Arthur Gruen

Arthur Gruen was born Arthur F. Sovak in 1914, the only child of Birgith (Betty) L. Stousland and Francis W. Sovak, a prominent New York City physician who pioneered a surgical treatment of sterility, and who, according to a newspaper report of his death in 1939, was a member of the Nobel Prize committee for medicine in 1935. Arthur’s parents separated within three years of his birth, and within six their marriage had ended in an acrimonious, well-publicized divorce that appears to have left Arthur estranged from his father, judging from the fact that as an adult he never used his middle initial, which, presumably, had stood for his father’s first name. In 1921, Arthur’s mother married stockbroker Sidney Roy Gruen, whose surname had been changed to Gruen from Gruenebaum. Sidney Gruen prospered as a stockbroker: the family’s address was in an affluent neighborhood near Central Park, and there is evidence the family frequently traveled to Europe. In October of 1930, Sidney Gruen took a room at the New York Athletic Club, of which he was a member, and there shot and killed himself. He left notes attributing his suicide to a painful seven-year ordeal of suffering from neuralgia, for the treatment of which he recently had been released from hospital care. The family’s financial situation appears not to have been altered by the death of Mr. Gruen, judging from the Park Avenue address of Mrs. Gruen (who never remarried), which Arthur listed as his Home of Record during his WWII Army service.

Arthur enlisted in the Army in September 1942 and was assigned to the Signal Corps, where he trained as a radio operator. In October of 1943, he was recruited into the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, where he was among about 100 personnel selected for Operation JEDBURGH. After receiving specialized training at sites in the United States, the men traveled to England in December 1943 aboard the Queen Elizabeth, which served as a troop transport during the war. There and at sites in Scotland the men received additional training, including parachuting. In addition to imparting and honing skills, the training served as a selection process to ensure the suitability of the men for the task ahead.

By the time Operation JEDBURGH came to fruition its mission was to insert 3-man teams primarily into occupied France immediately following the Allied invasions for the purpose of coordinating the activities of the French resistance (Maquis) with those of the invading Allies. The operational personnel of JEDBURGH comprised roughly 100 each British, French, and American personnel, along with five Dutchmen, five Belgians and two Canadians. Each 3-man team comprised two officers, one of whom was of the nationality of the target country (usually France), and one radio operator. Eventually, 101 teams would be deployed – 93 to France; 8 to Holland.  All but 25 of the teams were deployed from England into northern France or Holland in support of the Allied forces that invaded France across the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. The 25 that did not were sent to Algiers, from which they would deploy into southern France to support the Allied invasion there of August 15, 1944.

Among the 25 teams to deploy from Algiers was the team codenamed MILES, led by an American, Captain E. T. Allen, and including a Frenchman, Lt. P. Fourcade, and Sgt. Arthur Gruen as radio operator. Shortly after midnight on August 16, the three men of Team MILES parachuted from a B-24 Liberator into occupied southwestern France near Mont-de-Marsan, there to be met by elements of the local Maquis. For ten weeks, until the region came under Allied control, the team fought alongside the Maquis in conducting harassing attacks on German troops. At the end of October 1944, the team was withdrawn, first to Paris and then to England.

Upon completion of Operation JEDBURGH, the OSS men had been offered leave in the States if they volunteered for service in China. Many, including Sgt. Gruen, accepted. Sgt. Gruen’s OSS evaluation assessing his suitability for assignment to China rated his performance in France as "superior" and included the following: “An unusually intellectual sergeant... He was educated in New York City and in Switzerland. Did not finish college, but has read widely and with discrimination. As a mobile radio operator in Southern France he saw a good deal of action... Wants to write books after the war. A good man.” 

Gruen was among the volunteers who left the States for OSS assignments in China in early 1945. There Gruen, now a Master Sergeant, was part of a 4-man Special Operations team assigned to work with a group of about 80 Chinese guerrillas that conducted operations against the Japanese in southern Hunan province and northern French Indo-China. After the end of hostilities with Japan, Gruen returned to the US and was discharged from the Army in December 1945.

 Nothing is known of Arthur Gruen’s life after World War II, though it is reasonable to assume that he returned to New York City, where his mother lived until her death in 1973. Around the 1970s, the American Jedburgh veterans formed an organization and sought to locate or account for the participants of Operation JEDBURGH, and they subsequently held reunions. Efforts to locate Arthur Gruen were unsuccessful, and it was widely assumed among his comrades that he had died years before. But, in fact, he outlived many of them, though in what circumstances, given his final resting place, one can only conjecture.