The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  And thus another door opened for George and Mirjana. The man, Branco Denic, was in charge of broadcasting radio programs from the post in Jerusalem into Yugoslavia, first listening to the Nazi version of the news broadcast in occupied territories and then quickly writing another program that refuted the German lies and told the real news. Mirjana and George both accepted positions with the GSI, translating for the broadcasts, and Mirjana occasionally even went on the air herself to deliver the news. The couple spent a year in Jerusalem and in May 1942 they asked for visas to go to Cairo. Because they had worked with the British intelligence effort, the request was granted.

  The plan was to go to Cairo and make their way down the East African coast to Cape Town, South Africa, where they should be able to get a boat back to the United States. But when they got to Cairo, they found the city was in a near panic. German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox, was making his way across the Libyan Desert and there was fear that he might cut off the entire Middle East. Many embassies were abandoning Cairo as people looked for their own way out. George went to the American embassy repeatedly, asking if there were plans to evacuate U.S. citizens. On three separate occasions, the consul personally told him there would be no evacuation of Americans.

  The couple was trapped yet again. They were low on money and even lower on options. In his despair, George realized it was June 28, a major holiday in Serbia known as Vidovdan, which celebrates several historical events occurring on that date. To ease his mind and to pay his respects on Vidovdan, he made his way to a Russian church in Cairo and encountered several older men who were also praying. Some small talk revealed that they were with Pan American World Airways, the principal international airline of the United States at that time. The oldest man of the group was George Kraigher, a Serb who had flown for the Yugoslavian army in World War I. He was now head of Pan Am in Africa.

  Kraigher asked if George knew another young American who had been fleeing Yugoslavia as well, and George explained that the man had already found a way home to America. Kraigher said that was too bad, that he was going to offer the man a job.

  “In that case, I’d like to apply for the job,” George replied.

  Kraigher ended up offering George the job, but on one condition: He had to get a visa to go from Cairo to Sudan, then into Nigeria, and finally to Ghana, where the Pan Am job awaited. They had to get out of Cairo before the Germans arrived anyway, so George and Mirjana headed to the Sudan agency, an office run by the British to provide visas and other diplomatic services for countries in Africa. They found a crowd of four hundred people there clamoring for visas, agitated and yelling at the British guards, some trying to force their way in. The British were not giving out any visas.

  Mirjana saw the situation and realized it was hopeless. She broke down. “We’ll never get out of here,” she sobbed. “The Germans are going to come in a couple of weeks and we’ll be taken prisoner.”

  George held his wife as she cried and thought for a moment, staring at the crowd mobbing the agency gates, trying to come up with any solution. He knew Mirjana was right. If they just stayed in Cairo, they would be caught. He had to do something.

  So far they had been the beneficiary of incredible luck and fortunate coincidences, but now it was up to George to make something happen, to dig deep and find enough courage to bluff his way through the embassy. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off, but he had to give it a shot.

  “Let me see what I can do,” George said, pulling away from Mirjana. He walked off and, with all the attitude he could muster, marched up to a guard at the entrance.

  “I’d like to see Her Majesty’s consul,” he said, trying to sound as if it were a given that he should be allowed entry.

  “What for?” the guard asked.

  “I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.” George stood there just staring at the guard, trying not to look away. Then he pulled out his identification card from Jerusalem, which identified him as a member of the British GSI. The guard looked at the identification and pushed aside the other people trying to get to the gate, letting George walk on in. Once inside, George answered the receptionist’s query with the same reply: “I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.” When she directed him to the British consul, Phillip Reed, George was feeling pretty confident about his ruse. Reed asked what he could do for him and George explained that he needed to go to Ghana.

  “What for?” Reed asked.

  “I can’t tell you. I’m in intelligence and it’s confidential.”

  The consul paused for only a short moment and then asked for George’s passport. He had a clerk stamp the passport with visas for both Mr. and Mrs. Vujnovich, wished George luck, and shook his hand before turning to leave. He had been in the building for only ten minutes when he returned outside to find Mirjana. When she saw him return so quickly, she was sure he had been unable to get the visas. She broke down in tears again.

  “What’s wrong?” George asked with a grin, holding up his passport as he approached. “I’ve got the visas!”

  Mirjana was overjoyed and astounded. “How did you do it, George?”

  He couldn’t resist. “I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.”

  Kraigher was just as shocked when George returned with the visas, but he was pleased. He gave George and Mirjana first-class tickets to Sudan on the first flight out of Cairo, and when they got to the airport on June 28, George was surprised to learn that the flight was the first evacuation of Americans from Cairo. In the middle of a crowd of thirty Americans milling about was the American consul who had assured George three separate times that there would be no evacuation of Americans. Looking at the crowd of executives from American companies—a sea of camel-hair coats, crocodile-skin shoes, and ten-gallon hats—George immediately realized that the consul had notified only the wealthy and influential Americans in Cairo of the evacuation. People like George were on their own. But they had tickets for this flight, if there was enough room. It looked to George and Mirjana that there were far too many people for the plane, and they were stuck in the back of the crowd. Plus, the consul announced that he would be calling names for boarding and George didn’t expect to be at the top of his list.

