Before there were Green Berets, there were the Operational Groups. In Donovan’s Devils: OSS Commandos Behind Enemy Lines — Europe, World War II, Albert Lulushi recovers the little-known story of the Office of Strategic Services’ Operational Groups (OGs) — uniformed teams of American soldiers who infiltrated by air and sea into Italy, France, and the Balkans, operating for days, weeks, or months hundreds of miles from the nearest Allied troops. They conducted raids and ambushes, sabotaged infrastructure, organized native resistance, and rescued downed airmen and prisoners of war. The popular image of the OSS runs to cloak-and-dagger spies and well-connected Ivy Leaguers — the “Oh So Social” — but Lulushi tells the story of a different OSS: ordinary soldiers, most of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who volunteered for duty from which their enemy would show no mercy. They were the direct ancestors of today’s Army Special Forces.
Lulushi is an unusual and well-suited chronicler. A native of Albania who fled to the West, he built a career in information technology while writing deeply researched intelligence histories; his prior book, Operation Valuable Fiend, chronicled the CIA’s first paramilitary operation. For Donovan’s Devils he worked from declassified OSS records, personal collections, and oral histories gathered from participants on both sides of the conflict — and the CIA’s own chief historian has credited the book with finally giving the OGs their proper place in OSS history, alongside the better-known Jedburgh teams.
For the capability development professional, the OGs are a case study in building an unconventional force from nothing. General William Donovan’s organization had to invent, in wartime, everything a new formation requires: a recruiting model (language skill and heritage as selection criteria — Italian-Americans for Italy, Franco-Americans for France, Greek- and Yugoslav-Americans for the Balkans), a training pipeline for skills no Army school taught, insertion and sustainment methods for teams beyond any supporting range, and command relationships with theater commanders who often neither understood nor wanted them. Every modern leader who has stood up a new organization — a battle lab, a cross-functional team, a software factory — will recognize the pattern: ambiguous authorities, skeptical stakeholders, improvised doctrine, and results as the only argument that wins.
The book’s gravitational center is the ill-fated Ginny mission — fifteen Italian-American OG soldiers captured on the Ligurian coast in March 1944 and executed under Hitler’s infamous Commando Order, one of the gravest losses in OSS history. Lulushi’s detailed reconstruction, extending through the postwar war-crimes trial of the German general who ordered the executions, raises questions that remain live today: the legal status of uniformed soldiers conducting special operations, the treatment of captured operators, and accountability for orders that violate the laws of war. In an era when special operations forces carry an outsized share of the national security burden, the Ginny story is a sobering reminder of what the profession asks of its quiet professionals — and of the immigrant soldiers who proved their Americanness in the most unforgiving way possible.
An honest critique: Lulushi’s strength — exhaustive operational detail — occasionally becomes his weakness, as mission narratives accumulate names, dates, and coordinates at a density that can slow the general reader. And the closing section on the postwar murder of an OSS officer, while intriguing, sits awkwardly against the rest of the book — a true-crime coda to a unit history. These are quibbles against the book’s achievement: no fuller account of the Operational Groups exists.
In summary, Donovan’s Devils rescues from obscurity the soldiers who wrote the first chapter of American special operations. For the historian, it fills a genuine gap; for the practitioner, it offers a founding case study in capability creation under pressure — selection, training, employment, and the price paid when things go wrong. Read it alongside the SOF truths it anticipates: humans are more important than hardware, quality is better than quantity, and competent forces cannot be created after emergencies occur. The OGs proved all three, eighty years before anyone wrote them down.