The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan

by Anthony Cave Brown

From the best-selling author Anthony Cave-Brown, the extraordinary life of William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan, the founding father of America's first secret intelligence and special operations organization--a hero on the battlefield and a behind-the-scenes power.

With exclusive access to all of Donovan's personal and secret papers and his wife's diaries, Mr. Brown has laid out for the first time the remarkable and definitive life story of this most legendary figure of our time.

The scope of Donovan's career is astonishing. He made his mark in the U.S. Cavalry chasing Pancho Villa; won half a dozen of the highest medals of World War I in action on the western front, including the supreme award, the Medal of Honor; becoming acting attorney general of the United States; personally won a number of landmark cases before the Supreme Court; ran as Republican candidate for governor of New York and was often spoken of for the presidency; created the great law firm of Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine; was founding head of the OSS and the creator of the CIA, and ambassador to Thailand.

Among Donovan's greatest accomplishments was his role in the grand strategic plan for Germany's defeat in World War II, the Arcadia plan, in which Donovan's contribution was to ignite the national uprisings coincident with the invasion of France. He also made a decisive contribution in diverting the Nazi armies into the Balkans, fatally delaying the German invasion of Russia.

America's counterpart to the tale of Britain's "Intrepid" (Sir William Stephenson), Donovan's story will be relished by espionage and war buffs. Here, revealed at last, are the inside, background details of the most expraordinary military and spy operations of World War II.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Military Fiction, World War II, Politics

891 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1982

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild Bill Donovan was asked by Hoover to be his Vice President, asked by Roosevelt to be Secretary of War in 1940 and was considered by Eisenhower for nomination as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. A Medal of Honor won on the battlefield in WWI. He rose to great success and power as a poor Irish Catholic when that was two strikes against any success. He was a poor law student but a masterful lawyer with success in arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court. He spent vast amounts of his personal fortune in service to his country and died almost penniless. He had no significant weaknesses and J. Edgar Hoover tried like hell, unsuccessfully, to build a file to use against him. Finishing The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan brings mixed feelings. The first is relief because it is 800+ pages and I felt like it was a chore more than a treat. Brown goes on at great length at how much information he was able to acquire but he didn’t need to put everything in. Also, once we get to WWII, the book is mainly about the Office of Coordination of Information (COI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Not a lot post war either. In the end, I did not have as good a grasp on Donovan as I expected.

Donovan’s battle in WWI that resulted in the MoH being awarded:
Only when the fresh battalion was in place-five hours after he had been hit-did Donovan consent to his removal from the battlefield. A group of the original Micks came to his shellhole, put Donovan into a blanket, and, since he could not walk, took the corners of the blanket and carried him off the battlefield to safety-heroism that earned them the title thereafter of the Blanket Boys. The title was well earned, for even as he was being evacuated, WJD related, “machine-gun bullets passed thru the blankets and one of the bearers was hit. I told them to put me down but they said they were willing to take a chance. It was a tough hike.”

What Donovan did not relate in his letter, but emerged only in affidavits by soldiers in the regiment later, was that one of the reasons he insisted in remaining in command for five hours after he had been badly wounded-his knee and all nerve and blood vessels were shattered-was that soon after he was hit, he received news that the Germans were preparing a major counterattack. The size of the German group, the defensive situation, the nature of the enemy artillery bombardment (the Germans were using high explosive mixed with pumice dust impregnated with phosgene poison gas which created pockets of poison gas that did not disperse quickly and which could not easily be detected), and the morale of the regiment-all demanded Donovan’s presence.

That decision was wise, for Donovan had just time to deploy his mortar platoon to the front and the flanks when the German infantry, highly charged on schnapps, came dashing out of their smoke barrage, crying, “Für Gott und der Vaterland,” and bayoneting, knifing, strangling, clubbing, or shooting all who stood in their way. Such were the violence and suddenness of the attack that the battalion in the line, already badly dispersed by the artillery bombardment, wavered and began to break.

