The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  “Ne ja, Chicha!” Not I, Uncle! each boy would yell in return. Mihailovich continued teasing them, eyeing them suspiciously, pointing to first one and then another, saying, “I have definite information. Is it you?” The boys would continue laughing and yelling, “Ne ja, Chicha!” until finally Mihailovich relented and patted the boys on the back, saying, “I see that you’re all good Serbs. I shall have to tell my intelligence that they were wrong!”

  The stories Jibilian had heard of Mihailovich were confirmed when he saluted the general and received a salute in return, then hung around for a while to exchange a few pleasantries and listen in as Mihailovich talked with Musulin and the other Americans about the upcoming rescue. Followers were always crowded around, seeking close proximity to this local celebrity, a celebrity without pretense who didn’t mind a farmer suddenly giving him a bear hug and insisting on sharing a cup of plum brandy.

  When the celebration died down, Felman and Musulin conferred at length about the plans for getting all these men out. Musulin was reluctant to admit that the OSS had not anticipated so many men, but he did tell Felman that the rescue plan was audacious, bigger and riskier than anything that had been attempted before, and he gave him a basic rundown of how it would work. C-47s would come in and pick up a dozen men at a time and fly them back to Italy, he told Felman. Exactly how that would happen was still a little uncertain, and that was one reason Musulin and his team were there in advance: They had to figure out how to accomplish the airlift of so many people, using whatever resources they found here. The first order of business: Build an airstrip. On this rugged hillside. With virtually no tools. Without the Germans finding out.

  Musulin soon checked with an old friend in Mihailovich’s army for an update on the Germans in the area. What he heard was not encouraging. Only twelve miles away in the village of Chachak was a garrison of forty-five hundred German troops. Only five miles away on the other side of the mountain was another garrison of two hundred fifty Nazis. Within thirty miles in all directions there were a half-dozen cities and other centers important to the Germans, each with a number of troops stationed there. In Kraljevo, only thirty miles away, a Luftwaffe unit was stationed at an airfield just a very short flight from Pranjane. The meaning was clear for Musulin: This had to happen quickly.

  “If the Germans find out about this and attack, they’re going to bring superior firepower and overwhelm the Chetniks,” he told Felman. “Our friends will hold them off as long as possible, but eventually they will be forced to retreat through the mountains. All these airmen, especially the sick and injured, will never make it. We’ve got to do this evacuation before the Germans find out that my team is here.”

  Felman assured him that the airmen were ready to do whatever they were asked to make this rescue happen. Musulin knew he could count on the same from the villagers as well.

  Meanwhile, Jibilian set up his radio and made contact with Bari, letting them know the ACRU team had arrived safely and were proceeding as planned. The airmen set up a field hospital with the medical supplies that were dropped, calling on the services of an Italian doctor who had escaped from a prison camp in Belgrade.

  Jibilian was amazed by the number of airmen in Pranjane and by the generosity of the villagers risking their lives to help Americans. He was more determined than ever to get these men out safely, but actually seeing two hundred fifty men in one place was challenging his confidence. When Jibilian was asked by desperate airmen if the plan could really work, he always said yes. But deep down he was thinking, Only God knows. It was the same response he had when the airmen and villagers asked why the Allies had abandoned Mihailovich.

  The next morning, Musulin and his team wasted no time in setting about their tasks. Job one was clear: Get to work on the landing strip. They knew this would be tough work for the airmen and the local villagers to build an airstrip big enough to land C-47 cargo planes using nothing more than their bare hands and the occasional hoe or pitchfork, but there was no other way. The airmen had already begun clearing the field near Pranjane, the one where they had waited for the rescue team to arrive, but there was still a great deal more work to be done. And as Musulin kept reminding everyone, it had to be done quickly and without the Germans catching on. He confirmed that the site chosen by the airmen was the best option because it was relatively flat and clear, at least for the mountains of Yugoslavia, but it wasn’t much of a landing strip. It was just a small, narrow plateau halfway up the mountainside, about fifty yards wide and nearly seven hundred yards long. The field was surrounded by dense woods on one side and a sheer dropoff on the other. Farther out, the plateau was surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges that were less than two miles away. It looked like a pilot’s worst nightmare.

  Musulin knew from what the air force had told him in preparation for the mission, and plenty of the airmen on the ground confirmed it also, that the minimum distance required for landing a C-47 is seven hundred yards.

  “And that’s just the minimum,” he emphasized to the airmen. “God help us if there’s wind during the rescue attempt, or if the pilot comes in too fast. We could have a real mess out here if one of those planes runs off the end and bursts into flames. We’re going to lose American men, and the crash might bring Germans to investigate too. It could get real bad, real quick.” He repeated the same thing to the villagers gathered around, this time in Serbian. They all nodded in understanding, aware that the consequences of failing in this task were severe.

  He turned his attention back to the airmen and made sure they understood that their lives depended, in a very direct way, on whether they could build this airstrip.

  “And don’t forget you’re going to be on that plane when it tries to take off on this short little runway,” he said. “If I were you, I’d make that airstrip as long as we can possibly make it before those planes come.”