  They were waiting at the foot of the stairs leading into the DC-3 passenger plane, hoping to make it on the flight, when Kraigher walked up and onto the stairs. He looked over the crowd and said, “Employees of Pan American first. Mr. and Mrs. Vujnovich, please.” They pushed through the crowd and George peered directly into the eyes of the American consul as they boarded the plane first, enjoying the surprised look on the official’s face.

  After a couple days of flying, they arrived in Accra, in the Gold Coast, where George took over duties as assistant airport manager, working under Kraigher. About three weeks after arriving, he put Mirjana on a plane that went from Accra to Fisherman’s Lake, Liberia; then to Ascensión, to Natal, to Georgetown, and to South Africa. From there she went to Trinidad and Puerto Rico, and on to Miami. Then she rode a train for thirty-six hours to Washington, DC. With no previous arrangements, she walked into the Yugoslavian embassy and found someone with whom she had mutual friends. She was hired to work at the embassy, and her escape from Yugoslavia was complete.

  Vujnovich stayed in Africa, a decision that Mirjana was not entirely happy with, because he enjoyed his job with Pan Am. Even after such a long ordeal to get out of occupied territory, Vujnovich was reluctant to go home because he felt that his job with Pan Am promised more than anything that awaited him at home. Besides, the war was on and chances were good that he would be drafted and sent overseas anyway. Better to stay here on his own terms, he thought.

  The American war effort did reach out for Vujnovich before long. About the same time that Mirjana left, Pan Am was militarized for the war effort and became part of the Air Transport Command. Employees like Vujnovich were offered a military commission or a ride back to the United States with no job and the prospect of being drafted. So George acce
pted a commission as second lieutenant. Kraigher became a colonel. Vujnovich was soon transferred to Lagos, assisting with the delivery of planes to be used in the war, and eventually assumed command of the base. He excelled at his job, and then one day he was visited by two American civilians who asked him to join the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. He would be useful because he spoke the Serbo-Croat language and knew the region well.

  Vujnovich didn’t even know what the OSS was, so the men explained that it was a special agency that reported directly to the president. He probably would be promoted if he joined the OSS, they told him. Vujnovich thought it sounded like the chance of a lifetime, so he said yes and found himself in Washington, DC, for a week. He had some time with Mirjana and then he was sent to the “Farm,” the ultrasecret OSS training facility on a sprawling estate about twenty miles north of Washington, DC. This was where he learned close-combat skills, code work, and other espionage techniques. After a month at the Farm, Vujnovich was an expert in skills like reading maps and judging latitude from the sun. The instructor in close combat was a former police chief in Shanghai, and he taught Vujnovich how to break a man’s arm or leg quickly, and how to make a man hurt so he would do anything you wanted. Once Vujnovich was fully trained, he had to take the final exam that was required of everyone leaving the Farm: a real-world assignment that would test what he had learned during his stay. His instructors gave him a challenging assignment: Go to the Bethlehem Shipyard in Baltimore, Maryland, and find out what ships were being built and how many. This was in wartime 1943, and such defense information was supposed to be closely guarded. He was given a small pressing tool for copying documents and a special phone number to call if he were caught and the police got too rough with him. If they didn’t beat him too badly, he was supposed to maintain his cover as long as he could. Calling for help from the OSS because you received a standard police beating might mean you failed your exam.

  Vujnovich set out on his task and decided right away to use a technique called “negative information,” which involved stating information you know to be false in hopes that the other person will correct you and reveal secrets. The shipyard was in need of workers, so it was no problem getting a job there with a fake identification card he made himself. He befriended a coworker and joined him for a beer one day after work, casually mentioning that he had worked in another shipyard that was turning out one Liberty ship every five days, a pitifully slow rate during a war. “It doesn’t look like Baltimore is much faster than that,” he said.

  This was Vujnovich’s entrée into finding out exactly what the Baltimore yard was doing, because most individual workers weren’t supposed to know details about production rates, and if they knew, they weren’t supposed to talk about it.

  The other worker was eager to brag about the shipyard’s fast pace and told Vujnovich he was wrong, that, by God, they were completing a ship a day and they were damned proud of it. Vujnovich scoffed at the idea, so the man bet him a beer that he could prove it. He brought over another worker who confirmed the information. The man won his beer and Vujnovich became an OSS officer.

  After his training, Vujnovich was able to spend a month and a half with Mirjana in Washington, where she was living with a naval officer and his wife on the west side of town. He had to leave before they found out that Mirjana was pregnant. Then the OSS flew him back to Cairo and on to Bari, Italy, where he arrived on November 20, 1943. The British Eighth Army had liberated Italy only about three weeks earlier. By the time he arrived in Bari, Vujnovich had been promoted to first lieutenant.

