit of his P-51 Mustang, Stewart narrowly dodged bullets and shot off bursts from his .50 caliber machine guns. Credited with downing three Luftwaffe aircraft that day, he landed back in Italy to much fanfare. A photographer snapped this photo:

Nearly seventy five years later, in December 2019, I visited Stewart at his Michigan home to interview him about his World War II service for National Geographic. We talked about how his grandfather was born into slavery in Alabama during the Civil War. He recalled how, as a boy growing up in Corona, Queens, he’d go study the mammoth aluminum birds at La Guardia Airport and fantasize about what it’d be like to fly, initially unaware that Uncle Sam didn’t accept Black aviators. Between that, his lack of a high school degree, and a case of polio as a four-year-old that resulted in a heart murmur and a limp leg, the likelihood of him flying for the U.S. military was miniscule. But the USAAF had the highest loss rates, and America desperately needed pilots. After volunteering and qualifying to be one, Stewart graduated from the single U.S. Army Air Forces field that allowed African American cadets, in Tuskegee, Alabama, which graduated ~1000 airmen during WWII. He deployed to Europe to fly escort missions for the 15th Air Force.

Over the course of 1945, the 20-year-old New Yorker who’d never driven a car would fly 43 combat missions protecting formations of American Liberators on bombing runs over Europe.

Today, on the heels of Easter Sunday and the successful rescue of two downed American airmen in Iran, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Stewart, who turned 100 on Independence Day in 2025 and passed away in February 2026.

Stewart’s photo from the Easter Sunday dogfight was plastered across newspapers to boost morale and showcase what the segregated 332nd Fighter Group was accomplishing. For shooting down three Focke-Wulf 190s, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

But the smile on his face didn’t capture the full story. Stewart lost three fellow Red Tails in the skirmish that day: One of the pilots died instantly. One managed to land his mangled Mustang in Yugoslavia. The third, Walter Manning, bailed out, only to be captured and later lynched by Austrians. He wrote in his logbook, “Thank God, I’m alive.”

After the war, Stewart proudly served in the U.S. Air Force. In 1949, he and two fellow 332nd pilots won the Air Force’s inaugural Fighter Gunnery (or "Top Gun") competition. In 1950, he was honorably discharged (read: laid off) on account of peacetime budget cuts. He remained in the Reserves and earned his commercial pilot’s license on the GI Bill.

He applied to fly for Pan American and Trans World Airlines, but they rejected him; they didn’t hire Black pilots. He was 25 and unemployed, his experience as a war hero overshadowed by the color of his skin.

He returned to Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station, where he’d left for pilot training nearly a decade earlier. This time, he was working as a baggage man several floors below ground, lugging shipments of magazines that’d fill the station’s newsstands. It was the worst time of his life.

But he forged a new path, studying at New York University and graduating with a mechanical engineering degree, which he told me was his proudest accomplishment.

"Follow your dreams and try not to let anything deter you or sway you the wrong way,” he told me. “Do not be consumed by vengeance and hatred and self pity.”

He found a renewed sense of excitement working in engineering, at the cutting edge of technology. He traveled around North America, the Far East, and Europe and rose the ranks to become a VP at one of the nation’s largest natural gas pipeline companies.

He retired and, at 82, found his way back to the cockpit as a volunteer, taking Black and Brown kids from Detroit on educational flights and delighting when some went on to become commercial airline pilots.

I recommend checking out his book Soaring to Glory and any of his oral history interviews:

On Easter Sunday in 2018, Stewart traveled to Austria for the first time since the war, this time as a guest of the Austrian government as they inaugurated a memorial for Walter Manning, his friend who parachuted out of his P-51 on their bloody mission exactly 73 years earlier. Researchers investigating the fate of downed Allied pilots had determined that Manning, a 24-year-old Philadelphian, had been captured and in an Austrian holding cell, awaiting transfer to a prisoner of war camp, when members of a local mob broke him out. They lynched Manning on a lamppost on the town square, declaring that they were doing to the Black American airman what Nazi propaganda claimed “righteous” Americans did to their own.

Stewart was the sole survivor of the Tuskegee Airmen who’d been with Manning in the sky that day. I asked him what it was like to be there, alongside his daughter, as the Austrian government acknowledged the injustice all those years later. His eyes got glassy and he said it was indescribable.

In 2007, President George W. Bush presented the Tuskegee Airmen with the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Stewart was among six veterans on stage to receive it, looking out to an audience of some 300 fellow airmen. President Bush apologized and saluted him. Stewart saluted right back.

Some more from Lt. Col. Harry T. Stewart Jr. (July 4, 1924 – February 2, 2025):

Share WWII Stories for the Record

“The strangest man ever to play baseball” was how outfielder-turned-Yankees-manager Casey Stengel described fellow Major Leaguer Moe Berg.

That’s a fair characterization of Berg, the enigmatic polyglot who played ball for the Brooklyn Robins (a.k.a. the Dodgers), Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Washington Senators, and Boston Red Sox, and then spied for The Manhattan Project. His other nicknames—”Mysterious Moe,” “The Professor,” and “the brainiest man in baseball”—suited him too. Berg, whom I’ve written about for Insider and am featuring as my latest OSS veteran spotlight, also epitomized the description of the ideal OSS recruit as “a PhD who could win at a bar fight.”

His life is the subject of the nonfiction book (and Hollywood adaptation) The Catcher Was A Spy, as well as Aviva Kempner’s excellent documentary The Spy Behind Home Plate.

Morris “Moe” Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972)

OSS branch: Special Operations, and later to Secret Intelligence

Codename: Remus

Pre WWII

Born in Harlem in 1902, Berg was the youngest son of Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in pursuit of opportunity and religious freedom. His parents raised him and his brother and sister in Newark, NJ, where his dad ran a pharmacy. The athletically and linguistically gifted Berg played baseball on a local church team. He transferred from New York University to Princeton, where he captained the baseball team and rejected an offer to join an exclusive eating club knowing he wouldn’t be permitted to bring other Jews around.

