OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War II

Series: OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War II

Transforming Prince William Forest Park into Military Camps

Prince William Forest Park

The hilly, forested lands in the large northern part of Prince William Forest Park near Quantico, Virginia, became the site of training camps for the OSS Special Operations and the Communications Branches in 1942. In a 5,000 acre section of the park, Donovan’s organization set up Training Area A for advanced paramilitary work in sabotage and guerrilla activity and other aspects of unconventional warfare behind enemy lines. Additional acreage in the northern part of the park was subsequently designated Training Area C and was assigned as the radio operators school. Within Areas A and C, the OSS converted the five National Park Service summer cabin camps and one of the Civilian Conservation Corps work camps into sub-camps capable of training several hundred men. The U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico was located adjacent to the park, and the Marines used the acreage in the southern part of the park, where there were no summer cabin camps, for their own type of field training. The wartime military facilities in the 14,000 acre park played an important part in OSS and Marine Corps training. They also led to important changes at the park.

Area A (Advanced Special Operations School)

Three officers from Donovan’s headquarters were the first to arrive at the park, which was then known at Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area. On the last day of March 1942, they drove down U.S. Route 1 about 35 miles south of Washington to meet Park Manager Ira Lykes and to inspect the facilities. Lieutenant Colonel Garland H. Williams, executive officer of the Special Operations Branch, the man in charge of SO training, headed the group. Accompanying him were Captain William J. Hixson, an engineer, who would become the first commanding officer at Training Area A, and Lieutenant Rex Applegate, a military police officer soon to become a noted instructor in combat pistol shooting, first at Area B in Catoctin and later at other OSS stateside training camps. Accompanied by Lykes, the three officers inspected Cabin Camps 2 (Mawavi) and 5 (Happy Land) in the western section of the park. Williams told Lykes that the organization would begin occupation the next day, April 1, 1942. As 140 Chapter 5 Prince William into Military Camps commanding officer of Detachment A, Hixson would establish his headquarters in Cabin Camp 5, which was renamed Area A-5.¹ 

Williams emphasized that as a military facility, the park would be closed to the public. The War Department planned to use the large part of the park that lay north of Joplin Road (today County Route 619). That road, which ran from the towns of Quantico and Triangle northwest toward Manassas, could remain open, but between it and Dumfries Road (today Route 234) the secret training camp would be guarded from intruders by sentries and military police patrolling the perimeter.² Lykes later recalled that everything the OSS did was covered with the “greatest secrecy.” Even Lykes had to pass through military checkpoints to enter and leave the park³ Guard houses were built at the two main gates, the one for Area A on Joplin Road and the one for Area C on Dumfries Road. In addition, as sub-camps were created in other cabin camps, they often had guard houses at their entrance.⁴ The area was patrolled by mounted soldiers and armed guards with dogs, and barbed wire fences may have been erected in some sectors of the park, perhaps toward Batestown.⁵ In converting the facilities to military use, the colonel told the park manager that the War Department would provide the needed workers—carpenters, plumbers, electricians—to recondition the camp, and that in accordance with the use permit, Lykes would be consulted about the work. 

Within two weeks after that visit, the Army Engineers had come up with a construction plan for altering Chopawamsic to the needs of Donovan’s organization. The Civilian Conservation Corps and its youthful workers would do much of the construction as a national defense project. The National Park Service concurred and recommended that a CCC unit in the park which had been scheduled for termination, be maintained and assigned the job. Its personnel had been working on projects in the park for some time and were quick familiar with the area and local resources.⁶ The Army’s new projects included construction of roads and trails, extension and correction of sanitary systems and water supply systems, grading and landscaping for unidentified military purposes, obliteration of some buildings and roads, and other incidental work necessary for the maximum utilization of the area by the military.⁷ “It is estimated,” Lykes’ supervisor wrote in late April 1942, “that it will take a full 200-man company [of the CCC] approximately 72,000 man-days to complete the work outlined,” in other words, nearly a year.⁸ The CCC, however, was terminated by Congress in 1942, and subsequently, most of the construction work done for OSS in Areas A and C of Prince William Forest Park was performed by the larger workforce of a private firm, Kent and Company of Richmond, Virginia.⁹

Simultaneously, the War Department moved quickly to acquire land within the park by the OSS training area that was still in private hands. A representative of the Corps of Engineers had arrived at Chopawamsic at the end of March with copies of the Army’s property acquisition plan. Ira Lykes spent the morning with him going over the acquisition status for the private properties. The park manager called in John T. Gum, the NPS representative and acting manager for all the CCC facilities in the Chopawamsic RDA, both those still existent and the CCC work camps that had already been abandoned.¹⁰ Gum lived in the nearby town of Dumfries with his wife and three children.¹¹ Having worked as liaison with CCC and the Resettlement Administration for several years before Lykes arrived, Gum had an intimate knowledge of the land owners and land prices in the Chopawamsic RDA, and he shared that personal information with the Army’s representative. Because the OSS project remained secret, Lykes did not at that time inform Gum about the specific nature of the planned military use of the park. But John Gum, in his dual capacity of representative of CCC and NPS, would soon learn the details. In fact, Gum would supervise most if not all of the construction work performed by the CCC work crews for the OSS. Subsequently, John T. Gum was recruited into the OSS and given the rank of Army Technical Sergeant. He remained assigned to OSS Detachment A until it was closed down and was held in stand-by status from November 1944 through July 1945. At that point, Gum was transferred to OSS Area C in the eastern part of the park.¹² In the meeting of 30 March 1942, with Lykes and Gum, the representative of the Army Engineers told them that he planned to give full attention to acquiring the privately held tracts of land located within the area.¹³ Lykes had emphasized to the importance of including Batestown in the Army’s acquisition plans. “This so-called community is a hot-bed of bootleggers, thieves and vice,” Lykes said he told the Army “and is likewise a potential health hazard to the adjoining Camps 1 & 4 and the Quantico Creek Watershed.”¹⁴

Although the Roosevelt Administration had insisted that the people in the Chopawamsic RDA needed the help of the U.S. government to escape poverty, many of the local people did not consider themselves to be poor and did not want to be forced out of their homes. These people, whites and blacks, resided in small houses scattered throughout the wooded area or in a few tiny settlements. One of them, Batestown, a scattering of houses, a country store and a church, just east of the park boundary, was a largely black community. It had been founded after the Civil War by ex-slaves and free blacks who were members of the family of Betsy Bates, the matriarch. By the 1930s, Batestown had a population of around a hundred persons.¹⁵

