Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

Join us as Bruce Henderson shares the previously untold history of a top-secret operation in the run-up to D-Day in which American flyers and Allied spies carried out some of the most daring cloak-and-dagger operations of the Second World War.  In 1943, the OSS—precursor to the CIA—came up with a plan to support the French resistance forces that were fighting the Nazis. The OSS brought some of the best American bomber pilots and crews to a secret airfield 20 miles west of London and briefed them on the intended mission. Given a choice to stay or leave, every airman volunteered for what became known as Operation Carpetbagger.  Their dangerous plan called for a new kind of flying: taking their B-24 Liberator bombers in the middle of the night across the English Channel and down to extremely low altitudes in Nazi-occupied France to find drop zones in dark fields. On the ground, resistance members waited to receive steel containers filled with everything from rifles and hand grenades to medicine and bicycle tir