That night Duffy split the group between two villages, Panarit and possibly Manëz, after talking it over with one of the village councils for roughly an hour. Dividing the group would become a frequent routine with Duffy and lessened the burden on each village. Though the enlisted men were as exhausted as the others who were able to settle into their assigned quarters, a partisan guided them for another thirty or so minutes along the trail to the village where they would stay. As they made their way, they passed a group of men walking next to a woman dressed in bright, colorful clothing and makeup and riding a mule. No other woman they had seen in Albania had been dressed so elaborately and they wondered who she was.
They found out the next morning when the party met again. Stefa told them that the gunshots that had repeatedly woken them through the night were in celebration of a wedding, and the men had passed the bride. Most marriages in Albania at the time were arranged, and those who fell in love with someone else often paid a heavy price if they pursued it. Brig. Davies had heard the story of a young couple in love whose families were involved in a blood feud in which only a death could avenge a wrong, whether real or perceived. The couple eloped and ran away to live, but bad weather and a lack of food forced them to return to their village. When they came back, they had hoped to be greeted with happiness. Instead, the fathers each shot their own child. Some women in the northern mountains of the country who wanted to avoid an arranged marriage chose to become “sworn virgins,” which required them to live as men for the rest of their lives.
Eldridge was still so sick that as they made their way along the trail that day, people took turns walking beside him on the mule to make sure he didn’t fall off. Around midday they reached a swift section of the swollen Osum River that was about fifty feet wide. The current was too powerful for anyone to wade across, and the water was deep enough that it reached the mules’ bellies when they entered it. Duffy sent Bell and his radio equipment over first, followed by some of the mule skinners who were able to get the animals to backtrack across the river to pick up more of the party. When it was Eldridge’s turn, they all watched in fear. If he fell over, the river would quickly sweep him away. To everyone’s relief, the weakened medic held on tightly to the mule and made it safely to the other side.
With the nurses and Eldridge across, Duffy ventured ahead, leaving behind the medics and some of the mule skinners. Hayes and Abbott were the last to cross, and when they got to the other side, they had to scramble to catch up with the others on the trail. They finally found them an hour later at the next village, Gostinckë, where the locals were on guard after a partisan commander had stolen more than a thousand sheep belonging to the BK in the past week. Despite their fears of a reprisal, the villagers welcomed the Americans into their homes.
When the party headed out the following morning, they took a different route than Duffy had originally planned, to avoid BK territory. His interpreter refused to go near it, and Duffy thought traveling “at this stage without an English speaking Albanian threatened to be no fun.” The new course required them to pass by large numbers of partisans who were gathering on the hills opposite from where the BK forces were positioned. Concerned that fighting would break out at any moment, Duffy rushed the group through the area.
Despite their continued difficulties and the threats surrounding them, a few of the nurses insisted on stopping on the trail to reapply their makeup before they entered a new village. The delays irritated some of the other nurses who had all kept up with the men trudging up and down the mountainsides over the many weeks, and most of the medics were baffled by it. A few of the nurses had worn makeup periodically on the journey, but none had held up the group to do so before they met the British. Duffy noted that the nurses “always managed to create an impression, either entering or leaving a village. For years to come I feel sure that certain inhabitants of Albania will never forget the ‘Çupke Amerikane’ (American girls), who always managed to produce the necessary cosmetics and render the necessary repairs. They used to leave the people non-plussed, including, I might add, myself; after all they were in enemy occupied territory. Amazing! Much too deep for me as a soldier.”
The hours passed as the party continued walking, and Eldridge once again had to ride one of the mules. A few of the nurses and medics whose shoes were in the worst shape also hitched occasional rides. Hayes preferred to walk, though he wasn’t sure his right shoe would hold out much longer. After they had first met the British, one of the nurses had put his shoes too close to the fire to help them dry, and the sole of one had cracked. Though she had been trying to help, her mistake was one he was reminded of daily; and, now, whenever he took off his shoes, he tied the laces and looped them around his neck so nothing else could happen to them.
As they plodded along that afternoon, they saw someone they never expected to see again: Gina, the partisan whom they had last seen in Berat before the German attack, along with some of his men. He had shaved off his mustache, which made him look much younger, and it took the Americans a few moments to realize who he was. He first walked over to Baggs, who had given him the machine gun as a parting gift the last time they’d been together, and asked the copilot if he had any more ammunition. Baggs shrugged his shoulders and told him he had nothing left. Gina quickly rallied from his disappointment and walked along the line of Americans and greeted each one. The party immediately asked him if he’d heard anything about the three missing nurses, but he told them he had been in Elbasan and had not yet returned to Berat. When he revealed it had taken his group of men just five days to find them, the Americans were astounded that he could track them so quickly, particularly after their long journey.
