Assessment of men : selection of personnel for the Office of Strategic Services / the OSS assessment staff.

Date:
[1948], ©1948
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Assessment of men : selection of personnel for the Office of Strategic Services / the OSS assessment staff. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    32/576 (page 10)
    constitute the best possible definition of the task undertaken by the psy- chologists and the psychiatrists of the OSS. The Office of Strategic Services was a wartime agency set up by the President and Congress to meet special conditions of World War II. It was the first of its kind in the history of the United States. Its functions were varied. On the one hand its purpose was to set up research units in the United States and overseas as well as an elaborate network of agents to gather strategic information concerning the activities and vulnerabilities of the nation’s enemies, to analyze and evaluate this information, and to report it to those concerned. On the other hand, its object was to conduct a multi- plicity of destructive operations behind enemy lines, to aid and train resistance groups, and, by radio, pamphlets, and other means, to disintegrate the morale of enemy troops and encourage the forces of the underground. To carry out these functions it was necessary that hundreds of special skills outside the sphere of civilian experience be learned rapidly by thou- sands of Americans, many of whom did not feel like fighting. And these novel skills, taught by men who had mastered them but recently, had to be put into practice in some of the most inaccessible, least known, and outlandish parts of this broad earth. And here is where General Donovan came in. General Donovan himself was a mobile unit of the first magnitude. Space was no barrier to him—the Sahara Desert was a little stretch of sand, the Himalayas were a bank of snow, the Pacific was a mere ditch. And, what is more, Time was no problem. Circling the globe, according to good evidence, he would catch up with Time and pass it. No one was at all surprised if he left one morning and returned the previous afternoon. The General’s triumph over the two fundamental dimensions of our universe is certainly the leading reason why OSS men, seen or unseen, were operating on most of the strategic surfaces of the earth. | But more elementary than this—for one has to explain why he was in- clined to fly about the way he did—was General Donovan’s power to visualize an oak when he saw an acorn. For him the day was never suffi- cient unto itself: it was always teeming with the seeds of a boundless future. Like Nature, he was prodigal, uncontainable, forelooking, and every completed project bred a host of new ones. His imagination shot ahead, outflying days and distances, and where his imagination went, there would his body go soon afterward, and at every stop, brief as it might be, he would leave a litter of young schemes to be reared and fashioned by his lieutenants and transmuted finally into deeds of daring. This is the key to the problem. It explains why OSS undertook and carried out more differ- ent types of enterprises calling for more varied skills than any other single organization of its size in the history of our country. Now it is not for us to say to what extent these far-flung undertakings