  He didn’t really have to pound home the point. These were airmen and they were very skeptical that they could make this plateau into a landing strip and not just a death trap. But they had no other choice, so they got to work right away, glad to have work with a purpose. They looked at the airstrip construction as another mission assigned to them, just like getting orders for another bomb run to Ploesti. The able-bodied carried the worst of it, while the sick and injured contributed in whatever small ways they could, by hauling off the smallest rocks or bringing water to the others. The airmen worked practically nonstop, breaking from their labor only when they heard a German plane overhead, which sent the men sprinting into the woods to hide. They hoped that, without a few hundred people visible working on it, the landing strip would look like a farm field. If a German pilot saw that many people out there toiling at once, it wouldn’t take long to figure out who they were and what they were doing. At the call of “German plane!” even the most exhausted men would sprint for the tree line. The work continued well into the evenings because of the need to finish quickly and also because it was harder for planes to see the work in the dark.

  The two hundred fifty airmen were joined in their work by three hundred villagers and Chetnik soldiers, using sixty oxcarts provided by the peasants for hauling rocks out of the field and moving dirt around to make the airstrip more level. Stones and soil were harvested from nearby streams to level the field. With very few tools to use, the airmen worked with bare, bloodied hands, digging up rocks and tamping down the earth with their feet to make the field solid enough for a plane to land. Every one of them was a flier, so they knew how important it was to do the job right. One soft hole or rock left in the field could mean a plane full of dozens of airmen cartwheeling across the airstrip and bursting into flames. Some airmen concentrated on cutting down trees at the end of the field and ripping up the stumps so the landing strip could be extended, while others hauled gravel and stones from a nearby streambed to use as makeshift paving. Their goal was to extend the length of the field by seventy-five yards. Every extra foot was another little bit of hope, another margin of safety
for pilots who would be pushing their skills to the limit with this crazy mission.

  Meanwhile, Musulin was more skeptical about the airfield than he let on to the airmen. He knew it was up to him to approve this site and not just bring those C-47 crews in if they were certain to die in a pointless crash. He wanted to see if there was anywhere else to carry out this operation, so he dispatched two teams of airmen to go look for other, more suitable landing sites. Several days later, both parties returned with reports of better landing areas, but the closest was fourteen hours walking distance from Pranjane. Moving everyone to that site would mean shifting away from the relatively well-guarded, secure area of Pranjane and being more vulnerable if the Germans attacked. And asking all the sick and injured to travel fourteen hours was not a good option.

  So Musulin reluctantly accepted Pranjane as the rescue site. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t really have a choice.

  Each day, more airmen arrived and the newbies heard what was going on in Pranjane, why they had journeyed so long to get to this little village that looked like every other village they had passed through. And each new arrival greeted the news with the same reaction—a wide grin that quickly faded into a look of skepticism. C-47s here? On this mountainside? Won’t the Germans come and kill us all after the first plane crashes?

  Jibilian knew the men had good reason to be skeptical. Their lives depended on this plan working and no one could be sure it would. But Jibilian had no intention of leaving Yugoslavia again without taking as many of these airmen with him as possible.

  They had to make it work. Six days after arriving in Pranjane, Jibilian and his teammates thought it could. The airstrip was coming along well, looking smoother and longer every day as the trees came down on the far end of the field. After surveying the work on the landing strip one last time on August 8, Musulin told Jibilian to send a message to Bari.

  “Jibby, tell Bari we’re ready. We’ll start evacuation tomorrow night.”

  Chapter 15

  Red. Red. Red.

  Jibilian tapped out his Morse code message to Bari, requesting six planes for the following night, and when he received confirmation that the rescue would finally happen the next evening, word spread among the airmen in Pranjane like a bottle rocket skittering through a field of school-children. This was the news they had been waiting for. They were finally going home. Well, they were going home if this crazy plan actually worked. No one was forgetting that the whole idea was a big risk.

  The airmen understood that they wouldn’t all be able to leave at the same time. They would be going out a few dozen at a time, starting with the wounded and then leaving in order of their longevity on the ground, with no distinction between officers and enlisted men. Those who had been in Yugoslavia the longest would be at the front of the line, and bomber crews would go out together. Musulin drew up a list of seventy-two airmen, most of them wounded, and told them to be ready to evacuate the next day. He was playing it safe by assigning only twelve men to each C-47, even though they typically carried twice as many troops. Musulin had specified that the rescue planes carry only half a load of gas, just barely enough to get to Pranjane and back, to keep their weight to a minimum. They already were asking the rescue pilots to take off in the dark on a bumpy airstrip that was just barely long enough, so Musulin figured they should keep the planes light by assigning no more than twelve passengers. Plus, there would be fewer casualties if one of the planes didn’t make it.

