World War 2 Missions

In the frozen wilderness of southern Norway in late February 1943, nine Norwegian commandos accomplished what Allied bombers and an earlier commando mission could not: they struck a decisive blow against Nazi Germany's nuclear weaponsprogram without firing a single shot or losing a single man.

In the spring of 1943, Allied planners faced a problem that no amount of firepower could solve on its own. The invasion of Sicily was the next major step in the Mediterranean campaign, but its target was painfully obvious. Sicily sat squarely between Allied-held North Africa and the Italian mainland, and any competent strategist on the German side could see it coming. The challenge, then, was not to hide the fact that an invasion was being prepared, but to cloud the question of where it would land. The answer to that challenge was Operation Barclay, one of the most ambitious and carefully orchestrated strategic deception campaigns of the Second World War.

In the early months of 1941, Britain stood largely alone against Nazi Germany. The fall of France, the evacuation at Dunkirk, and the relentless Blitz had placed the nation on the defensive. Yet even in those dark days, British military planners were looking for ways to strike back to demonstrate that Fortress Europe was not impregnable and that occupied territories could be reached. One of the first and most successful of these offensive gestures was Operation Claymore, a commando raid on the Lofoten Islands off the coast of northern Norway, carried out on March 4, 1941.

In the spring of 1942, occupied Czechoslovakia existed under a regime of calculated terror. At its helm sat SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most powerful and feared men in the Third Reich. Appointed Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in September 1941, Heydrich had earned a reputation so menacing that he was widely known as "The Butcher of Prague" and "The Man with the Iron Heart." His assassination carried out under the codename Operation Anthropoid would become one of themost audacious acts of resistance in the entire Second World War, a moment when a small band of exiled soldiers struck at the very heart of Nazi power.

Among the countless stories of daring and determination that emerged from World War II, few rival the extraordinary tale of Franz Xaver Freiherr von Werra. A German fighter pilot, flying ace, and irrepressible escapee, von Werra earned a unique distinction that set him apart from every other Axis prisoner of war: he was the only German military prisoner to escape from Canadian custody and successfully return to Germany during the conflict. His remarkable odyssey took him across the Atlantic, through the United States, down to Mexico, across South America, and finally through Spain before he set foot on German soil once more on April 18, 1941.

In the summer of 1940, as German forces sweptacross Western Europe and the threat of invasion loomed over Great Britain, Winston Churchill's government undertook one of the most audacious and secretive operations of the Second World War. Code-named Operation Fish, this missionwould see Britain transport its entire gold reserves and billions of pounds worth of securities across the treacherous, U-boat-infested waters of the North Atlantic to safety in Canada. It remains the most significant known movement ofphysical wealth in history, and remarkably, not a single gold bar was lost.

On January 2, 1942, thirty-three members of a Nazi Germanespionage network were sentenced to serve a combined total of over 300 years in federal prison. This dramatic conclusion to what remains the largest espionagecase in United States history that ended in convictions marked a decisive victory for American counterintelligence on the eve of the nation's entry into World War II. The Duquesne Spy Ring, named after its colorful leader Frederick "Fritz" Joubert Duquesne, represented Nazi Germany's most ambitious attempt to gather military intelligence and conduct sabotage operations on American soil.