With Gina now traveling with them, they continued on their course while hearing repeated rumors of an Allied invasion at Vlorë and Durrës, the two chief ports on the coast. The rumors, Duffy wrote, had made “the two pilots slightly light-headed. They did think their walking days were over.” He was much more skeptical, however, because he’d heard the same rumors seven times over the past months. “I immediately rebuked them severely, pointing out that they, like myself, were part of an organized force, namely the English and American army and not party to a rabble they had experienced in this country.” When they arrived at the next village, Malind, that evening, Duffy and Bell sent a message to SOE headquarters as they had promised the pilots, though they knew what the answer would be. “Have heard persistent rumours of invasion STOP Yanks wish to hear as soon as possible any change in previous plan.”
Rain and cold followed them for their roughly four-hour journey the next day to the village of Odriçan. It was a short day of walking for the party, and Duffy was glad for it because he and Bell needed to charge the set’s batteries. As Duffy and Bell had expected, they received a message from Cairo hours later that the invasion was just a rumor, and they were to continue on their course.
The Americans said goodbye to Gina the next morning and set out on the trail. Unlike the other days where their destination had remained a mystery, Duffy informed them they were heading toward a town called Përmet. They would be traveling along a road sometimes used by the Germans, and he instructed the party that if they ran into trouble and were somehow separated, they were all to meet in the town. As they walked along the road, the Americans felt particularly vulnerable to attack, but luck was on their side, and they never saw another soul.
The Italians had previously burned Përmet, and the village had come under attack again just the week before by the Germans, who had burned many of the remaining houses. To protect what was left, a wooden bridge that once stretched over the Vjosë River and connected the road to the town had been destroyed and replaced with a swinging suspension bridge that would only be able to support bodies and not German tanks or trucks. The men and women, unsure of how much the bridge could handle, slowly made their way across it, spreading out their weight as they carefully maneuvered across.
When they were all safely on the other side, they bo
arded an old Italian truck that took them into the center of town as they passed a cheering crowd of people excited to see Americans.
CHAPTER 11
Lurking Danger
Hayes and Abbott awoke in a cold, barren room filled with straw on the morning of December 14. Their host brought them some money that Thrasher had given him earlier that morning on behalf of the two men and told them they were to go to the market to buy something to eat. The medics only had to walk a few hundred feet before they found the open-air market and others from their party. No one had eaten the night before, so Thrasher had dispersed some of the money given to him by the British and told all of the men and women to see what they could find. Hayes and Abbott had only been there for a few minutes when someone from their party told them it was time to meet the others. The men quickly scanned the choices, which seemed to be mostly cornmeal and onions, and settled on the largest head of cabbage they could find. They showed it and their money to the merchant, unsure of the value of either, and, to their surprise, the merchant took some of the money and gave the rest back to them.
Those in the market made their way to their meeting point in town, where they found Duffy, Bell, Thrasher, Baggs, and Stefa waiting for them. The only mules with them were the ones loaded down with the wireless gear, so Eldridge, who was still not feeling well despite having rallied a little, would have to walk. It was going to be a difficult day. To get to Sheper, their stop for that night, they had to take steep switchback trails over Mount Nemërçkë, whose highest peak rose more than 8,100 feet above sea level.
They were just about to leave when a group of about six Albanian men and women came out to greet them. One of the women held a jar of honey while another offered a spoonful to each person in the group. They savored the sweet taste, and the honey gave them a needed boost of energy. After weeks of mostly cornbread, onions, and sour cheese, it was a luxury.
After they all had a spoonful, they thanked their patrons and started their climb up the difficult trail, straining already sore muscles. Hayes and Abbott, who’d split the cabbage head in half, tore off leaves until there was nothing left. The steep mountain challenged even Duffy. “It took almost seven hours of what I consider the worst climbing in Albania, which is over the top of Mt. [Nemërçkë]…. This was the second mountain of this type the Americans had climbed. The remarks of some of the nurses longing for the plains of their own country were really amusing.” The trail was not only difficult but dangerous. Another SOE officer had a horse slip and fall while on that same trail at a different time. “But by the grace of God I had my feet out of the stirrups and slid off just in time. The horse fell down a clear drop of over 100 feet,” he wrote.
Exhausted after a day of grueling hiking, the weary party arrived at Sheper, a village of about one hundred stone houses and roughly fifteen miles north of the border with Greece. Like every place they had been to, the threat of danger was always present. Just six months later, a bomb splinter at Sheper killed Maj. Philip Leake, head of SOE’s Albania desk at the time, when two German fighter planes bombed and machine-gunned the village. The attack occurred the day Leake was supposed to head for the coast and return to Italy.
The group was soon greeted by forty-five-year-old Maj. Bill Tilman, the stocky and bristly mustached leader of the mission at Sheper, who found “the nurses in good heart and looks, the orderlies—big, stalwart men—tired, bedraggled, and depressed.” The oldest SOE man sent into Albania, Tilman was also a world-famous mountaineer who had been a part of three Mount Everest expeditions and was a decorated veteran of World War I known for being able to walk faster and farther than almost anyone. A fellow officer wrote, “Once his mission had been established he climbed the local mountains every morning before breakfast, to the great discomfiture of his partisan guards who had been given strict orders to accompany him everywhere and not let him out of their sight.”
