Sunday, September 01, 2019

Sons and Soldiers - Bruce Henderson

I am far from being a World War II historian, but I have a particular interest in the war’s European theatre and have read a few books on the fighting that took place in that part of the world. Still, for whatever reason, I had not heard of the exploits and important contributions to the war effort made in Europe by a unique group of young men known as the Ritchie Boys before picking up Bruce Henderson’s Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler.

As Hitler’s intentions toward the Jews became more and more obvious, Jewish parents began to scramble for ways to get their families out of Germany and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe before it was too late. But there were quotas and other delays to deal with in countries such as the United States and Canada. Ultimately, because obtaining visas and otherwise negotiating all of the paperwork involved in that whole exercise was such a time-consuming process, many thousands of Jews wanting to escape never made it. However, many desperate Jewish families were able to get at least their sons to the United States – and many of these brand-new U.S. citizens could not wait to return to Germany to fight the Nazis who had taken so much from them and their families.

Bruce Henderdson
Rather surprisingly (and I’m honestly surprised here because the military does not always work this way), someone in the U.S. Army had the foresight to understand just how big an asset these Ritchie Boys could be if used as interrogators of captured German prisoners. They knew the language, they intimately understood the culture that had spawned their prisoners, and they knew just how to provoke (or trick) those prisoners into revealing much more than they wanted to reveal to their interrogators. And they knew precisely how best to put the pieces of gathered intelligence together in order to do the most damage to the German army possible. 

Ritchie Boy intelligence teams were assigned to all the major combat units in Europe. They jumped out of airplanes in France with the 82ndAirborne, they fought their way from Normandy through Belgium and the Netherlands, and they were deep inside Germany when the war in Europe finally ended. It is estimated that some sixty percent of the intelligence gathered in Europe during World War II originated with the Ritchie Boys. Not only did these men face certain death if captured and identified as German Jews by the German army, they faced a similar threat from U.S. soldiers who often found it difficult to distinguish them from the German infiltrators who sometimes wore the uniforms of captured or killed American soldiers. Despite these special dangers, the Ritchie Boys contributed greatly to the Allied effort to defeat Hitler, and they saved thousands of lives in the process.

Bottom Line: Sons and Soldiers reveals a long-kept secret about a group of young men who deserve much more honor and credit for what they accomplished during World War II than they have received.  Bruce Henderson’s account of the war experiences of six of these men is well researched and reads almost like a war thriller at times. What the Ritchie Boys did was remarkable, and it is a shame that it took this long for a book like this one to be written about them.

6 comments:

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    1. It was fascinating, no doubt about it, The risk these guys took by going back into Nazi-occupied Europe is mind boggling. Most of them Americanized their names and showed Christian on their dogtags, but a little heavy duty interrogation would have shattered all of that pretty quickly.

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  2. Well, I honestly had no idea about any of this. Constantly amazed at how much I do not know about WW2 but slowly adding to my knowledge with this years reading. If I'm honest it's the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s that interests me, I don't know why. But also the resistance in France, 'escape' stories, the Holocaust, that sort of thing. Battles and strategy not so much.

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    1. Obviously, these guys were very secretive during the war so that the Nazis didn't start looking for them among POWs, but I can't understand why they didn't receive the credit they so much deserve later on after the war. I suppose they just didn't talk about it much themselves, and no one else go around to it either. It's way overdue.

      My father, who is 97, entered the war via the Normandy landing and fought his way through Belgium and Germany for the rest of the war. He never received a scratch although he lost a lot of buddies during those years. That's why the European theatre is the part of the war I know the most about- I've heard the stories directly from him. He still talks about the war every once in a while. He trained in Arundel and lived on the castle grounds there while training for the invasion. I have lots of pictures that he took during training and after he got to France, so it's still very real to me. I remember as a small child playing with all the Nazi pins and medals that he brought home and I probably lost 90% of them on the Louisiana farm we lived on at the time.

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  3. So many people it seems did not get any credit for various roles performed during the war and have had to fight hard for recognition.

    How wonderful that your father is still with us at 97, one of a dwindling number of WW2 veterans. My father and uncle both died just a few years ago. My father was an RAF cook (he'd trained as a baker in Cornwall) who followed after the Normandy landings. My uncle fought in Burma and had an amazing record of photos he took at the time. I assume my cousin will keep and treasure them but if not I should probably mention to her that the Imperial War Museum would likely be interested. Funnily enough we spent a week at Arundel last year. It's a very beautiful area. You and I are the last generation who grew up listening to stories about the war from our parents or parents of friends and so on. When I got married my parents-in-law had a whole new set of stories for me to listen to. Turned out my mother-in-law had served in the RAF doing radar in Sennen, about 10 miles from Penzance where I was born and brought up. Small world.

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    1. We are so lucky to have heard those stories firsthand, Cath. All the WWII vets will be gone in just a few more years, and others will never get that opportunity.

      I remember hearing American Civil War stories from my grandmother who heard them from her own grandfather. That kind of puts into perspective just how few generations it takes to link back to over 150 years of history. My two daughters and my brother's son have all heard my father's stories - when he feels up to talking about them. They find them hard to believe - almost ancient history to them.

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