RED TAILS
The Tuskegee Airmen and Operation Halyard:
An All-New Update for The Forgotten 500
Gregory A. Freeman
NAL Caliber
NAL Caliber
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Since I originally published The Forgotten 500, about the extraordinary rescue mission of five hundred downed airmen in the hills of enemy-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II, a fascinating new side story has come to light involving the famed Tuskegee Airmen and their never-before-told involvement in this rescue operation. During my original research for the book I wanted to tell the story of the aircrews that flew the rescue planes and the fighter pilots who protected them, but little information was available. I knew that they would have been part of the Fifteenth Air Force, but nothing more.
As The Forgotten 500 became popular, veterans, Serbian Americans, history buffs, and other readers realized that they knew additional details and passed them on to me. I was speaking with one of the heroes of the story, the late, great Arthur Jibilian, when he casually asked me if I knew that the Tuskegee Airmen flew fighter cover for the rescues. I was surprised and delighted to hear this and immediately set about researching the connection between Operation Halyard and the first black pilots in the military.
The bravery of the Tuskegee Airmen is a perfect complement to that of the men like Jibilian and his colleagues, many of them first-generation Americans, who risked their lives to carry out the rescue. I’m pleased to complete the story of The Forgotten 500 by honoring the contribution of the Tuskegee Airmen.
GAF
April 2011
Twenty-year-old Arthur Jibilian volunteered for the OSS, the World War II intelligence agency and precursor to the modern-day CIA, because he considered himself expendable. So when an OSS officer visited his base to recruit agents who could speak a foreign language, Jibilian stepped forward.
The fellow from Cleveland could speak Armenian, and as a Navy radio operator he might be valuable to the secret teams that infiltrated enemy territory to gather intelligence or conduct sabotage. The OSS officer warned Jibilian that the missions were extremely dangerous, that agents usually had only a fifty-fifty chance of coming back. This made Jibilian pause, because he didn’t consider himself any braver than his buddies, but then he thought about the young men he worked with every day, the guys he bunked with and shared a beer with on weekends. Most of them had families back home, some even had wives, and they were eager to return. Jibilian didn’t have any of that, so he figured it was better for him to volunteer for the dangerous position and maybe keep one of the other guys from taking it.
I’m more expendable. At least this way, maybe I’ll be more useful than if I’m just working a radio on a ship somewhere.
With that step, Jibilian began a dangerous journey that soon would place him in the middle of one of the most daring rescue operations ever conducted during a war. The slight, humble radio operator would be a key player in the ultrasecret mission known as Operation Halyard. Jibilian was one of three secret agents who parachuted into Nazi-held territory in Yugoslavia to organize an ambitious effort to rescue more than five hundred airmen, young men just like himself, who went down behind enemy lines.
The year was 1944 and much of Europe was firmly in the grip of Hitler’s armies. Yugoslavia had been invaded swiftly and decisively, with cruel punishment for those who dared to resist. The Allies were gaining a foothold in Europe, due in large part to wave after wave of bomber planes that flew for hours to attack targets deep in enemy territory, each one carrying ten or eleven young men who hoped they would survive their time over the target and then the long journey back to their home bases. While the Allies could not move into Yugoslavia without first beating back the Germans on other fronts, American bombers flew over the rugged country nearly every day on the way to bomb the Nazi oil refineries in Romania. The Yugoslav villagers knew the planes overhead were on dangerous missions to fight the Germans where it would matter most, the source of the all-important oil that drove the Nazi war machine. Not long after, they would see the same planes return, fewer in number and many of them badly damaged, limping back across Yugoslavia to their bases in Italy.
When the bomber crews could make it no farther, their only option was to bail out in this largely unknown land controlled by Germans. As 1944 wore on, the number of Americans trapped in Yugoslavia grew larger every day. Some were injured, all were hungry and tired, and it was only a matter of time before Nazi patrols would find them and, at best, make them prisoners of war. Chances were good that the Germans wouldn’t bother taking them prisoner, and the local villagers who aided them had no hope of escaping death.
The airmen had survived so far, some for months, only with the aid of a local Serbian guerrilla fighter, General Draza Mihailovich. At the beginning of the war, Mihailovich was strongly supported by the United States as an ally and revered as a great leader by the Western world. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine as a brave warrior.
But by the time the American airmen started bai
ling out of their planes by the dozens in the hills of Yugoslavia, Mihailovich was fighting two enemies—the Nazis who had seized his country, and Josip Broz Tito, his opponent in the ongoing civil war for Yugoslavia. Mihailovich suffered a major setback in 1943 when, despite his longtime loyalty, U.S. and British leaders decided that they no longer wanted to put their money on Mihailovich as the future leader of Yugoslavia. They sided with Tito in Yugoslavia’s civil war and labeled Mihailovich a Nazi collaborator—even though his troops were actively resisting the German occupation.
