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Ritchie Boy Secrets: How a Force of Immigrants and Refugees Helped Win World War II Hardcover – 7 November 2021

Beverley Driver Eddy . Stackpole Books . English

In June 1942, the U.S. Army began recruiting immigrants, the children of immigrants, refugees, and others with language skills and knowledge of enemy lands and cultures for a special military intelligence group being trained in the mountains of northern Maryland and sent into Europe and the Pacific. Ultimately, 15,000 men and some women received this specialized training and went on to make vital contributions to victory in World War II. This is their story, which Beverley Driver Eddy tells thoroughly and colorfully, drawing heavily on interviews with surviving Ritchie Boys. The army recruited not just those fluent in German, French, Italian, and Polish (approximately a fifth were Jewish refugees from Europe), but also Arabic, Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and other languages―as well as some 200 Native Americans and 200 WACs. They were trained in photo interpretation, terrain analysis, POW interrogation, counterintelligence, espionage, signal intelligence (including pigeons), mapmaking, intelligence gathering, and close combat. Many landed in France on D-Day. Many more fanned out across Europe and around the world completing their missions, often in cooperation with the OSS and Counterintelligence Corps, sometimes on the front lines, often behind the lines. The Ritchie Boys’ intelligence proved vital during the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge. They helped craft the print and radio propaganda that wore down German homefront morale. If caught, they could have been executed as spies. After the war they translated and interrogated at the Nuremberg trials. One participated in using war criminal Klaus Barbie as an anti-communist agent. This is a different kind of World War II story, and Eddy tells it with conviction, supported by years of research and interviews.

Categories: Action & Adventure

About the Author

Beverley Driver Eddy, now a professor emerita in German at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, grew up in Western Massachusetts, where she eagerly absorbed local history about King Philip's War, the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution. After a summer studying in Vienna, her interests turned to Germanic literatures and cultures. She studied for two years at the Freie Universität, Berlin, studied Norwegian in Oslo, pursued dissertation research in Copenhagen and Vienna, and went on to get a doctor's degree in Germanic literature at Bloomington, Indiana. She spent a good deal of her career writing scholarly articles on topics of Scandinavian and German literature while, for pleasure, delving into folklore. For nine years, she and her husband wrote a weekly newspaper column on the social history of words. In retirement, she turned back to her interest in history, and the manner in which the lives of individuals intersect with cataclysmic events. World War II became her focus, as she wrote biographies of Danish humanitarian Karin Michaëlis, Viennese Jewish novelist (and "Bambi" author) Felix Salten, and Thomas Mann's eldest children, Erika and Klaus Mann. Living, as she did, on the outskirts of Gettysburg, Eddy became interested in the soldiers, many of them German and Austrian Jewish immigrants, who were trained there at a secret army camp and sent to Europe as specialists in psychological warfare. Once that work -- "Camp Sharpe's 'Psycho Boys' " -- was completed, she turned to a more detailed examination of the parent camp in Cascade, Maryland, a military intelligence training center that produced the specialists who have become known as "Ritchie Boys." This book describes their training and their service on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific.

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