Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

  On January 18, 1945, a massive supply of twenty-four tons of weapons arrived in a day drop on the alpine village of Quarna, perched high up in the mountains a mile from the northwest shores of Lake Orta. Icardi and Lo Dolce were present at the drop, but the collection and distribution of supplies was handled entirely by Italian partisans from Communist and Christian-Democrat units. Shortly afterward, Icardi and Lo Dolce received the order to get out of the Lake Orta area and move to the town of Busta Arsizio, thirty-five miles to the southeast, halfway between Lake Orta and Milan. There they shed their military uniforms and, dressed in civilian clothes, spent the remaining months of the war setting up and running an intelligence network that collected and passed information about the strength of enemy troops to the allies through radio communications and through the OSS mission in Switzerland.

  CHAPTER 12

  Rescue Missions in the Balkans

  As the experience of missions like Ginny, Justine, Walla Walla, and Mangosteen-Chrysler showed, the operational success of the OSS teams behind enemy lines depended on a number of factors, including their training, the support they received from their headquarters, and the partnerships they were able to forge with the resistance groups on the ground. Enemy forces clearly had a big vote into the performance and livelihood of the teams, since they determined the rate and severity of mop-up operations and made life-or-death decisions for those men who fell into their hands.

  What is often overlooked is the dependency of these missions on the aircrews that flew the modified bombers deep into enemy territory initially to parachute the teams into their operational areas, and then to drop supplies for them and the resistance units they were organizing in the ground. The dependency became mutual very quickly and developed into a full-fledged symbiotic relationship. As the war efforts intensified in 1944, the number of bombing runs over targets in enemy-held territory increased. The toll of enemy fire on equipment and personnel climbed proportionally. Many airmen lost their lives, but a number of them were able to bail out. Once on the ground, enemy forces captured a good number of them and confined them in prisoners-of-war camps. Quite a few though, managed to evade capture and remain hidden with help and support from local resistance groups or populations friendly to the Allied cause. The OSS mounted a number of daring operations behind enemy lines to rescue these aircrews and bring them back to safety.

  * * *

  In the Mediterranean theater of operations, the United States strategic air assets were organized under the 15th Air Force, which was established on November 1, 1943, and operated out of airfields in southern Italy. Its first commander was General Jimmy Doolittle, the daredevil pilot who on April 18, 1942, led a squadron of sixteen bombers from the aircraft carrier Hornet in a one-way mission to bomb Tokyo and other Japanese targets for the first time in World War II.1 Starting in January 1944, it fell under General Nathan F. Twining, who was also the overall commander of the Mediterranean Allied Strategic Air Forces.2 The key objectives for the 15th included enemy oil facilities, air force assets, air defenses, communications nodes, marshalling yards, and enemy ground forces. Its area of responsibility covered Italy, southern France, Austria, southern Germany, and all the Balkans. The 15th consisted of five bomb wings flying B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators. Each bomb wing had three to six bomb groups, and each group had three to four bomb squadrons. A separate fighter command flew P-37, P-48, and P-51 fighters that escorted the heavy bombers to protect them during their runs.

  A separate group, the 2641st Special Group, had as its primary mission the insertion and supply of OSS teams in Italy and the Balkans, as well as the supply of partisan forces in these areas. The squadrons of the Special Group operated specially modified B-17 and B-24 aircraft painted all black with very limited identification markings. The aircrews were trained to conduct low-altitude night operations in which the pilot, navigator, and bombardier worked together to guide the aircraft to the drop zone. Such operations required flying over mountainous terrain followed by descents into deep valleys, in darkness, guided in the final approach by the eyes of the bombardier and the hands of the pilot. Final approach to the drop zones was at an altitude of a few hundred feet at near stall speeds.3

  The crews of the heavy bombers had a different set of challenges. Their flights lasted several hours with the majority of that time spent over enemy territory. Although they flew and carried their bombings from altitudes of eighteen to twenty thousand feet, they were very vulnerable to enemy fighters that preyed on them and to the formidable German 88-mm and 128-mm antiaircraft guns. Known as flak, from the German acronym for FlugzeugAbwehrkanone, or aircraft-defense cannon, these guns fired shells as heavy as fifty pounds each. They exploded in shrapnel mushrooms around the Allied bombers, riddling their fuselage, taking out one or more of their engines, and causing significant losses in aircraft and personnel.