Under the New Deal programs, the Department of the Interior had obtained title through purchase or condemnation of most of the lands within the new park. The developing agencies had been gradually moving the residents from these lands out of the park. But U.S. entry into the war and the designation of Chopawamsic RDA as a military facility dramatically altered the situation. With the secret training camp going into operation in April 1942, the War Department moved swiftly to remove remaining residents and acquire additional in-park tracts. Residents within the park area who had not moved were now quickly evicted. Some of them moved just outside the park; others moved farther away. Many of the longtime residents did not want to sell their land, and the government’s negotiations were often acrimonious.¹⁶ The village of Hickory Ridge with its houses, church and country store, was abandoned, and during the war, its empty buildings were destroyed in OSS field exercises including demolition practice. Today the site of Hickory Ridge village is marked only by the Virginia pine trees near the park’s Parking Lot D and Pyrite Mine Road, and by the nearby small cemeteries containing the remains of generations of Hickory Ridge residents who died before the park was created.

The War Department did not purchase the Batesville land outside the park, but incursion into the eastern sector of the park was impeded by the security that the military established. Batestown continues to the present day, although in recent years, the park has acquired some of its properties. In contrast, in the southern part of the park, the village of Joplin, which consisted of a number of houses, a grocery store, school, and a church at Joplin Road around the intersection with Breckenridge Road, no longer exists.¹⁷ 

When the United States entered the war, Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area included 14,466 acres, both north and south of Joplin Road, but the government did not yet have complete ownership or possession of all that property.¹⁸ There were leases, options to purchase, and deeds not yet conveyed. Many residents were still in their homes within what would become the military training camp. When Donovan’s organization took over the park north of Joplin Road, however, the process of acquisition speeded up. During the war, indeed mostly by the end of 1942, the War Department purchased 44 additional tracts of land within the park north of Joplin Road. They comprised a total of 1,139 acres. The price paid was $54,890, an average of about $48 an acre. They were privately-owned tracts that were acquired for security and demolition purposes. Two munitions storage magazines and three demolition areas were later constructed on them. After the war, in accordance with the usage permit, these tracts, plus the CCC camp lands, were turned over to the Department of the Interior and made part of the Prince William Forest Park.¹⁹

Transformation at Area A

Even as workers began to convert the northern part of the park into a Special Operations school, the first advanced training class began in the early summer of 1942. Members of one of the initial classes at the Basic Special Operations course at Catoctin arrived for the Advanced Course at Area A in Chopawamsic RDA the second week in May. Private Edgar Prichard, a journalist from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was one of them. He had joined the Army and become bored as a company clerk before being recruited by Donovan’s organization. “We arrived there in later afternoon, but it was still broad daylight,” Prichard, now a Virginia lawyer, recalled fifty years later. “The camp we were taken to appeared to have been a scout camp. There was a cluster of cabins beside a lake and a Mess Hall. The cabins had no window sashes, just screened openings, but there were Army cots in place. We were told to pick out a place in one of the cabins. I walked into a cabin which hadn’t been inhabited for a while and a big rat ran across the floor. I was carrying a .38 [caliber pistol] in a shoulder holster. I fired at the rat. I think I wounded him. Anyway, he took off squealing. And about that time, the Captain I had just met came storming down the hill and confiscated my .38.”²⁰ 

That facility was either Area A-2 or A-5, the first two training camps established by the OSS at Area A. The captain, who confiscated the pistol from Pritchard, may have the commanding officer, Captain Hixson, or the chief instructor, George H. White. Like Garland H. Williams, White was a veteran agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics [FBN], who had been recruited by Donovan’s organization. In March, White had been sent Canada to attend the British SOE school at Camp X. After graduating from what he called the “Oshawa School of Mayhem and Murder,” White helped teach the first Basic Special Operations class at Area B-2 in Catoctin in April He was then assigned as chief instructor at A-5 at Chopawamsic RDA.²¹ White was an inspiring instructor, but his countenance belied his lethal skills. Five feet, seven inches tall and weighing 179 pounds, the roly-poly agent reminded his boss of a Buddha statue. But behind that innocent, round face with the disarming smile, the short, plump White was, as one OSS official recalled, “the most deadly and dedicated public servant, I have ever met.”²² By late summer 1942, White had transferred to OSS counter-intelligence first as an instructor and subsequently in the field overseas, achieving considerably notoriety, in one case for personally identifying and assassinating the head of Japanese espionage system in Calcutta, India. In 1943, the former narcotics agent collaborated with Stanley Lovell, OSS director of Research and Development, in an unsuccessful search for a “truth drug” that would lead enemy agents or prisoners to disclose secret information. White was, according to one account, “probably the most dynamic, flamboyant and prolific agent in the FBN’s history.”²³ 

From Prichard’s description of his cabin, the work on preparing the military camps had just begun. His hut had not yet been fitted with window sashes nor had it been winterized as it would be later, but the Army cots had been delivered. During the war, the OSS did not remove or destroy any of the buildings in the NPS summer cabin camps, but it did make significant changes to some of them, and it erected additional structures and training facilities related to its military mission. Most importantly on a permanent basis, key buildings in all the cabin camps in the park were made suitable for operation during winter. The NPS camps had been designed for occupancy only during the summer months. The OSS training camps would operate year round. The occupants found them cold and damp in the winter months. To make them habitable at that time, the OSS installed pot-bellied, cast-iron Franklin stoves, and hot water tanks first and subsequently put in insulating wall board inside and creosoting outside many of the buildings. The pitlatrines were augmented or replaced by Army latrine/washhouses often with hot water showers. The kitchens in all of the mess halls were upgraded with new wiring and the addition of an array of new electrical equipment for food preparation and storage, including standard Army gas ranges, electric potato peelers, deep fryers, and dishwashers, plus large refrigerators.²⁴

In general, in addition to winterizing and upgrading the NPS summer camps at Prince William Forest Park, the OSS made a number of changes it deemed necessary for the operation of the areas as military training camps. As on any military base, that meant the allocation of more individual accommodations for officers than enlisted men on the staff (in contrast, the trainees were all treated alike regardless of their rank, which was unknown because the students dressed alike and had fictitious names). It also meant the creation of post exchanges, or PX, that is shops on a military post selling items of food, clothing and sundries, guard houses and sentry boxes, armories for weapons and ammunition, and magazines for storing explosives. It meant the creation of firing ranges, indoor or outdoor, for various types of weapons: pistols, rifles, submachine guns, which were a favorite among OSS Special Forces and Operational Groups, as well as areas to practice throwing hand grenades. There were demolition areas for instruction in the use of various types of explosives and fuses for blowing up samples of wood, steel, or iron, to simulate bridges, buildings, or railroad tracks. Extensive areas of woods and fields were designated for day and night exercises in map reading and deployment and for practice in field craft, that is the ability to operate stealthily and effectively regardless of weather or terrain, to “see without being seen,” either for attack or for evasion or escape from the enemy.

