* * *
With the 15th Air Force’s campaign against the Ploesti refineries reaching a crescendo at the beginning of summer 1944, the number of unaccounted aircrews grew significantly. General Nathan Twining created a special organization, the Air Corps Rescue Unit, under the command of Colonel George Kraigher, focused on organizing rescue and evasion missions to help the downed airmen. Kraigher had plenty of resources and materiel, but he needed men with experience in missions behind enemy lines and especially in chetnik territory.
The OSS office covering the Balkans, based in Bari, Italy, at the time, had experience getting American personnel stranded behind enemy lines to safety. One of the early successful operations came as a result of the efforts of Captain Lloyd G. Smith in Albania. On November 8, 1943, a Dakota C-53 medical transport plane was flying from Catania, Sicily, to Bari to pick up wounded personnel. There were thirteen nurses, thirteen medical technicians, and a crew of four aboard the plane. En route, the plane ran into stormy weather over the Mediterranean. The pilot lost his bearings and flew by mistake across the Adriatic Sea over Albania, where he was hit by antiaircraft fire. He managed to crash land in a field in central Albania, saving life and limb of the men and women aboard, but wrecking the plane. A group of Albanian partisans picked up the Americans and transported them over circuitous routes into the mountains to the south where the partisans were in firm control.
As in Yugoslavia, a civil war was going on in Albania at the time, with Communist-led partisans battling a loose coalition of nationalist forces for control of the country after the war. While the partisans controlled the interior of the country, the nationalists controlled the coastal areas—the only place where the Americans could hope to get a boat to return to Italy. The British Special Operations Executive had several missions attached to the partisans at the time. By the end of November, the Albanian partisans turned the American party over to one of these missions, who notified their headquarters in Cairo, who in turn notified their American OSS counterparts in Bari. They agreed that the British mission would accompany the Americans through partisan territory toward the coast. The OSS sent Captain Lloyd G. Smith, a Special Operations officer, to the Albanian coast with the task of cutting across nationalist territory, connecting with the British and American party, and bringing the Americans back to the coast where they would be evacuated by fast boats.15
Using a network of agents in nationalist territory and a supply of gold coins he had brought with him, Smith was able to travel inland, cross into partisan territory, collect the American party, and return with them through nationalist lines to the coast. The British officer who accompanied the Americans to the coast later paid tribute to “the people of the villages through which we passed, most of whom were extremely hospitable, even when a reprisal by the Germans would be the price to be paid.” On January 9, 1944, two months after they had flown out of Sicily to pick up wounded GIs, a boat carrying ten nurses, thirteen medical technicians, four airmen, and Captain Smith of the OSS arrived at Bari, Italy. All were safe, except for three of the nurses who had been separated from the larger group during a German raid and were still in Albania.16
Smith told later a story of being in the washroom next to his office on January 9, 1944. He had just finished making his report on his trip to Albania and was shaving when he heard the door to his office open and footsteps approaching. He turned to see none other than General Donovan who had come to congratulate him on the mission. “President Roosevelt has followed the situation daily and will be most pleased to learn of the group’s safe return,” Donovan said. He paused, then continued, “That is, all but the three nurses who are still in Albania.” After Smith reported that he had learned the whereabouts of the three nurses when he was in Albania, Donovan seated himself on the edge of Smith’s desk and told him to choose any place he wanted to go on furlough for a week or two. “Pick something good,” Donovan said, “because when you get back, you’ll be going back to Albania for the three nurses left behind.”17
At the beginning of February 1944, Captain Smith was back in Albania. From his refuge on the coast, he contacted his informers among the Albanian nationalist circles who confirmed that the three nurses were hiding in Berat, a city in central Albania under nationalist control. They had been there with a local family since mid-November, when a German raid forced them to lose connections with the rest of the American party. With the assistance of his Albanian contacts, Smith wrote a letter to the nationalist leaders, Mithat Frashëri and Kadri Cakrani, urging them to guarantee the safety of the three American nurses and conduct them safely to the coast for evacuation.