  At the beginning of 1944, the Allies saw the disruption of oil supplies to the German military machine as a key strategic objective of the air campaign. To implement this objective, the 15th Air Force focused on destroying the complex of oil refineries and depots in Ploesti, Romania, which contributed about 30 percent of the entire Axis oil and gasoline supply. In a sustained campaign that lasted until August 19, 1944, bombers from 15th Air Force in daylight raids and night bombers from the Royal Air Force 205th Group crippled the refineries, reducing them to only 10 percent of their normal rate of activity and cutting their production rate by 60 percent. Four days later, Romania switched to the Allied sides and joined the war against Germany.

  Over the course of the campaign, 15th Air Force and RAF bombers flew 5,287 sorties, dropping 12,870 tons of bombs. The cost was 237 heavy bombers, fifteen of them RAF, ten P-38 dive bombers, and thirty-nine escorting fighters downed all over the Balkans. More than 2,200 American airmen were lost.4

  Hundreds of the downed airmen were captured and held as prisoners of war. Hundreds others bailed out over areas in Yugoslavia controlled by Communist-led partisans under Josip Broz Tito. In the summer of 1944 both the British and the OSS had large missions attached to Tito’s headquarters and his partisan brigades. These missions located the downed airmen and arranged partisan escorts for them to the Adriatic coast where they were picked up by fast boats and evacuated to Italy. Nevertheless, there were still hundreds of men whose fates were not known and were listed as missing in action. There was a large swath of Yugoslav territory in the mountains of central Serbia under the control of anti-Communist forces lead by Drazha Mihailovich. There was hope at the 15th Air Force headquarters that some of their airmen had taken refuge in this area. The problem was that in the summer of 1944 the Allies considered Mihailovich a collaborator and maintained no connections with his headquarters.

  * * *

  It had been a stunning reversal of fortunes for Mihailovich. Only two years earlier, he had been the leader of the only resistance movement in Europe actively fighting and bloodying the Germans. He launched his movement right after the Germans conquered Yugoslavia in April 1941. After their quick victory, the Germans kept enough troops in the country to allow them to control the major cities, highways, and railroads, but left the countryside alone, especially in the mountainous areas of Serbia and Bosnia. This lax attitude gave an opening to members of the Yugoslav Royal Army, most of whom were Serbs, to move into these areas and establish control over them with relative ease. They revived the cherished Balkan tradition of harassing a much stronger enemy with small bands of warriors, who ambushed isolated enemy troops and quickly dissipated into the mountains whenever reinforcements arrived. The Serbian word for these small fighting units was cheta, so these men became known as chetniks. They wore the traditional Serb peasants’ black lambskin cap with a skull-and-crossbones emblem in front.5

  Mihailovich, an army staff officer himself, earned worldwide recognition as the leader of these bands. In 1942, Time magazine featured him on its cover and portrayed him as “the greatest guerrilla fighter in Europe.” He received th
e most votes from the magazine readers for the Man of the Year Award.6 Twentieth Century Fox began filming a movie, titled Seventh Column about the exploits of Mihailovich, in which Phillip Dorn played Mihailovich and Linda Darnell played his wife.7 On the day when the Italian Armistice was announced, the New York Times opined, “In the event that Italy is completely knocked out of the war, the Adriatic Sea would be open to the British fleet. With air cover from bases on the east coast of Italy only 150 miles from Yugoslavia, any Allied attempt to join hands with Mihailovich, whose resistance to the Axis remains as unrelenting as ever, would be likely to prove a less hazardous operation than the initial Allied landings in Sicily.”8

  But the war took a different course. The Allies decided to open the front in Italy rather than in the Balkans. Time gave Stalin the Man of the Year award. At the Teheran Conference in December 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt decided to place their support behind Tito, who eventually became the only leader of Yugoslav resistance that the Allies recognized. And, by the time Twentieth Century Fox released its movie in 1943, Mihailovich had been completely erased from it. The Allied support for Mihailovich faded away rapidly. Even though his troops did not relent in their war against the Germans, Allied communications downplayed their role and portrayed Tito’s partisans as the only ones doing the fighting.

