Roger Hilsman

Roger Hilsman Jr. (November 23, 1919 – February 23, 2014) was an American soldier, government official, political scientist, and author.

He saw action in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II, first with Merrill's Marauders, getting wounded in combat, and then as a guerilla leader for the Office of Strategic Services.

Hilsman was born on November 23, 1919, in Waco, Texas, the son of Roger Hilsman Sr., a career officer with the United States Army, and Emma Prendergast Hilsman.

He lived in Waco only briefly, growing up on a series of military posts.

He attended public schools for a while in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Hilsman spent part of his childhood in the Philippines, where his father was a company commander and later commandant of cadets at Ateneo de Manila, a Jesuit college.

His father was a distant figure whom the young Hilsman endeavored to gain the approval of, such as by choosing a military career.

Back in the United States, Hilsman attended Sacramento High School in Sacramento, California, where he was a leader in a Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program and graduated in 1937.

Later reports reflected his retreat to Malaybalay after he had faced overwhelming Japanese forces, followed by another move onto the island of Negros and he was captured by the Japanese once all the islands had surrendered in 1942.

After leaving West Point the younger Hilsman was immediately posted to the South-East Asian Theatre and joined the Merrill's Marauders long-range penetration jungle warfare unit, which fought the Japanese during the Burma Campaign.

There, he found morale to be poor due to typhus outbreaks and unhappiness with the generals leading the unit.

After spending a year at Millard's Preparatory School in Washington, DC, and another traveling around Europe, including a visit to Nazi Germany, Hilsman attended the United States Military Academy and graduated in 1943 with a B.S. degree and as a second lieutenant.

Following U.S. entry into World War II, Hilsman's father, a colonel, fought under General Douglas MacArthur during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.

Two weeks into the conflict, newspaper reports described Colonel Hilsman as still holding Davao on the island of Mindanao.

He participated in infantry operations during the battle for Myitkyina in May 1944 and suffered multiple stomach wounds from a Japanese machine gun while on a reconnaissance patrol.

After recovering in army field hospitals, Hilsman joined the Office of Strategic Services.

Now a lieutenant, he at first served as a liaison officer to the British Army in Burma.

He then volunteered to be put in command of a guerrilla warfare battalion, organized and supplied by OSS Detachment 101, of some 300 local partisans, mercenaries, and irregulars of varying ethnicities, operating behind the lines of the Japanese in Burma.

There, he developed an interest in guerrilla tactics and personally found them to be preferable to being part of infantry assaults.

By early 1945, Hilsman was considered, as Detachment 101 commander William R. Peers later stated, to be one of a number of the guerillas' "good... junior officers, every one outstanding and experienced."

Hilsman's group made hit-and-run attacks on Japanese forces and kept a Japanese regiment ten times its size occupied far from the front lines, all while waging its own battle with the ever-present leeches and other insects and various diseases.

In one particular engagement in May 1945, Hilsman led a mixed company of Kachins, Burmese, and Karens in staging successful raids in the area between Lawksawk and Taunggyi that culminated in a carefully-orchestrated ambush that caused a hundred casualties among the Japanese at no cost to the guerillas.

Hilsman wanted to deploy his unit farther south into the Inle Lake area but was constrained by orders to help hold the road between Taunggyi and Kengtung.

Soon after the Japanese surrender in 1945, Hilsman was part of an OSS group that staged a parachute mission into Manchuria to liberate American prisoners held in a Japanese camp near Mukden.

There, he found his father, who became one of the first prisoners to be freed.

His father asked as they hugged, "What took you so long?"

At some point, Hilsman was promoted to captain.

Returning from the war, Hilsman served in the OSS as assistant chief of Far East intelligence operations in 1945 to 1946, and once the Central Intelligence Agency had been created, he served in it in the role of special assistant to executive officer in 1946 to 1947 (he belonged to the Central Intelligence Group during the interim period between the two organizations).

Hilsman married Eleanor Willis Hoyt in 1946.

They raised four children together.

Sponsored by the Army, Hilsman attended Yale University, earning a master's degree in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1951 in political science.

He specialized in international relations and he studied under noted professors Arnold Wolfers and William T. R. Fox.

By 1951, Hilsman had risen to the rank of major.

He later became an aide and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and briefly to President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the U.S. State Department while he served as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1961 to 1963 and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1963 to 1964.

There, Hilsman was a key and controversial figure in the development of U.S. policies in South Vietnam during the early stages of American involvement in the Vietnam War.

He was an advocate of a strategy that emphasized the political nature of the conflict as much as the military aspect and was a proponent of the removal from power of South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm.

Hilsman left government in 1964 to teach at Columbia University and retired in 1990.

He wrote many books about American foreign policy and international relations.

He was a Democratic Party nominee for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972 but lost in the general election.

(Decades later, Hilsman related his wartime experiences in his 1990 memoir American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines. )