The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  He found out soon enough when the young officer, who appeared to want nothing more than a brandy, said hello to the men sitting at the tables. They all nodded in reply, wary but not wanting to provoke the German’s suspicions. Realizing that the officer suspected nothing, and feeling a bit cheeky about his deception, Felman gestured for the lieutenant to join them and pushed a chair out for him. He glanced over at his friends, whose eyes showed that they thought he was mad. Stefanovic, in particular, looked like he was about to leap out of his chair, and Felman wasn’t sure who would be throttled first—Felman or the Nazi. The German accepted the offer and sat down for a drink, not saying a lot because of the language barrier, but enjoying his brandy. He insisted on buying another round for the table, even though the Chetniks tried to decline because they wanted him to leave as soon as possible. Felman, however, was enjoying the moment, relishing this face-to-face deception. He smiled congenially at the Nazi, who seemed at the moment like a pleasant drinking companion. But Felman was seething inside.

  Here you have a Jew you can’t throw into the gas chamber, he thought. After a long, uncomfortable interlude, the lieutenant finished his drink and left, saying something that sounded friendly to Felman and the others. When he had left, the men all let out heavy sighs and rolled their eyes at one another, amazed that they had just shared brandy with a German officer.

  Felman had not been fooled by the German lieutenant’s apparent good nature. Despite the Chetniks’ efforts to avoid needless acts of retribution from the Germans, Nazi brutality invaded their lives regularly. One incident in particular reinforced for Felman how much the local villagers were risking by harboring so many American airmen—now more than a hundred—around Pranjane.

  Colonel Vasić, the debonair officer that Felman had met soon after landing in Yugoslavia, came to him one day and explained a difficult situation to him. As the leader of the downed airmen in Pranjane, he said, Felman should know that the Germans had delivered an ultimatum to Mihailovich. Hand over the American airmen you are hiding, they said, or we will raid a Serb village and kill all two hundred men, women, and children.

  Felman was appalled. How could they even consider letting those people die? He started telling Vasić that he and the other men would surrender and take their chances in a German prison camp—even though it was entirely possible that the Germans would simply kill them on the spot—but Vasić quickly cut him off. Speaking through an interpreter, he explained that he was not asking Felman to decide but merely informing him about the situation. Mihailovich would not give up the Americans; it was not their choice to make.

  “But we can’t let those people die in our place,” Felman protested.

  “Understand that the Germans will not stop killing because they capture you,” Vasić explained. “In our history, the Serb people have fought for our freedom and dignity against many enemies. We have learned that it is better to live with one leg than to spend your life on your knees. It is more important that we protect you, the people who have helped us fight our common enemy.”

  Felman protested further, but Vasić would not be swayed. The next day, Felman insisted that Stefanovic take him to the village that had been threatened. As they approached, he could smell the burning wood before he saw the remains of the village. The Nazis had burned it to the ground and killed everyone. Felman could only stand on the hillside and weep.

  Chapter 6

  Escaping Yugoslavia

  The airmen spent days, weeks, months waiting for help, hoping they wouldn’t be found by the Germans and trying to figure out a way to escape from enemy territory. They concluded that there just weren’t many options, and so they became steadily more depressed about their situation.

  General Mihailovich, who came to Pranjane to meet with the American airmen more than once, was well aware of the men’s festering depression and the reality that there appeared to be no effort by the Allies to rescue them. In addition to protecting them during their stay in Yugoslavia, Mihailovich was doing all he could to get the men home. He was sending information to the United States through indirect channels, making sure the U.S. government knew these men were here, that he was helping them, and that he would assist with any proposed rescue attempt. While Mihailovich truly cared about the airmen and their welfare, he also saw the potential for more aid from the Allies in his effort to fight the Nazis and Communist Josip Broz Tito, his opponent in the simultaneous civil war that threatened to tear the country apart. Mihailovich knew that helping the Allied airmen get home could lead to more support for his men, who were barely surviving on minimal food rations, old and insufficient arms, and ragged clothes. Many of his men, fierce fighters, had to make do in the cold mountainside with only felt slippers or boots so worn that their bare feet touched the ground more than what was left of the soles of the boots.

  In the months that he had been harboring the downed airmen, Mihailovich had been diligently sending information about each one by shortwave radio so that the Allies would know they were in safe hands. He even got messages to some of the airmen’s families, assuring them that their loved ones were safe for the moment. Part of Mihailovich’s concern was that the families of the airmen not be informed that they were simply “missing in action,” because he knew that would only inspire worry. It was reasonable to assume that a loved one reported as missing in action was dead, or at least captured, so Mihailovich thought he was doing a favor by letting the Allies know that these men were relatively safe in the hills of Yugoslavia. Mihailovich had his men send shortwave radio messages on a regular basis, reporting the name, rank, and military identification number of each airman his men had collected. The messages went first to the Yugoslav government, which was operating in exile in Cairo, Egypt, and from there they were sent to Konstantin Fotić the ambassador of Yugoslavia stationed in Washington, DC. In one message, Mihailovich said:

  Please advise the American Air Ministry that there are more than one hundred American aviators in our midst. We notified the English Supreme Command for the Mediterranean a long time ago. The English replied that they would send an officer to take care of the evacuation. Meanwhile, to date this has not been done. It would be better still if the Americans, and not the British, take part in the evacuation.