Detachment A was ultimately divided among four sub-areas in the park. Three of them, Areas A-2, A-3, and A-5, had been NPS cabin camps previously used for summer camping by various charitable or social service youth groups. They had a common pattern. Each camp consisted of several circles of huts, each cluster grouped around a recreation all. In the center of each camp, for use by the occupants of the various clusters, was a large central dining hall as well as some smaller structures: an administrative office, arts and crafts building, and an infirmary. Unlike these three former summer camp areas, OSS Area A-4 had been a year-round work camp for the Civilian Conservation Corps. With its already winterized facilities for a headquarters, barracks, motor pool, workshops, and communications building, the former CCC work camp fit the OSS needs for an administrative headquarters, supply facilities and motor pool for the entire military training camp at Area A.²⁵ Area A-4 served primarily as the headquarters of Detachment A, but because of the CCC barracks, it also served as a training area. When the military conversion of the entire Area A was complete, each of the sub-camps had its own small headquarters. At each sub-camp, an executive officer was responsible for the administrative staff and the running of the facility; a chief instructor had authority over the instructional staff, the curriculum and the training of the students. The entire Area A was the responsibility of the central headquarters of Detachment A located at A-4. That former CCC work camp housed the commanding officer and his staff as well as the motor pool and other facilities for furnishing supplies and services to all the sub-camps. It was also the location for the chief instructor for Area A and his assistants. The total staff at all four sub-camps plus Detachment A headquarters numbered approximately 280 officers and enlisted men. At capacity, Area A could hold some 600 trainees, giving a total of nearly 900 personnel that could be handled by OSS Training Area A.²⁶

Area A-5: First Headquarters, and SO Waterborne Infiltration School

As the first commander of Area A, Captain Walter J. Hixson had indicated to Ira Lykes on 30 March 1942 that he intended to begin by occupying Cabin Camp 5 in the western end of the park, which he did within the next few days.²⁷ Hixson set up the headquarters for OSS Detachment A there until the main headquarters was moved to the old CCC camp at what became A-4 in November 1942. Before the war, the NPS summer camp, known as “Happy Land,” had been used by needy children from Washington, D.C., brought to the park and supervised by the Salvation Army. Now it was converted to much different purposes. Beginning in mid-May 1942, the first class of trainees for Advanced Special Operations, arrived to learn more about sabotage, guerrilla leadership, armed and unarmed close combat technique, including silent killing, and other aspects of unconventional warfare.²⁸ These first groups of trainees were housed at A-5 and A-2. Later, between 1943 and 1944, Area A-5 served as a “finishing school,” basically a holding area for OSS personnel finished with their training and awaiting assignment overseas. The purpose of the finishing school was largely to keep the graduates in top physical and mental condition. Consequently, much of the activity was in physical exercise, weapons use, and field exercises.²⁹

Smaller than many of the camps, Cabin Camp 5 included only two subunits, A and B, each a cluster of cabins and a few other buildings. Depending on their size, the cabins slept four or eight trainees. OSS used two buildings as classrooms, one capable of holding 70 men for lectures or training films, the other accommodating 40 students for Morse code practice, map exercises, or other interactive training. An outdoor demonstration area seated 50. Later more classroom space was added through temporary buildings. Existing structures were converted to create officers’ quarters, a cabin for staff enlisted men, an armory, and a combination recreation hall and post exchange. Beginning in the winter of 1943-1944, key buildings in A-5 were winterized.³⁰ Area A-5 had a capacity to hold 8 officers and 10 enlisted men in the station complement, and a maximum of 112 trainees in double-decked bunks, a total capacity of 130 men.³¹ Normal housing, however, was for about 60 rather than 112 trainees.³²

A number of military facilities were constructed near Area A-5. A 275-yard firing range with 20 silhouette targets of the advanced, pop-up type was constructed for practice with rifles and submachine guns, the latter a favorite with the OSS. Farther away were demolition ranges for testing explosives. For outdoor and indoor pistol practice, students from A-5 had access to the pistol house and outdoor firing ranges erected at A-2 only half a mile away. To the east of A-5, an extensive area was set aside for practical exercises in map reading and in field craft.³³

For maritime use, a small boat house and dock were constructed near Area A-5 on a lake on the South Fork of Quantico Creek. Arthur F. (“Art”) Reinhardt, whose group of radio operator trainees was kept briefly at Area A in 1944 until space became available for them at the Communications School at Area C, recalled that there was also a pylon type structure with rope ladders. “The idea was to practice jumping off—supposedly in full battle gear—and tread water in case, if you went by ship, it was torpedoed, you would be able to tread water and survive.”³⁴ For the Special Operations trainees, the lake was used for practice in clandestine seaborne landings or river crossings.³⁵ It was the initial site for instruction in OSS waterborne operations before responsibility was transferred from Special Operations to the new Maritime Unit (MU) and instruction was moved to Area D on the Potomac River. So the lake near A-5 served a variety of purposes including amphibious and aquatic training in numerous exercises from evacuating from sinking ships to clandestine waterborne landings in kayaks or rubber rafts.³⁶ It may also have served for recreation for the OSS personnel if the photos taken of Technical Sergeant Louis J. (“Luz”) Gonzalez and his fiends horsing around at the lakeside dock in July 1942 are indicative.³⁷

