Operation Cornflakes

The British were the first to forge the Hitler head stamp in 3, 4, 6 and 8-pfennig values from 1941 until the end of the war. These stamps were of better quality versus the Americans' attempt at forgery because the British used actual stamp production facilities whereas the Americans did not have access to quality ingredients such as paper, ink or engravers. The American forgeries focused much of their efforts on the 12-pfennig stamp depicting Hitler's head and exposed skull. == Overview ==

Initiated in 1942, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed from the division of the Foreign Information Service (FIS) and the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), a division that President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted by Executive order 9128. The remainder of the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services. The newly formed OSS was under jurisdiction of the Joint Chief of Staff, giving the OSS the capability and status of a military branch. With this information the OSS and German exiles scoured the telephone directories and pulled over two million, randomly selected names registered within the Reich to send forged letters to. The letters contained writings about family happenings and gossip about non-existent people, the idea being that the domestic mail was not censored unlike the business mail. Forged letters from Rome were addressed and sealed in Siena, then went to Rome where they were placed into counterfeit mail bags which were sent to Bari to be routed and canceled, then delivered to surrounding cities. In hopes of further shaking the morale of the German people, the OSS called upon master forgers similar in nature as MI6 once had. Rather than having an image of Heinrich Himmler replacing Hitler, the OSS used a stamp of Hitler with some minor modifications. The modifications included a skull overlay that resembles a portion of Hitler's face having been "eaten away". The German subscript at the bottom of the stamp was altered from 'Deutsches Reich' (German Empire) to 'Futsches Reich' (ruined empire). These stamps were known as the "Death Head" and were usually placed in the letter with other subversive materials. Within 1944–45 twenty missions had been completed, reporting a success rate of 50%, leaving the 15th Air Force with over 320 delivered mailbags of propaganda. == Aftermath ==

A major oversight by the OSS and its task force in Rome was that the ravages of war shut down many of the cities' critical services and in some cases the postal service. While some cities continued its services of mail delivery, the allied bombing had turned many residences into piles of rubble; millions of people without a home were displaced and forced to leave and seek refuge elsewhere, in many cases with relatives. Without a physical address left to deliver the mail to, much of it was discarded. Another oversight was simply the fact that when people received mail from an unknown source they would usually destroy it, especially if the letters contained allied propaganda, either out of loyalty or fear of punishment. == See also ==