Jim Garvey

Wanted: Volunteers for immediate overseas assignment. Knowledge of French or another European language preferred; Willingness and ability to qualify as a parachutist necessary; Likelihood of a dangerous mission guaranteed.

That was all young Jack Berlin needed to hear over loudspeakers at his military base in the months leading up to D-Day. He didn’t need to be asked twice. He was in.

He had already been through basic training, mastered advanced skills as a radio operator and turned down Officer Candidate School because he wanted to get into the action as quickly as possible. And now, like a blessing, this call came for volunteers to the front lines — to fight the Nazis.

Many young people were patriotic in the 1940s, but few had the passion, intelligence, courage and fortitude of Berlin, a Jewish kid from New York City. A wiry, smart, funny and fearless teenager, he had just volunteered for what became known as the OSS Jedburghs: a British-American force of elite three-man commando teams that would jump behind German lines to harass, sabotage and kill.

After jump school and training in foraging, problem-solving, stealth, team-cohesion, tactics, demolition and silent killing, Berlin’s three-man team — an American, a Frenchman and Berlin as the radio operator — trained in North Africa and waited to be flown into southern France in June 1944. The Normandy Invasion was imminent. Berlin’s team was tasked with harassing the Germans in southern France from behind, blowing up bridges and tracks, to prevent a Panzer division from reaching Normandy.

Bad weather and miscommunications with French resistance fighters delayed the team’s jump into France until four days after the start of the invasion, but the German troops in southwest France had not yet begun to move.

When the team jumped out of their plane into the pitch-black night, they were flying too fast and too low. Berlin hit a rock when he landed. Stunned, he couldn’t get up. Someone in a German helmet came running toward him and Berlin pulled his revolver. But the running figure called out with a youthful voice, in French. He was a resistance fighter wearing the helmet he’d taken from a soldier he’d previously killed. The fighter helped get Berlin to the nearby farmhouse rendezvous where Berlin explained to the young Frenchman how his metal spoil of war nearly got him shot.

Hiding from German troops behind a false wall in a barn by day, the team joined resistance fighters by night to infiltrate, snipe, blow things up and stay hidden. They adopted the wisdom of their Resistance allies: “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.”

For five or six weeks, the team harassed the 2nd SS Panzer Division, preventing its departure. By then, the Normandy beachhead was secure, and the OSS Jedburgh’s objective had been clearly executed.

Berlin returned to England in October 1944, in time for another adventure.