After graduating magna cum laude from Princeton in 1923, Berg began his pro baseball career. He studied Sanskrit at the Sorbonne in Paris in the off season and appeared as a contestant on the NBC radio show "Information Please." Largely to appease his father, he earned his law degree at Columbia University and joined the firm Satterlee and Canfield (now Satterlee, Stephens) while juggling his MLB career. Playing professionally throughout the 1930s, he said he would rather be a ball player than a Supreme Court justice.

So yes, the brilliant polymath who inspired the term “good field, no hit” stood out in the Major League. But it turns out that as a spy, Berg could very much blend right in.

From idiosyncratic MLB catcher to intelligence officer

Berg went to Japan in 1932, ostensibly as part of a group of MLB players training Japanese players. He returned to Japan in late 1934 for the All-American Japan tour—an attempt to build goodwill and bolster U.S.-Japan relations through sports as tensions rose in the Pacific. He was there alongside American League all-stars—including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig—for the 18-game series against the Japanese. After his teammates left, Berg stuck around for another month. Despite signs banning photography, Berg sneaked up to the roof of one of Tokyo’s tallest skyscrapers with a movie camera and captured panoramic video footage of Tokyo Bay, which he’d screen for U.S. military and intelligence officials planning raids some eight years later. He also traveled to China, India, Egypt, and Germany.

Back in the States, Berg played for, and then helped coach, the Boston Red Sox. He was 39 when America entered WWII. In 1942, he worked for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a wartime governmental agency led by Nelson Rockefeller. Berg went to Latin America, supposedly to distribute baseball gear, and funneled intelligence back to Rockefeller.

Manhattan Project spy

In 1943, Berg was recruited—this time not by the MLB, but by the OSS. He parachuted into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia to collect intelligence on resistance groups and assess their capabilities, recommending that Tito’s Communist Partisans get more Allied support.

From there, OSS spymaster Gen. “Wild Bill” Donovan tapped Berg to spy for The Manhattan Project, the codename for America’s top-secret program to develop atomic bombs before Hitler (random tidbit: I recently learned that my great aunt, Gwen Graber Simon, was a secretary for The Manhattan Project).

After being briefed by America’s leading scientists, Berg was sent to Italy to collect important intelligence and documents on German nuclear progress from scientists—and, in some cases, the scientists themselves. From my Insider article:

“I see Moe is still catching very well,” Roosevelt said after learning Berg had located and extracted Italy’s foremost expert in aerodynamics, Antonio Ferri.

Ferri had destroyed lab equipment that could help the Axis and gone into hiding in the mountains with a crate of scientific documents. He raised a resistance circuit carrying out guerilla operations to thwart the Axis and enable Allied air drops. Berg and Ferri connected and began parsing and translating the scientific documents.

With special permission from Roosevelt, Ferri entered the US with a suitcase and the crate of documents and was escorted to the nation’s leading aeronautics research center, in Langley, Virginia.

In December 1944, Berg was sent to neutral Switzerland for a conference at the University of Zurich with a pistol, a cyanide tablet, and a false identity as a Swiss physics student. His mission? Attend an intimate lecture Heisenberg was giving at the conference. If Heisenberg mentioned working on a nuclear bomb, Berg was to stand up and shoot Heisenberg point blank, knowing this would also mean being killed himself.

Between the German and the physics terminology, Berg left the lecture unclear on how much Heisenberg actually knew. He complimented Heisenberg on his talk and later insisted on escorting him to his hotel. In the resulting report, Berg determined that Heisenberg had low confidence in the Nazis nuclear capabilities and that Hitler was at least two years behind the Manhattan Project.

In August 1944, U.S. unleashed two atomic bombs on Japan—the first on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the second on Nagasaki three days later. Less than ten days later, Japan announced its surrender, effectively ending WWII.

The short and long-term impact of the nuclear attacks proved catastrophic, with the resulting death toll by the end of 1945 alone estimated to be somewhere between 130,000 and 210,000 people across Nagasaki and Hiroshima, most of them civilians.

Post-war

• Berg was offered, but chose not to accept, the Medal of Freedom in 1946

• He never married or had kids

• He lived in New Jersey, at times with his older sister, Ethel, and brother Dr. Sam Berg, who served in the Army Medical Corps during WWII and went to Japan shortly after the bombings to research the effects of radiation. Sam practiced medicine in Newark for six decades.

• When Berg died in 1972, at age 70, his last words were reportedly: “How did the Mets do today?”

• His sister accepted his Medal of Honor after his death and donated it to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where it’s on display with his catcher’s mitt and passport.

Want more about Mysterious Moe and the OSS? Some recs:

• The Spy Behind Home Plate, Aviva Kempner’s documentary (it’s great)

• The Catcher Was A Spy (I’d go with the 1994 biography by Nicholas Dawidoff over the 2018 Hollywood adaptation, with zero offense to Paul Rudd)

• “Moe Berg: Baseball Player, Linguist, Lawyer, Intel Officer” from CIA.gov

• Moe Berg, Class of 1923 from Princeton University (also home to his personal papers)

• Need to Know by Nick Reynolds (with whom I’m co-authoring an upcoming book about another inimitable OSS veteran

Share Stories for the Record

This post is part of my OSS veteran spotlight series. An estimated 13,000 Americans—a truly eclectic and extraordinary mix of military and civilian personnel—served in the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. My grandfather, a pilot for Operation Carpetbagger (de facto air arm of the OSS), was among them. If there’s an OSS veteran you’d like to see featured here in the future, please comment below.

