Preservation of American Hellenic History
There are numerous reasons why all the ethnic USOGs in general and the Greek/USOG and the Yugoslav/USOG in particular have been ignored repeatedly.
During the 1942 Tehran Conference, the Balkan Peninsula, including Yugoslavia and Greece, was assigned to the British Sphere of Influence.
The Greek/USOG and the Yugoslav/USOG operated under the British in Greece and on the Adriatic islands and coast of Yugoslavia. British historians rarely if ever mention that American soldiers were there.
The American military did not officially recognize Greece and Yugoslavia as an American battlefield. OSS documentaries rarely mention Greece and Yugoslavia. So, we received two battle stars for the Apennines and Rome Arno battles in Italy, which were within the American Sphere of Influence as we happened to be in the vicinity where we experienced absolutely no combat; but we received almost no recognition whatsoever for our long periods of warfare behind the lines and on the front lines in Greece and on the Adriatic, which were in the British Sphere of Influence. We participated in Commando raids on numerous Adriatic Islands; and our base on the island of Vis was in close proximity to Split and Dubrovnik where the Luftwaffe was stationed; so, we were bombed almost nightly. We received merely one battle star for all those battles and bombings while we were based at Vis, and the same for our many missions and many battles behind the lines in occupied Greece.[note 1]
We did not have a shoulder patch to wear proudly on our uniforms such as the 101st Airborne had the Screaming Eagle. This was important for sake of our identity; and the OSS admitted this omission was a mistake.
We knew ourselves as the Greek/USOG, the Yugoslav/USOG, etc., because we volunteered into the OSS as ethnic groups to liberate those lands respectively. We had various other quasi-official names at different times also, such as the "Third Contingent, Unit B" (and earlier at Camp Carson, the "Greek Battalion" and "4th Army"), etc. The one constant was the name "Greek/American Operational Group".
The official name was established in August 1944, nearly one year from the day we volunteered into the OSS. It was the innocuous name "2671 Special Reconnaissance Battalion," and the ethnic USOGs were subsumed into its Companies A, B, and C. (The Greek/USOG and Yugoslav/USOG were relegated to Company C.) This stripped away any indication of our groups' missions, and it took our identities away.
No-one told us about the official name when it was established. Our groups of the Greek/USOG were in combat behind the lines in Greece at the time. A few of our men happened to discover the official name when our groups were reunited briefly at Bari, Italy, November 1944 (as I learned many years later). The rest of us did not hear about it until decades after the war, because we were split up suddenly and reassigned without being advised by our officers about the name. Simply, we were not told.
The ethnic Operational Groups were disbanded soon after the men of the Greek/USOG were reunited at Bari, November 1944. Each of our own groups had operated independently. We were gathered together again when our warfare in Greece and the Adriatic ended; but we hardly had time to say hello to each other, let alone to share our stories, before the battalion was disbanded. We were split up suddenly and dispersed.[note 2]
(When our battalion was being disbanded, there was a call at Bari for fifteen men from the Greek/USOG to volunteer into service with the French/USOG to train and lead commandos in China. The Greek/USOG volunteers were promised a one month leave to visit parents and family in the USA before embarking for China. We believed we would be reassigned to the Far East anyway as the war against Japan continued. So, I volunteered for the CBI Theater of Operations (China, Burma, India).[note 3] Other men of the disbanded USOGs were reassigned to various combat units, mainly in Europe.[note 4])
Our military records were classified as top-secret. They did not begin to be declassified by the CIA and transferred to the National Archives until around 1987. (Other parts of the OSS records have been released by the CIA to the National Archives as late as 2000 and 2008 as far as I know.)[note 5]
This was one of the reasons why I volunteered into the OSS and joined the Greek/USOG in the first place. I was loyal to my Greek heritage in the face of the prejudice in which I had spent my youth.[note 6] The same sort of prejudice still surfaces from time to time; and I believe it is one of the reasons why the ethnic USOGs are disregarded — and in particular the Greek/USOG and the Yugoslav/USOG.
[Skip the navigation links: Jump to the Citation Guidelines.]
[Skip the citation guidelines: Jump to the Bottom of the Page.]
Congressional Gold Medal,Addendum 2 (PAHH.com, 2018) in Greek / American Operational Group Office of Strategic Services (OSS): Memoirs of World War 2 (PAHH.com, 2004), available at http://www.pahh.com/oss/addendum-2/p64.html
(This is the bottom of the page.)