Herbert Auerbach was born in June 1922 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He attended a local high school in what is now Flatbush. His grandmother had a three story apartment. They spent a lot of family time there. Auerbach moved to Chicago where he attended Sullivan High School. The Auerbachs also lived in Florida before finally returning to New York. He enjoyed his time in high school. He played baseball and lettered in the sport. After the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Auerbach enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the Signal Corps. He received his Signal Corps training at Camp Crowder in Joplin, Missouri then went directly to New York to the Port of Embarkation. He could not leave the camp to visit relatives. In New York, he boarded the Mariposa. Since they left from New York they thought they were going to Europe but the convoy went instead to Bombay, India. While at sea, they handed out information booklets on communicating with Indians. In India, they boarded a small train and journeyed into the Himalaya mountain area to the border of India and China. Auerbach had gone overseas with a battalion of Signal Corps troops and ended up with V Force, which was a combination of American and British troops tasked with carrying out intelligence operations. The OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services] came into the CBI [Annotator's Note: China-Burma-India Theater] at this time. Auerbach was assigned to Detachment 101 although he did not know it was the OSS at the time. Auerbach's group covered quite a bit of Burma on foot. Fortunately, they had the support of the indigenous populations in the areas they operated in. When Auerbach first arrived in theater he was told to avoid combat but to gather intelligence instead. Auerbach was a cryptographer with a number of 805 [Annotator's Note: Auerbach's Military Occupation Specialty number, or MOS, was 805]. They were split up into small groups of three or four Americans and scattered around the country. Auerbach's group had indigenous agents assigned to them. The information was forwarded to the Army Air Forces for their use. At full strength, there were 10,000 natives under arms supported by the OSS. The Burmese forces under the OSS were well armed and skilled in the tactics of ambushing the enemy. The Burmese language was learned to some degree by each of the OSS men. After the war, the veterans felt they owed a debt of honor to the Burmese who had served with them in Burma. They stared up several programs to help the Burmese out.

Herbert Auerbach arrived in Bombay, India in October 1943 then went by train to northern Burma, nearly to Assam. From there they walked using the new road being built by black engineers to join the Burma Road which had been cut off by the Japanese. After reaching the end of the work, Auerbach had to enter jungle. There would be 15 or 20 on the patrol including Auerbach and one more radio operator, a cryptographer and an infantry officer with a small unit of Burmese natives. Later they would be sent in with more troops, but initially, it was only small groups that entered the jungle. The duties included clearing jungle for L1 and L5 light observation aircraft to land and take off. Auerbach flew those aircraft on occasion as part of his duty. They used a Burmese machete type knife called a dah to clear the jungle. They had occasion to walk through parts of Nagaland where there were former head hunters called Nagas. They would see skulls on poles. Most of the combat against the Japanese was hit and run by the Burmese natives under the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services]. The Burmese knew how to live off the jungle. They would incorporate the use of pits full of poisonous stakes to kill the Japanese. Auerbach ate well while with the Burmese. Often, meals of eggs, chicken or deer were fed to the OSS men in the villages. Depending on the situation, they would receive periodic air drops of weapons, ammunition and supplies. By the end of the war there were 10,000 indigenous Burmese troops, divided into battalions that helped the OSS. Auerbach and his compatriots felt a debt of honor to these individuals because they could not have completed their mission without them. Other than the OSS men, there were very few Allied troops in the area. Merrill's Marauders [Annotator's Note: 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional)] were the only large body of US troops in Burma. Auerbach felt that the Marauders were not treated fairly by their superiors. They were decimated by the Japanese and diseases like cholera and malaria. The largest number of overall Allied loses in this region were due to transport aircraft losses either through pilot error or being shot down. Only two OSS men were lost in ground actions that Auerbach knew of. The veterans were invited to reunions at the CIA. In the entryway to the CIA, there is a large image of the CIA’s seal. To the left of that is a statue of Wild Bill Donovan [Annotator's Note: William Joseph Donovan, also known as Wild Bill, was the wartime leader of the OSS] along with the names of OSS people lost in World War 2. Most OSS losses were among the Jedburgh teams in Europe. Auerbach felt that working in Europe would have been more dangerous because in Burma the OSS men had the assistance of the local natives.

Herbert Auerbach was a cryptographer. His duty was to take the Morse code messages from headquarters received by the radio operator and decode them into an understandable message. The radio operators would receive five letter codes that they gave to the cryptographers to be figured out. There were several different methods to hide the code from the enemy to prevent them from being able to use it. Initially, they carried code books but stopped because the books could be lost in the jungle. When a message had to be sent back to headquarters from the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services] unit, Auerbach would take the message from the infantry officer and translate the message into code for the radio operator to transmit to his counterpart in headquarters. 

