Figure 1. Russell W. Volckmann at his guerrilla headquarters in North Luzon during the war. Three years leading resistance forces behind enemy lines made him one of the Army’s leading UW practitioners. When asked to write doctrine, he still studied other resistance movements.

“The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.”

Sir William Francis Butler, Charles George Gordon (1889)

 

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675

 

“There is nothing so practical as a good theory.”

Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (1951)

 

The instructors called the recruit “clumsy” and “unsuitable for jumping.” Another wrote that the recruit had arrived “without the foggiest idea” what the training was for. Once on the ground, instead of destroying messages, the radio operator kept them, in code and in clear, in notebooks. The Gestapo seized them. With them, the Germans could work the captured radio back to London as if nothing had happened, and London believed it. Three more agents were captured as they landed. The radio operator was Noor Inayat Khan, a children’s author before the war. Executed at Dachau in September 1944.