The line would have collapsed altogether had Donovan not remained to encourage his men and to direct the mortar counterbarrage that broke the attack. But he cried through his bullhorn: “They can’t get me, and they can’t get you.” The Micks, not knowing that he was wounded and could not move, believed him. Seizing everything from rifles and pistols to picks and shovels, they smashed the Germans back into the fortress in a glorious burst of battlefield élan that astonished them as much as it did the Germans. Only then, when Donovan was sure the battalion could and would hold, did he permit the Blanket Boys to carry him off the battlefield, and then only when the eddying smoke drifted over the command post and concealed his departure.

Donovan's OSS needed to break into the Spanish Embassy and get the diplomatic codes to break the Spanish message traffic before the Torch invasion of North Africa. They needed to know if Spain would allow the Wehrmacht access to attack the invasion force. The OSS needs advice on breaking into the safe and go find an expert:
“under the ‘el’ on West Broadway." Here, in a long narrow shop resembling a junk-shop, he found Cohen “at his ancient roll-top desk filing a key.” He was “a little pot-bellied Jew with curly gray hair on which his battered derby sat like a chicken on its nest.”

Downes recounted later:

I told him I was from the government, that for the war effort it was necessary to open a certain safe in Washington. Would he do it and how much did he want to be paid. “Paid!” he screamed. “Paid. You’ve come into my place to insult me. Don’t I have two nephews in the army? Ain’t I an American as much as you? Aren’t you ashamed? Pay me? You can’t even tank me. Even a ticket to Vashington you can’t buy me, or a Coca-Cola.”

The OSS was able to gain access to the Spanish embassy safe, thanks to the ingenuity of the safe expert from NYC:

A week or so later, Downes wrote later, “we had both combinations and a key to the inner door.” It was now possible to burglarize the embassy as needed….

But the new OSS had little idea that some agencies were more interested in protecting their turf than allowing the OSS team to acquire critical intelligence needed for the coming employment of US forces in combat:
“…entering a foreign embassy clandestinely and ‘borrowing’ code books and coding machinery was full of risks for everyone concerned.” Donovan and his associates were “justly nervous,” for although the joint Chiefs had asked Donovan to undertake the burglary in order to get the data required in London, “if we failed, if someone was caught inside the embassy and talked, an international incident of great moment would result.” But “While Americans were dying overseas, the calculated risk of our thievery did not seem too great. We had taken all imaginable precautions-except one.”

They had never considered “betrayal by someone high enough in the American Government to know what we were doing.” J. Edgar Hoover was “ out for Donovan’s scalp. . . . Not only [the COI], but the British Secret Intelligence… were constantly being hounded by the FBI” because only the FBI was allowed to conduct intelligence operations in the Western Hemisphere. “A friend of ours had warned us that Edgar Hoover believed we were ‘penetrating’ embassies and that he was annoyed,” wrote Downes afterward. “All these fears and worries raced round my head as I waited for the three thieves to come back with the loot.”

The operation went brilliantly, and by the hot dawn the team had acquired 3,400 photographs relating to the system. Those data enabled the Ultra service to read the Spanish diplomatic wireless traffic throughout August. But because the Spaniards had introduced a complicated, monthly system of key changes, the operation had to be repeated in August, September, and October. All went well until the October operation, which was undertaken at the beginning of the month to enable the cryptanalytical authorities to read Spanish traffic between that date and Torch D-Day, November 8, 1942.

Then the FBI struck just as Aranda and his crew were opening the safe for the fourth time, two FBI cars pulled up outside the embassy, their sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing. The performance awoke the entire street, forcing Aranda and his group to abandon the operation. All, including Downes, were arrested, together with the code books. They were then taken to FBI headquarters, where they were kept in guarded anterooms while each member of the group was interrogated separately. Downes managed to persuade his interrogators that he was a COI officer and asked permission to telephone Donovan to prove the fact, although the FBI officers knew very well who the men were. Downes called Donovan at home-it was now near dawn-and as he was to record:

I don’t believe any single event in his career ever enraged him more. The next morning Donovan went to the White House to protest. . . . “Won’t the President do anything about such near treason?” I asked. “No,” said the Political Advisor of OSS, “he won’t. No President dare touch John Edgar Hoover. Let alone congressmen. They are all scared pink of him.”

