Word: oss
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...teach and to do research work on the origins of chemical reactions. As chief of the explosives division of the National Defense Research Committee in World War II, he organized and ran a 600-man explosives laboratory in Bruceton, Pa. Once Kistiakowsky got a rush assignment from the OSS: the allies needed an explosive that could be used for sabotage work in Europe and the Far East; it had to be easy to carry, innocent in appearance. Kistiakowsky's imaginative product was an explosive that looked like flour. Dubbed "Aunt Jemima," the powder could be transported as flour...
After V-E Day, Katz returned to Washington, where he first helped work out the organizational changes required for the transition from the wartime activities of OSS to a permanent peacetime Central Intelligence Agency. Upon transfer to the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, he "was assigned to the so-called Eberstadt group . . . in the preparation of a report on the Unification of the War and Navy Departments and Postwar Organization for National Security...
Experience in OSS even brought people to Harvard. Among them is Franklin L. Ford, one of the six tenured members of the present History Deparement who served in OSS. After six months of signal corps training, Ford was assigned in autumn, 1943, to Langer's division of the Office along with H. Stuart Hughes, another of the six. He worked on political intelligence for about a year and then went to London in the winter. While on a courier mission in North Africa, his plane narrowly escaped destruction when a German aircraft crossed the Mediterranean, attacked, and wounded the gunner...
...last three OSS men in Germany when the group was disbanded, Ford had his most interesting experience after V-E Day. In line with his work on political reorganization, he sat in on interviews with captured generals. His closest contact was with General Guderian, whose mind he characterizes as "naive politically, but brilliant and retentive." The former chief of the German General Staff provided for the trial of his colleagues...
Recalling his OSS work, Ford says that "until I'd had this experience, I'd never thought of coming to Harvard." Discharged in March, 1946, he entered the GSAS in the fall. Even today he jokes about the "danger that OSS would begin to look like a Harvard colony...