When one of my closest friends told me that her grandfather Arno Penzias—a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist—narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Germany as a boy and immigrated to the U.S. with the help of a stranger in New Jersey, I had more than a few follow-up questions.

The result was this National Geographic article re: “How a stranger’s kindness during WWII helped give us the Big Bang theory.”

Arno Penzias died peacefully on January 22, 2024, in San Francisco, CA, at age 90. His younger brother Jimmy resides in the Boston area.

On the heels of International Holocaust Remembrance Day—as we commemorate the many millions of lives lost and irreversibly changed by Hitler’s regime—I’m also thinking of how this particular family was spared, and of what America opening its doors to them meant, both for the family and for our collective understanding of the universe.

On January 3, 1940, the Penziases docked in New York City on an ocean liner that delivered them across the Atlantic, navigating around hurricanes and German submarines. Journalists snapped photographs of Arno and his little brother Guenther (aka Jimmy), wide-eyed young refugees taking in the sight of the Statue of Liberty—a symbol of their new home’s aspirational embrace of immigrants fleeing persecution in pursuit of safety and opportunity.

Fast forward four decades after the Penzias family fled from the Nazis and began anew as Jewish Americans in the Bronx: Arno had become Dr. Arno Penzias, a father of three and a world-renowned physicist. Some résumé highlights: He’d graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School and City College and served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps before joining Bell Labs in New Jersey and earning a PhD in Physics at Columbia University. In the 1960s, he and his research partner Dr. Robert Wilson co-discovered cosmic microwave background radiation, which led to the Big Bang theory of cosmology.

After receiving a telegram from U.S. President Jimmy Carter congratulating him on the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics, Arno responded with this letter:

Today, I keep coming back to Arno’s words to President Carter, and to the policies and people that enabled him to write them:

“I came to the United States thirty-nine years ago as a penniless refugee from Nazi Germany. For my family and myself, America has meant a haven of safety as well as a land of freedom and opportunity. At a time when the promise and meaning of American institutions are often questioned, I feel compelled to bear witness to the fulfillment of the American promise in my personal life experience. I am very proud to be an American, very grateful to America and to the American people.”

I am so ashamed of the U.S. federal government’s recent attitude and action toward immigrants—including citizens and non-citizens—along with the treatment of Americans exercising their constitutional rights to defend and support the vulnerable among us. Lest we forget that our embrace of immigrants has been among our greatest superpowers.

Still, I remain hopeful that we will, as a nation, find our way back to the core principles America is built upon. When I think about the circumstances by which Arno’s family was able to find refuge in America during a time when doing so was becoming increasingly difficult, their successful passage ultimately came down to a single American, Barnet Yudin.

Yudin wasn’t particularly rich or powerful. An immigrant himself, he’d fled religious persecution in Russia and worked his way from selling paint from a pushcart to owning and operating a paint and hardware shop in Belleville, NJ with his wife. When a fellow member of his local Jewish community came to Yudin’s door on the eve of World War II with a photo of Arno’s family and a plea to vouch for them so they could come to the States, he agreed to help.

It was Yudin who enabled the Penziases to come and, as Arno would one day write to the POTUS, “bear witness to the fulfillment of the American promise.”

Share Stories for the Record

I’d planned for today’s post to be about some of my favorite World War II books, and I’ll still share some recs. But first, I sadly feel the need to talk about several of the incredibly senseless, tragic mass shootings that have occurred over the last week.

As I was thinking about the horror that the Brown University community was experiencing after a gunman began shooting students—two of them to death—as they prepared for final exams last weekend, I saw the news that a pair of gunmen some 10,000 miles away were opening fire on hundreds of people at a Hanukkah gathering in Sydney, Australia. I see these shootings, targeted or not, as threats to the freedom, peace, and democracy that members of the Greatest Generation and others have fought and sacrificed to afford us with. I also believe that allowing ourselves to grow numb to mass shootings—e.g., accepting them as an unfortunate societal reality and praying that one never becomes personal—is perhaps one of the most dangerous and tragic things we can do. The problem then becomes: What can we do?

For one, we can recognize what several incredibly courageous individuals actually did.

If you’ve heard about the mass shooting on Australia’s Bondi Beach but haven’t yet watched a clip of the man who helped stop it, start here:

The short of it is: On Sunday afternoon, a father and son started shooting at people celebrating Hanukkah and murdered at least 15 people. Among them were a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor. Dozens more were wounded. Homemade ISIS flags and bombs were reportedly found in the attackers’ car. As it goes with mass shootings, the wounds, grief, and trauma permeate far deeper than we can capture.

Amid the vitriol, we also see heroism: In the footage, a man now identified as 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed charges one of the shooters from behind, wrestling the gun from his grip. As the disarmed shooter backs away, Ahmed is shown putting down the gun. He was hit in the shoulder with several bullets, seemingly shot by a second shooter.

This was someone who saw terror unfolding and leapt into action. He wasn’t a police officer or a soldier. He owns a fruit shop. The son of Syrian refugees and himself an immigrant to Australia, he has two daughters. He was reportedly grabbing a cup of coffee when he saw bloodied bodies hitting the ground.

He had the moral and physical strength to lean into the “fight” in “run, hide, fight,” and he interrupted a massacre. That’s not simply survival instinct. That’s courage and resistance. As his dad told BBC, “Ahmed was driven by his sentiment, conscience and humanity.” It sounds like he’s thankfully expected to recover.

Others who fought to stop the Bondi attack include Boris and Sofia Gurman, a married couple in their 60s. Footage shows Boris wrestling away one of the shooter’s guns and hitting him with it. He and Sofia try to force the gunman to retreat. They both got shot and could be seen lying dead in each other’s arms. Sixty-two-year-old father and businessman Reuven Morrison also took action. Footage shows him running toward, screaming, and hurling a brick at one of the gunmen as people ran for their lives. Morrison was killed. His daughter told reporters that she was devastated but not at all surprised that he died that way, trying to stop a massacre.

