Three Americans who helped make D-Day possible remain, eight decades later, virtually unknown. Key parts of their mission stayed classified, too entangled in Cold War rivalry to be released. My new book, Operation Sparrow, draws on archival research to tell the story of the only mission of World War II designed to end in capture and interrogation by the Nazis.
By Jason Bell
ON MARCH 15, 1944, an RAF Halifax bomber lifted off a rain-soaked airstrip at Brindisi, Italy. It was carrying three American officers who had seemingly bizarre orders: to parachute into enemy territory, surrender and confess their secrets to their captors. The plan was dubbed Operation Sparrow.
The men aboard had volunteered knowing the odds. Since late 1942, Allied commandos captured behind Nazi lines had stopped turning up in POW camps. Hitler’s Commando Order directed that they be summarily shot, whether they were taken in uniform or out of it, whether they fought or surrendered. The only exception was when the commandos were believed to hold vital information. Then, after their secrets had been extracted, the captives were to be killed immediately.
The Allied commandos for this particular mission, known to planners as “sparrows,” were to jump into Nazi-allied Hungary and get themselves captured. Then, under questioning, they would hand their interrogators a carefully constructed lie about the Allies’ upcoming invasion of Europe. Slowly, under pressure, they would reveal that the largest amphibious landing in history would come through the Balkans, a thousand miles from the actual target: Normandy, France.
A high-ranking team
The team’s commander was a 48-year-old colonel named Florimond Duke, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intelligence chief for southeast Europe. He had played football for Dartmouth and the New York Giants, flown fighters in the First World War, and gotten rich selling advertising for Time, Life and Fortune magazines. A married father who lived in a Connecticut mansion, he had every excuse to sit out the war, but he wanted to fight the Nazis up close.
Beside him sat Major Alfred Suarez, a quick-tempered radioman and demolitions expert who had fought fascists in 1930s Spain. On Duke’s other side sat Captain Guy Nunn, six feet tall, 200 pounds of Hollywood good looks and pure muscle. He was a multilingual propagandist, a left-wing labor activist, and a man with an authority problem.
A colonel, a major and a captain were unusually senior ranked operatives for a three-man drop behind enemy lines. But for this operation, the Germans needed to believe they’d netted officers who were convincingly privy to Allied strategy. Only that way might the disinformation they were planting find its way to Hitler himself.
A corpse only works once
The disastrous 1942 raid on Dieppe convinced the Allies that they needed to thin the enemy’s strength along the Channel coast as much as possible. Some sort of misdirection might compel Berlin to shift units from the Atlantic Wall to southern Europe.
And deceptions had worked in the past. In April 1943, the Allies’ top-secret Operation Mincemeat floated a corpse dressed as a British officer off the Spanish coast with fake invasion papers in a briefcase. It led Hitler to redeploy troops away from Sicily to Greece and Sardinia, allowing the Western Allies to gain their first foothold in Axis territory in July 1943.
Mincemeat was a success, but it was unlikely the Germans would be duped the same way twice. A future deception attempt would need something more convincing than another waterlogged corpse. It would need living Allied officers the Germans could question.
Sparrow fit the theater perfectly. Hitler was already fixated on the Balkans for reasons of race, strategy and logistics. The sudden appearance of high-level American commandos who would confess under pressure that the Western Allies were poised to invade southeastern Europe would confirm his fears.
Since January, the Allies had already been running a deception campaign aimed at the German high command — Operation Bodyguard — that suggested Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and the Dalmatian coast were objectives. Berlin responded by keeping German troops in the Balkans, far from the Normandy coast. In spring 1944, German troop levels in the region topped 826,000 men, five times the number the Allies would put ashore on D-Day.
Sparrow was the opening move of the great illusion. Anyone could fake a document, but real officers could be interrogated.
The mission was already blown
In addition to their ruse, the three American commandos carried a second brief. It involved peeling away an Axis client state: Hungary.
After the Nazis lost at Stalingrad, Hungary’s regent and prime minister Miklós Kállay had concluded that their German ally would lose the war. Diplomats sent by Budapest quietly approached Allen Dulles‘s OSS station in Bern about switching sides before the Soviets appeared on the Hungarian border.
