The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  With everything changed in Yugoslavia, and with so many more men awaiting rescue than ever before, this mission would be different.

  Musulin had told him there were about one hundred airmen waiting in Pranjane, Vujnovich thought. One hundred. That number alone meant that the rescue was exponentially more difficult and dangerous than any that had been carried out before. How do you get one hundred sickly, injured airmen out of enemy territory without the Germans noticing? There were far too many to just try to slip them out on a small plane, and moving them all to a border where they might sneak across was out of the question. They risked being caught if they ventured away from Pranjane, and Vujnovich knew that one hundred men can’t move anywhere with stealth. He decided there was only one way to rescue these men. They would have to go in and pick them up from Pranjane, right where they were. It was the only way, he kept telling himself, partly to convince himself that he wasn’t organizing a suicide mission. It’s the only way to get them out. We have to go pick them up.

  The numbers complicated everything. If it were a dozen airmen needing rescue, it wouldn’t have been such a wild idea to just send an OSS plane to land somewhere nearby and then sneak back out of Yugoslavia. Or you might be able to move through occupied territory until they reached a border that could be crossed. But with one hundred men, how many planes would that take? How many times would they have to land, pick up the airmen, take off, and fly home without being caught? Once was risky, but more than that was just foolhardy, wasn’t it? Maybe so, Vujnovich decided, but there was no other choice. So Vujnovich’s plan began to take shape: The OSS would organize a rescue by first sending in agents to prepare the airmen, and then the Fifteenth Air Force would send in a fleet of planes to land in enemy territory and bring them home. When Vujnovich approached his counterparts in the air force, they had him coordinate with an air force officer who suggested the rugged C-47. The ubiquitous C-47 filled many different roles in World War II—everything from troop transport and cargo delivery to paratrooper drops and rescue missions. The plane’s versatility led to the nickname Skytrain. The two-engine plane had a roomy interior that could be outfitted any way the user wanted, with seats, guns, or radios, or left empty to hold anything you needed hauled from point A to point B. They were the primary utility plane of the American military, serving all over Europe and playing a key role in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. In civilian life, it was known as the DC-1, DC-2, or DC-3. With a wingspan of ninety-five feet and a length of sixty-three feet, the C-47 was a big, bulky plane, but it required a crew of only four. When outfitted with seats as a passenger plane, a C-47 could carry only a dozen people in addition to the crew. The airmen in Yugoslavia would be picked up by C-47 cargo planes with mostly empty interiors, making it possible to carry more. But under the conditions of this rescue, the planes would probably carry no more than a dozen passengers per plane.

  That’s a lot of landings and takeoffs to get one hundred men out, Vujnovich worried. He didn’t yet know that his challenge was even bigger than that. Because of the lack of intelligence coming from Mihailovich’s camp after Musulin was pulled out, he did not yet know that the number of men in Pranjane had surpassed one hundred and was growing bigger every day.

  “And another thing,” the Air Force officer told Vujnovich. “Those boys in Pranjane will need to build an airstrip. There is no suitable landing area around Pranjane, so it will be up to the airmen and the villagers to build a landing strip big enough for a C-47.”

  Vujnovich knew the airmen and the villagers had no tools other than whatever farm implements might be around, so they would be building the airstrip pretty much with their bare hands. He had to hope they could find a flat enough area to make the landings possible, and that they could build the makeshift runway without attracting attention from the Germans just a few miles down in the valley. Nazi planes flew overhead all the time, prompting the airmen to dive for cover lest they be discovered, so it was going to be a challenge to build an airstrip for C-47s without being caught. And the consequences were substantial. If their efforts to prepare for the rescue gave away their location, Vujnovich knew the Germans would respond in one of two ways: Either they would come in immediately to raid Pranjane, kill the airmen and probably do worse to the villagers and Chetniks who helped them, or they would wait until the rescue attempt so they could do all of that and kill the rescuers.

  Secrecy was paramount, so the C-47s would go into Yugoslavia just a few at a time, without fighter escorts, to keep the mission clandestine. A big pack of C-47s and fighter planes would only draw attention and invite attack.

