Day 4: NARA

Gila - Gilmer

A couple days ago, I had a “nut to crack” regarding Opapa’s OSS mission to Austria/Slovenia. I had figured out that the Code Name for the mission was “Dania,” which allowed me to find several files about the mission. In one of the “Dania” files, I found the following piece of paper, which noted that the Signal plans for the mission were “GILA” and “GILMER.”

What did “Gila” and “Gilmer” mean, I wondered?

What I have discovered is that codes are the key to unlocking the OSS records. If you don’t have a code, searching through records is mind-numbingly difficult. But once you have a code, you can search for that term, and the relevant files will rise to the surface.

That’s what I did with “Gila-Gilmer.” I checked the Code Name finding aid again, and found a few files with that title. This led me to even more records about Operation Dania that had not come up when I just searched “Dania.”

It turns out that one of the “Gila-Gilmer” folders had a helpful description of what the codes “Gila” and “Gilmer” meant:

Gila and Gilmer, I confirmed, were code names for Gerbner (Gila) and Gilmer (Rosenthal) to use during radio communications.

Each agent was given specific times to send radio messages to the base. Here was the intended schedule:

Gila and Gilmer were also given pre-arranged decoding and encoding messages:

Alas, since the radios were lost in the parachute drop, Opapa and his team were never able to send messages back to the mission station as intended. And yet, according to the documents, radio operatives in Italy would still have been tuning in once a day at a pre-arranged time, just in case either “Gila” or “Gilmer” was able to connect.

It took ten days until the mission got any news of Opapa and his team. One of the “Gila-Gilmer” folders included the first message that the OSS headquarters in Caserta, Italy received after Opapa and his team went missing:

This message, dated February 17, was 10 days after the initial drop into Slovenia, meaning it took over a week for Opapa and Al Rosenthal to find a way to make contact with the OSS mission station. The message also refers to Opapa by his spy name, “Lt. G[eorge] Wood.”

In response to this news, the mission commander asked for Cox to “cable Belgrade” and urge “Partisans…to give all assistance in speedy evacuation.”

Alas, the evacuation would not be speedy! It would be another four months until they reached an Allied base — and the war would be over.

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Nuts to crack:

• Can anyone explain exactly how ciphers were used during radio communicatons during WW2? How did they utilize the lists (above) titled “encode” and “decode”? I know Opapa completed several radio courses, but I am still not exactly sure what he learned in this training.