Area A-2: First SO Training School

One of the first two camps opened by the OSS in Area A was sub-camp A-2, located only half a mile from A-5 where Hixson had set up his headquarters. Formerly NPS Cabin Camp 2, known as Mawavi, it had been used by the Girl Scouts before the OSS took it over and employed it first for an Advanced Special Operations course. Subsequently, A-2 was used for a variety of wartime purposes: a holding area for incoming personnel awaiting security clearance, a training area for Operational Groups in 1943-1944, and a holding area for already trained OG or SO personnel awaiting further assignment. Beginning in the spring of 1944, it offered basic military training for OSS personnel being sent overseas who had for some reason not already undergone such training.³⁸ The OSS retained all the NPS buildings in Cabin Camp 2. It was one of the larger camps and included four subunits: cabin camps A, B, C, and D, each clustered around a recreational hall. The OSS put four to eight enlisted men or trainees in each cabin and 12 men in each of three recreational halls. In the center of A-2 was a dinning hall, infirmary, a central shower building and an office. In addition to upgrading these, OSS converted two other buildings into classrooms for lectures and code work. For military purposes, the OSS built a small guard house, an armory and an ammunition storage building. It also erected a “pistol house,” actually a “mystery house” or “house of horrors” like the one created at Area B-2 at Catoctin under the direction of William (“Dan”) Fairbairn.. Outside in a neighboring area of A-2, the Army Engineers constructed a pistol range, a submachine gun range, and a jogging-type obstacle course that extended 150 yards. A map-reading and field craft exercise area were nearby.³⁹

Beginning in late fall 1943, the cabins and other accommodations at A-2 were winterized because of the heavy usage by the Operational Groups. In the spring of the following year, the basic training course had filled the camp to such an overcapacity that a new sewer field had to be installed.⁴⁰ Area A-2 was able to hold 44 officers, a large number probably because for the first six months, it served as the headquarters for Detachment A. In addition to the staff officers, it had the ability to accommodate 22 enlisted men in the station complement, and in an emergency, 206 trainees or holdees, in which case many of them were bunked in the mess hall, a total capacity of 274 men.⁴¹ Under normal conditions, however, A-2 held a much smaller staff and housed 78 students or 98 holdees.⁴²

Area A-3: Parachuting and Training

In the southeastern corner of the park, Cabin Camp 3 became OSS Area A-3. The NPS camp known first as Goodwill and later as Orenda had been used before the war by several different social service organizations. When Donovan’s organization first took it over, A-3 became the OSS Parachute School. Lieutenant Colonel Garland H. Williams had planned that after basic and advanced Special Operations training, students would then learn infiltration by sea or by air. The lake and then Area D were where waterborne infiltration was taught. Most of the OSS Parachute training was provided at the U.S. Army’s new Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia, but during a brief period in 1942 the OSS had a Parachute School in at Area A-2 in Prince William Forest Park. Captain Lucius O. Rucker, Jr., a dedicated career soldier and an avid paratrooper, from Jackson, Mississippi, was in charge. He brought a group of personnel qualified in parachute rigging and jumping from Fort Benning to the OSS camp in Virginia in June 1942 to establish the OSS Parachute School. The training equipment was primitive, but it did provide for landing training.⁴³ According to friends like SO instructor Captain Jerry Sage, “Ruck’s” slow, southern drawl contrasted with the speed with which he volunteered to jump out of airplanes. He had done well over three dozen jumps by November 1942. “We always said he could jump out of a plane faster than he could talk,” Sage recalled.⁴⁴ Rucker was often assisted in instruction by Sergeant John Swetish, who once set a record for the most jumps in twenty-four hours.⁴⁵ 

Air travel was not common until after World War II, and in the early 1940s few people had even ridden in an airplane, let alone jump out of one. Parachuting, however, was the fastest and most efficient way to infiltrate behind enemy lines, and paratrooper training also gave agents a further sense of self-confidence, courage, and pride and a feeling of belonging to an important, elite group. At parachute school, whether at Area A or at Fort Benning, trainees spent the first two days at Parachute School doing ground exercises of body control—jumping from a platform and learning how to tumble, practicing in a suspended harness—and also how to control the open parachute upon landing. They also learned how to pack their parachute and containers and how to dispose of both afterward so they would not be discovered. Finally, trainees had to make a total of five jumps in order for certification and award of the winged parachute insignia.⁴⁶

At the OSS Parachute School at A-3, candidates would board a plane at the nearby U.S. Marine Base at Quantico, fly low over Prince William Forest Park and parachute into clearings, simulating the manner in which agents and equipment would be airdropped into partisan areas behind enemy lines. They would walk back to the Marine base and jump again. Among SO instructors and trainees a tradition emerged by late 1942 of earning their winged paratrooper insignia by doing the ground preparation and all five required jumps in a single day.⁴⁷ In December 1942, OSS headquarters decided to transfer Rucker and the parachute school to North Africa, and, thereafter, if OSS trainees received parachute training in the United States, most of them did it at Fort Benning, Georgia. When the OSS went overseas, Rucker established and ran the OSS parachute training school in Algiers from December 1942 through August 1944, after which he was sent to China to help prepare the first Chinese paratroopers being trained and led by the OSS, including former Area B instructor Charles M. Parkin, Jr. Rucker left behind in Algeria some inadequate financial records, which the head of OSS finances subsequently excused, noting “Lt. Col. Rucker with the other officers that worked with him are typical parachute men, quite casual about everything except jumping. This is to be expected.”⁴⁸

Beginning in October 1943, A-3 became the site for advanced training for members of Special Operations and Morale Operations (psychological warfare). An “Etype” course developed at Area E, the basic SI school north of Baltimore, the course was designed to give an overall idea of all the various tasks by OSS personnel in the field so they could better coordinate with others and even do the others’ work if required. At the end of the two-week course, three days were allotted when students could be sent out of Area A on practical problems related to their specialization, mock exercises of espionage, sabotage, or the spreading of disinformation. There are reports that at various times before the OSS formal assessment program began in 1944, A-3 had been used for weeding out the unfit or unsuitable and determining those who would be sent on for advanced training for missions behind enemy lines.⁴⁹

