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largely to Paris for the rest of the active part of the European War, although I went on a lot of trips to all sorts of places, including Marseilles and Bordeaux and out to Alsace and Strasbourg and so on. But my work was closely involved with both British and French, and therefore, in answer to your question, the decorations, such as they were, were in recognition of very close and very friendly cooperation with the two services, and the American one, I guess, was for the same kind in our own service. One of them represents any especially heroic action, although - not, that's right. That's what they were for.

[Note added by JBO on rereading this in 1996, supplementing above: However, I did engage in some armed or combat action: once, in midsummer 1944, when Maj. Christopher Harmer (Br.) and I personally raided a house in Granville (Normandy), and seized and captured (we were fully armed and in uniform, of course) a “stay-behind” German agent who had been transmitting espionage data to the German intelligence HQ; later, in winter (Feb.) 1945, on the Battle of the Gironde below Bordeaux, when I commanded a small detachment of OSS troops (in uniform) and French “freedom fighters” (FFI) in capturing a German intelligence officer whom we had enticed into landing, supposedly to meet one of his agents. Unfortunately, a firefight broke out, the German was killed, and the 203 Germans in the boat that had brought him upriver from Royan (still in German hands) were wounded and captured. We suffered 50 casualties in either of the above incidents, but I guess that at least one or two of the decorations mentioned above were related to one or both of the above combat incidents.]

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