It was during their two-day stay in Çeremicë that the messenger Stefa had sent to look for the British returned with a note from a British officer. The note instructed the party to meet him in the nearby village of Lavdar, where arrangements would be made to escort them to the coast for evacuation. It was the best news the Americans could have hoped for. They still had no information about the three missing nurses, but escaping once again seemed possible—for those who were told of the note. Not everyone knew right away. Because the party was often spread out among several houses, and the officers, which included the pilots and nurses, spent the most time together, they often knew details long before the enlisted men, who had learned to pick up information wherever they could rather than wait for it to be shared.
As soon as the British officer received the note from the partisans, he informed SOE headquarters in Cairo, who then relayed the information to American officials that the party was safe and in contact with the British. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—America’s first national intelligence agency and a counterpart to SOE—was then informed, including those working at the new OSS base station in Bari. On November 27, twenty-three-year-old David Brodie, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in charge of OSS Communications at Bari, received word. Brodie had sent a wireless operator over to Albania just ten days before, and his men were ready to help in whatever way they could.
British Brig. Edmund Davies, one of the senior SOE officers in Albania, had been at his makeshift headquarters in Bizë, east of the capital of Tiranë and farther north than the Americans, on November 28 when his Albanian interpreter informed him that he had heard “an American aircraft containing many doctors and nurses to help the partisans had landed the day before at Berat.” The tough yet well-liked Davies, a balding and stout forty-three-year-old who had spent most of his career with the Royal Ulster Rifles and had twice been awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in the field, had laughed and told him it was “a Balkan rumour as usual—that there was nothing to it.” Though he’d only been in the country since October, Davies had quickly learned that false rumors were rife in Albania. But the next time he and his men heard from SOE headquarters in Cairo, they received “a top priority signal” that informed him a plane of Americans, including thirteen nurses, had crash-landed. He was to “take all steps to rescue the downed Americans and get them to Italy by sea as soon as possible.”
A day later, a copy of a radiogram received from the Air Service Command at Bari was sent to Eisenhower’s chief of staff at Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) in Algiers recommending that Eisenhower and other senior officials be notified that the Americans were believed to be in Albania and attempting to reach the coast. That same day, newspapers across the United States ran a front-page wire story from AFHQ in Algiers that a transport plane carrying thirteen nurses had been missing since November 8. The story was brief and offered only a few details: The last word from the plane was thought to have come while it was over the Adriatic, the nurses were part of an air evacuation unit, and next of kin had been notified.
The families of the lost personnel had received devastating telegrams issued by the War Department over the previous few days. Beginning with the infamous words “Regret to inform,” the terse message sent to each family by Gen. James A. Ulio, the Army’s chief administrative officer, offered little solace or hope regarding the young women and men. It indicated that they had been missing in the North African area for three weeks, and that the families would be promptly notified if “further details or other information are received.”
Nolan McKenzie, Watson’s husband of just a few months, was at a flight training school in Oklahoma when he received a telegram from Watson’s father alerting him to the heartbreaking news. McKenzie immediately wrote a letter to Watson’s parents. “I don’t know what to say. I’m so grief stricken that nothing now seems to matter except the thin thread of hope that always exists when the word is ‘missing.’ ” His mother also wrote to Watson’s parents, whom she had not yet met. “Your grief is mine too. All the tears I shed do no good. I am trying to get hold of myself and be brave…. I am worried and fear for Nolan. When he heard my voice, he went to pieces and could not talk. I fear he might lose control of his plane. Then our grief will be doubled…. Let’s keep praying and hoping yet our darling will be safe. Altho’ I prefer death rather than know she must suffer as a prisoner.”
For weeks, Hayes’s mother had been experiencing nightmares and premonitions that something had happened to her oldest son. Her deepest fears were confirmed when the call from the telegraph office came to the Hayeses’ Cape Cod–style home in Indianola. She and her husband were in such shock they sent their sixteen-year-old son, Karl, who had just received his driver’s license, to pick up a copy of the telegram at the Western Union office in the train station. When he returned to the house, the shaking boy handed the telegram to his parents, who read it over and over, as if in doing so the message might somehow change.
For the parents of Adams, from Niles, Michigan, whose brother was a Japanese POW, and of Schwant from Winner, South Dakota, whose brother was missing, this was their second horrific telegram in a matter of months.
As the weary party of American men and women left Çeremicë, Stefa stopped them and warned them all to be more careful of their behavior in the Muslim villages or risk their chances of finding shelter and food. It was then that Thrasher told Hayes and some of the other enlisted men that they were going to head northeast in hopes of finding a British soldier, though he didn’t mention the note they had received. He went on to say that if they were unsuccessful, they would split into smaller groups. Finding food and shelter for such a large party was proving too difficult to continue.
Stefa led them through bouts of rain and fog, and they spent the night in the village of Lekas. The trail, which had been steep and rugged since they fled Berat, had finally become smoother and more level, which made it easier for those whose shoes, particularly the nurses, now had gaping holes.
