HEROES OF A GENERATION: OSS spy Martin Gelb, 100 years old.
It was 1944. Martin Gelb, an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, was behind Nazi lines with a .45 and a Tommy gun.
“I was asked to do a lot of strange things, but you follow orders. It did get a little crazy,” the 100-year-old OSS veteran from Hudson, N.H., told the Herald last week.
He was part of William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s small crew of intelligence operatives working with the French resistance, hunting down German scientists and rounding up war criminals.
He was an expert radio operator who knew Morse code and International Morse code who slipped into France and Germany along with the D-Day invasion. He remained in Europe all the way through the Nuremberg trials. . . .
I was assigned to an advance radio group that would contact resistance fighters,” he said. “Everything was secret. So secret.”
He doesn’t highlight that he was a Jew fighting against the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but he doesn’t hide the fact that he was driven to succeed. He’s partially blind but his mind is sharp. Martin Gelb is one of the Heroes of a Generation the Herald is chronicling.
But unlike other World War II veterans, his bravery remained top secret until records from the Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to the CIA — were declassified in 2008. He was recently awarded the OSS Congressional Gold Medal for his service. . . .
Gelb recalls a mission to capture a German engineer in Germany, only to lose him to the Russians who got there first. That “engineer,” Gelb said, was involved with nuclear science. He had to shoot his way to safety using his Tommy gun that day.
He avoided snipers, was almost shot in the Battle of the Bulge, hauled German industrialists to the Nuremberg trials and said he once got into trouble with Gen. Omar Bradley — commander of the First Army — when he refused to leave an officer’s mess hall because he had an enlisted man with him.
“Bradley asked me ‘Who’s your commanding officer?’ And I said William Donovan.”
“Wild Bill? I know Wild Bill,” Bradley answered, Gelb said. And the general let the two men have lunch.
Wise decision.