![]() This article is a selection from the November 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĪn undated photograph archived with the HOUGHTEAM files. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 For the refugees among them, it was a chance to leverage their language skills and cultural familiarity to defeat the enemy that had uprooted their lives. Their job was to question European civilians about the movement of enemy troops, translate captured documents and interrogate prisoners of war. At Camp Ritchie they received training in interrogation and other psychological operations. Among the Ritchie Boys, as they were known, were European immigrants who had fled to the United States to escape Nazi persecution. Others had been through the secret Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. One was a Japanese interpreter on loan from the Office of Strategic Services, the spy agency precursor to the CIA. Four were highly educated civilians: an engineer, a geographer who had worked as a map curator at the University of Chicago, a linguist who spoke five languages, and the dapper son of an prominent Kentucky family who’d grown up mostly in Europe as the son of a brigadier general posted to various capitals as a military attaché. HOUGHTEAM, as the unit was known, was made up of 19 carefully selected individuals. Their mission was such a closely guarded secret that one member later recalled he was told not to open the envelope containing his orders until two hours after his plane departed for Europe. Now he was the leader of a military intelligence team wielding special blue passes, issued by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, that allowed Hough and his team to move freely in the combat zone. government and charted the rainforests of South America for oil companies. A short, serious man of 46 with receding red hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Hough had a degree in civil engineering from Cornell, and before the war he led surveying expeditions in the American West for the U.S. “The city appears to be 98% destroyed,” Hough wrote in a memo to Washington. Hough and two of his men arrived in early November. ![]() Rubble still clogged the streets when U.S. Bloody building-to-building combat ensued until, finally, on October 21, 1944, Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands. Tanks then rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city, the imperial seat of Charlemagne, which Hitler had ordered defended at all costs. American planes and artillery pounded the Nazi defenses for days.
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