J. D. Salinger served as a counterintelligence agent

Person: J. D. Salinger
Lived: 1919–2010
Field: Novelist
From: American

The story

Before the war, J. D. Salinger's father had sent him to Europe to learn the import trade, and he spent time working in Vienna and in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He returned with good French and German, skills that the army would put to use after he was drafted in 1942.

Salinger was assigned to counterintelligence, part of the network of Military Intelligence Service soldiers sometimes known as the Ritchie Boys after their secret training centre, Camp Ritchie in Maryland. Around 20,000 servicemen and 2,000 women passed through it. Many were German-speaking immigrants, often Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, chosen for their languages. They were trained in interrogation, investigation and psychological warfare, and many went on to serve in the Counter Intelligence Corps. With the 4th Infantry Division, from Utah Beach to the Battle of the Bulge, Salinger used his languages to interrogate prisoners of war.

In April 1945 he entered Kaufering IV, part of the Kaufering complex of eleven subcamps of Dachau, the largest of Dachau's subcamp systems and the one with the worst conditions. About half of its roughly 30,000 prisoners, many of them Jews forced to build huge underground aircraft bunkers, died. The Jewish Virtual Library records that Salinger witnessed the liberation of Dachau and assisted the Allies in the hunt for Nazi war criminals.

The war affected him deeply. After Germany's defeat he spent a few weeks in a civilian hospital in Nuremberg for combat stress, then signed up for a further six months of denazification duty in Germany with the Counterintelligence Corps, living in Weißenburg in Bavaria. He later told his daughter that the smell of burning flesh never entirely leaves you, however long you live.

Biographers believe he drew on these experiences in stories such as "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor", whose narrator, Sergeant X, is stationed in Bavaria after victory in Europe and is recovering from a breakdown. Salinger reached the rank of staff sergeant and served in five campaigns.

Why it matters

Salinger's intelligence work helped the Allies root out Nazi war criminals at the end of the war, and his fiction kept the war's human cost before readers.

About J. D. Salinger

Author of The Catcher in the Rye, whose voice of adolescent alienation spoke for generations of readers, before he withdrew from public life for more than half a century.

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J. D. Salinger

1919–2010 · Novelist

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