  Fotić delivered the information to the War Department, with assurances that Mihailovich was protecting the men for the moment, but also requesting that something be done to rescue them; the situation was grave, and there was no telling how long the airmen could last before the Germans found out where they were gathered. The information was dutifully received and recorded, but little else was done. No rescue was planned. Most of the airmen’s relatives were not notified that the airmen were alive and in good hands. They received the standard “missing in action” telegram like everyone else whose husband or son went down over enemy territory, the same one that Orsini’s mother received.

  With the War Department sitting on the information and making no effort to organize a rescue, the lives of the airmen fell into the hands of a sophisticated, learned, beautiful blond woman in Washington, DC. If only the airmen had known that such a brainy beauty back home knew of their plight and was worried for them. That simple knowledge would have made another day pass more easily.

  The woman was Mirjana Vujnovich, a lady in the Eastern European tradition—gracious, proper, and conservative, but at the same time warm, generous, and funny. While she was outspoken with family and close friends, she was reserved in public. Slender, with fine features and lively deep blue eyes, her blond hair worn in a modest shoulder-length style, Mirjana always caught the attention of young men who soon found there was much more to this gentle woman than her good looks. Mirjana was a great listener, skilled at drawing people out by listening intently, asking the right questions, and offering support. Her great passions, after her family, were literature and the arts.

  Mirjana was married to George Vujnovich, the control agent with the OSS in Bari, Italy. George was a tall, ruggedly handsom
e man, an all-American son of immigrants who seemed custom-built to look good in a uniform. The OSS was, in essence, home of the spies and secret operatives that got things done behind enemy lines. They did whatever was necessary, using trickery, subterfuge, exotic weapons, and nerves of steel to slip in among the enemy and accomplish things that might be impossible for an entire battalion of soldiers to do. From the post in Bari, in the recently liberated Italy, Vujnovich was responsible for operations in several nearby countries, including Yugoslavia. Mirjana knew what her husband did for the military, even though most OSS officers kept their job description close to the vest. Mirjana was more than just an adoring wife waiting back home for her husband serving overseas, though she was that too. A native of Yugoslavia herself, she had been through plenty with George and knew some of what he and the men serving under him were going through in Europe.

  In May 1944, however, Mirjana was safely ensconced in Washington, DC. Eight and a half months pregnant with their first child, Mirjana had little contact with her husband other than the occasional letter and spent her days with friends, including the other Yugoslav nationals who had immigrated to the United States. With a job at the Yugoslavian embassy, Mirjana was able to adjust well to a more comfortable, safe life in the United States, while still maintaining contact with the people and the culture of her homeland. It was through those contacts that she heard about the plight of the downed airmen halfway around the world. The community of Yugoslav expatriates was a tight one, and news from back home spread through the group quickly. When the embassy received reports from General Mihailovich about the hundreds of downed airmen hidden in the countryside, the news raced through the hallways. As it became clear that the War Department was not responding quickly to the notice, the plight of the American airmen became fodder for gossip every time a few Yugoslav immigrants got together for coffee in the morning or a drink in the evening. I hear Mihailovich is helping some airmen in the hills, a lot of them. Word of the airmen’s situation, sketchy as the information was by the time it was filtered down from officials in the embassy, spread quickly among anyone with a connection to Yugoslavia. All those boys are waiting for help. Mihailovich is protecting them. But the War Department isn’t doing anything.

  Mirjana’s friends knew that her husband was serving with a military group in Italy that was more than just a typical unit, so they wasted no time in getting the news to her. She was intrigued, just like everyone else who heard the story, and wondered why no one was doing anything to help the downed airmen. The next time she wrote George in Bari, she asked about the rumor she had heard, more as idle chitchat from back home than any sort of urgent request.

  There is plenty of talk here about the men whose planes were shot down in Yugoslavia, and how Draza Mihailovich is helping them until they can be rescued. I hear that there are perhaps a hundred gathered in one place. Are you involved in trying to get them out?

  Mirjana didn’t really expect an answer from George. She knew that he couldn’t and wouldn’t write back with any information about OSS operations, but she was making conversation with her husband as best she could. And she was genuinely curious nonetheless, so she asked just to get it off her mind.

  When George Vujnovich received the letter from Mirjana, his first concern was her pregnancy and whether there was anything new to report in that regard. He was pleased to hear that all was fine with his first child and he would soon be a father, though it pained him that he would not be there for the birth of his daughter, to be named Xenia. Among all the other news from home in Mirjana’s letter, her offhand comment about the men in Yugoslavia was the one that stayed with him as he put the letter away and went about the rest of his day. He kept thinking about that question. He hadn’t even heard about this particular group of downed airmen awaiting rescue, and he was in a position to know more about such matters than most people in the military. It was no surprise to him that there were downed airmen in Yugoslavia, of course; it was common knowledge that plenty of fliers had gone down in that region while on Ploesti bomb runs, and the OSS knew that some had survived and were evading capture.

