Medal of Honor

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was officially created in June 1942 under the guidance of General “Wild Bill” Donovan. If there was ever a time when the romantic notions of being a spy felt real, it was likely with the OSS. Young men and women, often recruited straight out of college, entered the cloak-and-dagger world of wartime intelligence. It was an exciting and dangerous period, and as the war progressed, so did the OSS’s mission. Sabotage, search and rescue, and subversion all became part of the organization’s daily operations.

It was during this time that 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 Allied command. It was an unmitigated disaster. Many planes missed their targets, were shot down, or crashed due to bad weather. One pilot, however, delivered the regiment he was carrying to its correct drop zone before his C-47 transport was forced down by enemy fire. That pilot was Jimmy Patterson, an unassuming twenty-four-year-old from Carthage, Missouri.

Patterson heroically protected his injured crew from a roving German patrol, single-handedly taking out half a dozen members 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 United States for a War Bonds tour, however, Patterson disappeared from his infirmary bed. Medal of Honor tells the story of what happened next.