  Vujnovich was back, and this time he was fighting the Nazis instead of running from them.

  When Mirjana wrote him from Washington to ask if he could help the airmen stranded in the hills of Yugoslavia, he immediately set out to determine if his wife really did know something that had eluded the OSS post in Bari. A little investigation revealed that no one had been informed of any group as large as the hundred airmen Mirjana referred to, but there was reason to think she might be right.

  If it proved true, the revelation in Mirjana’s letter was surprising but not exactly shocking. It was entirely possible for so many airmen to be in Mihailovich’s territory without word getting to him in Bari. Vujnovich knew quite well how the military bureaucracy and politics, not to mention the Communist moles that had infiltrated the OSS, routinely got in the way of his agents doing their jobs. But how the news got to him didn’t matter as much as what he could do in response. He instantly felt a connection to the young men who just wanted to get out and go home. And he also felt a strong tie to the local Serbs helping them, any one of whom could be his own relative.

  Not a man to stand aside and hope someone else acted, Vujnovich decided he had to get those men out of Yugoslavia. He knew the task would be challenging and he was not certain it could be done at all. But he was certain that it had to be tried and that the OSS was the right bunch of men for the job. While he tried to confirm Mirjana’s message, Vujnovich started looking into rescue options and quickly found out that the task would be challenging on many fronts, not the least of which was all the political maneuvering over the Balkans. Vujnovich knew that the political situation in Yugoslavia was growing more complicated by the day, and the interaction among the United States, Great Britain, Tito, and Mihailovich was becoming a tangled mess of alliances, pseudo-alliances, outright opposition, and conflicting loyalties. In just the past year, the relationship between the Allies and Mihailovich had taken a dramatic turn for the worse, which Vujnovich knew was the primary explanation for why the messages from Mihailovich about the downed airmen were not acted on. Sure, the situation on the ground was more complicated and more dangerous than when the OSS had gone into Yugoslavia in 1943 to bring out some pilots, but that didn’t explain all of the hesitation. Vujnovich knew that politicos were arguing back and forth about Tito and Mihailovich, juggling the reports from Yugoslavia—many of them questionable at best—to determine where the Allies should put their support. The facts about what was happening on the ground took a backseat to the political posturing and propaganda spewed by many parties with many different agendas. Vujnovich knew this and he knew that it would be as formidable a challenge for him as any Nazi trooper his agents might meet in Yugoslavia.

  The first thing Vujnovich investigated was the reports from Mihailovich. When he looked into Mirjana’s comment about the downed airmen, it didn’t take long for him to confirm that Mihailovich had been sending detailed accounts of the airmen he was harboring. So why wasn’t anyone doing anything about it? The answer, Vujnovich discovered, was that Mihailovich was officially persona non grata with the Allies now. By the time Vujnovich started working on the rescue, the Allies’ position was that Mihailovich could not be trusted and should receive no support that might give him an advantage over his internal opponent, Tito. Or rather, that was mostly the British position and the Americans went along with it.

  Vujnovich was no stranger to Yugoslav history and he was quite familiar with Mihailovich. This turnaround was shocking, though it fit into the pattern he was seeing within the OSS. There were so many Communists infiltrating the OSS and other military agencies, Vujnovich realized, that it was hard to trust any information disparaging an anti-Communist like Mihailovich. Especially one who had been such a loyal supporter of the Allies since the war began, and one who had been hailed as a great freedom fighter by the West.

  Only two years earlier, a flattering, dramatically rendered portrait of Mihailovich graced the cover of Time magazine, leading readers to an article that described him as “the greatest guerilla fighter of Europe.” The first articles in the Western press had appeared in late 1941, a few months after the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in April and soon after the Yugoslav government in exile in London was able to make radio contact with the rebel general. The people of America and Great Britain were captivated by the romantic tales of this handsome guerilla who dared to stand up to the German invasion. The news from most other fronts
in Europe was discouraging. German armies were advancing on Moscow and Leningrad, other countries had capitulated already, and resistance movements elsewhere were still fledgling. But the public was reading stories about this dashing general who refused to concede his country to the Nazis. The very idea that someone was fighting back gave people in the West reason to hope, and the press quickly realized that its readers couldn’t get enough of Mihailovich. Before long, Mihailovich was one of the better known and most popular public figures in the West, his name becoming synonymous with resistance and dedication to one’s country. Time magazine readers voted him Man of the Year.

  The press reported on everything they could find about Mihailovich, painting a flattering portrait of a man who was at once intellectually gifted and possessed of a fierce fighting nature. He was of medium height, wiry, with blue eyes, horn-rimmed or wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and a look that reporters often described as pensive. Before the war, when he held positions in the Yugoslav government, Mihailovich was mostly clean shaven. During the war, he sported the bushy Old Testament beard common among the Serb peasants. In most photographs of Mihailovich, especially those taken before the war, it would be easy to mistake him for a university professor rather than one of the world’s foremost resistance fighters.