[History Net] It takes courage to be a spy. The women who volunteered to be spies and came to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) unit attached to the 36th Infantry Division—with which I was serving in the Vosges Mountains of France in the fall of 1944—had plenty of courage.As soon as our OSS unit debarked on the Riviera on August 16, it was apparent that the Seventh Army campaign in Southern France would be unusual. The army’s lightning advance in the first two days caused plan after neatly conceived plan to be scrapped. Two days after D-Day, it was evident that the Strategic Service Section’s (SSS) plan to work only at army level was ineffective, and on August 18 (D-plus-3), small SSS detachments were dispatched to the three divisions of the Seventh Army.
The experiences of the SSS detachment working with the 36th Division comprised two very different phases—the period prior to the crossing of the Moselle River on September 21 and the period of the advance from the Moselle to the Meurthe River.