World War II: OSS Tragedy in Slovakia - Softcover

9780971748200: World War II: OSS Tragedy in Slovakia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0971748209 ISBN 13: 9780971748200

This is a dramatic account of the DAWES mission which the Office of Strategic Services ran in Slovakia in the fall of 1944. As the Slovak National Uprising raged, the Americans were caught in the middle. Forced to flee the rebel capital, the Americans evaded German patrols in the Prasiva Range in severe winter conditions. The day after Christmas, a German patrol surprised the main American Party and captured most of the personnel. Heinrich Himmler in Berlin ordered the prisoners sent to Mauthausen concentration camp where they were brutalized and then shot. Maria Gulovich, a Slovak school teacher who had joined the mission, luckily survived. General Bill Donovan brought her to the U.S. after the war and she became the first woman ever decorated at West Point.

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�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jim Downs is a former military intelligence officer and a retired United States History teacher. He also has worked as a newspaper columnist.

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Large Photo. Bari, Italy, September, 1944. Officers at the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) headquarters took a night off to celebrate in a local restaurant. The Allies were winning the war, and there were smiles all around. Nevertheless, OSS commanders continued to send missions behind enemy lines in order to hurry the defeat of the Third Reich. When the Slovaks rose against their pro-Grman government, for example, the OSS organized the DAWES team to come to their aid. The mission also set out to retrieve downed American airmen in the small country. But once in Slovakia, things would go horribly wrong. German SS divisions quickly overran the rebel-held territory, crushed the uprising, and sent the DAWES team fleeing into the mountains. In severe winter conditions, most of the men, weak from hunger and suffering frostbite, were captured, and sent to the infamnous Mauthausen concentration camp. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler personally ordered their execution. ! Five months after Captain Edward Baranski took this photo, he was shot after enduring hours of torture.

Aus dem Klappentext

Large Photo. B-17's sit on a grass landing field behind German lines with their engines running as Partisans and OSS agents unload arms and supplies for the secret DAWES mission. Advancing Wehrmacht forces were only a few miles away as 28 American airmen, who had been shot down in previous bombing raids, and other Allied personnel boarded the Flying Fortresses for the four hour rescue flight back to Italy.

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