  Hardly anyone slept that night. Like the rest of the airmen, Tony Orsini and Clare Musgrove, who had arrived in Pranjane about two weeks earlier, were way too wired to sleep. They alternated lying down for short stints until they couldn’t stand it anymore with sitting outside in the chilly air talking with each other. Musulin, Rajacich, and Jibilian were up well into the night double-checking their plans and conferring with the Chetnik soldiers about defenses around Pranjane for the following night. They wanted to be sure that if the Germans came roaring up the mountainside to investigate the C-47 landings, the Chetnik soldiers could hold them off long enough to at least let them get the planes loaded and back in the air. “If we’re going to be attacked,” Musulin told them, “let’s make sure we get some of these boys in those planes and on their way out before it all falls apart. We might not all make it out, but let’s make sure somebody does.”

  The air was crackling with excitement and anxiety, so it was no surprise that most of the men were still awake when the machine-gun fire started. All over Pranjane, Americans jumped out of the haystacks and barn lofts where they had been trying to sleep, throwing on the rest of their clothes as the rapid staccato of a large-caliber machine gun carried through the damp night air. They were ready to bolt into the darkness and run for their lives. Musulin and his team sprang into action at the first sound of gunfire, grabbing their weapons and heading toward the firefight. This could be it. They’re onto us and they’re not going to let this rescue take place.

  The OSS agents were making their way toward the sound of the gunfire, led by the husky former linebacker, when they met a Chetnik officer coming toward them. Musulin immediately was surprised by the man’s calm demeanor. The Chetnik waved his hands at the Americans as if to indicate everything was okay and shook his head from side to side with a look of chagrin on his face.

  “Is no problem. No problem,” he said. “One of my men saw something moving and challenged it. When it did not say anything, he fired his machine gun.”

  “Oh, so there’s nobody out there,” Musulin said, lowering his weapon.

  “Only cow. Now dead cow.”

  The agents and the airmen slept fitfully that night if they slept at all, and when they awoke on the morning of August 9, their first thought was of the rescue. For seventy-two of the men, they knew this was the day they would finally get out of Yugoslavia or die trying. For the others, this was the day they would see if this crazy plan would work and there was an end in sight for their time in Yugoslavia. The plan was to bring the cargo planes in at night to make them less of a target for German fighters, so there was still one more long day in Yugoslavia to get through. There was still work to do, however, so the men could focus on putting the final touches on their improvised airstrip, as well as setting up the flare pots that would help guide the planes in.

  Late in the day, Orsini and Musgrove joined more than a hundred airmen and villagers working on the field, looking for soft spots and rocks, pushing carts of dirt here and there to even out the ground as much as possible, while Musulin and Rajacich oversaw the work. Musulin was on horseback, looking for any last-minute problems or areas that could be improved, when he spotted two or three tiny specks off the horizon, coming from the direction of Belgrade. He knew at once they were German planes. Once again, he thought the jig was up, the Germans were onto them and coming in to strafe them just as they were close to rescue. Rajacich saw them too. Simultaneously, both men started shouting to the airmen and villagers.

  “German planes! German planes! Run! Get off the field! Hurry!”

  Everyone scurried like field mice from an approaching hawk, sprinting and hobbling off the airstrip and into the closest tree line, squatting down in the ground cover to hide from the planes. Musulin and Rajacich joined them, watching the specks get closer and louder. It didn’t take long to see that the planes were a Stuka dive bomber and two JU-52 Junker planes that were similar to the American C-47s expected later that night, only more angular and boxy. The Stuka dive bomber struck fear in the hearts of the airmen, who easily recognized it on sight. Though it looked more like a small fighter plane, airmen and infantry the world over knew the Stuka as a fearful plane to encounter when you were helpless on the ground beneath it. In addition to strafing, which most any plane could do, the Stuka was specially designed for precision bombing of critical ground targets—including airfields. One of the most advanced and successful planes used in World War II, the Stuka had a dedicated autopilot system that put it in a steep controlled dive, allowing the
pilot to aim the bomb with great precision, and then the system automatically pulled the aircraft out of the dive and back to level flight when the bomb was dropped. The extreme G-forces of such a near-vertical dive often caused pilots of other planes to temporarily lose consciousness during the pull out of the dive, resulting in a crash, but the Stuka’s autopilot prevented that from happening. The Stuka pilot also had an excellent view from the cockpit and special indicators to inform him of his dive angle and when he reached the optimal bomb release altitude, allowing him to focus entirely on precise aiming during the fast, steep dive. The sight and sound of a Stuka diving right at you should have been plenty frightening enough, but Hitler wanted to maximize the terror. So he ordered the Luftwaffe to equip the Stuka with a screaming siren that made the sound of its dive far more frightening, even rattling some antiaircraft gunners so much that they did not fire at the plane.

  While they were primary transports of one type or another, like the C-47s, the German Junkers were armed with machine guns and could make slow lazy circles around the airmen, strafing the men on the ground until the bodies were heaped in piles. On this day, it was likely that the Junkers were on a routine mission and the Stuka dive bomber was accompanying them for protection. It might have been pure chance that their path had brought them right across the Pranjane airstrip, but Musulin and Rajacich couldn’t be sure. They were only a few hours away from carrying out this mission, and German planes were flying right toward the field. . . .