The OSS saw the advantage of such a reversal: an Allied-backed Hungarian defection would prove to be an unwelcome distraction for Berlin.
Duke carried a message from President Roosevelt to Hungary’s regent that was too sensitive to put on paper: Change sides, turn their guns on the Germans, and Hungary could finish the war on the winning side.
Even in 1944, Hungary still sheltered around a million Jews — the last large Jewish community in Axis Europe — because Budapest had refused Hitler’s demands to deport them. The Führer’s spies reported Hungary’s prevarication. Furious, he ordered his generals to draw up invasion plans. He intended to take the country and destroy its Jews.
Then came a leak. In December 1943, American spies learned that a Hungarian colonel involved in the backchannel talks with Allied intelligence was reportedly feeding the Germans details of the subterfuge. Remarkably, however, the lone Hungarian officer was running his own deception: The intelligence he was providing Hitler’s agents was purposefully inaccurate. Either way, Berlin was now on alert for infiltrators, and Operation Sparrow was compromised before it ever left the ground. A blown mission was normally a canceled one. But since Sparrow was built around capture, its architects decided they could live with the leak. Dulles even sped the mission up, figuring Hitler had seen only part of the Hungarian plan. General Jacob Devers gave the launch order by word of mouth. Writing it down was too dangerous.
Six hundred feet over Hungary
Around 2:30 a.m. on March 16, 600 feet above the Hungarian countryside, the navigator aboard the RAF Halifax spotted the confluence of two rivers and shouted that they were over the drop zone. The green light came on.
Duke had never made a parachute jump in his life. Weather had canceled his training in Algiers. Instead, his preparation consisted of throwing himself from a parked aircraft while a jumpmaster talked him through it.
He leapt into the void first and was nearly knocked out by the fierce slipstream. It was worse than anything the NFL had ever done to him.
His compatriots followed him out the door in rapid succession.
All three landed intact near the village of Podturen, Hungary (present-day Croatia), where they were supposed to surrender immediately. Their story was that they had intended to land in Yugoslavia but had jumped into Hungary by mistake. This was their cover for meeting with Hungarian leadership without arousing German suspicion.
But the mission’s careful design collided with the technological limits of rural Hungary. It was the dead of night in Podturen. There was no telephone in the small town. There were no cars. There was, however, a boy who had a bicycle. He would become an unwitting part of their stratagem.
Duke dashed off a note addressed to the commanding Hungarian officer in the nearby town of Nagykanizsa. The message explained that the undersigned Allied officers had landed on Hungarian soil by mistake and now wished to surrender under terms of the Geneva Convention. Duke, Suarez and Nunn signed with their name, rank and serial number. The note was pinned inside the boy’s shirt, and the villagers cheered the lad off as he disappeared down the road.
Within the hour, truckloads of Hungarian troops arrived, fearing an invasion. The Americans saluted. Hungarian officers clicked their heels and saluted back. The Sparrows handed over their pistols and were taken into custody.
The trio made it as far as the chief of Hungary’s intelligence, with whom they shared the secret message of Allied support. They would never get a chance to hold their planned meetings with the prime minister and regent; within three days of their surrender, Hitler poured a hundred thousand troops into Hungary, believing that the three Americans captured were the advance guard of an invasion force. A Hungarian intelligence officer put it to Duke with some admiration: Sixteen German divisions to stop three American officers, not a bad ratio.
Breaking news
The Hungarian half of Sparrow’s plan was badly off track, but the wider deception was still in play.
Hungarian officers held the Sparrows in Budapest for nine days, treating them as guests as much as prisoners, before handing them to German military intelligence. Duke used the time to run the team through interrogation rehearsals, with two of the officers pretending to be Gestapo. It gave Nunn a rare license to threaten a superior officer.
The script they were preparing to perform had stages. First, they would give just their name, rank and serial number, as the Geneva Convention required. Then, under pressure, they would reluctantly admit that they were on their way to help Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia but had jumped in the wrong place. That three senior officers were meeting with the partisans would strongly imply that something big was coming in the southeast. Then, as the pressure mounted, the Sparrows would appear to break and start giving up “secrets” to earn their interrogators’ trust.