So what does this have to do with the sorts of WWII and Holocaust stories I often read and write? They are examples of everyday people demonstrating courage and resistance in unthinkably horrific circumstances, risking their own lives to stand up to evil.

The following books chronicle true stories of sustained risk-taking and courage that are as unexpected as they are extraordinary. While set in World War II and the Holocaust, I’m sharing them today in honor of Ahmed al Ahmed, the Gurmans, Reuven Morrison, and all people past and present who, upon witnessing humans being terrorized, find the moral courage and selflessness to help.

A Woman Of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

A riveting biography of Virginia Hall, an adventurous, multilingual American with a prosthetic leg who talked her way into volunteering as a secret agent, initially for Britain’s SOE, and then for the OSS, America’s CIA forerunner.

Hall’s clandestine work supporting the Resistance and thwarting Nazis in occupied France was as important as it was risky. Per a 1942 Gestapo transmission: “She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.” Spoiler alert: That didn’t stop her. Hall is the only civilian woman ever awarded the U.S. Army’s Distinguished Service Cross. She’d also go on to work for the CIA.

Rescue in Denmark by Harold Flender

The story of Danish citizens—fishermen, teachers, students, doctors, etc.—who worked together to save nearly the entire Jewish population of Denmark from Nazi deportation by smuggling them into Sweden by boat.

Published in 1963, it’s a potent reminder of how collective courage and resistance can—and did—change history.

And for readers young and old interested in the Danish Resistance and this storyline, I also recommend:

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Published in 1989, it’s historical fiction about a young girl in Copenhagen in 1943 and her family’s efforts to help a Jewish friend escape persecution. A novel, but inspired by real-life experiences.

Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List) by Thomas Keneally

A narrative nonfiction account of how German industrialist and Nazi Party member Oskar Schindler ultimately saved 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories in Kraków and Brünnlitz.

Keneally, an Australian novelist and historian, published Schindler’s Ark in 1982. The book would serve as the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning 1993 film Schindler’s List.

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner

The subtitle—“The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler”—sums this one up well.

Donner beautifully chronicles the story of her late great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, whose letters and FBI files serve as an entrypoint to a story of an incredibly intelligent, brave American woman who went to get a PhD in Germany as the Nazis rose to power. Harnack’s work as a resistant and wartime spy in Germany became so threatening to Hitler’s regime that he personally intervened in her sentencing.

Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless WWII Resistance Fighter by Clare Mulley

A propulsive journey into the wartime exploits of Polish resistance fighter Elżbieta “Zo” Zawacka, the only SOE-trained woman to be parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Poland to fight behind enemy lines during WWII.

The Gestapo tried again and again to capture Zawacka as she continued fighting for the liberation of Poland, including as a mission-critical courier and a leader in the Warsaw Uprising. Mulley artfully brings the story to light.

The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy by Tadeusz Pankiewicz

A memoir chronicling how a Catholic pharmacist worked and resisted inside the Kraków Ghetto.

Pankiewicz owned Eagle Pharmacy, which he managed to continue operating even after the ghetto was sealed. Published in 1947, this is a rare account written by a non-Jewish eyewitness who served as a lifeline to people in increasingly dire straits.

If you have recs of particular stories of courage and resistance from unexpected places that stick with you, please chime in. I’d love to hear.

Bearing witness to the devastation and panic, McIntosh did what she was trained to do: she wrote about it.

But her editors at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin told her that her article was too graphic, and that it’d be too upsetting for readers. They didn’t run it.

McIntosh—who’d been living with a Nisei (second-generation) Japanese family in Hawaii and learning Japanese—was listening to the radio and making breakfast on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, when an announcer broke in and with news that the islands were under attack. She and a a male photographer colleague drove toward Pearl Harbor to report on what was happening. The photographer was allowed into Pearl, while she wasn’t. She spent the day at a hospital and wrote about what she saw in the aftermath of the attacks, published in the Washington Post in 2012 for the first time:

“I saw a formation of black planes diving straight into the ocean off Pearl Harbor. The blue sky was punctured with anti-aircraft smoke puffs. Suddenly, there was a sharp whistling sound, almost over my shoulder, and below, down on School Street. I saw a rooftop fly into the air like a pasteboard movie set.”

“I felt that numb terror that all of London has known for months. It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you. It’s the helplessness and terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death.”

She watched victim after victim—some dead, some alive—arrive:

“Bombs were still dropping over the city as ambulances screamed off into the heart of the destruction. The drivers were blood-sodden when they returned, with stories of streets ripped up, houses burned, twisted shrapnel and charred bodies of children.”

“In the morgue, the bodies were laid on slabs in the grotesque positions in which they had died. Fear contorted their faces. Their clothes were blue-black from incendiary bombs. One little girl in a red sweater, barefoot, still clutched a piece of jump-rope in her hand.”

“There was blood and the fear of death—and death itself—in the emergency room as doctors calmly continued to treat the victims of this new war.”

The beautiful Hawaii she knew had turned into this:

“Seven little stores, including my drugstore, had nearly completely burned down. Charred, ripply walls, as high as the first story, alone remained to give any hint of where the store had been.”

“At the smashed soda fountain was a half-eaten chocolate sundae. Scorched bonbons were scattered on the sidewalk. There were odd pieces lying in the wreckage, half-burned Christmas cards, on one, the words ‘Hark the Herald’ still visible.”

“There were twisted bedsprings, half-burned mattresses, cans of food, a child’s blackened bicycle, a lunch box, a green ravelled sweater, a Bang-Up comic book, ripped awnings.”

