This American Commando Parachuted Behind Enemy Lines in Both the European and Pacific Theaters of World War II

When Francis Lowell Coolidge parachuted into Nazi-occupied France on a secret mission in August 1944, he understood the risks. Then 37 years old, the great-great-great-grandson of President Thomas Jefferson was a captain in the United States Army Air Forces and a combat veteran of the French Foreign Legion. Eager to put his skills as a French-speaking, parachute-trained officer to use in the Allies’ fight to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis, Coolidge had requested a transfer to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s World War II forerunner to the CIA, the previous year.

By the summer of 1944, Coolidge was a member of the OSS’s elite Special Operations branch in England. There, he reconnected with a familiar face: Peter J. Ortiz, a fellow enlisted officer from his French Foreign Legion days in North Africa.

A Marine Corps major attached to the OSS, Ortiz had recently returned to England after supporting the French Resistance behind enemy lines on a mission code-named Union I. Now, he was planning his next deep-penetration operation, Union II—and he wanted Coolidge to join him. Coolidge, Ortiz and five other OSS operatives planned to jump out of a B-17 heavy bomber flying less than 500 feet above the ground—a perilously low altitude—and land on a drop zone in the Col des Saisies mountain pass, inside occupied France.

They would be accompanied by an armada of 78 B-17s transporting 864 containers of munitions and supplies to a resistance unit known as the Bulle Battalion, after its leader, the Free French officer Jean Bulle. Before Coolidge left, he wrote a five-page letter to his wife, Helen Curtis Coolidge, to be given to her if he failed to come home. The couple had married in their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, four years earlier.

While Coolidge parachuted into France, Helen stayed behind in Concord with their young daughters, Georgina (nicknamed “Nina”) and Mary (nicknamed “Cuppy”). Because of the clandestine nature of the OSS, Coolidge was limited in what he could reveal to his wife. His missive, now published by Smithsonian magazine for the first time, is a poignant testament to the trials faced by families separated by war.

You gave me so much, and I gave so little in return. You gave me a purpose and a meaning that I never had before. Thank you, darling, for all that you have done.” This job for which I gave my life was a worthy one.