The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  So Oliver and the other Americans waited and waited. A month passed with almost nothing happening. Kent kept saying he was waiting on the Allies to agree to an evacuation plan, but the men saw no evidence of any forward progress. They had little to do but lie around the village, helping the locals with their chores and scrounging for food as they grew thinner and thinner. Oliver and the other Americans started pressuring Kent to do something with them, anything. They couldn’t stand the thought of staying in this little village for much longer, with the food shortage getting more desperate every day. Finally they convinced him to send them west to an area closer to General Mihailovich’s headquarters. Maybe something more could be done for them there, they thought.

  Kent arranged to have the Americans taken west, appointing Captain Ivan Milac as the leader of their escorts. The Americans were pleased, as Milac was one of their favorites in the village, a former officer in the Yugoslav Regular Army who had learned English mostly from listening to radio broadcasts. Milac issued rifles to the Americans and warned them that their journey would be dangerous. The village they were in was relatively safe because it was remote and offered nothing that would attract the Germans. But traveling to the west would mean heading into more heavily occupied territory. The Americans had to be ready to defend themselves.

  Their journey started on a mountain railroad, where they followed the tracks until they approached a large town that was sure to have German units patrolling. From there the group hiked through the woods, through fields, in the sun and the rain, just constantly marching westward and trying to avoid Germans. They traveled in the brush and sometimes at night to avoid the German patrols that they knew would either take them prisoner or just kill them. They knew that the short-handed German occupiers had little time to corral and care for dozens of downed airmen, so the more expedient solution would be to open fire with a machine gun.

  They would sleep in haystacks, on the wooden floors of whatever buildings they came across, anywhere they happened to be when night fell. Days blended into weeks, and Oliver could scarcely tell when one day ended and the next began. They were all filled with the same hunger, the longing for home, and fears about what might be around the next bend.

  Only once on the journey did Oliver forget his aching feet and his desire to be anywhere but Yugoslavia. It was the middle of the day when the group of Americans and their Chetnik escorts came to a village where the locals greeted them warmly, as always, and offered them bits of food and drink. But Oliver and a couple of his crewmates were singled out by three girls who stood out from the rest. They were young, probably in their late teens, and the Americans immediately locked onto them as the most beautiful girls they had seen since landing in this country. While all the villagers were as hospitable as anyone could desire, the Americans had noticed that the girls in the mountains tended to the robust and hardy, with babushka-type kerchiefs on their heads that reminded them more of grandmothers than pinups. These girls, however, were different. They were more slender, they wore nicer dresses, though still simple, and their hair was uncovered. Oliver and his crewmates surmised that they must be city girls who somehow landed in this country village, possibly fleeing the Germans in town.

  The American boys were smiling from to ear to ear and doing their best to charm the girls, who seemed equally interested in the Yanks. The girls gestured for the three Americans to come into their cottage and have lunch, and they didn’t have to ask twice. Oliver and his friends eagerly took seats at the rough-hewn wooden table and smiled at the girls, who shot flirtatious looks every time they brought a plate with bread and cheese to the table. The six of them sat there smiling at one another, the men eating and commenting among themselves about how nice it was to see a pretty girl again. The girls were chatting among themselves too, quietly, and giggling every so often as they looked at the three men.

  Then one of the girls started talking to the men and gesturing toward the back room, which had two simple beds. At first the men didn’t know what they meant, but with more gestures and simple words, they got the idea. The girls were telling them that they could stay with them for the night. When it dawned on them, the Americans could hardly contain their excitement. They looked at one another and grinned; then they turned back to the girls and all three men said yes at once. They nodded in the affirmative, said yes several more times, and nodded some more to make sure the girls understood.

  And just at that point, they heard the Chetnik soldiers come running by outside. “Heidi! Heidi!” they yelled. The Germans were coming. The Americans had to run. They truly hated to leave these beautiful girls, stuffing down more bread and cheese before taking a moment for just the briefest of kisses on the girls’ cheeks as they raced out the door and into the woods.

  Richard Felman, accompanied by his doggedly loyal bodyguard, was growing more and more fond of the Serbian people as he continued his own march through the Yugoslavian countryside. Though he and his crewmates were in constant danger, he came to appreciate the interaction with local people and wanted to learn more about this country. His bodyguard Stefanovic managed to find an old Serbian-English dictionary somewhere along the way, and Felman eagerly took to learning the local language. At each village where they stopped to rest and eat, Felman tried to speak a few words of Serbian, which invariably thrilled the locals. Stefanovic beamed with pride, as if showing off his pupil. Once they became comfortable communicating with short phrases and pantomime, the villagers usually got around to asking Felman about his home, this wondrous place they had only heard of. “How much does a worker earn?” was a common question. Knowing that dollars would have little meaning to these people who were always hungry, Felman instead told them of how much bread or how many dozens of eggs could be earned in one day by a typical worker in America. The answer always astounded them, and many said they wanted to go to America after the war.

