General Douglas MacArthur, commander in the Southwestern Pacific, would have nothing to do with the OSS. OSS tried but failed to gain significant access to the island-fighting war in the Pacific. 1 Within three months, he dispatched a representative to China to “improvise an underground apparatus.” 2 Donovan hoped his organization would play an important role in the war against the Japanese Empire. In the interwar years, he made several trips to Asia, and a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Donovan established an office in Honolulu for liaison with the Army and Navy in the Pacific. Donovan had a long and strong interest in the Far East, dating back to his prize-winning senior thesis at Columbia on Japan’s emergence as a world power. Most of the members of OSS Special Operations, Operational Groups, and Communications, and many in Secret Intelligence, who served in the Far East had obtained at least part of their training at Training Camps A, B, or C in Catoctin Mountain Park and Prince William Forest Park. Most importantly, the fighting in China itself tied down the bulk of the Japanese Army throughout the war.

OSS-led guerrillas, 10,000 Kachin tribesmen, helped undermine Japanese control in Burma, and the OSS established contact with other resistance movements in Thailand and Indochina. With the Burma Road severed, the Americans turned to an airlift and astonishingly supplied the Chinese by making thousands of flights “over the Hump,” across the Himalaya Mountains. In the beginning, after the Japanese had pushed through most of Southeast Asia, they were finally stopped at the border of India. But it was an important war and one in which the OSS made significant achievements. That contribution was mainly in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI), which American veterans of the CBI often call the “forgotten war” of World War II. Although the most publicized achievements of the OSS occurred in Europe and North Africa, Donovan’s organization also contributed to the war against Japan in the Far East.

Atomic covert dropout