OSS took over the NPS Cabin Camp 3 pretty much as it was. In three subunits, A, B, and C, it had clusters of cabins around recreation halls, several of which were turned into classrooms holding 40 men. Enlisted men and trainees slept six to a cabin and 12 in each barrack. One building was retained as a combination recreational hall and post exchange; the dining hall and infirmary were maintained but improved, as were the central showers. One small building was converted to a code room, a larger structure was retained as the headquarters for A-3. Of course, like the others, this cabin camp had to be winterized with insulation and hot water as well as enhanced utilities, water and sewage system. That did not occur, however, until well into the winter of 1943-1944. Meanwhile, pot-bellied, cast-iron heating stoves were installed to provide warmth. At A-3, a 25-man latrine/washroom was the only new building constructed by the Army.⁵⁰ Outdoors, the Army Engineers created firing ranges for rifle and submachine gun practice and a Demolition Area for using explosives in sabotage training.⁵¹ Area A-3 had a capacity to hold 6 officers and 20 enlisted men in the station complement, and 162 trainees, for a maximum capacity of 188 men.⁵²

Area A-4: Permanent Headquarters and Basic SO and OG Training

Although sub-camp A-4 replaced A-5 as the headquarters for all of Detachment A in November 1942, it also sometimes served as a training camp for basic or advanced Special Operations and Operational Group training. One of the new trainees there in 1942 was Prince Serge Obolensky, a royal Russian émigré and New York socialite, who had been an officer in the Czarist Army and leader of White Russian guerrillas against the Reds after the Revolution. After Pearl Harbor, Obolensky enlisted in the American Army, was commissioned a major and was soon ordered to report to Donovan’s headquarters in Washington. Donovan assigned him to Col. M. Preston Goodfellow, head of Special Operations for training of commando units to jump behind enemy lines. This was part of Goodfellow’s plan for a Strategic Services Command, an idea put forward in the fall of 1942, which was rejected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff but which ultimately was adopted in a smaller scale in the Operational Groups. Obolensky trained first at Area B.⁵³ Then as he later recalled, “I was sent immediately to a commando school in Virginia [Area A]. None of us had names. We were all given nicknames, which were printed on badges. Nobody knew who we were. My name was Sky. This was a physical toughener as well. We got up early and went to bed late, training in special tactics, shooting at sounds at night, guerrilla tactics, memory tests of small and configurations of places in total darkness, and especially demolitions work.”⁵⁴ After graduation, Obolensky reported to Goodfellow’s office to help write a proposed training schedule for the groups of foreign nationals and first generation American citizens into military units in the proposed Strategic Services Command. A variation of these would become the OSS Operational Groups (OGs).⁵⁵ Subsequently, as will be shown in a later chapter, Oblensky would use his skills and training effectively behind enemy lines in Italy and France.

Subsequently, a course was developed called the A-4 course because it was given over such a long period at that facility. It was, in fact, SO basic training, designed for men who were going to perform the rougher kinds of missions overseas. Many SO trainees went first to Area B-2 or sometimes Area E for their basic training and then to A-4, but many reversed that process and went first to A-4. The course lasted about three weeks and comprised such subjects as field craft, map reading, demolitions, weapons, Morse code, close combat and physical training. Students were taught how to make a few basic types of demolition charges adequate for the sabotage of industrial establishments, rail lines, and bridges. They were taught how to use small arms most effectively for rapid firing in daylight or at night. Practical problems assigned to the students at the end of the course included night map and compass problems, problems in reconnaissance, and problems in the placing of demolition charges on mock targets. A-4 courses were given not just at Area A, but also at various times at Areas B, D, F, and on the West Coast on Catalina Island.⁵⁶ 

Because it had been a CCC work camp rather than an NPS summer cabin camp, A-4 in the southeastern part of the park had a rather tenuous relationship during the war with the National Park Service. It was located not far from the park headquarters, but the CCC camps did not become the property of the NPS until after the war. Consequently, OSS concluded that the National Park Service “had nothing to do with the buildings and equipment” there. Indeed, John T. Gum, who worked there as liaison between the Civilian Conservation Corps and NPS, served as the CCC liaison with OSS in the park until CCC was terminated in the winter of 1942-1943. Thereafter, Gum worked as liaison between the NPS liaison and the OSS. Later, Gum recalled that in the prewar period the National Park Service had no definite plans for using the CCC work camp site as a summer camp.⁵⁷ 

Twenty-four buildings at the work camp of the Civilian Conservation Corps were taken over by the OSS. There, as at the NPS cabin camps, the use made of the structures by the two organizations was often similar. The CCC headquarters became the OSS Area A headquarters, five CCC barracks holding 80 young men each in double-deck bunks, remained barracks for the OSS enlisted men of the cadre or for trainees. The CCC supply warehouses, gas house, storage shed, and water tower continued to function in the same manner for their new tenant. Sometimes, however, buildings were put to new use: The CCC infirmary became the OSS Guard House, a CCC structure listed only as “Building,” became the OSS Post Exchange (PX) and Recreation Hall. Two-thirds of one CCC barrack became a gymnasium complete with parallel bars, punching bags, rowing machines, and place for instruction and practice in knife fighting and unarmed, close combat. The dining hall was retained as the mess hall, but the kitchen was completely remodeled and upgraded.

Nearly a dozen new buildings were constructed for OSS and remained in Area A- 4 at least until the end of the war. They included an auto and truck washing building, carpenter shop, commissary, armory, code room, storage shed, a small guard house and a sentry box. Most expensive was a ten-room, bachelor officers’ quarters (BOQ), which cost $13,000. A-4 also had two large classrooms, each of which could accommodate 50 students, where the trainees heard lectures and watched films about field craft, weaponry, and demolitions, plus a smaller classroom where code work was taught and practiced.⁵⁸ Area A-4 had a capacity for 15 officers and 128 enlisted men as part of the cadre and instructional staff, plus the ability to hold 76 trainees if necessary, a total capacity of 219 men.⁵⁹

For use in the military training courses at A-4, the Army Engineers built three indoor firing ranges, one each for pistols, .22 caliber rifles, and submachine guns. Outdoors in a neighboring area, they installed another pistol and submachine gun range. About a mile west-northwest of A-4, an M-1 rifle range with ten standard target frames was created. Not far away, in the same general area, engineers constructed two standard cinder block magazines for storing ammunition or up to 50 tons of explosives between them.⁶⁰ For physical training, the engineers erected an obstacle course as long as a football field and which included various difficult, optional objects to be overcome. Farther from the camp, there were practice areas for field craft and stalking the enemy, and a demolition area for practicing with various types of explosives on the kinds of wood, iron and steel fixtures used in bridges, railroads, and buildings.⁶¹