“I ran out of notepaper and reached down and picked up a charred batch of writing paper, still wet from a fire hose. There was, too, the irony of Christmas tinsel, cellophane, decorations. A burned doll, with moving eyes, singed curls and straw bonnet, like a miniature corpse, lay in the wreckage.”

After Pearl Harbor, she was transferred to Washington D.C. to cover the White House, with a focus on First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. During an interview with a story subject (a man who invented a sugar-cane-cutting machine and who, it turns out, knew her father, also a journalist), she mentioned she’d studied Japanese and wanted to go overseas. When the man asked her if she’d like to work for the government, she said that if it involved going abroad, she certainly would. That man happened to work for OSS Director Gen. “Wild Bill” Donovan.

He sent her paperwork that’d begin her career in the Office of Strategic Services—or, as it was informally known by some of its members recruited to Donovan’s eclectic, elite network: “Oh So Secret” and “Oh So Social.”

Elizabeth “Betty” McIntosh (March 1, 1915 - June 8, 2015)

OSS branch: Moral Operations (MO), Far East Division in the China-Burma-India theater:

A snapshot of her 18 months of OSS service:

• McIntosh was assigned to a team of storytellers (reporters, writers, broadcasters, and artists—including those with knowledge of enemy languages and cultures) who carried out psychological warfare, often by generating and circulating false news reports and propaganda to deceive, demoralize, and derail adversaries

• After completing OSS training in D.C. and Maryland in 1943, she was sent to New Delhi, India, where she and her (mostly male) MO colleagues were tasked with creating black propaganda; this entailed messing with Japanese soldiers’ postcards to their families; circulating a forged order for Japanese soldiers communicating that surrendering (vs. fighting the Allies at all costs) was suddenly an option; and having a Burmese OSS agent intercept and kill a Japanese courier, only to plant a forged order on him for the Japanese to find and believe (part of a push to get the Japanese out of Burma)

• In spring 1945, OSS flew McIntosh “over the hump” behind enemy lines into Kunming, China, on a plane with fellow OSSer Julia McWilliams (a tall, charismatic research assistant in Secret Intelligence (SI) who’d later marry OSSer Paul Child and establish herself as the famous French chef and author we know as Julia Child)

  

• In Kunming, McIntosh and her MO colleagues would generate and circulate fake news, leveraging their knowledge of Japanese culture and their creativity to infiltrate airwaves with broadcasts that’d seep into Japanese and Chinese listeners’ psyches

Post-war

• After OSS was disbanded, McIntosh worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, the UN, and Voice of America during the Cold War

• She also worked at Glamour in New York City (the magazine where I coincidentally also worked in my twenties; and having delved into the back issues and read about the topics filling the magazine’s pages during McIntosh’s time there, it comes as zero surprise to me that she didn’t spend much of her career there, even if it was notably forward-thinking and progressive for the time, as far as women’s magazines go)

• With support from General Donovan, McIntosh published her memoir Undercover Girl in 1947; she also authored several children’s books

• In 1958, McIntosh, newly widowed, approached CIA Director Allen Dulles (another OSS veteran), about employment opportunities, and so began the next chapter of her career as a case and ops officer at the CIA

• She retired from the CIA in 1973 but remained involved in chronicling and sharing America’s intelligence history and bringing together OSS alumni in many capacities, including writing about the women of OSS

• She celebrated her 100th birthday at a celebration at the CIA and died a few months later; she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery

For more on Betty McIntosh, I recommend:

• Her books, especially her 1947 autobiography Undercover Girl and 1998 bestseller Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of OSS

• OSS Operation Black Mail: One Woman’s Covert War Against the Imperial Japanese Army by Ann Todd

• “Spy Girl” Betty McIntosh, published in 2020 on cia.gov

This week marks the 84th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into WWII, which is just one of many reasons I’m featuring Betty McIntosh as the first subject of a new series on veterans of the OSS. If there’s a member of the CIA’s WWII forerunner you’d like to see featured here in the future, please reach out or drop me a comment.

Confession: I knew next to nothing about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the World War II forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. special operations forces (think: Navy SEALS and Green Berets)—before I started digging into my grandfather’s World War II service. I learned that, as a 23-year-old, he was piloting secret missions for an Eighth Air Force outfit that was the de facto air arm of the OSS—and that one of the heroes who helped him escape when he was shot down over France a month before D-Day was legendary OSS agent Pierre “Peter” Ortiz, who both inspired and acted in several Hollywood flicks.

In many ways, Ortiz—a tall, dashing commando who could charm you in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic, and who’d parachuted into France twice in 1944 to arm and mobilize the Underground—embodied a description of the ideal OSS recruit as “a PhD who can win a bar fight.” (In Ortiz’s particular case, he technically didn’t hold any higher-education degrees, as he ran away from school as a teenager and joined the rough-and-tough French Foreign Legion; but he was brainy, sophisticated, and well-read, and a fellow OSS Marine would later describe him as sounding “like a college professor rather than a Marine officer.”)

OSS was founded and directed by General “Wild Bill” Donovan, a charismatic WWI-Medal-of-Honor recipient turned Wall Street lawyer who knew FDR from their days as classmates at Columbia Law. President Roosevelt referred to Donovan—a Republican—as his “secret legs.”

To staff the organization, Donovan recruited a diverse cast of powerhouse personnel, whom he called his “glorious amateurs.” Roughly 13,000 Americans—a truly eclectic mix of military and civilian personnel—served in the OSS during WWII. As I wrote in the New York Times:

They came in as academics, military personnel, scientists, athletes, filmmakers, farmers and even some convicts; they served as spies, cartographers, forgers and propagandists. They broke code, planted false information to mislead the Germans and parachuted into enemy territory to blow up bridges and rail lines. One third of them were women.”

