Photo By Lori Stewart | German prisoners of war in a barbed-wire enclosure on Utah Beach, Jun. 6, 1944.... read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
ORDER OF BATTLE TEAM #6 LANDS ON UTAH BEACH
On the morning of Jun. 6, 1944, four infantry divisions of Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins’ VII Corps stormed onto Utah Beach. Part of the landing force was the corps’ three-man Order of Battle (OB) Team #6, led by Lt. Alexander Blazevicius.
Specialized order of battle training had begun at the Military Intelligence Training Center (MITC) at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, in the spring of 1943. Graduates of the inaugural class were sent to the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) in Washington, D.C. For the second class, MITC personnel conducted interviews of all students fluent in the German language. The top students began the four-week OB course immediately after completing their eight-week general intelligence course. The OB course’s main textbook was an early version of the Order of Battle of the German Army, published by the MID. Better known as the “Red Book,” this publication immersed the students in “all known information of the enemy army”: unit identifications and organizations, weaponry and equipment, uniforms, rank, and insignias. Additionally, the students pored over actual captured documents, learning how to extract from them the minutest of detail about the enemy armies.
Following the course, the students were organized into the Army’s first six OB Teams, each one manned with one officer and two master sergeants. All six teams set sail for England on Nov. 11, 1943. Once in London, the teams received additional briefings from British intelligence on German order of battle before being assigned to their units.
Lieutenant Blazevicius’s OB Team #6 was attached to Lt. Col. Goodwin’s G-2 Section in VII Corps headquarters. Thirty-one-year-old Blazevicius had been born in Connecticut and did his post-graduate studies (medicine and law) in Lithuania and Poland. One of his noncommissioned officers was 26-year-old Max Oppenheimer, Jr., who had been born in the United States but spent much of his childhood in Germany and France. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942 but, because of his fluency in German, French, and Spanish, soon found himself transferred to the MITC.
One of the first tasks given to OB Team #6 was assisting with Exercise TIGER, a pre-invasion amphibious landing training held in late April 1944 for American forces slated to land on Utah Beach on D-Day. Blazevicius’s team developed scripts that were memorized by the soldiers role-playing as “enemy prisoners of war.” During mock interrogations, these soldiers would provide their “imaginary intelligence” to interrogators, allowing the units to analyze how well intelligence was collected and then disseminated.
Following Exercise TIGER, OB Team #6 joined other VII Corps personnel at Rear Admiral Don P. Moon’s task group headquarters at Falmouth. There, the team assisted in planning the Utah Beach landings by providing what turned out to be a remarkably accurate picture of the German forces expected to oppose the assault. On Jun. 6, after coming ashore under fire, the team continued compiling OB information about the enemy. Some of their data came from interrogation reports, but they found documents obtained from killed and captured soldiers to be the most valuable sources of information. Pay books, personal correspondence, maps, and other items provided significant information on German troop positions, minefield locations, and gun emplacements. Throughout the rest of the war, OB Team #6 continued to refine its understanding of the German army, contributing information to the VII Corps G-2’s daily reports and plotting it on large colored situation maps for General Lawton and his planners.
Notably, while OB teams made up the smallest percentage of the specialty intelligence personnel (including photo interpreters, interpreters, and interrogators) deployed to the European theater, they were highly regarded. A postwar analysis of the use of intelligence personnel stated, “Although Order of Battle Teams were not intelligence collecting agencies, they were, in the opinion of a majority of the G-2 officers consulted, the most valuable teams of the Military Intelligence Service.”
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| Date Taken: | 05.30.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 05.30.2025 15:20 |
| Story ID: | 499325 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 19 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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