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Agents of history

Rumburg, who spent the early part of the war training new agents at the Catoctin camp, was eager for a mission overseas, said Harris. He was made an officer and given a command leading men into France from England. Sadly, he never made it to France. On Christmas Eve 1944, Rumburg was crossing the English Channel with more than 2,000 servicemen on a converted Belgian passenger liner, the S.S. Leopoldville, when the ship was hit by a German U-boat torpedo five miles off the coast of France. Rumburg hurried below decks to help save the hundreds of American soldiers waiting there. Witnesses say he threw off his coat and dove into the icy water that was filling the boat to rescue a soldier who was calling for help. Harris said that was the last he heard of Chris. “I talked to three people about it. They said he was on the third deck, and his crew was down on the lower deck. He went down below to get the crew out because they got torpedoed, and he was never seen again.” Although nearly 800 U.S. soldiers were killed in the incident, the full story of the Leopoldville wasn’t made public until 1996. It was suppressed, according to several historians, because the Allied governments were embarrassed that so little had been done to save the soldiers on the sinking ship.

Arden Dow became a senior OSS officer in China. For a time he was a deputy in charge of OSS/SACO affairs. SACO (the Sino-American Cooperative Organization) was an effort to join U.S. and Chinese soldiers in a force to fight the Japanese. American soldiers integrated themselves into Chinese culture, learned the language, and moved into Chinese communities.

Dow appears in the history books as a witness to a diplomatic faux pas that could have destroyed the relationship between the OSS and Chinese nationalist forces. According to OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War, by Maochun Yu, an American brigadier general went to Chungking in 1944 to meet with the two SACO leaders, U.S. Navy commander Milton Miles and Chinese general Tai Li. The meeting went smoothly, but afterward, at a welcoming party that Li gave in the general’s honor, the relationship fell apart. Dow gave his account in an urgent top-secret report to Washington, explaining that the general drank during the meal, said disparaging things about Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, and denigrated the Chinese people and their culture during a vulgar and racist two-hour tirade.

Dow later apologized to Li for the incident, at which point the Chinese leader vented his anger. The whole SACO effort was in danger, Dow told his superiors in Washington. Fortunately Miles and Dow’s superiors were able to repair relations.

Later in the war, Dow traveled deep into China to gather information about potential enemy forces and to train guerilla fighters.

Harris was assigned to the parachute school in Kungming, so he was close by when a team brought Dow out of his station deep in country. It took him days to unwind and return to normal, said Harris. But the presence of Dow’s old friend helped him adjust. When Dow went home to the states, he became a teacher, Harris recalls.

Joe Collart joined the IX Engineer Command, which built airfields in England during the war, according to public records. Later he became a colonel in the U.S. Army and took part in Army construction projects in Vietnam. After a long military career, he retired and returned to Washington. He passed away in 1999.

After his capture at Kasserine Pass, Sage was sent to Germany, where he sat out the war in Stalag Luft III, the POW camp made famous by the movie The Great Escape. The character of the American soldier played by Steve McQueen was based, in part, on Sage, who spent many hours in the cooler and was constantly trying to break out. In one attempt, he squeezed out of a moving ambulance. Preparing for another, he was playing catch with a fellow prisoner and tossed the ball close to the fence to find a spot where he wouldn’t be seen from the guard towers.

Besides persisting in his attempts to escape, he taught fellow prisoners some of his OSS skills, including the art of silent killing. He writes in his autobiography, Sage, about the tunneling efforts for which the camp is famous. He explains that crowds of prisoners, presumably gathered to take self-defense classes, would provide cover for men transferring excavated dirt from the tunnels. They would then dump the dirt on the ground through their pantlegs. The other prisoners would shuffle about and disperse the dirt into the surrounding sand.

Sage finally managed to escape in 1944, toward the end of the war. During a prisoner march between camps, he buried himself in a pile of rutabagas at a farm where they were spending the night, and was overlooked the next morning by the German guards. “This final escape was the easiest of any I had attempted,” he wrote. Sage took several months to make his way out of Europe and travel back to North Africa before heading home. One of the first things he did when he got to Washington, D.C. was call Ernie Krom, a buddy from WSC who was enlisted in the Navy, and invite him to dinner. Sage went on to a career in the Army, and in 1985 published his account of his time in the OSS. He died in 1993.

And what of Pinky Harris?

After missing his meeting with Sage in 1943, he went back to Algiers to train agents to parachute behind enemy lines. He was stationed close to Eisenhower’s headquarters—close enough to trade daily greetings with the future president. He was also close enough to pick up bits of information to pass on to parachutists infiltrating enemy lines. When Eisenhower turned his focus on Sicily, Harris and his crew parachuted in first to spy on the Germans and Italians.

As U.S. forces pushed farther into Europe, Harris and his team went too. He eventually ended up in Italy, then India, Burma, and finally China. He remained attached to the parachute school throughout, and made a number of jumps out of B17s and B24s.

After the war, he left the service and moved back to Washington with his wife and college sweetheart, Betty. They settled in Seattle. This year, Harris turned 90, and he and Betty celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary.

At its peak, the OSS was a $43-million-a-year operation and stationed 7,500 men and women overseas. But politics and power struggles in Washington, D.C. brought it to an end. In 1945, Donovan was released from his duties, and the OSS was broken apart. The secret intelligence and special operations pieces were given to the War Department. And the foundation, networks, allies, and operations the OSS had established became the beginnings of the Central Intelligence Agency. Some agents stayed on to work for the CIA, while many others, like Harris, went back to civilian life.

Harris is still amazed that he and almost all his Washington State classmates survived the war and came home to lead normal lives, have jobs, and raise families. “A lot of times I got in a place and said, ‘What am I doing here?’” he said. “We were so damn lucky, it wasn’t even funny.”

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