This Military Service Page was created/owned by
CW3 Richard Doty
to remember
Magruder, John, BG USA(Ret).
If you knew or served with this Soldier and have additional information or photos to support this Page, please leave a message for the Page Administrator(s) HERE.
Contact Info
Home Town Woodstock, Virginia
Last Address Unknown
Date of Passing Apr 30, 1958
Location of Interment Arlington National Cemetery (VLM) - Arlington, Virginia
John Magruder (June 3, 1887 - April 30, 1958) was a Brigadier general in the U.S. Army. Among his offices was that of Deputy Director for Intelligence for the Office of Strategic Services.
John Magruder was born on June 3, 1887 in Woodstock, Virginia. He attended the Virginia Military Institute and graduate in 1909. He was commissioned a Second lieutenant in Infantry in 1910. He was transferred to the Field Artillery branch of the Army in the next year.
During the World War I, Magruder served with the 112th Field Artillery within the American Expeditionary Forces in France. Magruder was transferred to China after war, where he was appointed an Assistant Military Attaché in Beijing. He served in this capacity until 1924, when he was assigned for study at Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
After his graduation, Magruder was transferred back to Beijing, now in the new capacity of Military Attaché.
During WWII Magruder served as Donovan's Deputy Director for Intelligence in the OSS.
In October 1945 the OSS was dissolved and its functions were split between the Departments of State and War. State received the Research and Analysis Branch of OSS which was renamed the Interim Research and Intelligence Service (IRIS) and headed by Alfred McCormack. The Department of War took over the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-espionage (X-2) Branches of the OSS that were housed in a new office created for just this purpose - The Strategic Services Unit (SSU). The Secretary of War appointed Brigadier General John Magruder as director to oversee the liquidation, and more importantly the preservation of the OSS' clandestine intelligence capability.
Magruder received his assignment from John McCloy:
"This assignment of the OSS activities...is a method of carrying out the desire of the President, as indicated by representatives of the Bureau of the Budget, that these facilities of OSS be examined over the next three months with a view to determining their appropriate disposition. Obviously, this will demand close liaison with the Bureau of the Budget, the State Department, and other agencies of the War Department, to insure that the facilities and assets of OSS are preserved for any possible future use....The situation is one in which the facilities of an organization, normally shrinking in size as a result of the end of fighting, must be preserved so far as potentially of future usefulness to the country."
The following day, Robert P. Patterson, the new Secretary of War, confirmed this directive and endorsed McCloy's interpretation, formally ordering Magruder to "preserve as a unit such of these functions and facilities as are valuable for permanent peacetime purposes". With this order, Patterson postponed indefinitely any assimilation of OSS's records and personnel into the War Department's G-2.
General Magruder soon had to explain this unorthodox arrangement to sharp-eyed Congressmen and staff. Rep. Clarence Cannon, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, asked Magruder on 2 October about the OSS contingents sent to the State and War Departments and the plans for the OSS's unspent funds (ca. $4.5 million). Magruder explained that he did not quite know what the State Department would do with Research and Analysis (R&A). When Cannon asked about the War Department's contingent, the general read ou loud from the Secretary of War's order to preserve OSS's more valuable functions "as a unit."3 Two weeks later, staffers from the House Military Affairs Committee asked why the War Department suddenly needed both SSU and the G-2:
"General Magruder explained that he had no orders to liquidate OSS (other than, of course, those functions without any peacetime significance) and that only the Assistant Secretary of War (McCloy) could explain why OSS had been absorbed into the War Department on the basis indicated. He said he felt, however,...that the objective was to retain SSU intact until the Secretary of State had surveyed the intelligence field and made recommendations to the President.The committee Committee conceded with the arrangement but hinted that both SSU and the remnant of R&A in the State Department ought to be "considerably reduced in size."
"To keep morale high despite the thousands of dismissals, General Magruder told his lieutenants in autumn 1945 that SSU was quietly winning friends in high places, but repeatedly pointed out the need for discretion, noting that "some people" did not like SSU "and the less said about (the Unit) the better."
Instead of reducing the budget of both IRIS and SSU the Truman administration eventually convinced Congress to increase funding for both pieces of OSS.
Shadow Warriors: The OSS
The Office of Strategic Services was the product of Major General William O. Donovan, an energetic visionary whose propensity for freewheeling activity earned him the nickname ?Wild Bill.? Donovan was a tough and smart veteran of World War I who received the Medal of Honor for heroism on the Western Front in October 1918, and who made a fortune as a Wall Street lawyer during the 1920s and ?30s. When World War II erupted in Europe and threatened to engulf the United States, Donovan convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt that a new type of organization was needed, one that would collect intelligence and wage secret operations behind enemy lines.
In 1941, President Roosevelt directed Donovan to form this agency, called the Coordinator of Information, or COI, and Donovan, who had been a civilian since World War I, was reinstated as a colonel. COI blossomed quickly, establishing operational sites in England, North Africa, India, Burma and China. In 1942, the agency was renamed the OSS. Donovan became a major general in 1944. The primary combat operations of the OSS in Europe were those of the Jedburgh?s missions and the Operational Groups. The Jedburgh mission consisted of parachuting three-man multinational teams into France, Belgium and Holland, where they trained partisan resistance movements and conducted guerrilla operations against the Germans. The OGs were 34-man elements designed to operate in two sections and perform sabotage missions and raids behind enemy lines. Other OSS operations took place in Asia, most spectacularly in Burma, where OSS Detachment 101 organized 11,000 Kachin tribesmen into a force that eventually killed 10,000 Japanese with a minimal loss of its own. Other OSS detachments operated in China and Southeast Asia. Soldiers John K. Singlaub, Caesar Civitella and Herbert Brucker were among the many former OSS members who later served in Special Forces. After the war, President Harry S. Truman disbanded the OSS, but not before creating a legacy still felt today. Many veterans of OSS were part of the cadre of the early SF groups.