Every one of those secrets they were to reveal had come right out of the pages of The New York Times and Time magazine. Nazi propaganda published only what Hitler wanted to read, so ironically German intelligence was often forced to rely on Allied newspapers for an accurate picture of world events. Under wartime conditions, however, foreign papers reached Berlin late. Headlines the Sparrows had read and memorized in Brindisi days before their jump would strike their interrogators as fresh intelligence. Later, when German agents abroad passed along similar details, it would build up the captured Americans’ credibility.
The three commandos had plenty to tell too: fuel rationing figures, a submarine loss, Roosevelt’s manpower troubles, Allied friction with Moscow over Italy, the decision to arm Tito’s communists. To German intelligence it looked like a gold mine. Gestapo interrogators noted everything, convinced they had broken their prisoners. Despite solitary confinement, the Americans’ stories lined up and checked out. Men who revealed a dozen true facts would be easier to believe when the thirteenth was pure fiction.
D-Day: June 6, 1944
Hitler took the bait, believing the disinformation that the Balkans were the Allies’ next target. The region stayed heavily garrisoned by German and Axis troops who might otherwise have been manning the Atlantic Wall.
At around 3 a.m. on June 6, 1944, after a night of talk and newsreels at his Bavarian estate, the Führer went to bed, giving orders that no one wake him. At that very moment, Allied paratroopers were already on the ground in Normandy while, miles offshore, 150,000 American, British, Canadian and Free French troops were steaming toward their landing beaches. Along the coast, just 50,000 Germans manned the defenses, unaware of the storm gathering beyond the pre-dawn gloom. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of their comrades were in the Balkans because of the lies spread by three American prisoners.
As the Sparrows awoke the morning of June 6 in a Vienna jail cell, they had no idea that the fateful day had come. Lice-bitten and starving, they waited to be executed by a Gestapo firing squad.
Instead, the Sparrows were shuttled to another Gestapo prison, then transferred to German army custody. Their lives, it seemed, would be spared.
Colditz Castle
In August 1944, the trio were sent to the infamous Colditz Castle near Leipzig, a high-security prison for captives the Germans considered most dangerous and valuable. They’d remain there for months.
By April 1945, Duke was the senior American officer at Colditz. As the Allies poured into Germany, the inmates of the prison could hear the sound of American artillery closing in by the day.
One day, 800 Waffen-SS troops moved into the village and set up powerful 88 mm guns on the hill behind the castle. If the SS turned the town of Colditz into a strongpoint, American artillery would level the stronghold with the prisoners inside — that is, if the Nazis didn’t execute them all first.
The camp kommandant received an urgent telegram: destroy and evacuate. It was an order being sent to POW camps across Germany: Shoot the weak and force the rest on a death march deeper into the heart of the shrinking Third Reich. A mile away and across the river, those orders were already being carried out by the guards in a camp of Hungarian Jews.
Duke and the senior British officer at Colditz, a colonel named Tod, refused to cooperate. The prisoners would rather fight their jailers, they declared, than turn themselves over to the SS. The kommandant backed down. Duke and Tod even coached him on what to say as he telephoned headquarters to refuse the directive. His commanders at headquarters, likely wary of war crimes prosecution, backed off the order to march the POWs and gave the kommandant permission to surrender when the American army approached.
Duke demanded more. He was an American colonel, he asserted, so there was no need to wait for the U.S. Army column to arrive. The camp personnel must surrender now. The kommandant handed over the keys to the armory. The prisoners had taken the castle without a shot.
One deadly problem still remained. The advancing American First Army had no idea that Colditz held prisoners, and its howitzers were ranged on the walls. The only way to warn them was to send a man out into the open ground between two armies. Nunn volunteered.
Before dawn on April 16, he walked out the gate of Colditz, crawled down the road under machine-gun fire, and whistled at two scouts from the U.S. Army’s 69th Infantry Division. The two soldiers had thought that only Nazis lay ahead of them. Nunn talked them down using his Los Angeles slang. “This is kosher,” he added — a word he was sure no Nazi would use.
The ordeal for the men of Operation Sparrow was over. Thirteen months after parachuting into Hungary to purposefully get captured (and possibly shot), the Sparrows had ended their war by capturing a castle.
Jason Bell is professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick and the author of Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War. It’s published by HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press.
