Operation Jedburgh
The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and its American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), came up with the concept of the Jedburghs in May 1943.
[6] In addition to their personal weapons (which included an M1 carbine[7] and a Colt automatic pistol[8] for each member) and sabotage equipment, the teams dropped with the Type B Mark II radio, more commonly referred to as the B2 or "Jed Set", which was critical for communicating with Special Force Headquarters in London.
They were also issued pieces of silk with five hundred phrases that they were likely to use in radio traffic replaced with four-letter codes to save time in transmission, and one-time pads to encipher their messages.
Like all Allied forces who operated behind Nazi lines, the Jedburghs were subject to torture and execution in the event of capture, under Hitler's notorious Commando Order.
However, of the Jedburgh teams dropped into France, only British Captain Victor A. Gough met that fate, being shot while a prisoner on 25 November 1944.
One team code named "Gambling", was a combined Jedburgh/Special Air Service (SAS) group that was dropped into the centre of the Netherlands to assist the Allied advance.
[13] Jedburgh teams, or parties organised on a similar basis, also operated under the command of Lord Mountbatten in the South East Asia Command (SEAC) areas in 1945, including Japanese-occupied French Indo-China, where sixty French Jedburghs joined the newly created Corps Léger d'Intervention (C.L.I.)
"Billet" was a plan to raise resistance to the Japanese among the majority Burman population, primarily through the largely communist Anti-Fascist Organisation (AFO).
In You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger, a memoir of his offbeat adventures as an agent in the OSS, Roger Wolcott Hall describes his work with the Jedburghs.
Hall's first assignment with the OSS was as a Special Operations instructor at the Congressional Country Club in Maryland, which had been converted into a training center.
Hall instructed the recruits in Special Operations tactics and demolition, often leading them on simulated night raids on the country club's golf course.
"[14] In 1944, while stationed in England, Hall was assigned to join a Jedburgh team in occupied France and coordinate resistance operations following the D-Day invasion.
Hall parachuted into France and linked up with the Jedburgh team, only to discover that a sudden offensive by General George S. Patton's tank divisions had pushed through the area a few hours before, and he had landed in friendly territory.
A turn-based tactical game, the player leads a Jedburgh team in the run up to D-Day conducting a series of operations across northern France.
Tells the story Virginia Hall and Noor Inayat Khan and what they did with OSS and SOE in France as part of Operation Jedburgh.
