The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  Lalich was on the radio serving as air-traffic controller for the C-47s coming in. The airstrip was just as short and bumpy as it had been the night before, but in the light of day, the big planes were able to get down safely. It was nonetheless still the kind of landing that the pilots would talk about over beers for many years to come. To make sure they didn’t run off the end of the runway and into the trees, some of the pilots even used a potentially disastrous technique called the “ground loop,” a rapid horizontal spin on the ground. This quick U-turn solves the problem when running out of runway, but only if the pilot avoids the tendency for the inside wing to rise and the outside wing to scrape the ground, which happens more if the ground surface is soft like on an improvised airstrip. If the outside wing digs in, the aircraft will skid violently or even cart-wheel. The ground loops amounted to a dramatic flourish for the airmen on the ground, who knew the danger in pulling such a maneuver in a big plane like the C-47. The airmen let out another hearty cheer of appreciation when they saw the risky maneuver completed successfully. Musulin admired the bravery of the C-47 pilots and thought they must be the best around, but he also thought they might have more guts than brains.

  Everyone involved with preparing the field was elated at the success of the landings. The Mihailovich soldier in charge of guarding the airfield strutted around with his chest puffed out, a big grin on his face.

  “Tell me,” he asked an airman standing nearby, “is LaGuardia airfield anything like this?”

  The scene from the previous night was repeated, with cheers and celebration every time a C-47 touched down, but today there was more of a sense of urgency. Once the six planes were on the ground, Musulin and Felman quickly hustled the chosen men onto them, usually twelve at a time. Seeing that the planes could take off safely, if not easily, Musulin eased up a bit on the twelve-man limit and allowed a few more men on some planes. The first men on the planes were the twenty-four sick and wounded who hadn’t made it onto the previous night’s planes, followed by other injured men, including Felman. As he boarded the C-47, Felman was overcome by the way the airmen wanted to show their gratitude to the Serb villagers who had helped them. Like those on the planes the previous night, many of the men on the rescue planes were shoeless and shivering in the cold, having given everything they could to the peasants who had kept them alive for so long.

  In a repeat of the previous night’s dramatic departures, the planes rumbled down the runway as fast as possible and slowly climbed to just barely clear the surrounding woods, more than one brushing the treetops with its wheels as it soared away. Musulin was astounded at the skills of the C-47 pilots and concluded they were some of the hottest fliers he had ever seen. A half hour after landing, the first six planes were off again, circling Pranjane to gain altitude and then forming a clumsy V formation for the return to Italy. When the rescue planes were assembled, the fighter escorts regrouped around them and the American planes dipped their wings in a farewell salute before heading toward the horizon.

  Half an hour later, at nine a.m., another group of six C-47s and twenty-five fighter planes arrived for the remainder of the airmen, including Musgrove. They repeated the same scene again with cheering airmen, jubilant villagers, and more fighter attacks on the surrounding German forces.

  One of the last planes became mired in the mud and Musulin worried for a while that it might have to be left there. Leaving the plane was in itself not a huge concern because the crew and passengers could be spread among the other departing planes. But leaving a big C-47 sitting out in the open would be a glaring sign to any German planes flying overhead later, and the villagers of Pranjane would pay the price after the Americans were safely back in Italy. They couldn’t let that happen, so Musulin organized a hundred Serbs to push the plane out of the muck.

  As the planes lined up for the takeoffs that would take out the rest of the airmen currently in Pranjane, Musulin checked his records and saw that one was missing. No one knew where he was and Musulin wasn’t about to hold up the planes to look for him. Just as the last plane out of Pranjane was about to take off, the missing man came stumbling out of the woods, rushing to the plane in a stagger. He had overindulged in plum brandy during the night and almost missed his flight.

