On Mar. 15, 1944, less than three months before D-Day, three OSS operatives dropped into Nazi-aligned Hungary on what they knew might be a suicide mission. Chief among them was Col. Florimond Duke, a former starting lineman for The New York Giants, and at 47, one of the oldest Americans to parachute into enemy territory during World War Two.
They didn’t really hide: Their immediate goal was to be captured by the Nazis.
So opens Jason Bell’s Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War. Bell, a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, has done extensive research into this sidelight to the looming Normandy invasion, drawing on previously classified reports and little-noticed memoirs, chiefly Duke’s and, to a lesser extent, Capt. Guy Nunn’s.
Their purpose for being captured was to make contact with secretly anti-Nazi senior Hungarian officials, who were expecting their arrival and were searching for a way to break with the Axis and surrender to the Allies. In the process, the plan was for the Hungarians to turn the commandos over to the German army.
Once in German hands, the three Americans—the third, besides Duke and Nunn, was Maj. Alfred Suarez—were to endure intense, even brutal interrogations before appearing to break and provide an orchestrated mix of half-truths and deceptions to divert the Nazis’ attention from France and persuade them that the real invasion plan was an amphibious assault on the Balkans and southeast Europe.
It was hardly the only deception operation floated at Hitler’s doorstep, of course, but perhaps the least known. With Operation Sparrow, it’s finally getting its due.