The capacity of Area A overall, including all four sub-camps when they all had been winterized, equipped with extra temporary classrooms, and completely operational in early spring 1944 was 550 men—trainees or holdees. This was in addition to the 130 men assigned as the station complement for Detachment A.⁶²

Teaching Effective Use of Violence at Area A, including the “Mystery House”

Overall at Area A, a variety of firing ranges, demolition areas, pistol houses, and other facilities were installed by the military for instruction in the effective use of violence in pursuit of OSS objectives. A list of what was available in Area A and environs in the spring of 1944 began with ten target ranges for practicing with pistols, carbines, rifles, and submachine guns, including a 200-foot rifle range with ten, 6 by 6 frame sliding targets, a 400-yard mortar range, a range for the use of hand grenades, riflepropelled grenades and M-1 rocket launchers. Also listed were two booby trap areas and tactical problem houses; four objective tactical areas, a proposed infiltration course, three map and reconnaissance areas, a marine dock at Quantico for use of amphibious tactics on the Potomac River, and fifteen thousand acres of all various types of terrain for tactical problems. Plus outside the area, the commanding officer of Area A reported, there were numerous civilian facilities available for exercises involving simulated capture or demolition—from the Manassas Power Dam and Control Tower to the bridge at Woodbridge, Virginia for the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad.⁶³

Demolition areas, where explosives were used against wooden, iron, or steel objects, mock bridges, towers, buildings, or railroads, were extremely hazardous areas. There were three of them, ranging from one to four acres, and two magazines for storing explosives and other munitions had been erected on lands acquired by the War Department in1942 for that purpose.⁶⁴ Because of the danger from the use of explosives, the Army convinced Prince William County officials in April 1944 to close old Route 644 which ran through the park near the demolition areas and to abandon several sections of secondary roads in and around Chopawamsic RDA until six months after the end of the war.⁶⁵ A number of the OSS field exercises involving weapons and live ammunition and explosives took place in a large corner area of the park formed by old Route 644 and the Joplin Road.⁶⁶

Within Area A, there were several specialized houses built for OSS. They included two or three “Problem Houses” and a “Mystery House.” The Problem Houses involved field exercises. Trainees might be required to recognize and dismantle booby traps or making a nighttime rendezvous, or message drop, at a “safe” house, or they might assault it as part of an enemy outpost. What Fairbairn called the “Mystery House” at Area A, like the similar structure at Area B at Catoctin Mountain Park, was created for indoor weapons training and testing reaction time.⁶⁷ It contained sounds of gunfire and visual props such as pop-up targets, resembling armed enemies soldiers to test the trainee’s nerves and skill in instinctive pistol firing as he proceeded, gun drawn, through the rooms and corridors of what many students called the “House of Horrors.” 

At Area A, like Area B, there was a Mystery House or House of Horrors. It was constructed by the CCC work crews under the supervision of the OSS and the NPS Park Manager Ira Lykes. Years later, Lykes, after a career of preserving the forest and its wildlife while fostering healthy recreation in nature, recalled, still with some concern, the brutal elements involved. “I remember we built a little place we called Little Tokyo⁶⁸ in which we had one building, and [they] had to train the men to get through the door of that thing and walk down a labyrinth in a blue light, a very, very dim light while they were being fired at [and were firing back] in order to protect themselves. They taught them such delicate things as when they burst into a room of German staff officers which one to shoot first. The one that stood up was the one that got shot first and the one that had the wild look and stare on his face got shot last because he hadn’t collected himself yet and he didn’t know what to do. This was the fine shadings in murder. Of course, we had to do it because we had to fight fire with fire and it was a really justified program.”⁶⁹

Normal ethics were put aside and the idea of a fair fight rejected in the OSS training program that emphasized the need for an agent behind enemy lines to use any effective means available to accomplish their mission and avoid capture. As an example of such training, two former OSS Special Operations officers, writing immediately after the war, informed the public with barely concealed relish about what a typical recruit would learn at an OSS training camp. “Here he would be taught to meet the enemy on the enemy’s terms. He would park all idea of clean sportsmanship along with his name, and learn to fight barehanded, gutter-style, with all the dirty tactics of gutter fighting: a knee in the groin, a savage slash with the side of the hand across an Adam’s apple, a jab at the eyes with fingers stiffly hooked in a tiger’s claw.”⁷⁰

Destruction in the Park

During the OSS training exercises a number of buildings within the park were destroyed. Most were old structures—farmhouses, barns, outbuildings, sheds and shacks—which had been abandoned or whose owners had been evicted. They were destroyed in exercises involving booby-traps, explosives, or mortar shells. During a demolition exercise in March 1943, the OSS blew up an uninhabited, dilapidated old house in the western border of the park. But a few weeks later, they learned that the house and its two-acre site on County Route 619 were not owned by the government, but had remained the property of the Stark family, which complained about their destruction. As Captain Eliot N. Vestner, current chief instructor, reported to OSS headquarters, he and the then chief instructor, Captain Arden Dow, were operating on the basis of a map showing a training area that included the property and the unoccupied house. “We have been accustomed to maneuver all through this [park] land and have likewise demolished other houses in the immediate vicinity,” Vestner reported. It was only on investigation, presumably by conferring with Park Manager Ira Lykes, that Vestner learned three months later that the two-acre plot was only under option to buy and not yet been purchased by the War Department. The National Park Service had been anxious to acquire the property for the park, and the government had originally offered $1,000 for the property, which they, but apparently not the owner, considered a fair price.⁷¹ The entire Stark property, all ten acres, on Route 619 was eventually purchased for the park.