  The Americans were so thankful to the local Serbs for their help in saving the airmen that they offered evacuation to two who needed urgent medical attention. One was a man going blind, and the other had a serious leg injury. Musulin, as the rescue team leader, found it hard to shun these men when the Serbs were doing so much for the Americans and he gave approval for these two men to be evacuated on one of the first C-47s to arrive that day. But by the end of the morning he found out that he had stepped on some toes back in Italy. The Serb fighters were still officially seen as Nazi collaborators, no matter what they had done for American airmen, so army leaders in Bari were not pleased to see them step off the plane with the rescued airmen and considered their evacuation a grave indiscretion by Musulin. The error might have been overlooked except that several of Tito’s Partisans were at the airfield in Bari when the plane landed and they recognized the two Serbs as Mihailovich guerrillas. Musulin soon had orders to get on one of the rescue planes and return to Italy. He argued with his superiors by radio, hoping to change their minds and stay to help rescue more airmen, but his immediate concern was whether Germans were soon going to attack Pranjane.

  Assuming that there was no way the Germans didn’t notice what happened in Pranjane, Musulin and his team retreated ten miles into the mountains to wait. While hiding out and keeping an eye on the village below, Jibilian received radio communications from Bari congratulating the team on a successful mission. As they hid in the mountains, villagers brought them five more Americans who had arrived in Pranjane only hours too late. The airmen were furious that they had come so close to rescue but missed their ride.

  After several days in the mountains with no evidence that the Germans would attack Pranjane, Musulin decided to take the OSS team and the five airmen back down into the village. Though they found it hard to believe, the only conclusion that made sense was that the American fighter planes had so effectively attacked the German garrison that the troops dug in for protection and never saw the C-47s.

  The team remained in Pranjane and greeted more American fliers, but the urgent messages from Bari kept ordering Musulin out. Reluctantly leaving Yugoslavia for a second time, Musulin returned to Bari on August 26. Initially there were calls to court-martial Musulin for refusing the order to offer no aid to Mihailovich during the mission, but the furor soon died down.

  Rajacich and Jibilian stayed behind but didn’t know how long they would be permitted to stay in Yugoslavia. Nick Lalich took over the OSS team and concluded just as quickly as Musulin had that the Serbs were completely loyal to the American cause. Lalich obtained permission for the team to stay in Yugoslavia, soon reporting that he had met with Mihailovich, who said he could funnel many more men to be rescued. We can take more, Lalich reported. There are a lot more men to be rescued. Despite ongoing misgivings about whether Mihailovich could be trusted, the authorities in Italy gave permission for Lalich, Rajacich, and Jibilian to stay in Yugoslavia and coordinate more rescues.

  The airmen were surprised to hear from the crew members on the C-47s that some of the rescue planes had dropped supplies to Tito’s forces, the enemy of the man who had harbored the airmen, on the way to Pranjane. In one of the later rescue flights, a crewman stepped out of the C-47 and happily announced that they had made a successful drop to the Partisans on the way over. The unsuspecting airman nearly had his throat slit by the Serb fighters before the Americans intervened and bundled him back into the plane.

  Two hundred and forty-one U.S. airmen were rescued on the night of August 9 and the morning of August 10, along with six British, four French, nine Italians, and twelve Russians—a total of 272 men rescued, when Vujnovich and the other OSS leaders thought it would be a stretch to retrieve one hundred. Still, thes
e airmen were only the first of hundreds to be rescued through Operation Halyard. All made it safely back to the U.S. air bases in Italy.

  A mission that was supposed to last a couple of weeks went on for six months, during which the OSS team rescued 432 American airmen, and eighty personnel from British, Canadian, French, Italian, and Russian units. As Robert Wilson, Mike McKool, and all the other downed airmen made their way to Pranjane under the protection of Mihailovich and his fighters through December 27, 1944, they learned of the ongoing mission and prepared for repeats of the same landing and takeoff dramas that preceded them. The total number of men rescued was 512, with not a single life lost in the effort.

  Operation Halyard, an audacious response to a desperate radio call for help and the query of a curious young woman in the States, turned out to be the most successful rescue ever of downed airmen behind enemy lines and one of the largest rescue missions of any type in World War II or since.