They continued heading east, spurred on by the news of the British soldier, but the GIs, blisters, lice, hunger, and general exhaustion suffered by so many of them was slowing them down.
On the last day of November, after twenty-two grueling days in Albania, they found the British soldier. As they approached the mountain village of Lavdar, they could barely believe it when they saw a fair-haired young man with a boyish face and blue eyes in full British uniform. He was engaged in conversation with the locals, and as he came over to greet them, he was surrounded by the men and women who all wanted to shake his hand. After introducing himself, twenty-three-year-old Capt. Victor Smith escorted the party out of the cold and into a one-room building with a blazing fire.
As an SOE officer, Smith had completed specific training before he’d been dropped into Albania by parachute less than a month before. Like other SOE personnel, he had been instructed in numerous spycraft techniques, including “silent killing” as well as operating traditional arms and explosives.
SOE personnel, who came from a variety of backgrounds, attended paramilitary schools, mainly in the Scottish Highlands. In addition to preparing them physically for the field, the schools taught them skills such as map reading, weapons handling, raid tactics, and demolition training. They were then sent to the Royal Air Force base in Ringway, Manchester, in northern England, to learn parachuting and complete at least two jumps. They ended their training at finishing schools on the Beaulieu Estate in New Forest in southern England, which covered everything from how to maintain a cover story to proper communication in the field, and even honed their skills in lock picking, the use of secret inks, and disseminating effective propaganda.
The majority of the British officers in Albania received the same type of training but at SOE schools in the Middle East, including a requisitioned monastery in the British Mandate for Palestine on the slopes of Mount Carmel, and a jump school at a Royal Air Force station at Ramat David near Nazareth. Though the bas
ic coursework remained the same, there were some specialty courses offered, such as skiing and climbing and mule management at a mountain warfare school in Lebanon. One officer found that the mule management class was “just about the most useful course of the lot.” They had to be prepared for almost anything, and they trained accordingly.
Though SOE officers often entered enemy territory in disguise, the men in Albania wore uniforms that could withstand the harsh conditions of the mountain caves from which they operated. Some added local touches, including curly-toed slippers or fezzes, but battle dress was standard. Given that they worked in uniform rather than undercover, the men working in Albania were often referred to as British Liaison Officers (BLOs).
SOE had sent its first mission into Albania in April 1943 with the goal of organizing the Albanian resistance and destroying Albania’s oil fields and chrome mines. By then, Churchill and his advisors believed that encouraging resistance in the Balkans would help divert enemy troops from other fronts and assist the Allies in any future attacks on German forces in Italy and the Balkans. With the go-ahead to move in, a group of four men had parachuted into northern Greece in the dark hours of an April night and eventually made their way on foot over the Albanian border. Had any of them been captured by German troops, they stood a good chance of being executed following Hitler’s Commando Order of October 18, 1942, which demanded that Allied men caught behind enemy lines be killed before being given a trial—a policy that violated international law. It stated that “all men operating against German troops in so-called Commando raids in Europe or in Africa, are to be annihilated to the last man. This is to be carried out whether they be soldiers in uniform, or saboteurs, with or without arms; and whether fighting or seeking to escape.”
By mid-August 1943, SOE had trained some eight hundred Albanian men of the First Partisan Brigade and outfitted them with weapons to help them wage war against the Italians. By October, after the German invasion, twenty-four British special operations men worked in the country and were organized into seven small missions—all of which faced constant danger. Of the first fifty men sent into Albania, sixteen of them were eventually captured or killed. In comparison to the other Balkan countries of Greece and Yugoslavia, however, the number of personnel sent into the country was small. More than one hundred SOE men were stationed in Yugoslavia and nearly two hundred in Greece.
When the Americans arrived in Lavdar and met Smith, they knew nothing of SOE. They only knew that Smith was a captain in the Lancashire Fusiliers, a British infantry regiment. They told him about their long and tortuous route through the mountains and the three nurses who were missing. When they finished, Smith turned to Stefa and asked, “Why did you bring these people all the way here?” Lavdar was so far east that they were now close to Korçë, a town only about twenty miles from the border with Greece and heavily occupied by German troops. It was almost as far as they could possibly be from their intended destination on the western coast and far too close to the enemy for comfort. Stefa’s response was calm and vague. He explained that he needed to avoid the territory controlled by the BK and was looking for villages that could feed and shelter the large party. The Americans stood speechless as Smith reminded Stefa that there were other British near Berat, and if the partisans had contacted them, it was likely that the Americans could have been evacuated within a few days.
