Young’s two-year sojourn in Cairo as an OSS chief left him heartily sickened with desk work. Rodney Young, former curator in the Mediterranean Section, ran the OSS Cairo desk. Months later in German-controlled Athens, he recuperated sufficiently to make the long journey back to the USA, where he helped engineer the creation of an OSS outfit to offer succor to Greece. His companions feared the worst but this bull of a man, rather like Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, survived first a field hospital in Korça, then evacuation in the face of the German invasion via Ioannina to Athens. Little over two months later, close to the lakeside port of Pogradec, Young’s ambulance was strafed by an Italian fighter-plane, leaving him unconscious with shrapnel in his abdomen and intestines. Young was a people’s person, as well as energetic to a fault. Here, in desperate conditions Young’s ambulance offered merciful assistance in a bitter winter conflict. The invaders, in this case, were the very Italians that Hemingway had joined and the battle with Greece, by the time Young arrived, was in the Korça basin-a fertile tract of southeast Albania that the Greeks still knew as Koritsa (its name before it was handed to Albania). Allen speculates that it was his father’s noblesse oblige as president of the New Jersey chapter of the American Red Cross which shaped Young’s decision to pay for an ambulance, christened Iaso, and set out like Ernest Hemingway had 23 years earlier to support his adopted country against the invaders. Young was the “coddled child of the gilded age,” heir to the Ballantine Ale fortune, who had studied classical archaeology at Columbia and Princeton before he joined the American School. The second story tells the largely underwhelming history of OSS’s Cairo desk, run by Young, with his hand-picked operatives largely from the world of American classical archaeology. He is the Hemingway-esque hero of this book, the archaeologist whose personality and daring capture the reader’s commitment to the end. The first is a sketchy but compelling biography of Rodney Young, the post-war Penn Museum Professor of Classical Archaeology who excavated Gordion and found what was believed to be the great tomb of Midas.
Susan Heuck Allen’s book about these American spies ventures boldly to tell this story, mixing heroism with an uncomfortable litany of institutional compromises and missed opportunities.Ĭlassical Spies is really two connected stories. By contrast, until now the part played by their American counterparts in the OSS has remained a history in search of a narrator. Two stand out: the Olympian John Pendlebury, deputy to Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos, wounded then executed in defense of Crete in 1941 and Nicholas Hammond who narrowly escaped the Cretan debacle to become a pivotal player in the British SOE missions to mainland Greece and Albania. Their “cousins” in the British School at Athens, notwithstanding the imperial values of the British government, harbored crusading archaeologists whose names have lived on long after the end of the conflicts. The Americans would not have been alone in this idealism. For the American fellows, the romantic notion of aiding Grecian democracy (and the Greeks) must have been a frequent topic of discussion, especially once WWII began. Greece, after all, in the 1930s was on the verge of fascism under Prime Minister Metaxas and profoundly suffering as a result. For the Americans, steeped in the benign liberalism of FDR’s era, the crusading prospect of confronting fascism or even, in some cases, communism must have been compelling. Lawrence as the prospect of a new war in the central and eastern Mediterranean came ever closer. Doubtless during the 1930s, the fellows of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens would have discussed the contribution of English archaeological spies like J.L. by Susan Heuck AllenĪrchaeologists have long played a part in clandestine wartime adventures. 448 pp., 17 photographs, 2 maps, hardcover, $40.00, ISBN 978-9-7 Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece. Classical Spies: America n Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece by Susan Heuck Allen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
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