German operations in the area where Smith had taken refuge delayed plans for a quick exit. In the meanwhile, the nationalist leaders had provided local credentials and civilian clothes to the American nurses and kept them hidden from the Germans. When the situation in the coastal area returned to normal, they secured an automobile for the nurses and provided a truck full of their troops to escort them. Whenever German patrols stopped the convoy, the Albanians showed a letter by their leaders authorizing the trip toward the coast for the purpose of fighting partisans. Under this cover and protection, the three nurses were able to travel most of the way to the coast and met Captain Smith on March 19. They left the Albanian coast in the evening of March 21, and in the early-morning hours of March 22, 1944, they arrived in Italy after almost five months behind enemy lines.18
* * *
When Colonel Kraigher of the 15th Air Force’s Corps Rescue Unit came asking for men with experience with the chetniks, the OSS provided a team of three operatives, code-named Halyard. Lieutenant George Musulin was the natural choice to command the team. He was born in the United States to parents who had emigrated from Yugoslavia and spoke Serbo-Croat very well. A bulky, 250-pound, five-foot-eleven former University of Pittsburgh tackle, steelworker, and physical education teacher, Musulin was far heavier than the 185 pounds that was the official limit for Army paratroopers. Yet he had no problems going through the rigorous physical regimen during the OSS training. The parachute instructors at Fort Benning placed bets each time he was due to jump as to how many panels in his chute would break. But Musulin had no problems earning his paratrooper wings, either. After completing the training in the United States, Musulin arrived in Algiers in June 1943 and on October 19, 1943, parachuted into central Serbia to assist the British liaison mission attached to Mihailovich’s headquarters. At the time, he was the third American officer to parachute into Yugoslavia. Musulin remained with the chetnik forces until May 29, 1944, when the Allied mission received orders to withdraw.19
Musulin added to the Halyard team two fellow OSS operators who like him had completed missions in Chetnik territory. Master Sergeant Michael (Mike) Rajacich was his second-in-command and Arthur (Jibby) Jibilian would handle the radio communication. Rajacich was of Serbian descent and spoke the language. Jibilian, the youngest member of the team at twenty-one years old, was of Armenian descent. An orphan at young age, he was raised by cousins in Toledo, Ohio. He was drafted in the Navy in March 1943 and was training as a radioman, learning Morse code and Navy signals, when OSS recruiters came to his base looking for volunteers for extremely dangerous missions in enemy territory. Jibilian volunteered, because, as he explained later, “I was more expendable as I had no immediate family and I might, just possibly, be more valuable with OSS than if I were on a ship.”20
Musulin did not waist time in preparing his team for the Halyard mission. On July 3, he reported that they were ready to go and were prepared to drop blind if there was no time to prepare proper reception. But sending a mission into Mihailovich territory raised serious political concerns. If the Halyard team went in and rescued the airmen, could Mihailovich still be called a collaborator? The British and the Russians were vehemently opposed to anyone going into chetnik territory on any pretext. Legend has it that when Donovan described the proposed rescue plan to President Roosevelt, the president mentioned that the Britis
h would be unhappy with it. Donovan replied, “Screw the British, let’s get our boys out.”21
Several attempts to parachute the team in July were not successful. Musulin was convinced the British were sabotaging his mission. On one occasion, when they were above a landing area that a reception party in the ground had supposedly arranged, bright glares suddenly illuminated the plane followed by heavy small arms fire. This was either a trap or they had flown completely off their pinpoint and had almost dropped into the hands of Germans.22 The failure to make the rendezvous on the night of July 31, 1944, over Pranjani raised further concerns. Musulin said later:
By that time the three of us on the team were nervous wrecks. I was very worried about getting our mission off and about the morale of the team. I kept thinking about the plight of those airmen and I knew that their danger would increase with every flight we made to the area. The terrific tension of those long dangerous flights, the strain of being constantly alerted at the airfield, the unnerving knowledge that each successive flight might mean being shot down, or a jump to death, had us all pretty groggy. We had nearly had it a dozen times, and we weren’t even inside yet. I haven’t enough praise for Mike and Jibby, who kept taking it and were still game for another trip on August 2.23
