Word: staff
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ranger battalion that had hit the Normandy beaches, including the wounded. He helped write a series of 16 monographs on landings, concentrating his efforts on the story of Omaha Beach. After the war, series on the workings of the engineers, the medics, the supply corps, and the general staff were prepared, modeled after the original case studies...
...super-university," a group of highly qualified experts on foreign affairs, experts that knew other countries inside out from personal experience and years of study. One of the first few in OSS--which was barely organized by Pearl Harbor--by the end of the war he had a staff of 1500 working under his guidance and direction...
...tried to pull all the knowledge of crucial areas together," he recalls, citing the secret intelligence reports from behind the lines as well as economic and political information that the staff of experts prepared from published material. The biggest problem OSS had to face was securing the most important information without angering army and navy intelligence men. Such information as the most important bombing targets ("We couldn't tell the Air Force what to bomb, but we could tell them what the relative importance of targets was") and what railroads needed attack was provided by the "cloak and dagger boys...
Langer relates with a good deal of pride the map room rigged up for the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff by OSS. Still operating today, "it is one of the most impressive things to come out of the war," according to Langer. Using the latest methods in cartography, these clay relief maps with exaggerated elevations and terrain markings in paint proved most helpful to the armchair generals...
...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...