  Only once did Felman encounter a Serbian villager who was not happy to see the American. As was their custom when entering a village to stay for the night, the soldiers divided the Americans up among the various homes and expected the local people to play host. Stefanovic had taken Felman to a house where the married couple welcomed him as usual, but it didn’t take long for the mother-in-law to make it clear that she didn’t appreciate some strange American barging in and eating their scarce food. The old lady was railing about Felman’s presence, while the married couple tried to calm her down, when Felman tried to smooth things over. He picked up a cup of plum brandy and raised it high.

  “Long live King Peter!” he shouted, looking expectantly at the old woman. He motioned to her with the cup, and she could not refuse the toast. She begrudgingly took a sip, followed by Felman.

  “Long live Draza Mihailovich!” Felman shouted. The woman muttered something and took another sip of brandy. Felman followed with enthusiastic toasts to President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The woman stopped complaining about Felman and soon became warmer, eventually laughing with him and offering him more food. When Felman left with the soldiers the next morning, the old woman clutched him tightly and sobbed, kissing his hands and waving her kerchief as he pulled away.

  After weeks more of marching and scrounging for food, but no more pretty girls, Oliver and his cohorts finally arrived near General Mihailovich’s headquarters. Milac explained that they were going to stay there, the men dispersed throughout the peasant farmhouses in the area, until Mihailovich could determine how to get them home. Oliver looked around and didn’t see anything that would explain why they had walked for weeks to get here.

  “Why here?” Oliver asked Milac. “Where are we?”

  “Pranjane,” he replied. “This is where you will wait. There will be more.”

  And soon there were. Mike McKool, Richard Felman, Tony Orsini, Clare Musgrove, and Robert Wilson also converged on Pranjane over the course of several months, along with hundreds of other airmen. They all had been shot down over Yugoslavia, bailing out
of their bombers and landing in the arms of the local Chetniks. Each was greeted like a long-lost brother and then assigned to a group, the hundreds of airmen divided informally to facilitate housing assignments in the local village and the assignment of some small tasks. They all had similar stories to tell when they straggled into the remote mountain village and were assigned to stay with different farm families. Tony Orsini regaled the Americans with the story of how he received three marriage proposals along the way, including one from the daughter of a local brewery owner who was very insistent that the young Italian-American take his daughter back to the United States with him. Noting that the girl would have made a better linebacker than a wife, Orsini politely declined.

  Once they arrived in Pranjane, the Americans had plenty of time on their hands. There was little to do except stay out of sight of any Germans that might pass by, but thanks to the remote mountainous location and the nearly ten thousand Mihailovich soldiers surrounding Pranjane, German units rarely ventured into this territory. Still, the Americans were always ready to sprint into the woods or bury themselves in a haystack if someone shouted that Germans were coming, or if a German plane flew overhead. The Americans were keenly aware that their presence put all the local villagers in danger, so they didn’t want to be spotted and invite a brutal German retaliation on these locals who were being so generous. Most of the Americans spent their days idly in the villages, whittling corncob pipes and smoking whatever locally grown tobacco they could find. They all rued the fact that the normal source of tobacco in Yugoslavia, a city to the south called Nis, had been bombed. The airmen watched the locals go about their humble daily routines, learning how to bake bread by putting the dough on a plate in the fireplace, covering it with an overturned bowl and then heaping hot ashes on top. They also pitched in with the local villagers as they worked the fields, sometimes joining in what the locals called “mass work,” in which many residents would work on one farmer’s fields at the same time to get the season’s work done. Then they would move on to the next farmer’s fields, each grateful landowner thanking them with a celebratory meal—or the closest that could be provided under the circumstances—when the work was complete. Even on the best days, the food was always simple: whole-grain bread, cheese, milk, maybe some butter, and mixed root vegetables. Any sort of meat was a rarity, but it would always be offered first to the Americans. The one thing that could always be counted on was plum brandy. Plum trees covered this part of the country, growing wild and heavy with fruit, so even the poorest household had its own still for making plum brandy and plenty of casks to get them through to the next spring when the trees would be full again. The villagers and the airmen might have been hungry most of the time, but their cups were always full.

  Occasionally as they worked in the fields or lay around waiting for something to happen, the airmen would see squadrons of bombers flying overhead, more planes from the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, their own home bases. First they would hear the rumble in the distance and then the sound would get louder and louder as the big planes flew over, prompting the airmen and the villagers to whoop and holler, cheering the Allied planes on. But each flight of bombers made the airmen grow wistful as well, the planes so close but so out of reach and then disappearing into the distance without them. They also knew that every time they saw another dozen planes on their way to Ploesti, a few of those crews would soon be joining them in Pranjane.

