More history for the day

Bill Pennington has an article in The New York Times about World War Two:

The soldiers arrived in the dead of night, packed shoulder to shoulder in trucks with canvas walls that obscured the route to a secret destination. They were the first recruits of World War Two for a new covert operation called the Office of Strategic Services, a long, vague name that hid what the soldiers would become: spies, saboteurs, commandos and undercover agents. The troops were unloaded at a large, bland tent city.
“It was six of us to a tent with a potbelly stove in the middle,” said OSS veteran Caesar Civitella, describing the night in 1943. “We had been sworn to complete secrecy. They told us to go to sleep, so we went to sleep.”
When the soldiers emerged from their tents in the morning, they turned to glimpse a palace beside the campsite, an immense Mediterranean-inspired clubhouse overlooking a Shangri-La: the rolling hills and golf holes of Congressional Country Club, site of this week’s 111th United States Open.
During World War Two, the club’s more than four hundred acres, about twelve miles outside Washington, had been leased to the United States government to serve as the training ground for America’s first intelligence agency, the forerunner to the CIA and American Special Forces.“We came out of the tent and thought, ‘Hey, country club living,’ ” Civitella said. “But we were wrong; it was no country club life.” In fact, another OSS veteran, Alex MacDonald, later called the training at Congressional “malice in wonderland.”

The practice range became a rifle range, and bunkers were used for grenade practice. The dense wooded areas were perfect for nighttime commando exercises and an obstacle course, set with booby traps, stretched across the first and second holes. Hand-to-hand combat was taught next to a mock fuselage from which paratroopers learned to jump. Men crawled on their bellies across fairways sprayed with live machine gun fire, and the greens made excellent targets for mortar practice. So did the caddie shack and every rain shelter on the course.
“We literally just blew the place up,” said Al Johnson, who, like most of the living OSS veterans— there are about two hundred— is in his late 80s.
When the world’s best golfers play Congressional (photo) this week in Bethesda, Maryland, little evidence of the mayhem that preceded them by more than 65 years will remain. After the war, the federal government restored the course to its original splendor. Golf shots replaced gunshots.
“But Congressional remains a pivotal place in the history of the country,” Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society, said. “It’s the birthplace of the American Special Forces. Groups like the Navy SEALs— the Congressional Country Club is where it all started.”
It was an eclectic collection of fighting men who arrived at Congressional in 1943. Most were drawn from the United States military, pulled aside because of one aptitude or another, like familiarity with a foreign language. They would be asked if they wanted to volunteer for hazardous duty, and would face physical and psychological testing to determine if they could handle life behind enemy lines. Founded by the World War One hero William Donovan, known as Wild Bill, the OSS recruited from civilian trades, and sought well-traveled intellectuals as well. An ideal OSS candidate was once described as “a Ph.D. who can win a bar fight.”
The troops at Congressional, known to them as Area F, were generally trained in groups of about two hundred men. From 1943 to 1945, more than two thousand soldiers passed through Congressional. The officers lived in the clubhouse, where the grand ballroom was turned into a classroom and the dining room was a mess hall. They did little marching or traditional, regimented military drilling.
“The idea was not to build discipline, but innovation,” said John Whiteclay Chambers II, a history professor at Rutgers University who has written extensively about the OSS training. “They wanted to create men who would be daring, aggressive, and imaginative. They had them work together to build a stone bridge over a creek on the golf course. Then they would ask them what’s the best way to demolish it with plastic explosives.”
Nighttime brought the grounds alive with missions not unlike the child’s game capture-the-flag, except the sentries were armed and the commandos carried scalpel-sharp stilettos. Pity the poor milkman assigned to make deliveries to Congressional; he was the target of more than one ambush.
Of his time at Congressional, MacDonald once said, “It was the Ten Commandments in reverse: lie and steal, kill, maim, spy.”
Andrew Mousalimas, another OSS veteran, said: “There was nothing ordinary about our training because there was nothing ordinary about what they were asking us to do in battle. We might have to operate completely by ourselves behind enemy lines. We had to be ready for anything.”
Three OSS recruits died during the exercises at Congressional, Chambers said.
Congressional had a long relationship with Washington’s elite, going back to 1923, when Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, helped lay the cornerstone of the clubhouse. Presidents, cabinet members, generals and admirals had been members. But Prohibition and the Depression had been hard on the club’s finances. The $4,000 annual rent the government paid during the war— along with the restoration efforts— may have saved Congressional.
If the OSS trainees felt the juxtaposition of training for the drudgery and strain of combat in a place of great privilege, they did not dwell on it. “Maybe ten percent of us had ever played golf, so we didn’t even know about that world,” said Johnson, who served in North Africa, France, and China. “We made a joke or two about going to tee off, but we were pretty focused on where we were headed and what we needed to learn to be ready.”
The OSS veterans have returned to Congressional for several reunions. “I have to remind them not to blow anything up,” said Pinck of the OSS Society, which includes descendants of veterans and members of the American intelligence and Special Forces community. Pinck’s father, Dan, served as an operative behind enemy lines in China.
The reunions have allowed the veterans to discuss their service, which they generally had not done since World War Two. During the war, OSS members were instructed never to discuss their missions or their training, even with relatives. When the war ended, a similar silence about their role continued, for as long as fifty years. It was said that OSS stood for “Oh So Secret”.
“Getting together was great for letting all the stories out,” Johnson said. “Sometimes it was like we were all back at Area F.” Johnson said that he had become a semiregular golfer in retirement, and that he would watch the 2011 United States Open. He said the world’s golfing elite would have a far easier time navigating the Congressional course this week than they would have in 1943. “Back then, it would have been hard just finding the greens,” Johnson said with a laugh. “And we left some divots that no golfer could have gotten out of in less than three shots.”