Medal of Honor

Story

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was officially established in June 1942 under the leadership of General “Wild Bill” Donovan. If there was ever a time when the romantic notions of life as a spy became a reality, it was undoubtedly during the OSS era. Young men and women, often recruited straight out of college, plunged into the mysterious world of wartime intelligence. It was an exciting and dangerous time, and as the war progressed, so did the OSS’s mission. Sabotage, search-and-rescue operations, and subversion became part of the organization’s daily operations. During this time, a young lieutenant in the Air Transport Corps stepped onto the scene and changed the OSS forever. On June 5, 1944—the night before the D-Day invasion—the Allied command launched the largest troop airdrop in history to that point. It was a total disaster. Many planes missed their targets, were shot down, or crashed due to bad weather. One pilot, however, managed to bring the regiment he was transporting to the correct drop zone before his C-47 transport plane was forced to land by enemy fire. That pilot was Jimmy Patterson, an unassuming 24-year-old from Carthage, Missouri. Patterson heroically protected his wounded crew from a roaming German patrol and single-handedly took out half a dozen Wehrmacht soldiers before help arrived. For his actions, he was nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor—the nation’s highest military decoration. But just days before he was to be sent back to the United States for a War Bonds tour, Patterson vanished from his hospital bed. “Medal of Honor” tells the story of what happened next.