Here’s a high-level overview of OSS’s various branches:

As the war came to an end, Donovan made the case for a peacetime centralized intelligence service. He called OSS “an unusual experiment …to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross-section of racial origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents could risk an encounter with the long-established and well-trained enemy organizations.”

President Truman wasn’t sold on Wild Bill. In September 1945, Truman disbanded OSS, transferring select parts of it to the State Department and the War Department to maintain specific capabilities and personnel. By 1947, though, Truman came to recognize the need for a centralized intelligence agency, leading to the formation of the CIA we know today. While Donovan wouldn’t hold a formal position, four other OSS veterans would go on to serve as CIA director. Wild Bill is very much regarded as the founding father, with a bronze statue of him there to greet you when you step into the HQ’s Langley, VA. lobby. Next to the Donovan statue is a memorial honoring fallen OSS members, with 116 of their names listed in a book.

By the time I really began learning about what different branches and members of the OSS did during the war, there were just ~100 OSS veterans still with us. From a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in 2018, I watched a subset of them accept the OSS Congressional Gold Medal (with thanks to the OSS Society for making that happen and for preserving and honoring OSS’s legacy). Members of Congress cited them with carrying out some of the bravest acts of WWII. I know just a few OSS vets who are still with us, and I’m endlessly grateful to them and to all the OSS vets and descendants who’ve welcomed me into their homes and memories.

Today, their exploits are largely declassified, and some have been popularized in modern movies like The Good Shepherd, Bridge of Spies, and Inglourious Basterds, along with books like A Woman of No Importance, The Catcher Was A Spy, and many others worthy of their own posts.

I’ll follow up soon with the first installment of an “OSS Alumni Spotlight” series—an attempt to highlight some of their incredible stories.

If there are particular OSS veterans whose stories you want to see featured, please let me know or drop their names in the comments.

Last week, I attended a conference at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, which was an amazing opportunity to learn from leading scholars and experts (including my Ortiz’s War co-author, historian Nick Reynolds) about the largest conflict in modern history and its legacy. It was also a heartening display of the lengths that people go to in order to understand an incredibly formative chapter in human history.

The Museum began as the brainchild of historians Stephen Ambrose and Nick Mueller, originally opening its doors in 2000 as the D-Day Museum. Those doors have been reconstructed and expanded quite a bit over the years. As for what makes the museum so special? It has a great campus and staff, with thoughtful exhibitions, collections, and cutting-edge technology. But to me, the power lies in the number of actual World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors who’ve contributed over the years, sharing their time, artifacts, and stories.

On this latest visit to New Orleans, I found myself thinking a lot about Jeannine Burk, a Holocaust survivor and longtime volunteer at the museum. She was 80 when I interviewed her for National Geographic’s “Last Voices of WWII” portfolio in 2020. She was at Mardi Gras when I first called her. She told me about life as a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Brussels: Her father had seen the writing on the wall and smuggled her to a stranger he’d connected with through the Underground—an older woman who agreed to hide her—shortly before he was rounded up and taken to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Jeannine was so proud to talk about her 14 grandchildren and two great-grandkids. A few months after the National Geographic story ran, her grandson emailed me with sad news: She’d passed away unexpectedly.

Jeannine believed talking about World War II and the Holocaust was key to “never again.” Looking back on my notes, I hear her loud and clear:

“All the young people that I speak to, I tell them that when I die, there will be no survivors left. So they’re the ones who are going to have to remember.”

Today I’m sharing a few portraits that Robert Clark shot of Jeannine at the National WWII Museum for National Geographic in 2020, along with a slightly longer version of my accompanying story:

When Jeannine Burk was three years old, her father took her on a streetcar across Brussels, rang a doorbell, and left her with the woman who answered. Knowing that Jews in Nazi-occupied Brussels were beginning to disappear, he’d arranged for Jeannine’s older brother to live at a Christian home for boys. Back at their family’s apartment, as her parents planned how to hide Jeannine’s older sister, the Gestapo barged in. They forced her father into their car, declaring they’d be back for the rest of the family. He became one of more than a million people killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1944, Jeannine remained hidden in a stranger’s home. When Nazis paraded through the neighborhood, her helper ordered her to the outhouse. She’d peek through the wooden slits and then hide in the darkest corner.

In 1944, troops in different uniforms, with British accents, arrived in Brussels. Soon after, her mother rang the doorbell, back from hiding as a nurse’s aide in the countryside. Burk and her mother and siblings returned to their prewar home. She started school, where a boy called her a “dirty Jew.” She never saw her helper again.

When she was 10, her mother died of cancer. Orphaned, she received a letter from relatives of aunts she didn’t know she had. They’d immigrated to New York before the war and, on her 12th birthday, flew her there to live with them. It wasn’t the American dream she’d imagined, even if the streets felt paved in gold. She yearned for her siblings and the familiarity of life across the ocean.

After a few decades in the Bronx, marrying and divorcing young, she met her great love, her late husband of 43 years. They moved to New Orleans. Ahead of her 65th birthday, she managed to finally track down the name and address of the woman who hid her. Mrs. Kurznia had passed away, but Burk went back to the house where she’d spent two years of her life in hiding. “I’m 80 years old, and I still cry,” she said. “I never had a chance to say thank you.”

If you want to hear more from Jeannine, below is her oral history from the National World War II Museum. And if you’re in New Orleans, I also recommend visiting the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, which shares stories from Jeannine and many others. Their stories serve to remind us of how terrible humans can be, but also of how courageous they can be.

“You know Tony, right?” my friend Angelena asked when she learned I lived in Long Island City, NY and wrote about WWII history—especially from the perspective of the people who lived it.

