Sepia Saturday #240: The Ritchie Boys

During his career in intelligence my husband had many different ID's for various positions he held and for military/intelligence properties he accessed. After searching through my own photos in vain I asked him if he remembered one of his ID's that matched the prompt this week. Here's what he came up with....his Fort Ritchie, MD identification which fits the bill. Did we laugh over his helmet hair! Thank God I can barely see his tie under the sign!

Fort Ritchie is closed now, but at one time it played an important role in our history as a training center for the Ritchie Boys. Who were they?

Wikipedia

The Ritchie Boys consisted of approximately 9,000 young Germans and Austrians,^[1] who were mostly Jewish, and who had escaped from their countries of birth and immigrated to the US as refugees.^[2] Most had been drafted or volunteered into the United States Army. Some had originally arrived in the USA as children, many without their parents so that these were also One Thousand Children. (One such OTC was Ambassador Richard Schifter.)

They were trained at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, now officially known as Fort Ritchie. They were specially trained in methods of intelligence, counterintelligence, interrogation, investigation and psychological warfare.^[3] They were suitable for these tasks because they knew the German language, and importantly the German mentality and life behaviours, better than most American-born soldiers.^[4] The role of these soldiers was therefore to work in the front lines (or even behind them), at strategic corps and army levels, at interrogation, analyzing German forces and plans; and also as members of the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps;^[5] and also to study the enemy, and demoralize him in order to achieve an unconditional surrender.

After the US declared war on Germany, the Ritchie Boys became a decisive weapon for the Allied powers. Many of them entered Europe on D-Day on June 6, 1944 along with the other Allied troops.^[6] Others followed over time. Shortly after reaching land they left their units and pursued their special tasks. They were able to feed the Allies valuable information. Gen. Oscar Koch (Gen. Patton's G-2) acknowledged that the advance warning of the German Bulge offensive was made possible by information gathered by their MIS units. Moreover, the Ritchie Boys helped break German resistance by demoralizing them in both open and covert operations. They interrogated POWs and defectors to obtain information about German force levels, troop movements, and the physical and psychological state of the Germans. By means of targeted disinformation via newspaper announcements, flyers, radio broadcasts, and sound trucks, the German population and military was prompted to cease their resistance against the Allied invasion.

The most interesting part of writing to Sepia Saturday prompts is the information you wander into. I started out howling with laughter over my husband's photo and ended up crying my eyes out after reading of the "One Thousand Children". The story is fascinating and worth reading about but far too long and complicated to tackle in a post. If you're interested, read here:   The One Thousand Children.

For more stories about identity and things true and false, head over to Sepia Saturday!