  Chapter 17

  Gales of the World

  The long ride back to Bari was joyous but tense for Tony Orsini and Clare Musgrove, cold and loud as they sat on hard metal seats built around the rim of the plane’s interior. The higher the plane climbed, the colder the air became and many of the men shivered in nothing but the thin shirts they were left with after leaving their overcoats behind for the Serb villagers. The crews of the C-47s handed out a few blankets and offered a spare jacket when they could, but the cold bit into the men’s skin as the roar of the propellers stymied any attempts at conversation. The rescued airmen did their best to just settle in and ignore the cold, some closing their eyes and dozing off, others distracted by their fantasies of a hot shower and a hot meal.

  Orsini, like others on his plane, had his fingers crossed that the plane could make it back to the base in Italy without being intercepted by the German fighters. He knew the C-47 was no match for the Luftwaffe, and even with the American fighter planes as escorts, it would take only one lucky hit to send the rescued airmen right back down again.

  When they landed in Bari, the airmen onboard let out a loud cheer as the wheels touched down. Finally they were back. Their weeks and months behind enemy lines were over. When the first plane landed, George Vujnovich was standing with a broad grin on his face, clapping his hands, overjoyed at the success of such an audacious mission. Standing next to him was General Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Fifteenth Air Force, who was equally overjoyed and eager to personally greet his returning airmen. Vujnovich and Twining, along with many of the other OSS leaders who had made the mission possible, stayed at the airfield for hours to welcome the men back, congratulating them on a job well done, but there was no fanfare or publicity about Operation Halyard. The press wasn’t told, and there was no newsreel cameraman waiting at the airport.

  Twining lauded the returning airmen for their service and perseverance while in enemy territory, and then he issued a stern order.

  “Do not talk to anyone about this. Do not reveal even the most insignificant information about your experience and adventures to anyone except the officers of the intelligence service,” Twining told the men. “The war is still going on and we don’t want to jeopardize any future evacuations.”

  Felman understood the reason for the order. Operation Halyard was not finished, and any security leaks could jeopardize the efforts to bring more men out. Plus, word of the mission’s success might prompt the Germans to retaliate against the Serb villagers. Felman reiterated the orders to his men, but he also suspected there was a secondary reason for keeping quiet about the rescue.

  Orsini had a shock when he first returned to the base in Italy. Amid all the jubilation of returning from Yugoslavia, a friend at the base took him to see the posted list of KIA—airmen killed in action. Orsini’s name was on the list. He and his friend laughed, the other man telling Orsini that they had never given up hope for his return.

  “We knew you’d come back. We knew you must still be out there,” the man said, slapping Orsini on the back.

  “Then why’d you put my name on the list?” Orsini asked, his smile starting to slip away.

  “Well . . . we were hoping, you know,” the man muttered. “But you were gone a while, so . . .” The two looked at each other for an uncomfortable moment and then laughed again at the irony of Orsini standing there looking at his name on the KIA list. Orsini shrugged it off for a while, but then he worried that his mother had been told he was dead. She hadn’t, but it would be some time before he could get a message home to her assuring her that he was alive and relatively well.

  Orsini and some of the other injured men were taken immediately to the sick bay, where X-rays revealed that his collarbone was very badly broken. He wasn’t surprised, having lived for more than a month with the dull pain, which became truly bad only when he had to jump over a fence while fleeing the Germans or do something similarly physical. But still the X-ray of misaligned bones startled him. The doctor explained, however, that despite the severity of the break, there was little that could be done. Even with a fresh break, doctors could do little to help a collarbone heal except provide a brace that would keep it from moving around too much, and after five weeks without any care at all, the broken bone had already begun mending. The injury would heal, the doctor told him, but there may always be some pain and difficulty moving.

  For the men without serious injuries, the first stop in Bari was for delousing. The airmen were taken to a specially equipped room, told to strip, and handed spray guns with delousing powder. The men in charge left and closed the door behind them, and then the airmen took turns spraying every nook and cranny on each other to kill the lice, fleas, and whatever other vermin they might have brought with them from Yugoslavia. While the chemical deluge was unpleasant, the men welcomed the opportunity to finally clean themselves of the grime and fleas that had plagued them the whole time they were in Yugoslavia. The delousing was followed by long hot showers and lengthy time in front of a mirror as they shed their scraggly beards.