  When Mihailovich refused to step aside, civil war erupted in Yugoslavia, with chetniks and partisans spending more energy fighting each other than the Germans. In the spring of 1944, the Allies branded Mihailovich a Nazi collaborator. On May 29, 1944, the last Allied personnel attached to Mihailovich’s headquarters and about forty airmen rescued by his forces left aboard transport airplanes from a secret airfield in the mountains. Airmen flying missions over the Balkans received instructions to bail out only on Tito partisan-held areas and avoid the chetniks who were said to turn shot-down Allied crews over to the Germans.9

  The experience of many airmen who were shot down shows that the rumors were not true. On July 9, 1944, Lieutenant Richard L. Felman and nine other crewmembers of the B-24 Never a Dull Moment bailed out over chetnik territory on their way back from a strike at the Ploesti oilfields. When they fell into chetnik hands, they fully expected to be handed over to the Germans, or worse. Before every mission, the bomb crews were briefed to seek men with red stars on their hats, Tito’s Communist partisans. Intelligence reported that Mihailovich and his chetniks were “cutting off the ears of American airmen and turning them over to the Germans.” The Americans were surprised to find refuge and support among these people they were told to avoid. Felman said, “The Germans had seen us hit the silk, and immediately demanded that the local population surrender us. The peasants stood fast: they refused. The reprisal—their village was burned to the ground.”10

  The chetniks took Felman’s group to Mihailovich’s headquarters at Pranjani in the mountains of central Serbia, about ninety miles south of Belgrade. There were other rescued Americans there, and more kept arriving every day. They were divided into small groups and billeted at peasants’ farmhouses, where they idled without much to do. Lieutenant Thomas K. Oliver, a pilot with the 756th Squadron, 459th Bomb Group, who had been in chetnik territory since the beginning of May, wrote, “We had lots of time to kill and would whittle out corncob pipes and smoke whatever local blend of tobacco we could lay our hands on.” Oliver remembered that gypsy bands moving from village to village were the only entertainment available. “They would come into the village carrying an accordion and a couple of violins. Then that evening the whole village had a party. Food was brought out and everyone had dinner. Then the gypsies played and there was dancing in the public square. Next day the gypsies moved on.” The stream of flights over their heads reminded them that the war continued. “It was an impressive event each time the 15th Air Force flew overhead on the way to targets in the Ploesti area,” Oliver wrote. “We would first hear a faint buzzing sound, like bees. The sound would get louder and louder until it became a roar and the sky was filled with airplanes. We knew we could count on another two or three crews to join us on the ground.”11

  * * *

  By the end of July 1944, there were close to 150 allied airmen in and around Pranjani. They wanted to get back to Italy as soon as possible, but there was no longer a direct communication channel between the chetniks and the Allied headquarters. Chetnik commanders said they had reported the presence of the Americans to their government in exile in Cairo who, in turn, had forwarded the information to the British. But they had received no response from the British. Gradually, the idea rose among the Americans of finding a way to send a direct message to the 15th Air Force in Italy. If they knew how many Americans were stranded in chetnik territory, they would be more likely to act than the British in Cairo. Oliver, who had become the unofficial leader of the group, met with Mihailovich and asked him to use one of his radio transmitters. Mihailovich was very willing to help the Americans establish communications with their headquarters.