  While most of the airmen stayed in Pranjane and grew more and more bored, others, like Felman, wanted to get back in the fight. Felman, who quickly emerged as a de facto leader of the downed airmen gathering in Pranjane, made more contacts with the Chetnik fighters in the area and convinced them that he could be an asset to their work against the Nazis. Relying on his growing familiarity with the local language, Felman joined Mihailovich’s forces in conducting sabotage against the Germans. Felman had been moved by Colonel Vasić’c description of the Chetniks’ determination to fight against overwhelming odds, and his encounters with the local people motivated him to help in any way. He could not sit idly by while these people risked their lives for him and his fellow airmen.

  Sabotage, especially the very careful use of certain types that were hard to trace, was a key element in the Chetniks’ fight against the Germans occupying their homeland. Though they were not overly sentimental about losing their lives in defense of their country, the Serbs had learned early on in the Nazi occupation that skirmishes with German patrols and open defiance resulted only in a disproportionate response from their enemy. Shooting a few German soldiers who wandered into Mihailovich’s territory might prompt a bloody raid on an entire village, and sneaking into a rail yard to blow up a Nazi supply train might lead to dozens of innocent Serbs being hung from the light poles as a warning against further uprising. The Chetniks were not discouraged from fighting, however. They just had to fight smarter, and they taught Felman what they had learned.

  Felman and Stefanovic joined six other guerillas on a dark night, working their way quietly through the woods to a railway station farther down the mountainside. A railway worker had risked his life by informing Mihailovich’s forces that a train loaded with food was leaving the next morning for German units stationed in Romania. The eight men carefully made their way to the station, stopping at the edge of the woods and scanning the area for German guards. Few were out at that hour, but all of the men were armed and ready to fight if necessary. They lay low and watched for a while, making sure the train yard was quiet before carrying out their objective. Once the Chetnik soldiers were confident that a German guard would not surprise them, the youngest of them—a fifteen-year-old boy with more experience in sabotage than Felman would ever know—scurried out of the wood line and to the train parked on a siding. As Felman and the others watched from the distance, the boy hid among the big engine’s wheels for a moment, making sure he had not been seen, and then he clambered up onto the coal tender directly behind the engine. He quickly pushed aside the top layer of coal, digging down as far as his arms could reach, and then he pulled a small black package out of his coat. He shoved this parcel down into the hole and raked the coal back over it, covering it completely. Taking a quick look around before jumping off the tender, the young man raced back to the wood line, where the men greeted him with whispered congratulations for a job well done. The saboteur was covered in coal dust, his smile showing clearly against his black skin.

  The group turned to leave, and Felman at first thought they were only going back into the woods a short distance for more safety, since the Germans would be on high alert after the train blew up. But as they kept moving, Felman asked his friend Stefanovic why they were not waiting to make sure the train blew up.

  “No, not now,” Stefanovic whispered, using a few words of English that Felman had taught him. Then he said something in Serbian that Felman couldn’t understand and motioned with his hands to show the train leaving and then—boom!—blowing up. It was then that Felman understood. This was delayed sabotage. The bomb the boy hid in the coal tender wasn’t intended to blow up now, while the train was still in the station, because then the Germans would know it was the local Serbs who did it and they would exact revenge. The explosive was hidden deep in the coal tender so that later, long after the train had left Pranjane, the train’s fireman would unknowingly shovel it directly into the boiler of the engine. The fire would set off the explosive, the train would be destroyed, and it would not be obvious to the Germans how it happened or who did it.

  Ingenious, Felman thought. As he went out on more sabotage runs with the Chetniks, he learned other ways to sabotage the Germans without inviting a bloodbath. One favorite method was to discreetly pour sand into the engines of German vehicles. The damage would be delayed but crippling to the machinery.

  Felman’s work helped him blend in seamlessly with the local people, and after months on the ground, he started to look like one too. His clothes were in tatters and constantly filthy, and he wore pieces of g
ear that his Chetnik friends had offered him along the way. He fit in so well that the Chetniks were comfortable taking him along when they went into nearby towns without weapons or anything else that would identify them as Mihailovich’s soldiers. They weren’t looking to engage any Germans they might encounter, so they assumed the role of local villagers instead of soldiers. Felman was with a group of Chetnik fighters one day when they decided to go into a nearby town for a drink, taking off their rifles and knives before marching down to the tavern for some rest and recreation. (Felman always carried his military insignia patch inside his shirt, however. If he were caught by the Germans, that patch might count as him being “in uniform” and deserving of protection under the Geneva convention as a prisoner of war. Otherwise, he could be considered an enemy combatant in civilian clothes, classified as a spy and shot dead on the spot. It was all theoretical, of course, because the Nazis weren’t sticklers for following the rules.) They’d had a few drinks already when they heard a car pull up outside. The sound of a vehicle was alarming in itself, because few locals had a car. That sound usually meant Germans were coming. As the group peered outside, they could see a German staff car stopped and a young officer about to come inside. The driver stayed with the car.

  Felman and his friends were worried, the American most of all. The other Chetniks could pass easily if they didn’t want to cause a ruckus with this Nazi officer, but Felman suddenly doubted his camouflage. Do I look like a Serb? Or do I look like a Jew from New York?