Herbert Auerbach worked with the Burmese ambushing the Japanese. On many occasions the troops would just spray an area of a trail with fire when the enemy came through. The fire fights did not take long. They did not dig trenches or fight protracted battles. Auerbach carried a carbine but there were also BARs [Annotator's Note: Browning Automatic Rifle] and light machine guns. Most combat actions were hit and run and the unit did not know the extent of casualties until villagers would report to them. Auerbach went out on some patrols that lasted for a couple weeks through the jungle. He saw American aircraft and British Spitfires [Annotator's Note: British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft] overhead. Once, four British Spitfire pilots crash landed in the jungle near the village Auerbach was operating from. Auerbach and several others hacked their way through the jungle to rescue them. In the process, Auerbach cut two of his finger tips so bad that he thought he had cut his fingers off. A Navy corpsman saved his finger tips but days later jungle rot set in and he had to be removed from the area by a small plane. He was brought to a MASH [Annotator's Note: mobile army surgical hospital] type hospital and his finger tips were removed. At that hospital was the only time that Auerbach saw a snake while he was in Burma. A native brought the snake into the recovery area on his shoulder. Auerbach was told by an observer one time while he was carrying a stack of firewood that a small green snake, a krait which is very poisonous, had popped out of the bundle but Auerbach did not see it. Some people ate python snakes but Auerbach never tried it. The jungle was full of monkeys that the natives cooked into a spicy hot stew. Auerbach could not eat the stew because of the hot sauces. After he returned home, Auerbach said he would never eat rice again because they ate rice with every meal in Burma. Once a month, an airdrop would deliver a case of beer and a case of cigarettes. Auerbach did not drink but he smoked. He would trade beer for cigarettes. Mail and other goodies from headquarters also came with the airdrop.

While in Burma, Herbert Auerbach saw American transport aircraft resupply Allied troops with airdrops. Bags of rice weighing 50 pounds were often dropped. On occasion, the Chinese troops would try to catch a bag of rice and suffer injury. Those Chinese troops were often peasants and were not very sophisticated. During the monsoon season it would rain so much that they could not even leave their village. Auerbach viewed the British as reluctant to fight until General Slim [Annotator's Note: British Field Marshal William Slim] came in as their commander. There were two main rivers in the area, the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin. Auerbach's unit operated on the Chindwin. It was during this time that four British Spitfire [Annotator's Note: British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft] pilots ran out of fuel and came in with the wheels up and crash landed near Auerbach's outpost. None of the pilots had an injury because the emergency landings were successful. Auerbach became friendly with one of the pilots, a guy named Tough who was from Scotland, and maintained contact with him for years and even took him to some of their reunions. Auerbach was away from his outfit for only a short time due to the finger injuries he sustained while attempting to rescue the pilots [Annotator's Note: see segment titled OSS in the Jungle]. Each group had a Navy corpsman to treat any wounds. Auerbach did have some close calls with the enemy. They dug foxholes around the villages where they were based and put barbed wire out to prevent Japanese infiltration at night. It got scary at night. The OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services] agents had the ability to call in airstrikes against the Japanese when they could see them. They would fire off a phosphorous mortar shell to mark the target for the Allied aircraft to strike. The airstrikes were carried out by P-38s [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightening fighter aircraft]. The Japanese would run to the other side of the mountain when the P-38s came in at them. The P-38s would come down so close to the Allied troops and the pilots would wave as they went by. The pilots' faces could be seen and it was reassuring. As the Japanese retreated, the OSS moved up because they were nearly always behind the enemy lines. The Japanese were being caught in the middle between the Chinese and American troops. The Chinese were not seen by Auerbach as being too efficient a fighting force. They often fired on each other. Auerbach felt General Stilwell [Annotator's Note: General Joseph Stilwell] let Merrill's Marauders [Annotator's Note: 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional)] down as they were decimated by disease.

When the war in Europe ended, Herbert Auerbach found out there was a point system set up to determine who went home and who would be shipped to the Pacific to take part in the invasion of Japan. It worked out that Auerbach had enough points so that he could return home but he would have to return to be part of the invasion of Japan. He returned home aboard the Bergen [Annotator's Note: USS Bergen (AP-150)] which was a Navy transport. It was a much better ship than the previous troop transport. Auerbach shipped out of Calcutta about a week before the first atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August [Annotator's Note: 6 August 1945]. The Japanese refused to surrender so a second bomb was dropped. The Bergen was one of the first ships to return to New York Harbor after the war ended in the Pacific. After they arrived, all of the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services] personnel were sent to the Congressional Country Club in Washington DC. The end of the war celebrations were everywhere. On the weekends, Auerbach could get a pass and would take the train from Washington, DC to New York where he visited the USO [Annotator's Note: United Service Organizations] or other places. His relatives who lived in New York treated him very well. He saw two big Broadway shows. One day at the country club he was asked if he was ready to get out of the Army. He was sent to Fort Sheridan near Chicago and discharged. His father got Auerbach his first postwar civilian suit. He then registered to go back to dental school. He was late for the annual dental school start so he got a job at the local Chicago racetrack. His job was to validate that the tellers were paying properly for winning tickets. Auerbach's father loved the racetrack and thought his son would be getting good tips for winners. Instead, Auerbach lost every bit of income he earned at the track by betting on losing horses. Auerbach's middle brother was a self-made man. He loved jazz music and bought into a bar called the Jazz Workshop. He also bought two or three race horses. Auerbach and his brother would go to the track and bet on his horses. His brother died at age 39 because of a heart condition in the 1960s. Auerbach never thought about staying in the Army or the OSS. After the war they were required to sign agreements promising not to talk about their service with the OSS. Details of the operations were not discussed for years. There were reunions later but Auerbach did not even know that Detachment 101 had an association until he received a letter in 1985 informing him that the group was having a reunion in San Mateo. The OSS veterans were located through the Veterans Administration. Auerbach attended a reunion in California for two days. He did not recognize any of the individuals there. The one man Auerbach remembered and looked for at a reunion, Captain Ted Burns, was killed in the Korean War. The individual groups never had contact with one another in Burma so they would not know each other when they went to a reunion.