jennings

Really, really beautiful.

William Jennings Bryan spoke in Union Square, New York City, April 30, 1912:

Another Bain/LOC photo of William Jennings Bryan speaking in Union Square, New York City, April 30, 1912:

Robert Edward Jennings (January 19, 1895 - October 16, 1957), Naval Aviator No. 1709. Robert E. Jennings would also serve during World War II, having attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander (USN) as a Special Intelligence Officer with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He would be captured by the Germans on September 26, 1944, along with famed American socialite and spy Gertrude Sanford Legendre, after the jeep they were in with two others wandered beyond Allied lines, coming under German fire which led to their capture. See: fishersisland.net/gertrude-sanford-legendre-socialite-spy/

Legendre and a handful of other women staffers received their orders to join the OSS operations in France two weeks later. They put on the uniforms of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC)—and Legendre was suddenly a lieutenant without even knowing, as she said, how to salute— but when they flew in they found the OSS headquarters on the Champs-Élysées wasn’t ready. They had several days in which to do more or less nothing. After exploring Paris, which she already knew well, Legendre, too, wound up one evening at the Ritz bar. It was full of reporters talking about their plans to go find Gen. George Patton and the U.S. Third Army somewhere around Luxembourg, and she envied them. Then she recognized a fellow OSS officer, Lt. Cdr. Robert Jennings of SI, also on leave, and they began plotting how they might travel north as well. They set off next day in a battered Peugeot that broke down constantly, and after spending the night at a little hotel, met yet another OSS officer, Maj. Maxwell Papurt of X-2, the OSS counterintelligence branch, who had controlled important enemy agent operations in Italy. He had a jeep driven by a young private named Doyle “Dick” Dickson. All four drove together in search of the front line (as others, including David Bruce, were doing that day), but as they approached the little town of Wallendorf, Germany, they suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of it. German soldiers opened up on the jeep, badly wounding Pvt. Dickson and Maj. Papurt. As they lay “in a slime of blood, mud and oil,” Legendre remembered, they realized their situation was hopeless. Jennings “pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and tied it to the end of Papurt’s rifle.” So began an ordeal for all of them. Jennings would survive in a prison camp. Dickson appears to have died from his wounds, and Papurt was killed when the Allies bombed the hospital where he was taken. The men who ran OSS had confidence that the men taken prisoner wouldn’t break. But as Douglas Waller writes in his authoritative biography of Wild Bill Donovan, “Panic swept through the OSS over Gertrude Legendre’s capture.”

Below is a link to raw footage of Jennings' liberation from a Luftwaffe-run Prisoner of War (PoW) camp, Dulag Luft Gross Tychow, on March 29, 1945. Jennings is the bespectacled officer seen at the beginning of the footage smoking, and in close-up at the 20-second mark. YouTube - Critical Past: "Liberated US and Allied prisoners of war smile, wearing bandages and on crutches at Dulag-Luft near Wetzlar, Germany" See: www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp13x00001r... CIA.gov - OSS - RETURNEE REPORT FROM MRS. HARRIET HAWKINS/CRITICISM OF ROME SI SECTION/ROBERT E. JENNINGS REPORT ON HIS CAPTURE AND TREATMENT WHILE A POW IN GERMANY/NUMEROUS REPORTS FROM OSS PERSONNEL DESCRIBING THEIR EXPERIENCES OVERSEAS, 1945 (Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP13X00001R000100410001-8) See also: www.findagrave.com/memorial/86072985/robert-edward-jennings