After he graduated from Dartmouth, Col. Florimond “Duke” DuSossoit flew fighters in World War I, tackled opponents in the NFL, and made his fortune on Madison Avenue. But on April 7, 1944, he sat half-starved in an underground cell, waiting for the Nazis to extract his secrets.
He heard boots in the corridor, a slammed door, screaming. The Gestapo was at work again. Duke figured his turn was coming. Washington, D.C., had already listed him missing, presumed dead, along with his two comrades.
Guards pulled him from the cell and shoved him into an interrogation room where an iron ring hung on a bloodstained wall. The interrogator glared in silence, then spoke in English: “All three of you will be shot tomorrow.”
Duke lifted his chin. He wanted the German to wonder what kind of prisoner refused to beg.
“You don’t dare shoot us,” Duke would later recall saying. “We surrendered in U.S. Army uniforms. As prisoners of war, we are protected by the Geneva Convention.”
The Nazi exploded out of his chair, drew his pistol, and leveled it at Duke’s head. “You are not prisoners of war! You are spies!”
Duke held his stare. Between now and D-Day, he and Operation Sparrow had to sell a noble lie, convincing Adolf Hitler the Allied invasion would strike southeastern Europe, a thousand miles from the real target in Normandy, France. If Duke succeeded, the Wehrmacht would be looking the wrong way on June 6, 1944. If he failed, D-Day would be a slaughter.
You don’t dare shoot us,” Duke would later recall saying. “We surrendered in uniform.”
Tall and square-jawed, Duke was described by the 1916 Springfield Republican as the “college strong man” and “a tower of defensive strength.” His teammates nicknamed him Duke and made him captain.
But he didn’t play his senior year. When the first armed American unit headed to France to fight in World War I, Duke was on the ship. He drove ammunition trucks for the French through artillery fire, then joined the 1st Aero Squadron, America’s original air force.
After the war, as his Dartmouth classmates filed into mahogany-paneled offices, Duke signed with the original New York Giants football team, lining up across from renowned former Olympian Jim Thorpe in a game where helmets were still optional.
When the franchise folded, Duke moved to Manhattan, joined Time Inc., and by 1929 was the first advertising director of Fortune magazine. He was known as a clean-living man in an industry of liquor and exaggeration. He changed his French-Belgian surname to Duke a month before the Wall Street crash of 1929, then steered through the Great Depression toward the coming golden age of advertising.
By the eve of World War II, Duke was a wealthy, middle-aged veteran who didn’t have to fight again. But when the Nazis threatened America, he volunteered anyway. By 1942, he was in the new U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II equivalent of today’s Special Forces and CIA combined. By December 1943, he ran the southeast European section for OSS. He coordinated intelligence from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and served as case officer for the war’s highest-ranking German double agent, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr counterintelligence agency.
As a result, Duke knew countless secrets. His mind wasn’t one intelligence file; it was a whole filing cabinet. Which is what made what happened next look insane: He volunteered to be arrested by the Nazis to sell the lie that could change D-Day. Of the millions who fought in the war, his team at Operation Sparrow was the only one meant to be captured.
In the months before D-Day, the Allies approved the top-secret plan to deceive Hitler about where the invasion would land. Three American commandos, led by Duke, would parachute into Nazi-aligned Hungary, where the leader, Miklos Horthy, was secretly fishing for a way out of Hitler’s war.
Duke’s cover story was that his team had accidentally landed in Hungary when it was aiming for Yugoslavia. His secret job: get caught and then, under Nazi questioning, make a southeastern Allied landing sound real. The prize was enormous: 826,000 German troops would be pinned in the Balkans waiting for an attack that would never come. And they would not be shooting at the Allied forces as they hit the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
Duke wasn’t originally slated to lead Operation Sparrow because he knew too many secrets. But in February 1944, Hitler fired Canaris, the intelligence chief who was a double agent. OSS networks that had worked under the admiral’s tacit protection suddenly became vulnerable, and Duke asked to be sent behind enemy lines, arguing he would face no more peril than the other agents. Allied spy cells in the southeast were dead men walking—silent, they’d be picked off one by one for no Allied advantage; loud, they could sell the Balkans and mislead the Wehrmacht regarding D-Day.
Duke knew it was only fair to take the same risk as others, and OSS agreed to the dangerous gamble. His capture would look to the Nazis like the Americans had made a catastrophic mistake, because no intelligence service would risk sending a top colonel straight into enemy hands.
Duke was 48 and had no parachute experience. Still, on the night of March 15, 1944, a Royal Air Force bomber carried the Sparrows to the Hungarian frontier and Duke leapt into the dark.
Within days, Hitler ordered 100,000 troops into Hungary to find the infiltrators. Duke’s team was soon arrested by the Gestapo. That’s how a Dartmouth man came to be in an underground prison staring down a Luger.
Despite being tortured with starvation, mock executions, and solitary confinement, he didn’t break. Duke’s interrogation stretched across months in one brutal prison after another before the Sparrows were finally sent to Colditz Castle, the POW camp for dangerous officers. In April 1945, with U.S. tanks across the river and the Schutzstaffel, or SS, preparing to massacre the prisoners, Duke, as senior American officer, negotiated the castle’s surrender.
The lie had held. The Madison Avenue executive had pulled off one of the greatest advertising campaigns in the history of war. On D-Day, the Wehrmacht’s southeast divisions stayed where Hitler had put them, a thousand miles from Normandy, convinced that another invasion was coming.
After the war, Duke founded an ad agency with offices in New York City and Toronto, bought a farm in New Hampshire, and served as a state representative. He wrote a brief memoir but official secrecy meant he could not tell the full story: Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain, and the Hungarian democrats who had fought the Nazis were now organizing against the Soviets.
Duke died in Arizona on April 4, 1969. Today, 80 years after the Nuremberg verdicts brought some measure of justice to the Nazis, one of the men who helped make them possible remains virtually unknown.
He is buried in Hanover Center, a few miles from the Big Green football field where his teammates elected him captain.
Jason Bell is author of Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War, drawn from recently declassified files.