The Americans simmered with frustration and confusion at the unnecessary suffering and risk of capture they had experienced since they’d been on the run with Stefa over the past two weeks. Three of the nurses were still missing, and the party wondered if they had been captured or were dead. They weren’t sure what to think. They’d never heard from the messenger Stefa had said he would send to Berat, and now they were hearing that so many of their troubles could have been avoided if the partisans had taken them to the nearby British immediately. Though Stefa had kept them out of German hands and secured food and shelter for them, he had dragged them across the country while putting his own life in danger. Had he done all of that to encourage the people to support the partisans? Was he under orders to do so?
Smith made a list of their names and told the Americans that his team would send a message to the U.S. military alerting them that the group had been located. As the Americans continued to give Smith details of their journey, they explained they’d had little to eat for the past several weeks and showed him the condition of their shoes. He assured them that his mission, or team, at a nearby village called Krushovë would provide them with food and would try to find some replacement shoes. He had already arranged for the party to stay in Lavdar while he went back to his headquarters to make arrangements for them to join him.
After the group followed Smith into the main part of the village to say goodbye, Smith handed several local maps to Baggs, who often took the lead within the party despite not being the senior officer. Baggs looked around for something to put them in and decided that Hayes’s medical kit could serve as a map case. He asked Hayes to give it to him. Hayes had no choice but to hand Baggs the kit, but he was hesitant because he still had the K rations he’d taken from the plane, which he planned only to reveal to the others or use if it seemed like it was a matter of life or death. When he opened the kit and transferred the K rations to his musette bag, he felt the disapproving eyes of the entire group watching him, but no one said a word.
As soon as Hayes, Owen, Abbott, and Wolf, the four medics who’d become so close during their training at Bowman, arrived at the house they’d been assigned to for the night, the other men demanded that Hayes share the K rations. They argued that Smith had assured them the British would give them food so there was no reason to save them. Hayes refused and said they were to be used only if someone was in dire need, but the men told him either he could share them or they would take them. Hayes quickly decided it would be better to share, and they opened two of the rations. They were all so hungry that, for the first time, the K rations tasted fairly good to the malnourished men.
That night, a few of the nurses, including Jens, were assigned a home where they took baths in a shallow, wooden tub the family placed in front of a fire, ate a meal of mutton, and were treated to a bed with a feather mattress. With food in their stomachs and a warm place to sleep, however, all Jens could think of were her three missing friends, nurses Lytle, Maness, and Porter, and what could have happened to them.
CHAPTER 9
Secret Agents
When Smith returned to Lavdar, the party met him in the center of the village. Several inches of snow had fallen the previous night, and it was still coming down when they left for Smith’s headquarters at Krushovë, where they would stay for the next few days.
They walked for roughly six hours into higher elevations as the snow continued to pile up, and several in their party, including Eldridge, who had taken the rock from the imam, struggled to continue as exhaustion, illness, and sore feet made each step of the strenuous walk that much harder. Many were cold, particularly the three nurses who didn’t have coats and the medics wearing just field jackets. A few in the party rode mules while others tried to keep their minds off the walk with talk of when they would finally escape. Jens even bet Wolf a dollar they’d be home by Christmas. Wolf took that bet, saying he couldn’t lose; he’d either have an extra dollar, or they’d be back behind Allied lines.
As they continued on, they passed three Italian soldiers, who looked even colder and more miserable than they and who were huddled by the remains of a demolished building. It was a desperate and haunting scene of men barely clinging to life. Portions of two walls provided some cover from the wind, but without food or proper shelter, the Americans knew the Italians would most likely not survive for more than a few days.
By the time the party arrived in Krushovë, they were trudging through knee-deep snow. Smith assigned the enlisted men to two homes, and the ten nurses shared a single room, while Thrasher, Baggs, and Stefa were housed together. As they had so many times over the pas
t few weeks, the enlisted men slept on hard floors without blankets. This time, however, the villagers had blankets to offer, but they refused to share them because they had heard the Americans were infested with lice. The hardy insects that raced across their bodies throughout the day and night and made them constantly itch had remained the Americans’ constant companions while they continued the fight against hunger and the GIs.
With so many difficulties weighing on them, the nurses and medics were now battling each other as well. “Some individuals grated on one another’s nerves in close quarters,” Jens wrote. “A few were almost blood enemies from earlier arguments over things that would not have mattered back in Sicily.” One argument in Albania left Adams, the medic from Niles, Michigan, whose brother was a prisoner of war, with a black eye.
While the enlisted men adjusted to their quarters, Smith introduced the nurses to twenty-nine-year-old Alan Palmer, a major in the Royal Berkshire Yeomanry and leader of the small mission at Krushovë. Palmer had parachuted into Albania in October along with Smith and several other men; and, like many SOE officers, Palmer had come from a background of privilege and prestige. His great-grandfather was one of the founders of the world-famous British biscuit company Huntley & Palmers, and he had attended the exclusive Harrow public school followed by Oxford University. Palmer told the delighted nurses that through the mission’s SOE wireless operator and their headquarters in Cairo, they had successfully alerted the American military that the party was now with them.
The Secret Rescue Page 11