To be more specific, I’m talking about sending specially trained soldiers behind enemy lines to kill (or conceivably capture) specific individual targets. I only know of a few, and by and large they seemed pretty successful. As I ponder why it wasn’t attempted more often, I question how many more attempts there were, either failures or ones that didn’t make it into mainstream WWII histories.
As for the ones I’ve heard of, the are:
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto – killed by the planned interception and shooting down of his aircraft. IIRC Nimitz personally approved this attack.
Reinhard Heydrich – killed by Czech agents parachuted in from England for the job. I’m not sure at what level this mission was approved. I think it originated with the Czech government-in-exile, though.
Irwin Rommel – IIRC there was an attempt to capture him and his command center sometime during the desert war, and I don’t recall what went wrong. I would assume the British unit would be ordered to kill him if capture turned out to be impossible. I’m not sure at what level this mission was approved.
As far as German operations, weren’t there a few of royalty snatch-jobs in some of the Balkan and Mediterranean states?
The Germans infiltrated an SS team into Tehran that was supposed to kill Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin.
I don’t know the details, but Soviets were believed to have arranged the death of Marshal Sikorski, a leader of the Polish resistance.
An elite team of German paratroopers, led by Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland, were dropped into England to kill Churchill. No wait…that was a movie.
There was apparently a British plot to assassinate Hitler, but I don’t know anything about it. (I saw a promo about it while surfing past The History Channel.)
I have a vague memory of reading about a German attempt to snatch the royals when they invaded the Netherlands. It was unsuccessful, of course, but apparently it was part of the plan.
Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Catcher Was a Spy, about the life and career of perennial White Sox/Red Sox/Senators third catcher and wartime OSS employee Moe Berg, describes an apparent mission to Switzerland by Berg to hear Werner Heisenberg speak at a conference and assess how close the Germans were to having atomic weapons. Supposedly, if Berg judged the threat to be imminent, his orders were to kill Heisenberg. It sort of stretches credulity to think that a few weeks of cramming would be enough to allow anyone, even an undeniably brilliant man like Moe Berg, to learn enough about nuclear physics to reliably assess the state of the German atomic weapons program from lecture comments (and, according to some sources, a single conversation at a public dinner afterwards). But everything about Moe Berg stretches credulity, and the OSS was still young and feeling its way along in 1944; perhaps it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The rescue of Mussolini by the famous German commando Otto Skorzeny sort-of-kind-of fits the bill. Mussolini had been arrested by Italy’s provisional government and held while preparations were made to turn Il Duce over to the Allies. Hitler ordered Skorzeny to resuce him and, reportedly, kill him if he refused to be rescued. Skorzeny finally tracked him down to a mountain resort, landed his force on the mountainside in gliders and flew him to Vienna in an airplane also landed there.
In a separate incident, some of Skorzeny’s men dressed in American uniforms and inflilatrated the American lines. The rumor was that they were hoping to kidnap Eisenhower in France, but I don’t know whether that was true.
Miller, thanks, that Meyer bio is a goldmine, thought not necessarily related to this thread. I had no idea (and I’m still skeptical) that The Dirty Dozen was based on an actual historical mission. I may start a separate thread about this, I’ve never even heard it suggested.
I also had no idea that Roger Ebert wote the screenplay for *Beyond the Valley of the Dolls". Somehow that makes me think – Eeeeewwwwwww.