Musulin had no way of knowing that Lieutenant Oliver’s men on the ground did not light the recognition signals out of caution. He considered the failed contact as yet another British foul-up. For their next flight, scheduled on August 2, 1944, Musulin requested and received an American plane, an American crew, and an American jumpmaster.24
* * *
On the evening of August 2, Oliver and the rest of the American airmen were again at the airstrip in Pranjani. At 2210 hours, they heard airplane engines in the distance. As before, they could not be certain whether it was friend or foe, but at that point they decided to risk it. They lit up the flares in the prearranged signal and waited. The plane flew overhead, and after about thirty seconds, it turned around and headed for the airstrip. Everybody hid in the bushes, just in case it was a German plane coming in to strife them. Oliver later remembered:
The plane circled for about ten minutes, then came in very low over our strip. As it zoomed over our heads, we could see the big white star of the Air Force under the wings. With one voice the men let out a yell—the most terrific cheer I have ever heard went up in those Yugoslavian mountains. It was just like Ruth hitting a homer with the bases loaded in the World Series. The sight of that American plane was the first tangible evidence of rescue that we had seen since landing, and the boys nearly went crazy.25
The Chetniks collected the containers and packages that had parachuted from the plane. Musulin, Rajachich, and Jibilian arrived soon after. They had landed in a cornfield two miles from the pinpoint—Musulin crashed on a chicken coop and destroyed it, but a payment of 15,000 dinars ($10) was sufficient to compensate the Serbian farmer for the damage.26 The Americans immediately began distributing the cigarettes and chocolates they had brought, but found that the airmen had far greater needs. Over two dozen of them were wounded or hurt, the majority were barefoot, and many of them had peasants’ clothes mixed with their worn-out uniforms. Jibilian established contact with the headquarters in Bari that very morning, reported the safe arrival in the area, and requested an immediate airdrop of clothes, shoes, food, and medicine for more than two hundred airmen that had assembled around Pranjani. On the night of August 5, a large supply drop arrived, which improved the situation immensely.
As soon as he arrived, Musulin reviewed the condition of the airstrip where he had landed. It was nothing more than a natural plateau nestled among mountain peaks that surrounded it only a mile and a half to two miles in the distance. It was 150 feet wide and approximately 1,800 feet long. There were woods on one side and a sheer drop on the other. At one end of the strip there were some large trees and at the opposite end, a huge depression. Lieutenant Oliver and other Air Corps officers doubted an airplane could use it in its condition. They knew of at least two other fields more suitable than the one in Pranjani, but they were a fourteen-hour walk away. It was not practical to move all the airmen, including the sick and the wounded, over that distance. Furthermore, these remote locations did not have the strong defenses that the Chetniks had organized around Pranjani. On Mihailovich’s orders, they had set up an outer and an inner protective ring around the mountains that surrounded the airstrip. Roadblocks controlled every road that the Germans could take to attack Pranjani. Sergeant Rajacich inspected the defenses and was satisfied to find hundreds of men in the outer and inner defensive positions ready to block any German attempt toward Pranjani.
For these reasons, Musulin decided to stick with the airstrip at hand and improve it to meet the minimum requirements for a C-47 transport plane to land. Under the guidance of the Air Corps officers, all the able-bodied airmen and three hundred local Serbs worked for days to improve the airstrip. The villagers provided sixty oxcarts, which they used to haul stones and dirt from nearby streams. Within a few days, they managed to extend the airfield by another seventy-five yards to give it the absolute minimum length for C-47 operations. On August 8, Jibilian radioed the headquarters that they were ready to receive the transports. Bari responded that the planes would arrive on the night of August 9.