  Vujnovich, meanwhile, was doing his best to support Lalich, Jibilian, and Rajacich as they continued their evacuation of the airmen who made their way into Pranjane. As the winter of 1944 progressed and the snow grew deeper in the mountains of Yugoslavia, Lalich sent a message to Vujnovich pleading for more supplies. Medicine was especially needed, he said. The poor villagers had absolutely none, and no way to travel to a doctor in the heavy snows.

  Even in the security of his office in Bari, Vujnovich had no trouble imagining the scene described by Lalich, and he wanted to write the requisition orders immediately. But he was stopped by the standing order that the Allies were not to provide any material support to Mihailovich or his supporters. The Operation Halyard mission was strictly for the purpose of bringing out the downed airmen, not to aid Mihailovich in any way. Vujnovich thought about the request for a day, seeing no way he could refuse but no way he could say yes without explicitly violating orders. It wasn’t long before he came down solidly on the side of doing the right thing, orders be damned. Vujnovich instructed the supply depot to put together two large containers of medicine and lied on the paperwork ordering an airdrop over Pranjane, saying it was food for the OSS team.

  In December, as the end date for the mission approached, Lalich contacted Vujnovich again and pleaded for shoes. He and his team could get by, Lalich told Vujnovich, but it was unbearable to watch the Serbian villagers walking about in rags, sometimes with their bare feet turning black against the white snow. The OSS agents had been tempted to give away their own boots and jackets when they saw the local people suffering, and Lalich begged Vujnovich for help. Again, it didn’t take Vujnovich long to decide that he would do as Lalich asked. He drove the short distance from the OSS post in Bari to the air force base, where he walked into the supply officer’s office and asked for six hundred pairs of shoes.

  “Six hundred pairs of shoes?” the man replied, looking up from his desk.

  “Yes, six hundred. I’ll take less if tha
t’s all you have,” Vujnovich said. He knew that the air force was under standing orders to comply with any request from the OSS, so the supply officer wasn’t going to resist no matter how odd the request sounded.

  “Well, we don’t have anything close to that. If you want that many, you’ll probably have to try the British. They should have it,” the man said. “I can write the order for you, and if you take it to them they’ll give you the shoes.”

  So Vujnovich took the requisition for six hundred pairs of shoes from the air force to the British base, where an officer filled the order with only a quick raise of the eyebrows and a “hmmmph, six hundred . . .” The shoes were trucked back to the air force base and on December 27, 1944, Vujnovich had them loaded onto a B-25 that was to be the last flight of Operation Halyard, the plane that would pick up Lalich, Rajacich, and Jibilian and bring them home.

  The plane was to be flown by George Kraigher, the Serb who had flown for the Yugoslavian army in World War I, before heading Pan Am in Africa and helping Vujnovich as he fled the Germans. Kraigher, by this time, was flying for the air force and making special runs into the Balkans for the OSS. Vujnovich knew Kraigher would be the one going in to pick up the OSS team and the last few airmen, so he thought he would be able to convince him to take the shoes. Kraigher, however, was shocked when he went to the plane and found the entire floor covered with boxes of shoes, to a height of about three feet.

  “George, what the hell is this?” he asked. Vujnovich knew he should be at the plane, ready with an explanation.

  “Shoes. Let’s just call it a belated Christmas present,” Vujnovich said. He gave Kraigher a friendly grin and hoped he would just go along. Kraigher paused and looked at the fully loaded plane, then back at Vujnovich.

  “You know I can’t do this. I’m not allowed to carry that kind of cargo into that area.” Kraigher was right; it was completely against the rules. But Vujnovich could tell his friend felt the same way he did, and he urged him to just take the shoes. “No one will know,” Vujnovich said. “And when you get there and see those poor people with no shoes, you’ll be glad you did this.”