Building and Maintaining Roads

The National Park Service had established five cabin camps in Chopawamsic RDA, but the camps were not connected by any system of internal roads. They had been used by separate civilian, non-profit organizations, and the Park Service did not have the funds for the expensive work of constructing an interconnected road network through the forest. This meant that one had to drive around the periphery, nine miles over state roads, for example, to get from Cabin Camps Numbers 1 and 4, in the northeast section to Cabin Camp Number 3 near park headquarters in the southeastern sector of the park. In 1942, Superintendent Ira Lykes hoped that the “Army occupation” of the park would provide a “splendid opportunity” to build “at least temporary connecting roads between the organized camps, particularly camps one and four and the central road.”⁷² But Lykes saw little chance that this would happen, because during the first few months after the military had occupied the park in April 1942, he had run into major difficulties trying to get “the Army to stop unnecessary auto traffic,” the volume of which Lykes believed was counter to sound conservation and indeed ultimately harmful to the preservation of the park.⁷³ 

The effects of the heavy military vehicles on the roads within the OSS training area, plus the deterioration accelerated by the weather during the winter of 1943-44, led Corps of Engineers to agree that it was imperative that the roads in Training Area A be repaired. Furthermore, the engineers recommended that culverts be installed and other drainage be put into place before the fall of 1944 and even greater damage created in the following winter. The Army Engineers furnished the labor, but the material would have to be purchased. The commanding officers of both Areas A and C agreed that the first priority was for the roads leading to the OSS constructed magazine for storage of ammunition and explosives, as the dirt road had become almost impassible in the winter. Second priority went to repairing roads which connected existing camp areas. The third priority was for repairing roads classified as secondary roads within the training area and which were used mainly for training purposes and in connection with field exercises. The roads were in such poor condition that they were inflicting undue wear and tear upon military motor vehicles, which consequently were frequently in need of repair. OSS concluded that under the agreement between the War Department and the Department of the Interior, “we are required to maintain existing roads and, of course, maintain any roads we ourselves constructed.”⁷⁴ By 1945, Superintendent Lykes could report that the Army did maintain “certain roads in good condition.”⁷⁵

Closure of Area A

Recruiting and training of paramilitary personnel in the United States for the European Theater of Operations ended in the summer of 1944, and consequently Area A was closed down as a training area in November 1944. Most of the OSS training in 1945 for the war against Japan was done in West Coast camps. Area A was declared officially closed effective 11 January 1945 with the exception of normal maintenance and safeguarding of property, and was held in stand-by status until it was permanently closed in July 1945. When the OSS personnel vacated Area A, responsibility for the facility was transferred to the commanding officer of Area C, Major Albert Jenkins.⁷⁶ Of course, the two NPS officials at Chopawamsic RDA, Ira Lykes, the park manager, and John T. Gum, the NPS liaison person, first with CCC and then with OSS, also maintained responsibilities for the preservation of Area A as well as for all of the park. Area C remained in operation until October 1945.

OSS Maritime Training (at Areas A and D)

Special Operations had initial responsibility for training OSS agents, especially from SO and SI, in techniques of clandestine infiltration by water—from the sea or across a lake or river into enemy territory. The original training for such waterborne landings began in May 1942 using a boat house on a lake near Area A-5 and sometimes a dock at the nearby Marine Base. About the same time, Special Operations had begun that same month to create a maritime training camp on the east bank of the Potomac River, a few miles from Quantico. It was subsequently designated OSS Training Area D.⁷⁷ The precise location of Area D is still the subject of debate among some veterans, but the CIA records indicate that it was at Smith’s Point, in Charles County, Maryland.⁷⁸ That would place it just below what is today Purse State Park on Wade’s Bay, a half a dozen miles down river from Quantico, and about three miles west of the village of Grayton, Maryland. OSS. The temporarily obtained property included a long stretch of river frontage and 1,400 acres behind it.⁷⁹ After a few yards of river bank, the area was covered with light woods interspersed with open fields. The camp site was about 50 feet from the river. Three or four miles away there were some scattered dwellings, including a tavern, sometimes frequented by the OSS staff.⁸⁰ Temporary prefabricated buildings, possibly CCC-type portable structures, had been secured from the Army and used for housing the students and the equipment.⁸¹ When expansion of Area D was completed by the summer of 1943, and by that time was used mainly by Special Operations, it had a station complement of 75 officers and enlisted men and could house an additional 180 trainees, for a total capacity of 256 OSS personnel.⁸²

The initial development of the maritime infiltration school at Area D was by OSS personnel from the U.S. Navy under the supervision of a commando experienced Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander H. G. Woolley of British Combined Operations. Among the American naval officers assisting him were Lieutenant Jack Duncan, who had trained with the U.S. Marines’ Raider Battalion and with the British commandos in England, and Lieutenant John (“Jack”) Shaheen, later chief of special projects for Donovan, and who the following year would run a small boat mission, the McGregor mission, to obtain information about Nazi weapons development from Italian naval officers. Instruction in clandestine waterborne landings had begun at Area D for SO and SI agents in August 1942. In October, OSS planned to expand use of the area to include not just for small craft amphibious landings but full blown field exercises, including airborne infiltration by parachute drops and small planes from the Marines’ airstrip at Quantico.⁸³ Army Lieutenant Jerry Sage, an instructor from Area B-2 who had just returned from SOE training in Britain, arrived in the late aumn of 1942.⁸⁴He became executive officer for Major Albert B. Seitz, commanding the SO training exercises. (Within a year, Sage would be trying to escape from a German prison camp after having been captured in North Africa, and Seitz would be parachuting into Yugoslavia as a member of the first U.S. military mission to the Chetnik partisans fighting under General Draza Mihailovich.) 

In the autumn of 1942 at Area D, however, Sage’s assignment was to build an earthen landing strip at the camp in woods to experiment with short takeoffs and landings by light planes. Obtaining a bulldozer from the Corps of Engineers, Sage used it to tear up trees and stumps and to scrape an even landing surface. The first test landing went off perfectly, but when the pilot tried to take off, the unencumbered strip was not quite long enough. Suddenly confronted with the camp flagpole, the pilot banked sharply, lost control of the plane and crashed, fortunately without sustaining serious injury.⁸⁵ Another near fatal mishap occurred during a major field exercise in November, Sage was leading the simulated attacking force coming down a road in Army trucks. Lieutenant Frank Gleason, Corps of Engineers, a fellow instructor from B-2, was leading the simulated guerrilla force setting up an ambush including explosives. Someone else had set a booby trap with a wire, pull switch, and two blocks of TNT, about half a pound of explosive. When Gleason pulled the pin, the trip wire had been wound too tight and instead of triggering the time fuse, it set off the explosive, which was only four or five feet away from him. “I almost bought the farm that day,” he recalled. “Fortunately I had a helmet and heavy back pack on. The blast knocked me off my feet and onto the ground. When I came to, I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t hear for a week.”⁸⁶

