Brookline native Florimond Duke at the German POW camp Oflag. Photo courtesy Jason Bell and Harper Collins.
A Brookline High School athlete who went on to become an OSS intelligence chief, and volunteered for a strange and dangerous mission during World War II, is getting his story told in a new book.
“Operation Sparrow,” by University of New Brunswick professor Jason Bell, tells the story of Florimond Duke, a Brookline native, Dartmouth football captain and later advertising executive, who in 1944 parachuted into Nazi-occupied Hungary as part of a three-man mission.
Their objective? Be captured and interrogated by the Germans.
The mission worked and, according to Bell, played a significant and largely unrecognized role in the success of D-Day.
Born to Belgian immigrant parents, Duke was a football, hockey, track and gymnastics star in Brookline before enrolling at Dartmouth. He left campus before finishing his senior year to volunteer for World War I, quickly rising from private to officer.
After the war, he played a season in the NFL with the New York Giants before building a career in advertising, eventually becoming the advertising director for Time Inc.
When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Duke volunteered again, leveraging his French language skills and prior intelligence work to join the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. He rose quickly to head the agency’s entire southeastern European branch.
Bell, who lived in Massachusetts for several years and taught many students from the same immigration generation as Duke’s family, said the story resonated with him partly as a portrait of the immigrant experience in the state.
“If not for that, Florimond Duke couldn’t have been raised there, and wouldn’t have been in a position to beat the Nazis,” he said.
The operation at the heart of the book, codenamed Sparrow, sent Duke and two other agents, Alfred Suarez and Guy Nunn, into Hungary with orders to let themselves be caught.
Once in German custody, Duke slowly “revealed” fabricated Allied invasion plans, feeding the Nazis a false narrative that a major invasion was coming through southeastern Europe.
That deception was part of the broader Operation Bodyguard, the umbrella campaign designed to mislead Hitler about the true location of the Normandy landings.
Bell said the payoff was staggering. Nearly a million German troops, along with millions more Axis soldiers, were tied down in southeastern Europe, compared to just 50,000 defending Normandy.
Unlike the more famous northwestern deception operations like “Operation Mincemeat,” the Sparrow mission unfolded in territory that fell under Soviet control after the war, which Bell said is largely why it faded from public memory.
Some documents related to the mission remained classified for decades. Bell said he successfully petitioned to have additional material declassified while researching the book, though certain names and details still remain sealed.
Duke, Suarez and Nunn spent much of their captivity in solitary confinement, later housed together at a castle that narrowly avoided being leveled by American artillery in the war’s final days. Its POW status was only discovered when soldiers spotted homemade Allied flags hanging from the windows.
The cover of ‘Operation Sparrow,’ Jason Bell’s new book about a World War II operation. Photo courtesy HarperCollins
The OSS Society, a nonprofit that preserves the history of the OSS and its successor agencies, sees Sparrow as emblematic of the organization’s broader wartime contribution.
Charles Pinck, the society’s president, said the OSS’s contributions to the war have never gotten the recognition they deserved.
Pinck said the enduring lesson of missions like Sparrow is what a handful of the right people can accomplish.
“There was an OSS veteran who some years ago said OSS was the greatest collection of people in the history of the world, and that’s not hyperbole, it truly was,” he said.
For Bell, the story carries a message beyond history. Duke was a conservative Republican, Nunn a liberal Democrat, and Suarez further left. Yet the three set aside their political differences to complete the mission.
“People who support democracy need to be able to band together to fight evil,” he said.
Mia Council, an editor at HarperCollins who oversaw “Operation Sparrow” said the book taps into the evergreen appetite among readers for World War II stories, particularly the kind that reveal hidden operations behind well-known outcomes.
“There’s so many people that are still so interested in World War II as this kind of archetypal conflict between good and evil,” Council said. “This book gets at the American personalities that were at the center of the operation.”
Signed copies of “Operation Sparrow” will be available at Brookline Booksmith the evening of September 29, the book’s official release date. Bell said he plans to visit the store to sign copies for local readers.
This story is part of a partnership between Brookline.News and the Boston University Department of Journalism.