I think the term for the concept I am asking about is “Fifth Columnists,” though I realize this term has several meanings. These people are said to be spies sent to mingle among the troops in a combat situation and lower their morale. I have especially heard about them in World War II from American veterans. Several veterans have sworn that such people really existing, though I remember a history professor saying they did not.
These people were said to have been German or Japanese (in WWII), though they were so trained in American culture that they could talk about growing up the in the suburbs, catching lighting bugs with the neighborhood kids, baseball and apple pie, etc. Plus, they looked “just like you.” So, there is no way you would recognize them.
It seems like a rumor to me, though I’ve not been so tasteless as to say this to any of the veterans who mentioned these people. I’m not asking about higher level spies, which certainly existed, but about people sent to gain secrets and lower morale among the ranks. It seems like a scary story that would have caught on, because if you couldn’t trust a friendly guy from your town, who could you trust.
German & Japanese Intel was hardly brillant in WW2. :rolleyes:
British Counter-Intelligence caught every single agent sent in by Germany during the War. Verified fact, from captured German records & released British War Documents.
The Germans also sent a small group of Fifth Columnists to the US. Evidently, when they got here, it was pretty much “party time” for them until they got caught (a month later at the most). And when I say “party time,” I mean, partay time. The guys didn’t bother trying to complete their assigned missions, they just hit the bars and fancy restaurants waving their money around.
Could Otto Skozeny’s troops in Operation Greif during the Battle of the Bulge be termed fifth columnists? I always thought fifth columnists were people already part of your society who sympathised and aided the enemy, like the Kurds in Iraq during the Gulf War or South Vietnamese Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, rather than people from outside, sent in to spread discord and gather intel.
Interesting you should ask. I was a “snitch” in WWII. When I had been at Sheppard Field, TX for basic training for a couple of weeks I got orders to appear at base HQ. When I got there I was taken in to see a MAJOR in Intelligence.
Now, I was a 20 year old, naive kid from a small town in Iowa and the highest rank I had seen was 2[sup]nd[/sup] Lt. To me a Tech Sgt. (two rockers) was up in the Himalayan ranks somewhere so I assumed that anything that came directly to me from a by-God MAJOR was an ORDER.
Well, the MAJOR went through a long song and dance about how important morale was and how it could be damaged by agents planted in the ranks to lower it. He went into considerable detail about how intelligence works by gathering bits and pieces of information and then assembling it; how incessent back stabbing of the chain of command can result in loss of confidence in leardership, etc. I have realized since that he was giving me a sales pitch in order to get me to agree and be “on the team.” However I took it as instructions.
Anyway, I was to keep an ear to the ground for gripers and report them. No one who just occasionally let go with the usual enlisted gripes about the “fuckin’ Army” was a problem, but if an individual was always griping and faultfinding with commanders and the army in general he wanted to know about it.
I was to write a weekly letter to a fictitious friend in Henrietta, OK as the means of converying the information to him. So I wrote the letters for the duration of my stay at Sheppard.
Well, I left Sheppard for college training in Beloit, WI, and first thing the Commandant of Cadets (big title for a Shavetail) called me in as told me to continue the job of snitch. This time my “friend” was in Rockford, IL. I did this for about 3 weeks but by then I was beginning to get the hang of how this was working and I just stopped writing. The LT. bitched at me to get on the ball but I didn’t and pretty soon shipped out to Santa Ana, CA for pre flight and that’s the last I ever heard of it.
I don’t have any idea whether or not there were such agents in the armed forces but the Army Intelligence sure thought there were.
Secondly let me ask - did that imply they were after American guys who had been ‘turned,’ or recruited by the Germans to join the Armed Forces or already in the Armed Forces, or that they were after enemy agents ‘planted,’ already trained and recruited in Germany and sent to the US, possibly before the war, to join the Armed Forces?
Thirdly - any idea why you in particular were selected?
Right. That is the standard: it’s more than infiltrees, it’s actual local collaborators. But it goes a bit beyond that (). There were suspicions of Fifht-columnicm, founded and unfounded, aplenty, for example about the Bund, or how they rounded up the Japanese-Americans. But to work as a proper Fifth Column you need more than sympathizers, you need to be organized to take concrete actions, by leadership that is formally answerable to the other side, rather than being just a buncha malcontents. So that organizational/leadership role could indeed be filled by infiltrated “sleeper agents” – and after all, at the time there were still huge populations of old-country-born Central or Southern European immigrant-Americans among whom a German or Italian agent could melt into. But as mentioned, it did not get too damn far in the US/UK.
()From the Spanish Civil War, when a fascist commander commenting on the siege of a republican-held city, is reputed to have answered “four columns are encircling the city, but we have a fifth already on the inside”
Nobody said. In intelligence work, or “The Company” as we of the inside cognoscente like to say, things are played close to the vest. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. That way, if the bad guys had ever gotten their hands on me, I couldn’t have given away the store.
Yeah, because I’m sure if you’d have had the misfortune of being captured by the Germans, the first thing they would have asked you was, “How’s the morale in you unit? Any soldier’s grumbling they’re not happy with Roosevelt’s war?”
Not that the Germans knew about it during the war. Dozens of what the Germans thought were German agents were in fact Allied double agents, feeding Germany a steady diet of carefully scripted lies. On the other hand, Allied spies were everywhere. The French civil service was famously infested with Allied moles.
Axis intelligence was just awful in the latter stages of the war; it might well have been the #1 reason they lost. I find the idea that Germany had any effective saboteurs or fifth columnists to be beyond the realm of possibility.
Indeed, it should be noted that despite its general effectiveness, the ALLIES didn’t have an active program of fifth columnists at work in Axis formations. The reason should be rather obvious; it’s a waste of talented personnel. How effective is it going to be, really, to drop 10-15 whiny jerks into the enemy’s infantry formations? A whole army isn’t going to be brought down because a dozen guys bitch a lot.
My knowledge of this is sketchy, but my understanding is that Germany had very effective “Fifth Columnists” in continental Europe in the1930s, particularly in Austria and Czechoslovakia. They fell onto two broad categories: what might be termed the international Fascist movement, and ethnic Germans who wanted a closer connection to their homeland.
I have never read accounts of their actions, so I can’t say what they did beyond public demonstrations. IIRC, in the Czech Sudetenland, they agitated enough to draw a response from security forces, and the Germans marched in on the pretext of protecting them. Also, in virtually every country the Germans took over, there were local Fascists who could be installed into positions of power in puppet governments.
How does one distinguish between Fifth Columnists and collaborators? I’d guess that it may boil down to issues of foreknowledge. A Fifth Columnist knows what is coming and tries to prepare the way through whatever means are available. A collaborator simply goes along after the fact.
I have a friend who runs an Outward Bounds school that does executive training and team building in an outdoor, boot camp-like setting. He said that in every class you can count on a certain number of people with certain traits: leaders, followers, thinkers, and some others I have forgotten. I asked him what he thought I would be. He looked at me kind of funny, and then reluctantly said “plant”. He explained that there is always someone who is suspected by other team members as having been planted to f**k things up, even though that is never done. I was half mortified and half pleased.