Musulin set up an order of evacuation that made no distinction between officers and enlisted men. The sick and wounded had the highest priority. The rest of the airmen would board the planes based on the length of time they had been behind enemy lines. Musulin radioed Bari the concerns about the length of the airstrip. To enable the planes to take off on such a short runway, they needed to minimize the weight of the planes. They decided that only twelve men would board each plane. The flight crews stripped down the airplanes of all unnecessary materials and fueled them with only half a gasload, barely enough for the roundtrip flight from Bari to Pranjani.
There was a scare on the afternoon of August 9, when three German fighter planes suddenly appeared in the skies and buzzed the airstrip. Fortunately, all the laborers had finished work by that time. Sheep and cattle were grazing peacefully on the airfield and the fighters disappeared as quickly as they came. Nevertheless, Musulin was concerned that the Germans had discovered that there was something in the works down below. Unlike B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers that had their own protective guns and crews, C-47 planes were stripped-down transport planes with no protection of their own. They would fly in on the night of August 9 without fighter escort and would be easy targets of German night fighters if discovered. The image of these planes loaded with airmen blown to bits over the skies of Yugoslavia was a nightmare that hunted Musulin for the rest of the day. He received some reassurance when one of his Chetnik contacts reported in the evening that all was quiet in the closest town where the Germans had stationed a garrison. Afterward, Musulin described those tense hours as follows:
By ten o’clock the designated first seventy-two airmen assembled at the strip. I had a Chetnick soldier stationed at each flare, ready to light them up at my signal. The airmen were all in top spirits, but unfortunately, we of the Halyard Mission were not able to share in their exuberance. We waited there in the darkness for another hour and then in the distance we heard airplane engines. Everyone strained his ears and then the airmen began to cheer—they sounded like American planes.
Jibby was standing by me with an Aldis lamp to blink the proper identification signal. As they circled over for the first time, he blinked ‘Nan’ and to our great joy received the correct reply, ‘Xray.’ So far, so good—at least they had found us, and there had been no German interference. Now to get them down and off again. I gave the order to light up the ground fires and shot up a green flare, our signal that the landings were to commence.
The first plane started down with his landing lights on and headed toward our strip. The airmen were cheering and shouting, but as that plane came in the noise died down. Everyone was holding his breath and more than a few praying. Down and
down he came, and then just before he put down his wheels, he gave it the gun and roared off, having overshot the field. The next plane, however, made a perfect landing and pulled at the end of the strip. The rest of them were supposed to stay aloft until I had the strip cleared, but they disregarded our signals and kept coming right in. I was afraid that there would be a pile up at the end of the strip, and had some of the Chetniks and airmen wheel the first plane down into a slopping depression off to one side at the end. This was done just in time, because the wings of the next plane just passed over the top of this first one as it wheeled about to taxi to one side. It missed by inches, and I could see that these night landings were too dangerous. The slightest mix-up, and the whole show might be ruined.27
Four C-47 transports brought in fresh supplies and a medical crew that would set up a field hospital for the airmen and the local villagers. In addition, Lieutenant Nick Lalich, another OSS officer of the Yugoslav section, arrived to assist Musulin in the evacuation operation. It took only a few minutes to empty the cargo from the planes and to board the departing airmen. Most of them stripped off their shoes and clothes and tossed them to their chetnik friends as they boarded the planes. No more than twenty minutes after landing, the first airplane started down the airfield to take off. Everyone watched anxiously as the plane began climbing in the air at the last possible moment. The other three planes followed, one of them brushing the trees at the end of the runway, but all were able to take off safely. Only forty minutes from the time they first noticed the engines of the approaching airplanes, Musulin and his men heard their noise fading in the horizon as the airplanes headed toward Bari.
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