  As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the air force officer informed Vujnovich of one last detail: “The planes will have to go in at night, landing on that rough little airstrip in pitch-black darkness. It’s the only way to improve the cargo planes’ chances of going undetected by the Germans.”

  Vujnovich understood the necessity of a nighttime rescue, but he could hardly believe how difficult this mission was becoming. Vujnovich was no pilot, but he knew that a dark landing on an unfamiliar makeshift runway would challenge even the most experienced fliers, and if one of the planes crashed in the dark, that would be the end of the rescue. No more planes could land; dozens would die in the crash itself; and the commotion would probably bring in the Germans to finish off the rest.

  This was an audacious plan, a rescue attempt unlike any ever attempted by the OSS or anyone else. Vujnovich knew that his career was on the line with this mission because he had pushed so hard for it and because he was betting so much on what 20/20 hindsight surely would call a desperate, ill-advised folly if it failed. His own future was not a priority at the time, however. Vujnovich felt a great responsibility to get it right, to make sure he was working through every possible scenario, because so many lives depended on this rescue being completed smoothly. Not only were the airmen’s lives at stake, but Vujnovich was putting a great many more on the line: the villagers in Pranjane, the Chetniks, and the dozens of OSS agents and air force fliers who would carry out the mission. Vujnovich went over the details again and again. There was so much risk involved, so many ways that the whole plan could fall apart, but there was no other way to get them out. They had to make this work. They had to.

  Vujnovich started putting together a team for the mission to Yugoslavia. He was reluctant to hand over such an important and risky plan to someone else, not to mention that he might be sending agents to their deaths, so Vujnovich’s first intention was to go into Yugoslavia himself. He was more of a desk officer by this point, but he was fully trained as a field agent and he knew the language. That plan didn’t get off the ground, however. When Vujnovich briefed his superiors about his intention to lead the mission, word spread to the State Department, which was not happy that this mission was going forward at all. The idea of Vujnovich, known to be a die-hard anti-Communist, parachuting into Yugoslavia made them uneasy. Who knew what this brash Communist-hating OSS officer would do if he were allowed into Yugoslavia to meet up with Mihailovich?

  So one day the State Department liaison to the OSS in Bari came to Vujnovich’s office and handed him a telegram. The message said, Former naval person objects to George Vujnovich going into Mihailovich’s headquarters. Therefore he will not be sent. It was signed by President Roosevelt.

  Vujnovich knew that “former naval person” was a common euphemism for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had served as First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I and the early part of World War II. The picture was clear to Vujnovich: The Communists had convinced Churchill that he was not sufficiently pro-Tito and anti-Mihailovich, so it was too risky to let him go. Vujnovich would have to find someone else to lead the mission, and he didn’t have to look far. His second choice for leading the mission had always been the obvious one—Musulin.

  Musulin was eager to go back into Yugoslavia. He hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place and had done everything he could to avoid following orders, so he jump
ed at the chance to lead this critical mission. He knew how difficult it would be, but he also knew how much those men needed help. He had been with them already. He knew the Americans streaming into Pranjane were hanging on the hope that one day the Americans would come for them. Vujnovich didn’t even have to ask. He knew how badly Musulin wanted to return, so he simply told him one day, “George, they’re not going to let me go. You’ll lead the mission.” Musulin was overjoyed, a big smile piercing the bushy black beard he still sported. They needed three agents altogether, and Musulin worked with Vujnovich to pick the other two members of the team, looking for men who could speak the language and whom he could trust with so many lives.

  To work alongside Musulin, they chose another OSS agent who spoke the local language. Sergeant Mike Rajacich, from Washington, DC, and of Yugoslavian descent, had arrived in Bari only days earlier, but he had served in Cairo since October 1943 and came highly recommended. Rajacich mentioned to Vujnovich that if he needed another agent with the right language skills he could count on Nick Lalich, a handsome young OSS officer with a big black mustache. The son of Serbian immigrants, Lalich was in the Cairo OSS post and assigned to the activities in Yugoslavia. Both of these men could be trusted with this important mission, and Musulin seemed comfortable with the idea of taking Rajacich in as the second agent. Lalich wasn’t needed at the moment, but Vujnovich was glad to know he was available.