Was the capture of the bridge at Remagen a result of covert action? Donovan made a sudden secret trip to Europe just as the crossing of the Rhine became the main focus. Interesting coincidence? Furthermore, the theory that WJD was involved in some way with the Remagen episode gathers some minor strength when it is recalled that he was stationed near Remagen with the Fighting 69th just after World War I, and knew the bridge well. Certainly he knew where the demolition chambers were, for it had been his job to prevent the destruction of the bridge in the event the Germans failed to honor the Armistice and the Allies were forced to occupy Germany.

As the war grinds to the end, Donovan institutes a new, aggressive policy to penetrate the British and Russian controlled sectors (on the assumption they would do the same in the American sector). In particular, the Americans and the Brits surge to conduct air reconnaissance over the soon-to-be-closed ground of Eastern Europe:
Meanwhile, Donovan’s new policy was in effect in Europe. There as early as the middle of March 1945 the Russians had shown themselves extremely sensitive about violations of their airspace-a reflection of their deeper concerns about the power of the Anglo-American air forces and, perhaps, the capability of those air forces to position Allied intelligence and subversion agents in their territory. They could, and did, react violently, as an incident on March 18, 1945, had demonstrated. On that day a large force of U.S. heavy bombers over the Soviet bridgehead across the Oder River in eastern Germany was attacked by a wing of Soviet fighters, and although the American aircraft were plainly marked, there was an aerial battle in which six of the Soviet lighters were shot down by the Americans, who suffered no losses, no damage, and no casualties at the hands of the puny Russian fighters. Nothing was said about this incident, but it was followed by others, all occurring along the eastern frontiers of Soviet airspace.

‘Casey Jones’ along with its associated operation, ‘Ground Hog’, was, according to General Edwin L. Sibert, chief of intelligence first to General Omar N. Bradley at the Twelfth Army Group and then to General Eisenhower as commanding general of United States Forces in Europe, “a project undertaken jointly with the British to use the post war confusion to get photo coverage of all Central and Western Europe, Scandinavia and North Africa. Operation Ground Hog was a similar project for the collection of geological data of military interest.”

Under the Donovan-Sibert plan, some 2,000,000 square miles, including parts of Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, and all of Russian occupied Germany, were photomapped. About sixteen squadrons of U.S. and British heavy bombers modified for aerial photography were employed in the operation, which lasted through the spring, summer, and autumn of 1945. Priority was given to those areas occupied by US. and British forces that were, by agreement, to be turned over to the Russians.

All U.S. aircraft carried American markings, but there was some evidence that the British used unmarked planes over Albania. Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, for as Alexander Kirk, American ambassador ,at Rome, reported in August 1945: “The British Foreign and War Offices have queried [Allied Forces Headquarters in Italy] concerning the feasability [sic] of making aerial photographs of Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. ’ In reply, the Royal Air Force component at the headquarters recommended that Mosquito aircraft be used “with all insignia removed” to “obtain photographs from 25,000 feet and Governments concerned not be notified.”

The purpose of Casey Jones evidently did not escape the Russians, for the operation was almost certainly betrayed to them by one of their spies in either the British or the American intelligence services. Nor did the magnitude of the aerial effort escape their attention for in one month alone one of the American units involved-the 305th Heavy Bombardment Group-Hew about 470 missions, taking 70,000 photographs of about 90,000 square miles. Consequently, the unmistakable nature of aerial photographic flying provoked sharp reaction from the Red Air Force.

Upon Donovan’s death, one of his officers composed an ode in the Greek manner:

Wild, people called him, who had heard of his fame
And wild he was in heart and in feyness
But more than wild was the man with the wile of Odysseus
Like the king of Assassins he welded together
An army of desperate, invisible soldiers
Who blew no reveille or taps
Each as bold as himself in single deeds
But none as keen as himself, the leader of all, commander of men
Who would ask, “Jim will you limpet that ship?”
Knowing the answer, for none would refuse him,
or “Carl, free ride to Albania?” “Yes? Then you’re off Ten minutes to Zero,”
and we would all die for him.
Die for him some of us did, but he died for us all.
Some who are left would burn him whole, like a Viking Jarl m his ship
Others would cover his bones with a colossal marble cross
Each to his taste, say I, Yankee, Irishman, Italian.
As many tombs will he have in our hearts as the scattered remains of Osiris,
How lucky we were that he came when he did in the long tide of history
Hail to Wild Bill, a hero of men and a name to hang myths on
As American as chowder, Crockett, and Putnam
A free fighter’s hero, may God give him peace.