  The formulation of the message was a challenge in itself. The message would go over an open channel that the Germans could be monitoring. They had no prearranged signal security plans, so they had to find a way to let the headquarters recognize the message as an authentic one coming from American personnel and not an attempt from the Germans to draw them into a trap. They also had to establish a challenge and response code to ensure that any message they received was genuine from the headquarters and not from the Germans. The message could not be encoded and was formulated in plain English. So, they had to obfuscate the content enough for a German listening in to miss its meaning, but not to the point where the Americans would fail to understand it. Using Air Force slang and data points known only to a handful of people at his bomb group headquarters, Oliver sent the following message:

  Mudcat driver to CO APO520

  150 Yanks in Yugo, some sick. Shoot us workhorses. Our challenge first letter of bombardier’s last name, color of Banana Nose’s scarf. Your authenticator last letter of chief lug’s name, color of fist on wall. Must refer to shark squadron, 459th Bomb Group for decoding.

  Signed, TKO, Flat Rat 4 in lug order.12

  The Yugoslav radio operator sent the message on the air as soon as it was ready. A British radio operator in Italy picked it up, recognized APO520 as the routing code for the 15th Air Force, and forwarded the message to its headquarters. There, they recognized the keywords “shark squadron” as a reference to the 756th Squadron of the 459th Bomb Group—all the airplanes of this squadron had shark teeth painted on their noses. So, they referred the message to Walt Cannon, the commanding officer of the squadron who decoded the message and recognized it as genuine.

  The challenge—“first letter of bombardier’s last name, color of Banana Nose’s scarf”—could only be “B-White.” Banana Nose was Sam Benigno, a pilot in the 756th Squadron who always wore a white scarf. The authenticator—“last letter of chief lug’s name, color of fist on wall”—was “M-Red.” The commander of the 459th Bomb Group, Colonel Munn, once wrote on the wall of the officers’ club, “Each lug in the 459th sign here,” and then signed, “M. M. Munn, Chief Lug.” The “fist on the wall” in the message was a red fist on the club wall, part of the 15th Air Force emblem. Finally, there was no doubt that Oliver had sent the message. He had signed his name on the wall of the officers’ club as “T. K. Oliver, Flat Rat 4” and had named his plane The Fighting Mudcat, because the catfish was a survivor.

  As to the content of the message itself—“150 Yanks are in Yugo, some sick. Shoot us workhorses”—it was clear that 150 Americans were stranded in Yugoslavia and were asking for C-47 troop transporters to take them back. A workhorse was a C-47 in the US Air Force slang and not the draft animal. But, Oliver wrote later, “We hoped the literal-minded Germans would picture us executing old dobbin.”13

  Once the headquarters was satisfied with the authenticity of Oliver’s message, they asked him to encode the following communications using his radio operator serial number, which
made the exchange of messages easier. Oliver sent the coordinates of Pranjani. The headquarters sent word that they were preparing a team to come on the ground to assess the situation and prepare the evacuation. They directed preparations for a reception area and recognition signals.

  The message that the airmen had waited for so long finally arrived: “Prepare reception for July 31 and subsequent night.” A feeling of relief mixed with anxiety came over everyone, because no one could be certain that the effort would succeed. There was always fear that the Germans could get wind of the presence of such large numbers of Americans in the area and could attack at any moment. Pranjani, although free of Germans, was in a very precarious situation. Forty-five hundred Germans were garrisoned in the town of Chachak, only fifteen miles south. Just five miles from the landing zone as the crow flies there were another twenty-five hundred troops. The only security for the Americans came from the mountains around Pranjani and the Serbian population that sheltered and protected them. Lieutenant Felman described those anxious moments:

  The 31st finally came. General Mihailovich himself and about one thousand of his ragged troops came to visit us at our encampment near the tiny airstrip from which we expected to be evacuated. He held a review of his troops in our honor, and then talked to us through an interpreter. He told us how much he loved America and how sorry he was that he had not been able to do more for us, though his people had given us the best of everything they had. He also assured us that he had eight thousand troops deployed over a twenty-file mile area around our airstrip with orders to hold off the Germans at all costs until we were evacuated.

  That night at ten P.M. we were all down at the field. We waited for forty minutes silently. Exactly at 10:40 came the sound of motors, but we were afraid that coming so late it might be a German plane, so we decided not to light up the flares, since that might give up the whole show. Nothing happened the rest of that long night—nor on the next. Our spirits hit rock bottom.14