I didn’t yet know Tony—a.k.a. Michelantonio “Tony” Celestino Onofrio Vaccaro. But turns out I’d seen some of his post-war photography: His elegant portraits of celebrities and artists like JFK, Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and the Eisenhowers lined the walls of Manducatis Rustica, Tony’s favorite Italian restaurant, down the street from where we both lived. After Googling him and watching the excellent 2016 documentary—Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, focused on the ~8,000 photos he snapped from the frontlines in Europe as a WWII infantryman—I reached out.

In the spring of 2021, when Tony was 98, he welcomed me into his NYC studio, an apartment-office-museum hybrid overflowing with his life’s work. He was warm, spunky, and soulful. “Let me show you something,” he said again and again as I tried to keep pace with his tour. He traded one of his dress shoes for an antique wooden clog from Italy and then led me to drawers filled to the brim with his negatives, telling stories attached to each. He had us listen to his favorite operas from his record player and told me how the cane he was carrying once belonged to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he’d photographed in the 1950s.

Then he reached into a glass display case and handed me a film canister filled with blood-stained sand he’d collected from Omaha Beach in June 1944. Before Tony became a commercial fashion photographer, he was a young American soldier who broke the Army’s photography rules and captured World War II as he experienced it, very much including the horrors. Here are some of his photos that we discussed:

Tony captured a fellow soldier’s final step before shrapnel tore through him, a jubilant kiss between a GI and a young French girl in a newly liberated town, and stark portraits of ransacked corpses. Today, these images help us better understand the horror he and millions of other soldiers and civilians experienced in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. They reveal the true costs of war.

Here’s an excerpt from the Insider piece I wrote after talking to Tony about his life, very much including his war photos, reflections, and memories:

Vaccaro wanted to serve his country with a camera during World War II, so he tried to join the US Army Signal Corps. But under Uncle Sam’s rules, the 20-year-old draftee was too young for that branch.

So Vaccaro, the orphaned son of Italian immigrants, became a private first class in the 83rd Infantry Division. By June 1944, days after the first wave of 156,000 Allied troops descended on the beaches of Normandy, Vaccaro landed on Omaha Beach, where he saw row after row of dead soldiers in the sand.

Vaccaro was armed with an M1 rifle. He also brought along his personal camera: A relatively compact Argus C3 he’d purchased secondhand for $47.50 and had become fond of using as a high-school student in New York. In addition to fighting on the front lines during the Battle of Normandy and the ensuing Allied advance, Vaccaro photographed what he was seeing. At night, he’d develop rolls of film, mixing chemicals in helmets borrowed from fellow soldiers. He’d hang the wet negatives on tree branches to dry and then carry them with him.

When he had enough to fill a package, he’d generally mail them home to his sisters in the US for safekeeping and to ensure the images would survive even if he did not.

During 272 days at war, he captured thousands of photos. After the Allied victory, he felt sickened and debilitated by the devastation he saw. He wasn’t ready to return to the US. And he never wanted to photograph armed conflict again.

He bought a Jeep and traveled with his camera, eventually photographing brighter moments, like the reconstruction of Europe and the beauty in the lives of famous artists and everyday people.

After the war, as Tony’s photography career took off, he quietly struggled with nightmares and what we now refer to as PTSD. That he couldn’t look at what he’d photographed for so many decades makes sense. That he eventually revisited and shared them is extraordinary. When I asked him what he remembered most vividly from World War II, he closed his eyes and paused before answering: “I see death. Death that should not happen.”

Tony loved talking about his determination to turn 100. In December 2022, days after celebrating a century on Earth, he passed away at home, surrounded by his family.

Coming Soon: WWII “Image of the Week”

Every Thursday, I’ll post a different image—famous or forgotten—that reveals something about someone’s experience in WWII or the Holocaust: the human stakes, the small moments, the unexpected angles…

If there’s a particular photograph that changed your understanding of WWII or the Holocaust and how people experienced it, please share it—along with its credit and backstory—in the comments.

Share Stories for the Record

If you’ve seen the film Twelve O’Clock High with Gregory Peck, or the more recent Tom-Hanks-Steven-Spielberg-Apple-TV-collaboration Masters of the Air—or really any media re: the Allied air war over Europe—you’re likely at least somewhat familiar with the U.S. Eighth Air Force. The Mighty Eighth was the largest air armada of its kind, tasked primarily with sending hundreds of thousands of American airmen on sweeping daylight precision bombing raids to cripple Germany’s infrastructure and might.

My grandpa’s missions were different: Instead of bombs, he and his crew were dropping items like messenger pigeons, ammunition, folding motorcycles, medicine, and counterfeit currency—along with Allied agents they knew only as “Joes” and “Josephines”—to the European Underground. He was one of a few thousand American airmen attached to a secret, inter-Allied operation codenamed Operation Carpetbagger. Carpetbaggers flew some 3,000 aerial supply and agent drops supporting Resistance circuits throughout Europe between 1944 and 1945. They generally flew late and low, in stripped down B-24s painted black to blend into the darkness. Moments before takeoff, ground crew loaded parachute-equipped canisters of supplies and, if the mission called for it, agents—into the bomb bay. The Carpetbaggers were the de facto air arm of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence agency that evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency and parts of the U.S. Special Operations Command. They came home sworn to secrecy. It wasn’t until the 1980s, as OSS records were declassified and living Carpetbaggers started gathering for reunions, that the details of their missions really began coming to light.

In the process of researching and writing about my grandfather’s war, I introduced another author, Bruce Henderson, to the little-known history and lovingly preserved archives and artifacts of the Carpetbaggers. I sold my research and reporting to him, and today marks the release of Midnight Flyboys.