  But a hundred airmen all in one place, waiting for rescue? Could Mirjana’s information be right?

  Reports from OSS agents in the field had made it clear that any airman stranded in Yugoslavia was in dire straits. One agent reported finding a half-starved B-24 tail gunner who had been shot down in the first raid on Ploesti. He was discovered rooting around in a farmer’s pigsty, fighting the animals for bits of rancid food. Another agent reported that two fighter pilots had been hidden in a convent, only to be discovered by Germans when their army-issued boots protruded from underneath the long black habits supplied by the nuns. Other agents reported finding injured American airmen hidden and tended by peasants in the hillside.

  A year earlier, General Nathan Twining, commander of the Fifteenth Air Force, organized a joint rescue effort for the airmen known to be in Yugoslavia, using the resources of the air force and the OSS agents already at work behind enemy lines in the occupied country. The OSS agents delivered escape maps to the downed airmen that would point them toward friendly areas where they could be picked up and with safe houses marked along the route. Agents also provided the Yugoslav villagers, almost all of them illiterate, with posters showing how to recognize Allied planes and the insignia of the friendly forces. With OSS agents providing covert organization on the ground and air force planes making taxi runs, about a hundred fliers had been rescued in 1943. The effort was aided by both Mihailovich’s Chetnik forces and Tito’s Partisans, in the last year before those two sides erupted into an all-out civil war. Vujnovich knew any such rescue would be even more difficult now, with those two sides fighting each other as bitterly as either fought the Germans.

  The OSS and the air force had both performed admirably in the 1943 rescues, but if there were a hundred fliers waiting for rescue this year, why hadn’t he heard about it? If they were being protected by Mihailovich, could they be organized enough to effect a real rescue? Vujnovich was intrigued by this curious question from home, and he had to find out if there was a job here for his OSS team.

  If there are a hundred men in Yugoslavia waiting for us to do something, we’ve got to get going. I’ve got to see if Mirjana is right.

  Vujnovich was driven by more than just professionalism or a dedication to duty. Vujnovich instantly felt a bond with the Americans stuck behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia because he had been there himself only a few years earlier. Vujnovich had never flown a plane or served behind enemy lines, but he had spent plenty of time in Nazi territory, and he sympathized with the airmen in a way that no one else in the OSS could.

  A Pittsburgh native of Yugoslav descent, Vujnovich had been visiting Yugoslavia as a student when the war broke out, leaving him trapped behind German lines. He spent the next two years trying to get out of occupied territory and to safety, and if Mirjana’s rumor was true, he knew the danger these Americans were in. He also was proud to know that the local villagers, the people of his family’s homeland, were safeguarding these men until he could get them out.

  Vujnovich had grown up as an all-American boy in Pittsburgh, but in the same Serbian-American community that now embraced his wife, Mirjana. Vujnovich’s parents had emigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia years earlier, and like many others from there who spoke no English, they settled in a labor-intensive part of the country—in their case Pittsburgh, with its steel mills. His father had arrived in 1912, immigrating to the United States from his village near Ogalen, close to Za- greb. Used to a hardscrabble life in the countryside, he was being pressured by authorities to join the Austrian army, and chose a new life in America instead. Two years later Vujnovich’s mother joined him. Vujnovich estimated that about half of the south side of Pittsburgh—where they lived—was of Serbian descent, and his father worked in the steel mill with men who had grown up in the same village in Yugoslavia. The neighborhood stores had signs in Cyrillic Serbian and it was as
common to hear the Serbian language in the streets as it was to hear English. Vujnovich grew up speaking both languages with his parents and his brother, Peter, and sister, Mary.

  When Vujnovich graduated from high school in 1934, he had no notion of even joining the military, much less becoming a top officer in the country’s premier spy agency. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, and though Vujnovich originally wanted to become an engineer, he had to admit that his math skills were not up to par. The binomial theorem was too much for him. So the thought of becoming a doctor started to sound more appealing. There was still a big problem, though. The son of a steel mill worker in Pittsburgh would find it difficult to pay for medical school in the United States, so Vujnovich considered another opportunity that his parents suggested: Go to study in Yugoslavia. Go back to our homeland. See the country where your family comes from. Get to know the country that we left so we could give you a better life in the United States.

  The more Vujnovich looked into the idea, the more he liked it. In the Yugoslav system, he would start studying medicine right away instead of first getting an undergraduate degree. And as he talked about the idea with his friends, he learned that there was a scholarship that could make it all possible. The Serbian National Federation, a group organized by immigrants like his own parents, offered scholarships for young Serbian Americans to go back to Yugoslavia to study. The Federation wanted to keep these young American-born Serbs connected to the homeland of their parents, fearing that without a special effort to show them the culture of Yugoslavia the connection would be lost in two generations. In the same year that Vujnovich decided this was a great opportunity, so did eight others from around the country. The Serbian National Federation provided full scholarships for study in Belgrade, transportation across the Atlantic, and a stipend of twenty-five dollars per month. Vujnovich’s parents explained to him that this was an extreme blessing for him, one that he could not possibly appreciate as an American-born young man who had never known hunger.