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In his memoirs, the anthropologist Carleton Coon wanted to set one thing straight: The explosives his team of Arab saboteurs used to blow up German tanks were not, as Time magazine once erroneously reported, fake camel turds. They were fake mule turds.

Few people back then knew what an anthropologist was, much less why one should be any use in fighting a war. Coon, a Harvard professor who had done his Ph.D. thesis on the Riff tribes of Morocco, tried early on to sell his services to army intelligence and got “a polite brush-off.” But the world was a lot smaller then, and one November day in 1941—it was just before the Harvard-Yale game, when one more “tall, dignified, elderly gentleman wearing a blue serge suit” would hardly attract notice amid the multitude of loyal alumni swarming the campus—such a man knocked on Coon’s office door.

“First he swore me to utter secrecy,” Coon recalled, “then he told me more about myself than I had dreamed anyone else could know. Then he informed me that I had been chosen to be the Lawrence of Morocco.”

Although Coon’s direct military experience amounted to listening to his grandfather’s Civil War stories and setting off the Fourth of July fireworks on the town common as a boy in Wakefield, Massachusetts, his subsequent resumé could have been the model for Indiana Jones. He had learned Egyptian hieroglyphics well enough while still a student at Phillips Andover to attract a crowd in front of Cleopatra’s Needle in Paris, when his father, who had taken him to Europe one summer, demanded that he translate the inscription by sight. (“Although this attention greatly pleased my father, it made me feel like jumping into the Seine,” Coon said.) In college—to his roommate’s considerable annoyance—he spent hours reciting Arabic prayers, fantasizing about passing as a native Muslim if ever put to the test with his life in the balance. As a field anthropologist he had rattled over wild tracks in Morocco in a Model T Ford packed with tents and digging tools, trekked on zigzagging mountain paths with foot-wide ledges and sheer drop-offs, extricated himself from delicate encounters with tribal sheiks, explored caves, sailed on creaky Arab dhows, and, back at Harvard, found himself consulted with alarming frequency by his Radcliffe students for advice with their personal troubles, “mostly concerned with amorous affairs, or just plain sex.”

His official job description from his new employer, the OSS, read like a parody, except that it described exactly what he proceeded to do. “He will be sent to the Near East Theater for special subversive and demolition work. He will be responsible for physical subversion in enemy or enemy occupied or controlled territory. He will promote, organize, and equip partisan groups and operational nuclei for guerilla warfare.”

One of Coon’s first assignments was “to teach some Arabs to blow up railroad tracks, a form of academic instruction of which the French took an exceedingly dim view, for they were thinking of the postwar future.” He bribed a local mullah with fifty thousand francs to ensure cooperation; he and a colleague produced a very free Arabic translation of FDR’s speech announcing the Allied invasion and asking for the citizenry’s support. “Every time Mr. Roosevelt mentioned God once,” Coon noted, “we named him six times.” And having noticed that mule deposits were the one reliable feature found on all Moroccan roads, he scooped up as many as he could, carefully wrapped them, sent them to London in the British diplomatic pouch, and received back via Gibraltar perfect plastic-explosive facsimiles thereof. “The mule’s revenge on the motor vehicle,” was Coon’s elegant encomium.

As David Price notes in his new book Anthropological Intelligence, some two dozen anthropologists worked for the OSS in the course of the war; all were academics recruited for their unique and intimate on-the-ground knowledge, language skills, and personal contacts in regions where Allied forces operated. In a 1945 memorandum urging that the OSS become a permanent force to anticipate and preempt the rise of another Hitler anywhere in the world, Coon wrote: “We have, by a combination of historical accident and of selection, assembled a group of versatile and bold individuals the like of which has not been brought together for many centuries.”

The bureaucracy of cold war America, alas, could never equal the great “historical accident” of World War II that brought together that unique assemblage of scientists, artists, writers, and assorted other very unmilitary thinkers who in their own ways helped defeat Hitler.

 

Originally published in the May 2008 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here