Team Frederick in Brittany: the OSS London war diary, 1944

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The Office of Strategic Services kept a running war diary of its London headquarters, branch by branch. Volume 4 of the Special Operations Branch diary covers the Jedburgh teams, the three-man Allied parties parachuted into occupied Europe from June 1944 to link resistance groups with Special Force Headquarters (SFHQ) in London^1,3. What the CIA released in 2008 is a fragment of that volume. Its first sheet says the next two pages are denied; most of what follows concerns one team, Frederick¹.

Team Frederick

The diary introduces the team as the third Jedburgh team sent to France: a British major, A. W. Wise (code name KINROS); a French officer, P. Aguirec (VIRE); and an American radio operator, Master Sergeant R. R. Kehoe (PESETA)¹. "Aguirec" was a nom de guerre; Kehoe later identified him as Paul Bloch-Auroch². Frederick dropped on the night of 9/10 June with Free French paratroops of the SAS, whose base in the Forêt de Duault, code-named Samwest, it was to help establish. Each officer carried 100,000 francs and 50 dollars, the radio operator 50,000 francs^1,3.

The briefing assumed little organized resistance in the area. The team found the opposite. Its first message, on 11 June, reported "great possibilities" in the Côtes-du-Nord¹. A week later it told London the SAS base had been attacked "Monday," 12 June, and dispersed; the team was guarding three wounded SAS men and had already cut the Paris–Brest underground cable^1,4.

The radio traffic

The core of the diary is a numbered log of messages, each footnoted with its cable reference. It records requests for Stens, carbines and grenades, drop grounds code-named Yves, Pierre and Alain, BBC signal phrases, and promotions sent over the air. It also records narrow escapes: on 20 July Frederick reported being encircled by 600 Germans and breaking out with only arms and cipher¹. On 2 August, as American armor drove into Brittany, SFHQ changed the mission from sabotage to preservation of the Morlaix–Saint-Brieuc–Lamballe road. Frederick answered that 2,000 men were moving to guard it¹.

Wise's report

The last part of the Frederick entry is the team's report on its return, written in Wise's voice and dated for the period 9 June to 29 August¹. It describes a noisy reception committee, the destruction of the Samwest base, the move from farm to farm, a German attack on the Maquis near Plésidy that the report says cost the Germans 500 killed and wounded, and liaison with the American task force at the Paimpol peninsula. It estimates that the team armed about 4,200 men. It is frank about friction with the SAS and about reprisals: Wise wrote that he saw five Milice members ill-treated and executed¹.

How to read it

This is a headquarters compilation, not the team's own file: the narrative is copied from cables and debriefings, and its numbers for enemy losses come from the resistance and were not checked. Kehoe published a memoir of the mission in the CIA's journal Studies in Intelligence in 1998, written from memory and from his copy of the team report; where the two differ, he says, he followed memory². The final pages of the release are scraps from the entries for other teams in Brittany and central France, among them George, Felix and Daniel¹.