The book recounts some successes and some spectacular failures of the OSS. The British helped start Donovan down the path to the COI and OSS, providing support and training. Later on, the Americans and Brits would clash over spheres of influence and the attitude of each toward imperialism. It is clear the Americans were outclassed for quite some time by the long-practiced tricksters and prevaricators of Europe. Some paid the ultimate price. A good book but I can’t say it was very enjoyable to read. 4 Stars

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is hard to describe the significance that Bill Donovan had in the outcome of WWII and the selfless energy and devotion, much of it unrewarded, that he gave for his country. Very similar to the book Brown wrote about Stewart Menzies and the fact that he and Menzies and Churchill, against all odds survived WWI to go on to provide the leadership to win WWII.

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bill Donovan was born in New York in 1883. He served during World War I and World War II. His World War II service was very interesting to me, as I specialized in that for my war history major. Donovan met with many key people during the war years, and made no secret about what his opinions of the Axis powers were. He became involved with the OSS, and did all manner of spy-style things. His efforts for the Nuremberg trials were exceptional, and I really wish I would have known more about this before know. He also helped form the CIA and was an Ambassador to Thailand. He really did have an interesting life.

I, unfortunately, did not enjoy this book nearly as much as I had hoped. I got it for a dollar at the used book store, so, for the money, it was worth reading. The author did his research, and he did provide a decent amount of information about Wild Bill Donovan and the OSS. The issue that I had was that the tone of the book was just stale, there seemed to be an unnecessary amount of information and documents about the OSS that were not really needed that made it seem like page filler as opposed to important information, and it seemed like the author didn't quite have a grasp on the personality of his subject enough to integrate that into the writing. There were some really interesting parts, but as a whole, I do not think I would recommend this book.

[Jay Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this a biography? At times it seems more like a history of the OSS, the precursor of the CIA. At some point you realize that the story of the OSS is the same as Wild Bill Donovan. A smart Irish immigrant who grew up in Buffalo, New York. A devout Catholic who falls in love with a rich Protestant. He becomes a great lawyer and a better politician. He finally is crushed by the snub of Herbert Hoover. He turns back to his law practice until World War II, when he turns to espionage. Frankly, the history is amazing and outside of my previous studies. It is well researched and despite its length, held my attention. If you have an interest in World War II or the beginnings of the CIA, this book should interest you.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

A cumbersome tome of a book, ensconced between the rock of a vanity project and the hard place of documenting the life and times of a highly secretive man and his highly secretive agency. The myriad of de-classified information gives significant relevance to Donovan and OSS doings ad nauseum. In the near forty years since its initial publication, one must wonder what else has floated to the surface of this murky lake that is early American Intelligence.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read Oil, Gold and God, and this book suffers the same issues, only worse. A good editor is needed to prioritize the details of William Donovan's life. The research was prolific, but in its entirety its a snoozefest.

[Nancy Randall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable but got bogged down at end. Perhaps as wartime ended and Wild Bill got political?

[Robert Ayres · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill Donovan starts out in WW I winning the Medal of Honor and then goes on to win every award thru WW I, WW II, and the Cold War. Denied the vice presidental nomination because he is Catholic/Irish by a Republican president, he finds another way to help his country. Later he is denied a cabinet post by a Democrat because he is a Republican.

His organization the OSS makes huge contributions to winning WW II and inspiring the creation of the CIA but petty jealosy by others in politics and the military establishment try to stop him at every turn. He still makes huge contributions to American safety and success.

Very good book !

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very intriguing individual. I was fascinated by his exploits when he was younger and the operations the OSS was able to pull-off. The number of well known people with whom he crossed paths was also interesting -- Truman in WWI and Ian Fleming.

[Graham]

I'm reading "Legacy of Ashes" about the CIA, so I am interested now in reading more about one of its forefathers, Wild Bill Donovan. This looks like the book to read about him.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A biography of a man who was at the right place at the right time.

[Larry Loftis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definitive book on the founder of the OSS (forerunner of the CIA). Anthony Cave Brown's research is always exhaustive.