In one of the waterborne exercises in the Potomac River off Area D in 1942, one of the trainees accidentally drowned. earlier that year. Seaman John Pitts Spence, an instructor who became the Navy’s first frogman, remembered that during the autumn while the weather was still mild, the men trained in underwater demolition and the use of small rubber boats which were launched from a converted yacht, the Marsyl. It was during one of those exercises that one of the trainees in underwater demolition apparently became disoriented in the murky waters or was trapped in debris, was carried downstream by the current and drowned.⁸⁷ 

Underwater swimmers from Italy had been sinking British ships, and Donovan’s organization decided to initiate a group of underwater warfare swimmers (later called combat swimmers or “frogmen). Spence, was one of the first chosen. Beginning in November 1942, he tested a new self-contained underwater breathing device that recirculated the oxygen and left no telltale bubbles on the surface.⁸⁸ This was the Amphibian Breathing Apparatus or Lambertsen Respiratory Unit, named after Christian J. Lambertsen, a physician, who invented it in 1940. The underwater combat swimming groups began training in May 1943 at Annapolis. Meanwhile, in January 1943, OSS designated maritime activities the Marine Section of Special Operations Branch, and in March 1943, that section assumed complete control of Area D. The emphasis was still on waterborne infiltration rather than underwater sabotage, but the combat swimming groups did proceed from Annapolis to Area D for training in small boats and the use of limpet explosive devices for use against ship’s hulls. The Marine Unit (MU) of OSS was established as a separate branch on 9 June 1943, and it did emphasize the use of “frogmen” for underwater demolition work. Polluted water in the Potomac and ice in winter prevented effective underwater combat swimming training, and as a result, training for the “frogmen” was shifted to Silver Springs, Florida, and in 1944 to Nassau in the British Bahamas as well as Catalina Island and the Camp Pendleton Marine Base near San Diego, California. Dr. Lambertsen transferred from the Army Medical Corps to the OSS Maritime Unit in 1943 and remained with it until the end of the war.⁸⁹

When the Maritime Branch was created in June 1943 and vacated its training camp on the Potomac for bases in the Caribbean and on the Pacific Coast, Area D, still under control of Special Operations Branch became available as an adjunct to SO’s Area A. In October 1943, for example, the overflow of students at A-4 basic SO training was briefly sent to Area D for Special Operations training there. Area D also served as a holding area for already trained SO and OG personnel awaiting assignment overseas. The SO role continued until April 1944, when Area D was closed, its staff moved to Area A-5 at Prince William Forest Park, and the property in Charles County, Maryland, returned to its owner.⁹⁰

Area C: the Communications School

In the hilly, wooded northeastern corner of Prince William Forest Park, Donovan’s organization established Area C as a site for training in clandestine radio operations and equipment, probably in June 1942.⁹¹ At that time, communications was part of the Special Operations Branch, and the initial purpose of Area C, then called the SO-SI Communications School primarily to train agent-operators for the Special Operations and Secret Intelligence Branches. They were taught a smattering of International Morse code, secret cipher and radio techniques and equipment operation and repair.⁹²It was initially a very small facility, part of one of the two National Park Service summer cabin camps there.

To create a secure, rapid, global communications system connecting agents in the field with regional bases and ultimately with the OSS message center in Washington, Donovan established a new and separate Communications Branch (CB) of OSS on 22 September 1942. It replaced the separate communications systems that SO and SI had been creating, at least at the higher, central level.⁹³ The Communications Branch was headed by Lawrence (“Larry”) Wise Lowman, longtime vice President in charge of operations at the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York, who had been recruited despite the opposition of CBS chief William S. Paley. Lowman soon became one of the few full colonels in the OSS.⁹⁴ 

The Communications Branch combined all previous OSS signal and traffic facilities, was charged with developing a global communications network, and most relevant to this study, in October 1942, it was given responsibility for all communications training in OSS. The CB or “Commo” Branch, as it was informally called, had responsibility for recruiting and training staff and field personnel, both civilian and military, and providing instructors for communications courses in all the OSS training camps, not just its own communications school at Area C but at the other camps as well.⁹⁵ Despite an attempt in November 1942 by the newly centralized Training Directorate of Kenneth Baker, Lawrence Lowman, and British SOE advisor Bill Brooker to move the communications school from Area C to a country house near Area F, the former Congressional Country Club, the main CB training center remained at Area C for the duration of the war.⁹⁶ Although all training at Area C, including the selection of the trainees and the instructors and the course of instruction, was the responsibility of the Communications Branch, the camp itself and the cadre who ran it remained for administrative purposes in the Special Operations Branch. Schools and Training Branch never obtained much authority in regard to Area C, which remained primarily the responsibility of the Communications Branch. More than 1,500 communications personnel were trained at Area C between 1942 and 1945 in highly technical courses that ran from nine to thirteen weeks and included telegraphy, short-wave radio, codes and ciphers, OSS equipment operation and maintenance, weaponry, and demolition work, as well as physical and mental conditioning, field craft, and close combat skills.⁹⁷

Around November 1942, when Lowman was considering moving the Communications School closer to Washington, he sent one of his staff to spend a week at Area C and report on conditions there. R. Dean Cortright, a civilian engineer for the Navy and like many of the “Commo” people an amateur, short-wave radio operator, a “HAM,” as they were called, had joined OSS in October 1942, becoming perhaps the third person to be assigned to the new Communications Branch.⁹⁸ Years later, he recalled his visit to the Communications School at Area C. “Upon arrival, I found that there was a building housing the code room. There were a few `agent operators’ in training; from Thailand, I recall.[⁹⁹] There was a housekeeping group [cadre] in place, with supply arrangements capable of handling a few operators. There was no commo [communications] equipment for practicing, other than a couple of British agent units. I can’t remember the officer in charge at the time, but later on it was Maj. Albert Jenkins.”¹⁰⁰ 

After the decision was made in November 1942 to retain Area C as the main school for the new Communications Branch, Cortright was sent back there with orders to redesign the technical program and establish the kind of training necessary to produce the large numbers of communications personnel that would be needed for OSS’s global operations. Winter was imminent, and the first priority was to get the NPS summer camp cabins and dining halls winterized. They were soon provided with insulation and castiron stoves that could burn local coal or wood. As in Area A, the mess hall was equipped with improved kitchen facilities. Major Jenkins arrived in December and quickly set up areas for physical training, an obstacle course, and pistol, rifle, hand grenade ranges. Jenkins and Cortright obtained vehicles, set up a motor pool, and also made arrangements to purchase food supplies from the nearby Marin