World War II Work
While in Rome, Corporal Lauwers assembled a team of German prisoners to work in counterintelligence and psychological warfare. The prisoners worked as “cobblers”— spies who create false passports, visas, diplomas and other documents. She conducted Operation Sauerkraut, which infiltrated enemy lines with teams of German prisoners that spread “black” propaganda regarding Hitler throughout occupied Italian towns.
Corporal Lauwers also created the "League of Lonely War Women" or VEK in German. This mythical organization was to demoralize German troops by making them believe that the females in their lives back home were having casual relations with other soldiers. Eight faked field post letters in the German language were produced by the OSS in Italy with the total number of forged field post letters that were printed in Rome being indicated in an OSS production report. 287,000 copies were produced in the period between 15 July 1944 and the end of the war. The operation was so successful that the Washington Post was fooled and ran a story on 10 October 1944 entitled, “German soldiers on leave from the Italian front have only to pin an entwined heart on their lapel during furloughs home to find a girlfriend.” The newspaper got the story from a circular which had been captured on the Eighth Army front and was actually written by Lauwers and carried behind German lines by the Sauerkraut agents.
In another mission, Corporal Lauwers led a team in writing and delivering “black” propaganda targeting soldiers attached to the German army in northern Italy. On 29 April 1945, this mission was so successful that 600 troops defected behind Italian lines and withdrew their support from the Germans. This operation was the reason that Corporal Lauwers was given the Bronze Star.
Read more about this topic: Barbara Lauwers
Famous quotes containing the words world war, world, war and/or work:
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“In peacetime, they had all been normal decent, cowards, frightened of their wives, trembling before their bosses, terrified at the passing of the years, but war had made them gallant. They had been greedy men. Now they were self-sacrificing. They had been selfish. Now they were generous. War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best, the highest morality he is capable of.”
—Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981)
“only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)