According to Langer, "the Harvard contingent in OSS was a very powerful one;" included in that group were mostly History Department people, but here and there a professor of something else was accepted. Such a man is Milton Katz, Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law. After a period as Solicitor for the War Production Board and U.S. Executive Officer of the Combined Production and Resources Board (U.S. Britain-Canada)-- work which involved planning industrial mobilization for war--Katz in 1943 joined the Navy and was assigned to OSS duty in the Mediterranean and Western European Theatres.

His primary responsibilities, he says, "related to the placing of agents behind the enemy lines, first in northern Italy and Austria and (later) in Western Germany." Although he himself did not enter enemy territory, it was his job to select men for the job and to brief them, "to prepare them for what they should learn and how they should protect themselves," he recalls. He would then arrange for communications.

"It was easy getting men into occupied territory," Katz says, "but Germany was difficult. There weren't many Germans who wanted help, but our principal assistance came from the German practice of putting captured men to work as slave labor in Nazi factories. The roads were full of such people after the Ruhr bombardment, and we were able to get people in under cover as wandering unemployeds."

Troop Data Sought

The information sought was mostly military--troop movements and supply locations. "Toward the very end of the war," he recalls, "the rumor has been received that Hitler was planning a last redoubt in the Austrian Mountains, but it was pretty much dismissed."

After V-E Day, Katz returned to Washington, where he first helped work out the organizational changes required for the transition from the wartime activities of OSS to a permanent peacetime Central Intelligence Agency. Upon transfer to the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, he "was assigned to the so-called Eberstadt group . . . in the preparation of a report on the Unification of the War and Navy Departments and Postwar Organization for National Security."

Experience in OSS even brought people to Harvard. Among them is Franklin L. Ford, one of the six tenured members of the present History Deparement who served in OSS. After six months of signal corps training, Ford was assigned in autumn, 1943, to Langer's division of the Office along with H. Stuart Hughes, another of the six. He worked on political intelligence for about a year and then went to London in the winter. While on a courier mission in North Africa, his plane narrowly escaped destruction when a German aircraft crossed the Mediterranean, attacked, and wounded the gunner.

Ford Stayed Behind

One of the last three OSS men in Germany when the group was disbanded, Ford had his most interesting experience after V-E Day. In line with his work on political reorganization, he sat in on interviews with captured generals. His closest contact was with General Guderian, whose mind he characterizes as "naive politically, but brilliant and retentive." The former chief of the German General Staff provided for the trial of his colleagues.

Ford remembers Guderian as a loyal man, one who had no part in the famous July 20 plot to kill Der Fuehrer, and in talking to him, he was able to obtain much of the information needed to recreate that plot. Asking questions as historians, Ford and his colleagues learned for instance that the Germans had been told Coventry was bombed in retaliation for Dresden. The impression gathered from talks with the highly competent generals, Ford recalls, was that "if Hitler had let the generals run the war, such disaster would not have occurred."

A Ride in the Country

One afternoon in July, 1945, Guderian requested permission to be taken for a drive through the German countryside. Agreeing, Ford--and a couple of soldiers--piled into a jeep and took him for a ride. All along the way, Germans stopped and came to attention when they saw the great man. "Had the war still been on," Ford muses, "we would have been court-martialed for this, but after the war we got information any way we could."

Recalling his OSS work, Ford says that "until I'd had this experience, I'd never thought of coming to Harvard." Discharged in March, 1946, he entered the GSAS in the fall. Even today he jokes about the "danger that OSS would begin to look like a Harvard colony."

Over in Asia, another History Department "cloak and dagger boy" was at work. John K. Fairbank, now Associate Director of the Center for East Asian Studies, battled the Hump, inflation, poverty, and disease as he attempted--rather unsuccessfully, he thinks--to gather information on the Japanese and to distribute microfilmed American publications to Chinese universities.

Over the Hump

Flying in C-47's over the Hump from Calcutta to Kunming could be frightening. Sometimes they would run into storms and go down, he recalls, and "You'd always wonder whether you were going to make it. One night fourteen planes went down."

Chunking was his home for a good part of the war--Chunking, cut off from the world except by air, with its population combatting the difficulties of the Chinese war resistance and sweating out bomb raids in the crowded caves through 1942. Fairbank himself was beset with jaundice and dysentery, but says he was not in much danger of losing his life. "We ate better than the poor people," he reports, although stringy water buffalo meat and goat's milk doesn't sound too appetizing today. The group he was with lived