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 82^ndAirborne, 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.