The book features my grandfather’s crew (along with the story of my Great Uncle Sidney Simon, a B-24 navigator shot down over the Pacific on a bombing mission weeks before my grandpa, and my incredibly strong Great Grandmother Annea “Anna” Simon). Spoiler alert: there’s a happy ending…

More on that—along with the extraordinary stories of the Simon crew’s bombardier Johnny Mead, navigator John Reitmeier, and gunner Graham Hasty—in the pages of Midnight Flyboys…

I never met my grandfather, great uncle, or any members of their crews, but when I first started learning about Operation Carpetbagger, someone pointed me in the direction of a Carpetbagger vet named Eugene Polinsky, saying he lived not too far from me in New York, and was “a special one.” That was an understatement.

I was lucky enough to get to know, travel with, write about, and befriend Gene in the final years of his life, and it feels fitting that Midnight Flyboys opens with him and his story.

Today, as I think of the Carpetbaggers—and all veterans, past and present, to whom we owe so much—I’m sharing this reel my friends Chris George and Marci Brennan made from my first interview with Gene. His memories—raw, funny, and poignant all at the same time—remind me why I started Stories for the Record:

After I profiled Gene for National Geographic in 2020, I asked him to sign one of the portraits that photographer Robert Clark had taken of him for the magazine, addressing it to my newborn son. On it, he wrote: “Dearest Little Jake — You already have one of life’s greatest gifts: To be beloved.”

I’m planning to share that with Jake, now 5, when he gets home today, and to talk with him about what I’ve learned—about war and about life—interviewing Gene and others who’ve served our country.

If you have any favorite stories or memories from veterans in your life—or nuggets of advice they passed along to you—please share in the comments.

Katie S. Sanders is (@katieSsanders) an award-winning writer whose work—often about World War II and the Holocaust—has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, Insider, Fast Company, Forbes, Glamour, and Marie Claire, among other publications. She’s co-author of the forthcoming historical nonfiction book Ortiz’s War.

In partnership with fellow journalist Nina Strochlic, she also operates an oral history documentation service, For the Record, helping families chronicle and preserve loved ones’ life stories for generations to come.

I’m a journalist and history nerd who has spent the last decade researching and writing about World War II, often from the perspectives of those who experienced it. Veterans of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, America’s CIA forerunner), Holocaust survivors, Tuskegee Airmen, French Resistants, Rosie the Riveters, and an infantryman who carried his personal camera with him on Omaha Beach shortly after D-Day—these are some of the folks I’ve been lucky enough to sit down with, notebook in hand.

Today—on the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps and the eve of Veterans Day—I’m launching Stories for the Record to share stories and threads I believe belong in modern textbooks and memories.

Posts will draw largely from my reporting i.e., interviews with World War II veterans, Holocaust survivors, and their families; conversations with military historians, curators, and other writers; and visits to public and private archives across the U.S., England, and France.

Subscribe to receive occasional Stories for the Record posts (it’s free and appreciated…):

Subscribe now

Why this, and why now?

My fascination with WWII began with my quest to understand how my mom ended up with a chunk of the black B-24 Liberator that her dad—a Jewish kid from Queens, NY—was piloting when he was shot down over France a month before D-Day.

I started visiting archives, airfields, reunions, crash sites, museums, and relative strangers’ doorsteps across the U.S and Europe to learn more. As I sought out details from one of the darkest, most murderous periods in human history, I was met with extraordinary kindness, warmth, and love—not only from veterans and survivors themselves, but from descendants of the very men, women, and children who helped save my grandfather and his crew when they parachuted out of their burning plane in 1944.

I’ve published bits and pieces of the saga (see: Three Generations, Two Young Women, and One Incredible Story of Survival in WWII in Marie Claire and The American Spy Who Surrendered to the Nazis to Save Civilians in Smithsonian). The latter, co-written with historian and retired USMC Col. Nick Reynolds (NYT–bestselling author of Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy) is a good preview of our forthcoming book about our shared hero, OSS Marine Col. Pierre “Peter” Ortiz. Ortiz’s War is slated for publication by HarperCollins in 2026, so expect some posts about that and related threads—e.g., OSS, SOE, and BCRA operations and innovations; WWII Marines in Europe (yes, Europe!), POW experiences; the French Resistance, Hitler’s Third Reich, and the Mighty Eighth Air Force, to name a few.

What you’ll find here:

• Write-ups on secret agents, soldiers, and everyday people whose acts of courage and resistance between 1939 and 1945 continue to connect us, across time and generations

• “On this day in history” posts featuring source material…newspaper articles, telegrams, excerpts from speeches and broadcasts, and—my personal favorite—letters

• Unique wartime art and photos

• Book, article, TV, movie, and podcast recs re: the Greatest Generation, military history, and unexpected heroes

• WWII veteran and survivor spotlights (re)introducing true stories of courage, resistance, friendship, and intergenerational connection

World War II involved more than 100 million military personnel from 30+ nations and six continents. Still regarded as the deadliest conflict in human history, the scale and impact is hard to fathom. In the U.S. alone, the Department of Defense is still actively recovering and identifying remains of some 70,000+ missing WWII service members.

Eighty years later, we are all, in one interesting way or another, shaped by it. That, combined with the reality that members of the Greatest Generation often didn’t talk about their experiences, means that for every story we do hear, there are many more.

Thanks for joining me on this journey.

— Katie

P.S. For the warbird buffs out there: Do you recognize what part of a B-24 Liberator I’m holding in this photo? Drop your best guess in the comments. Bonus points if you can explain why it’s painted matte black.

Katie S. Sanders is (@katieSsanders) an award-winning writer whose work—often about World War II and the Holocaust—has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, Insider, New York, Fast Company, Forbes, Glamour, and Marie Claire, among other publications. She’s co-author of the forthcoming historical nonfiction book Ortiz’s War (HarperCollins, 2026).

In partnership with fellow journalist Nina Strochlic, she also operates an oral history documentation service, For the Record, helping families chronicle and preserve loved ones’ life stories for generations to come.