Greek / American Operational Group Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
Memoirs of World War 2

73 Years after the War

The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian honor that the United States Congress can bestow. It was awarded to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in a ceremony at the Capitol's Emancipation Hall, March 21, 2018.

"100 to 200 former members of the OSS are believed to be alive" from the "13,000 civilians and service members" that the OSS employed "at its height"; and among the dwindling ranks of the survivors, only "about 20 OSS veterans" gathered in Washington DC for the award ceremony.[note 1]

Only one was present from all of the US Operational Groups of the OSS: me at 93 years of age. I was accompanied to the award ceremony by three of my adult children.

These six United States Operational Groups were comprised mainly of Americans of ethnic backgrounds who volunteered for hazardous duty behind enemy lines in the countries whose languages they spoke: the Greek/USOG, Yugoslav/USOG, Norwegian/USOG, French/USOG, German/USOG, and Italian/USOG.

The Greek/USOG itself had six groups of twenty-four men and two officers each when we left the United States. The type of warfare was unique in which the Greek/USOG (Co. C., 2671 Special Reconnaissance Battalion) was engaged, according to OSS records:[note 2]

"During a period of 219 days from 23 April until 20 November 1944, troops of Co. C., 2671 Special Reconnaissance Battalion [the Greek/USOG] were continuously in occupied Greece. The type of warfare they engaged in was unique in the history of the American Army."

253 days was the total for my own Group 4 of the Greek/USOG on the front lines at the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia and then behind the lines in occupied Greece: 16 February to 19 June 1944 and then 16 July to 20 November 1944, respectively.[note 3]

It saddens me that I was the only one who was still alive and able to go to the ceremony, but it was seventy-three years after the war.

Irony Etched in the Medal

It also saddens me that none of these six United States Operational Groups were mentioned during the award ceremony at Washington DC, although the USOGs collectively saw more battles than any other units of the OSS combined.

The name of an OSS airborne unit is emblazoned on the Congressional Gold Medal because they flew the soldiers into the battle zones (and flew themselves out);[note 4] but "USOG" does not appear among the names on the medal, not even the shortest two letter abbreviation "OG" — to remember those men who were flown into battle zones and who stayed there.

The code name of an operation in which the Italian/USOG was involved, "PEE DEE", is included on the medal; but it was a single battle involving one USOG among many battles by the six ethnic USOGs. Why did the OSS Society single out its name for preferential treatment while ignoring the much longer and much wider, excellent battle records of all of the ethnic USOGs? Someone's influence, perhaps? No matter how important the single operation might have been, it was no more important and no more difficult than other operations by the ethnic USOGs, and it should not have eclipsed our excellent, fuller battle records. It looks strange on the medal.

Only one OSS veteran spoke during the award ceremony. The other speakers were politicians and government officials, along with a OSS Society executive on the podium. There was nothing about the ethnic USOGs in anyone's speech, not even for a moment. It was as if these USOGs had hardly existed while plane pilots were acknowledged, pilots who flew infantry to drop points.

A Pattern of Disregard

The ethnic USOGs have been ignored repeatedly or relegated to second-class status in the OSS Society. This sort of disregard surfaced early in the history. After a couple of our initial successful raids in the Adriatic, Major P. G. Lovell — who had limited military training and involvement[note 5] — tried to merge the Greek/USOG and the Yugoslav/USOG into a "Balkan Group". He would have become a colonel through the merger but at the expense of the two USOGs, which would have lost their identities. Captain Bob Houlihan and Captain Andy Rogers, the commanding officers of the Greek/USOG and of the Yugoslav/USOG respectively, went over Lovell's head and contacted Colonel Russell Livermore, the Commanding Officer of all of the ethnic Operational Groups who agreed that the Greek/USOG and the Yugoslav/USOG would remain distinct.

Forty-eight years later, a reference to a "Balkan Group" surfaced again. This time it happened in 1992 during the OSS 50th anniversary commemoration at McClean, Virginia, near CIA headquarters. By this time, our key officers such as Captain Houlihan and Captain Rogers had died. So had First Sargent Strimenos who was another excellent leader of the Greek/USOG. A few other veterans attended — three other Greek/USOG veterans including an officer and then two Yugoslav/USOG veterans — but they did not wish to get involved when I asked them to help me correct the nonsense about a "Balkan Group". This old guy had to struggle on his own. I was unable to discover who was responsible for the concoction "Balkan Group". So, I entered interview rooms and demanded to be heard. People looked blank at me for a moment and then continued with their own interviews as if I wasn't there. Yes, I was upset. Finally, a young military historian Troy Sacquety took notice, and he approached me. He promised to try to correct the mistake We exchanged e-mail addresses. I did not expect much help from the young man. I was pleasantly surprised later.

The next year, 1993, I am glad to say, the Special Forces and their CO General Downing referred to the USOGs as the "grandfathers" of the Special Forces — the USOGs only. This took place at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, during a USOG reunion. Fort Bragg is the headquarters of the United States Army Special Operations Command.

Troy Sacquety was there. In the meantime, he had come to Oakland, California, to interview me as a member of Group 4 of the Greek/USOG, and I drove him to San Jose to interview Angelo Lygizos as a member of Group 5. Troy received his doctorate in military history at Texas A & M. He was assigned to Fort Bragg as a military historian; and he edited Fort Bragg's quarterly magazine Veritas, in which he featured Commando units such as the Rangers, the Seals, and the Operational Groups. Whenever he would write about the Operational Groups, he would recognize the Greek/USOG and the Yugoslav/USOG distinctly.[note 6]

In 1993, Troy was proud to show me the Operational Groups monument that had been placed there on the grounds at Fort Bragg, and I was very pleased to see that the monument included each of the six ethnic USOGs clearly and distinctly, including the Greek/USOG and the Yugoslav/USOG. But this occurred outside the OSS reunion programs.