  The team was not yet complete, however. This was to be a three-man team and every infiltration team like this needed a radio operator. Even though the OSS had access to the most advanced radio equipment available, World-War-II-era radios that could transmit from one country to another were bulky, temperamental devices that required a skilled operator, a far cry from the push-and-talk radios of the modern military. OSS agents often were hindered by the need to carry around a suitcase-sized radio, most frequently disguised as an actual suitcase, and not just any OSS agent could use the device effectively. For this mission, Vujnovich knew that it was crucial to have reliable communication from the field so that the difficult rescue could be coordinated properly, and that meant sending in someone with the best possible radio expertise. When he considered the agents available, Vujnovich was pleased to find one who not only had proven himself an excellent radioman but who also had been behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia before. Arthur Jibilian, a compact, amiable fellow from Toledo, Ohio, wasn’t the most cocky of the OSS agents and didn’t inspire fear at first glance—unlike say, Musulin, whom you wouldn’t want to see charging toward you in anger—but Vujnovich knew he was a combat veteran who could take care of himself in Nazi territory.

  Only a couple months earlier, Jibilian himself was on the ground in Yugoslavia running from the Germans and hoping he would make it back alive. He had spent two months gathering intelligence behind enemy lines, this time with Tito’s forces, narrowly escaping death many times. The experience had taken him a long way from the Art Jibilian that people knew before the war. A second-generation American of Armenian descent, Jibilian was raised by his cousins Sarkis and Oksana Jibilian because his father had fled the Turks during a Turkish/Armenian war, after his own father was beheaded. Jibilian’s father came to America to escape a similar fate, leaving his mother, two brothers, and one sister behind in Armenia, but eventually the Turks drove the family out, with one brother and Jibilian’s sister dying in the process. The mother and the surviving son escaped to the United States to join his father, and Arthur Jibilian was born soon after in 1923. The family had settled in Cleveland by the time he was born, but any dreams of an idyllic American life were shattered when Jibilian’s mother committed suicide only eighteen months after he was born, the pain of losing her other children and the terror she experienced in Armenia too much for her to bear. Jibilian’s father left soon after and so did his older brother, leaving the young American-born boy to be cared for by cousins in Toledo.

  Jibilian—known as Jibby to friends—had only recently graduated from high school when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Like so many other men of his generation, he marched right downtown to enlist in the military, and like a great many of them, he wanted to join the Navy Air Corps to be a flier. But he missed a letter on the eye exam and was advised to come back and try again in a couple weeks. Before he could get back to the recruiting office, bad news came to the household. His cousin Sarkis, whom he looked to as a father figure, was diagnosed with lung cancer and Jibilian decided he had to stay with him instead of enlisting right away. Sarkis died on January 19, 1943, and before he could try enlisting in the Navy Air Corps again, he was drafted into the regular navy, not the air corps. With Sarkis’s death, Jibilian felt all alone and saw the draft notice as an acceptable alternative to pursuing life in Toledo on his own. There was no longer anything to keep him there, so he was happy to arrive at boot camp on March 15, 1943. A series of exams revealed that Jibilian could be a good radioman, so before long he started learning Morse code and navy protocol for radio communications.

  One day in boot camp, Jibilian heard that there would be a visitor from the OSS and that he wanted to meet anyone who spoke a foreign language. Jibilian spoke Armenian, but he wasn’t sure how useful that would be when the country was fighting Japanese and Germans. He went to the meeting anyway and was interviewed by a lieutenant commander from the OSS who confirmed that, indeed, they weren’t so interested in people who spoke Armenian. “But we are interested in radio operators. We’re in desperate need of some good radiomen,” he explained. “And who knows? That Armenian might come in handy someday.” When Jibilian asked about exactly what a radioman would do for the OSS, the lieutenant commander explained that they accompanied other agents into the field, usually parachuting into enemy territory, and used the radio to relay intelligence such as troop movements. They also might take part in sabotage such as blowing up bridges. Jibilian was thinking about whether he should volunteer for that kind of assignment when the OSS man spoke again.

