Medal of Honor

BEFORE THE CIA, THERE WAS THE OSS

The Office of Strategic Services was officially created in June 1942, under the guidance of General 'Wild Bill' Donovan. If ever the romantic notions of being a spy actually excited, it was probably with the OSS. Young men and women, often recruited right out of college, entered into the cloak and dagger world of wartime intelligence. It was an exciting and dangerous time, and as the war grew so did the mission of the OSS. Sabotage, search & rescue and subversion all became part of the organisation's daily operation.

That's when a young Lieutenant in the Air Transport Corps entered the picture and changed the OSS forever. On June 5, 1944 - the night before the D-Day invasion - the largest aerial drop of troops in history up to that point was launched by the Allied command. It was an unmitigated disaster. Most of the planes missed thier targets, were shot down or crashed due to bad weather. One pilot, however, got the regiment he was carrying to its correct drop zone before his C-47 transport was forced down by enemy fire. He was Jimmy Patterson, an unassuming twenty-four year old from Carthage, MO.

Patterson heroically protected his injured crew from a roving German patrol, single-handedly taking out a half dozen of the Wehrmacht before help arrived. For his actions, he was nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor - the nation's highest military award. Just days before being sent back to the States for a War Bonds tour, however, Patterson disappeared from his infirmary bed. Medal of Honor tells the story of what happened next.