 |
 Photo of Elmer Harris '42 by Matt Hagen
In February 1943, Elmer Harris ’42 arrived in North Africa on a
top-secret assignment. World War II was at its height. Germany had
invaded France, Denmark, and the Soviet Union, and the United
States was fighting Japanese forces in the Pacific.
Nazi troops, led by General Erwin Rommel, were rapidly taking
territory in northwestern Africa. To stop them, the Allies, under
commanding general Dwight David Eisenhower had moved their
headquarters from London to Algiers to fight Axis occupation.
Harris, who was known to his friends as “Pinky,” was under
orders to collect munitions and meet up with Jerry Sage ’38, his
old classmate from Washington State College. Sage had already been
in the region several months, making trouble for the Nazis.
They were stationed in Algeria near Tunisia and the Kasserine
Pass. Both men worked for Roosevelt’s secret army, the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), and both had been given very general
orders: Do what you can to slow down the Germans.
Sage and his crew were harassing Rommel’s forces by blowing up
supplies and soldiers behind enemy lines. They would set bombs in
the road and then bury them under a pile of manure, making them
nearly invisible to the Italian and German soldiers driving
through. “It was a job you did on the spot. And to get what
[equipment, manpower, and munitions] you needed, you begged,
borrowed, or stole,” said Harris, one of several OSS agents who
attended Washington State, and the only one of the five who figure
in this story to be still alive.
On this particular mission, Sage was planning to “do a sabotage
job” on the front lines in Kasserine Pass to weaken the German
forces and help an American combat command. He arrived to find that
the command had already been outgunned by German Tiger tanks. He
decided to take a few men and get behind enemy lines through a
flank being held by a British outfit. He and his men wove their way
into a German minefield. They were spotted and tried to run, hoping
the British would fire on the Germans to give them cover. Instead,
two German shells exploded just above them. One man was hit in the
leg and head with shrapnel; Sage was hit in the leg and shoulder,
but he could still move. He dragged the man as far as he could,
then promised to come back for him after dark. Crawling a short
distance away, he lay in a depression in the sand, hoping the
Germans wouldn’t spot him. It didn’t work. Fortunately, he managed
to jettison his guns, dagger, and other spy equipment before his
captors loaded him into a tank. Had he kept them, they would have
known he was a spy, and would have killed him.
As Harris drove up the road for his meeting with Sage just a
half hour later, a local who was a member of Sage’s crew came
zooming toward him in a jeep, shouting, “Mr. Harris, Mr. Harris!
Major Sage is captured!”
“I’ll never forget that,” Harris said during a recent interview
at his home in Edmonds. “I missed him by half an hour.”
Over the next few days Sage made several attempts to escape. He
even tried to steal a truck. He and two other prisoners managed to
slip out of a moving train, only to stagger through the desert and
get caught and handed back to the Germans. Sage was again able to
escape detection as a spy when the two other prisoners, who were
airmen, told the Germans he was their commander, leading them to
believe he was a pilot.
Harris, meanwhile, returned to his station, where he was set up
to train American and guerilla spies to parachute behind enemy
lines and bring information back to Allied troops.
Page
1
2
3
Continued
|
|
| |
.jpg)