  “Let me make one thing very clear,” he said. “These missions are extremely dangerous. Every time you go out there’s a good chance you won’t come back. This is a volunteer assignment; you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  Jibilian appreciated the officer’s candor and he continued pondering the possibilities while the other man sat and waited for him to decide. He took only a short moment before speaking up, saying, “I’m interested. I’ll volunteer.” The OSS officer was glad to hear it and shook Jibilian’s hand, telling him he was making the right choice and doing a tremendous service to his country. Jibilian hoped so. He felt good about the decision, but he had just volunteered for something far more dangerous than anything he probably would have been assigned in the army. The danger actually was one thing that pushed him toward volunteering, not because he was a big risk taker but because he knew he was different than a lot of guys in boot camp who had families, wives, even children to go home to after the war.

  I’m more expendable. I don’t have any immediate family and maybe it’s better that I take a dangerous assignment than let it go to some guy who has people waiting for him at home. Shoot, I don’t even have a girl. So if anybody is qualified for a dangerous assignment, it’s me.

  At least it should be more interesting than sitting on a ship out in the ocean and tuning a radio, he thought.

  After the initial excitement and anxiety about volunteering for the OSS, Jibilian didn’t hear anything more about it until just before he had completed his training for becoming a radioman. He was beginning to think the OSS had forgotten about him or didn’t need him anymore, but then he received orders stating he was on “detached temporary duty with the Office of Strategic Services.” So Jibilian was in the OSS after all. The orders said he was to report immediately to the Farm outside Washington, DC, the same place that Vujnovich and scores of other agents had been trained in spy craft. There he underwent the same training as every other agent, learning to kill and avoid being killed, but the OSS also provided specialized training in
the use of the radios that spy teams took into the field. The radio set consisted of a transmitter, a receiver, and a power pack, all fit into a small suitcase that, the agents hoped, could let them mingle into a crowd of refugees or at least look reasonable as you were walking down a road in Europe. After that training, Jibilian and some other agents in training were sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, where they spent a week—instead of the typical four to six weeks—learning how to parachute out of a plane. Not long after, he found himself at the OSS post in Cairo where, in his downtime, he managed to make contact with members of his family from Armenia.

  Jibilian was still waiting for his first mission when he heard that OSS Lieutenant Eli Popovich was looking for a radio operator to join him and Colonel Lynn Farish on a trip behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia. Farish had already made one trip into Yugoslavia, but he had been unsatisfied with having to rely on British radio operators to get his reports out. He insisted that for this mission they should take an American radioman. There weren’t that many available, so the rookie Jibilian got the nod. He was thrilled to be selected, as he was eager to actually put his skills to use. The mission, code named Columbia, was launched from Brindisi on the night of March 15, 1944. Popovich, Farish, and Jibilian parachuted into Yugoslavian territory held by Tito’s Partisans. When Jibilian hit the ground, the most grueling two months of his life began.

  Once they landed in the wooded hills at the base of a mountain range, the team made sure the area was safe and then Jibilian set up his transmitter to try to contact the OSS post. He was eager to prove himself and do his job, but he was also nervous. The adrenaline coursed through him and his heart pounded as he manipulated the controls of the radio, trying to get a signal through to Cairo and listening for a response. There was nothing despite repeated tries. He kept sending the signal over and over, waiting for a call back, and when nothing came, he decided he had to use more antenna. Popovich and Farish watched with concern as he unreeled more of the wire antenna hidden in the suitcase, hoping it would boost the signal strength but also knowing that he was increasing the chances that the Germans could use a direction finder, known as a DF to radiomen, to electronically home in on the broadcast and find the trio of spies. It was risky, but it worked. Jibilian finally got a signal to Cairo and felt he had redeemed himself with the other two more experienced agents. They were surprised to find out why it had been so difficult make contact. It hadn’t been Jibilian’s fault at all. His radio signals were going through just fine, but no one was listening for them in the Cairo OSS post because they thought the mission had been cancelled.