Tilman and his men had created an organized life at Sheper, which, for a man who craved adventure, was rather “dull and placid” when they weren’t receiving drops of weapons, clothing, and boots for the partisans. “We ate our three good meals a day, ciphered signals, visited neighbouring villages, showed the partisans how to use explosives, and argued more or less amiably with various people who came to see us,” he wrote.
Given Tilman’s expertise in the area and in climbing, Duffy spoke to him about the location of the sea evacuation and his planned route. Expecting another supply drop, Tilman tried to get Duffy to stay in Sheper for the next few days, but Duffy declined because he wanted to get to the coast as soon as possible.
Before the party was split into two for the evening and the medics left for the next village, Tilman announced that they had about a twenty-five-mile hike ahead of them the following day. It would be their longest walk yet.
OSS officer Lloyd Smith waited at Seaview for five days with no word over the wireless on the location of the American party. The conditions at the camp were grim and the days long. Sheep and goats had once lived in the low-ceilinged caves, and the lice they’d left behind were rampant. SOE officer Smiley, who had just been evacuated from Seaview days before, wrote, “We were desperately keen to go, for we were very rapidly running out of food and water. The mule that had carried the wireless set died, and for the week that we were there this was the only meat we ate, eked out one day by some tinned food…. There was no water locally, and we would have run out but for a very fortunate storm one night; after that our only meagre supply was what we could collect from puddles in the rocks with a sponge.” The situation had become worse when a local appeared and tried to convince the men he owned the cave, and if they didn’t pay him a sovereign a day he would turn them over to the Germans.
Unwilling to wait any longer in the bleak caves for word on the Americans, Smith decided to see what he could discover on his own. British Lt. Comm. Alexander “Sandy” Glen, a former Arctic explorer who was working from Seaview for MI6 gathering intelligence and organizing sorties, had told Smith that Tilman was in the village of Kuç and might have some information on the American party. With a .45-caliber handgun, a compass, maps, and a shepherd to guide him through BK territory, Smith set out on his mission through unfamiliar and dangerous terrain.
About noon the following day, he arrived at the village of Dukat, where more than two dozen armed members of the BK argued with him for an hour about why he should not travel through partisan territory, which was necessary to get to Kuç. They told him thirty people had recently been killed in Tërbaç, one of the villages he would pass through, after a skirmish broke out between the villagers and the partisans, and that the Germans were now thought to be occupying it. With Smith’s guide scared and wanting to go back but Smith refusing to alter his plans, the BK offered him three of its men to take with him as long as he guaranteed their safety and escorted them back to BK territory. Smith accepted the arrangement, and he and his new guides headed out later that afternoon.
They had been on a rocky trail for a few hours when they ran into a band of more than two dozen partisans armed with Breda 30s, light machine guns used by the Italians, as well as several types of rifles and British and Italian grenades. Though the large group of men and their weapons must have concerned the BK guides when they first saw them, only one of them stopped and insisted on accompanying Smith and his men the rest of the way to Tërbaç.
They arrived in the early evening, and the partisan led them to a house where Smith was welcomed. As Smith talked to the men with the aid of a female interpreter, the partisans asked him why the Allies weren’t making better progress in northern Italy and told him how well the Russians were doing. It wasn’t long before they also told him they wanted to take the three BK guides as prisoners, quickly introducing Smith to the country’s muddled politics. Smith told them he wasn’t going anywhere without his guides, and if the partisans prevented him from completing his mission he would tell the U.S. government they were the cause. That was enough of a threat for the partisans, who
quickly backed off. The female interpreter suggested Smith go talk to the commandant of the Fifth Partisan Brigade, whose headquarters were at Ramicë, village just a few hours to the north.
With ten partisans surrounding him, including the interpreter, Smith and his guides left for the village. On their way the party ran into the commandant, who insisted that Smith ride his horse for the rest of the journey. They finally arrived at Ramicë around midnight, only to have the commandant leave to check on some of his 1,500 men. Smith tried to get more information through the commissar, the partisan’s local representative, but the partisans continued to steer the conversation toward politics.
The commandant still had not returned in the morning, but one of the SOE demolition officers arrived and informed him that Tilman had gone back to his headquarters at Sheper. With few alternatives, Smith decided he would return to Seaview to see if any news had come over the wireless.
Smith and his guides headed back to Tërbaç. When they arrived that afternoon, they learned that the partisans and Germans were fighting in the Llogora Pass, a winding road that cut through the mountains. His planned route was now blocked. With darkness only hours away, it was too late to try to cross the mountains north or south of the pass, so Smith decided he and his men would camp where they were. As he waited in the village that evening, he noticed partisans carrying German boots, army rifles, a machine gun, and three Luger pistols. “I estimated that at least ten Germans must have been killed to secure this quantity of arms, and equipment. Every Partisan I met claimed that he alone had killed from eight to ten Germans.”
The Secret Rescue Page 14