Practical Martial Arts Association

Australian/American Signals cooperation was not only important in stopping the Japanese advance to Australian shores but marked the beginning of Australia embedding its forces with the United States rather than simply furnishing troops for the British.  Whilst the British, in my opinion , had a long history of using Commonwealth troops to either protect their colonial interests or to take on deployments with high expected rates of attrition, when Australia faced the real possibility of invasion with the vast majority of its troops and equipment deployed overseas, it was the Americans, whose interests in the Pacific aligned with our own, that were on hand to push the Japanese back from our shores. The Battle of the Coral Sea saw the beginnings of the deployment of Australian sea power under direct American command, a joint approach that would continue to the present time – it was, however, Signals Intelligence that led the way to the embedding of US/Australian forces and played a ma...

On September 20, 1945, President Truman issued an executive order terminating the OSS, effective 1 October.    In the few days remaining to the agency, General Donovan ordered Lt. Edwin J. Putzell to assist him in microfilming select documents from Donovan's safe files for his own action and personal use. Donovan and Putzell worked, under pressure of time, with a Kodak Recordak Camera to produce 131 rolls of 35mm microfilm from the records of the Donovan files. You can find the summary of the contents of those microfilms here - not only is it a good place to look for other reference material, the summary itself makes for fascinating reading and shows just how many pies the OSS was trying to stick its fingers in by 1945.

In  July 1941, President Roosevelt signed an order naming William J Donovan Coordinator of Information.  Donavan had been acting in an informal (amateurish) intelligence gathering role for FDR for some time. Donovan (the only person to have received all four of the United States' highest awards: The Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the National Security Medal) began to construct, with the help of the British, the infrastructure of an organisation that essentially combined the activities of MI6 & SOE - this included the infamous Camp-X, which was set up in Ontario (as the US was yet to join the war) with W E Fairbairn seconded from the British to teach his unsavory methods. The Office of Strategic Services was established by a Presidential military order issued by President Roosevelt on June 13, 1942, to collect and analyze strategic information required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to conduct special operations ...