Inside the OSS reunion programs, things were different. At Fort Bragg in 2009, there was a reunion for all of the OSS veterans and spouses. My wife Mary and I attended. The ethnic USOGs were ignored during the program despite the monument there on the grounds of Fort Bragg, despite the articles in Fort Bragg's magazine Veritas, and despite the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, 1993, referring to the USOGs as the Special Forces' "grandfathers". So, after the OSS reunion ceremony, Caesar Civitelli confronted (retired) General Singlaub in the lobby. Civitelli was a veteran leader of the Italian/USOG. Singlaub was a key speaker in the program, a former officer of the OSS and a founding member of the CIA. Old Civitelli grabbed Singlaub by the throat, yelling at him for ignoring the USOGs "again!" I grabbed Civitelli from behind, worrying he might hurt Singlaub. Civitelli and I had not met before then. Caesar Civitelli died a few weeks before the Congressional Gold Medal presentation in Washington DC.

Reasons for the Disregard

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.

• #1. Tehran Conference

  During the 1942 Tehran Conference, the Balkan Peninsula, including Yugoslavia and Greece, was assigned to the British Sphere of Influence.

• #2. Operations under the British

  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 7]

• #3. No shoulder patch

  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.

• #4. Numerous names

  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.

• #5. Sudden disbanding and reassignment

  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 8]

  (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 9] Other men of the disbanded USOGs were reassigned to various combat units, mainly in Europe.[note 10])

• #6. Top secret until 1987

  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 11]

• #7. Prejudice

  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 12] 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.

Personal Consequences, too

Imagine it: You would go the Veterans Administration, and the VA would say you had not served. Why? No records. Historians and veterans would look at you as a liar if you mentioned your duty. No records. 253 days in warfare on the front lines in the Adriatic and behind the enemy lines in occupied Greece. No records available.

The records were classified as top-secret, but we did not know that. No-one told us. The records began to be declassified by the CIA and transferred to the National Archive about forty-two years after the war. I did not see any records of my own group until the 1990s. Then in 2014 — through the help of my son Soter and through the help of Dan Muryako the AmVets advocate in Oakland, and through examinations by Josh Olney and others at the Veterans Administration clinic at Oakland — the VA recognized me as 100% disabled because of injuries sustained during warfare in US military service during WW2.[note 13] That was sixty-nine years after the war.

So, I wasn't pleased when the American ethnic USOGs were ignored at the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony at Washington DC, March 2018.

There was an OSS reception on March 20th, the evening before the medal ceremony. I went uninvited to the podium during the reception to ask if there were any other veterans of the USOGs in the audience. I had to walk up and ask, because none of the very few veterans in the audience had been introduced publicly by the OSS Society except one of the Society's favorites (and none were invited to speak except the one the next day at the ceremony either). The OSS Society members on the podium were not pleased by this old guy's request to speak at the reception on the eve of the ceremony, but they gave me the microphone for a moment. I asked if there were any USOG veterans in the audience. I found that, yes, at 93 years old, I was the only veteran from all of the ethnic USOGs.

The next day at the ceremony, I did not expect to be introduced. I was handed my medal while sitting in the audience. I was very pleased with the medal … until after the ceremony when I had time to peruse it and saw that it had a lot of abbreviations and acronyms on it for various OSS units and operations but not the short abbreviation "USOG", not even just the two letters "OG".

Final Words:
My purpose for writing these memoirs

Writing these memoirs, I've struggled to make sure that the brave young men are remembered who volunteered into their respective USOGs for hazardous duty behind enemy lines.

I have never meant to glamorize war, not even to glamorize my involvement with the elite Operational Groups. I am sad whenever it appears to me that I might have. For instance on Sunday March 25, 2018, the Sunday after I returned from Washington DC, I was invited by our parish priest Father Tom Zaferes at the behest of the Parish Council of the Ascension Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Oakland, California, to come forward at the end of the church service to be honored because of the Congressional Gold Medal. There was a outburst of approval from the congregation. I wish I had the opportunity to speak. I went quietly back to my seat in the congregation. A couple of teenagers nearby whispered "thank you" to me for my WW2 service. I couldn't say anything. I might have shouted to warn them, "War is hell on earth!"

The next day, I spoke by invitation to an association of senior citizens at Rossmoor, Walnut Creek, California. They are Greek-Americans, very old now but still younger than me. There were familiar faces I have known for a long time. I spoke to them about the darkness of war. I spoke about Hitler's dastardly edict, ordering his commanding officers to execute any and all allied soldiers captured behind enemy lines.[note 14] I spoke of the sad story of the sixteen Italian-Americans, sons of Italian immigrants, who were captured when they landed in Northern Italy behind enemy lines. They were betrayed by Italian Fascists, turned over to the Nazis, and executed forty-eight hours later. We trained those boys at Bari. They were my friends.

I concluded by saying that none of our Americans were betrayed by the Greeks during our long combat behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied Greece.

This, also, has been a motivation for me to write my memoirs: to make sure that I express our gratitude to those people of Greece for their courage. Greek civilians were murdered one after the other by the Nazis in retribution because of the resistance; but not one of our American boys was betrayed by the Greeks.[note 15]

We would recall only the good times whenever the "California Five" would get together in civilian life — the five of us from California in our Greek/USOG; and especially, Perry Phillips, Alex Phillips, and I. We would remember especially the wonderful hospitality of the Greek-Americans in the Greek Orthodox communities and parishes in so many locations of the USA where we soldier-boys would stop during our assignments. I am glad to recall this, too, for posterity.

I've written and spoken only to make sure that the courage is remembered, but never to glamorize war. And with these words, I sign off.