Though he felt betrayed, Mihailovich and his followers were immensely grateful to the young American airmen who were risking their lives, and dying at an alarming rate, to fight the Nazi occupiers. These were men like nineteen-year-old Clare Musgrove, a ball turret gunner in a bomber who found that when it came time to bail out of his crippled plane, the electrical mechanism for raising himself up from the glass bubble under the plane’s belly was shot. As the pilot yelled, “This is it, boys! Bail out! Bail out!” Musgrove realized that he was trapped in the ball turret. His only option was to use a hand crank that would slowwwwly raise the turret into the plane to where he would be able to bail out. As he cranked and cranked and cranked, Musgrove watched the ground steadily rising closer. When he finally got the turret cranked up into the plane, Musgrove was drenched in sweat and shaking with adrenaline. The plane was eerily silent, the engines out and the other nine crew gone.
Musgrove made it out of his plane, and found himself in the same position that hundreds of other young men would experience—drifting down into the hills of Yugoslavia, wondering what fate awaited him. He soon was in the arms of waiting villagers, who took him to a small farmhouse, where he sat at the family table, bewildered and staring back at the children, who seemed fascinated by the American. He didn’t have any idea what they would do with him because no one else spoke English. But when there was a knock at the door and the father got into a heated discussion with another villager, Musgrove could tell that the other villager wanted the American out. Musgrove’s host angrily got rid of the other man and slammed the door, but then he grabbed Musgrove and hustled him into the bedroom and stuffed him under the bed. Musgrove lay there quietly for a long time, not knowing what to expect, and then he heard the door fly open and the children shriek. Then, from his vantage under the bed, all Musgrove could see was a pair of shiny, tall black boots walking around the house slowly, as if whoever was wearing them was looking around. As the heels clicked on the wooden floor, he could hear the man speaking German.
When twenty-one-year-old Tony Orsini bailed out of his bomber on his first mission, after first using a pair of pliers to pull a piece of shrapnel from a crewmate’s skull so he would be able to parachute out, he saw a heavyset peasant woman rushing toward him as he slowly drifted down. Orsini had no idea whether the woman would help him, attack him with a pitchfork, or summon German soldiers. The crews had been warned that some of the Serbs in this area would cut off their ears and turn them over to the Nazis.
Orsini landed hard, bouncing off a tree in the process and breaking his clavicle. He passed out momentarily, and when he awoke, the fat woman was cradling his head against her ample bosom, wiping his face and saying soothing things in a language he didn’t know. He did understand, however, that he was in good hands. Like hundreds of other airmen during the war, Orsini landed in Serbian territory controlled by Mihailovich’s forces. The local peasants were so appreciative of the risks taken by the allied aircrews that any airmen who crashed or parachuted out in their territory were hidden from the Germans, the Serbs doing all they could to feed and shelter the airmen even as they were barely able to feed themselves.
Most of the downed airmen bided their time hiding out in haylofts and root cellars as Nazi patrols searched for the Americans, but others put the time to good use and worked alongside Mihailovich’s forces as they fought the Germans.
Sabotaging Nazi operations was a good way for Richard Felman, a New York City native and son of Jewish immigrants from Romania, to spend his time in Yugoslavia. A navigator on a B-24 named Never a Dull Moment, Felman learned how to conduct “soft sabotage”—sabotage that would have a delayed effect so the Germans could not retaliate on local villagers. One night Felman joined a group of seven Serbs sneaking to the railway station in the middle of the night, targeting a train that was to leave the next morning with supplies for German troops. Felman helped guard the area as a fifteen-year-old Serb boy climbed into the train and hid a blackened container of explosives deep in the coal bin behind the engine. Blowing up the train in the station would have prompted the Nazis to kill scores of villagers in return, but this way, the train would not explode until it was almost at its destination and the explosive was shoveled into the engine.
Felman knew well that the German policy was to kill one hundred villagers for every German soldier lost to the resistance, and he had witnessed firsthand the Nazis’ willingness to massacre the Serb peasants. Only three days after he landed in Yugoslavia, a German patrol demanded that the Serb guerrillas hand over Felman and the rest of his bomber crew or they would storm a village of two hundred Serbs, including women and children. Felman and the other Americans immediately insisted that they give themselves up and be taken prisoner, but the Serbs refused to allow it, explaining that they could not submit to the Germans no matter what the price. The next day, Felman stood on a hillside and wept as he watched the village burn.
The brutality of the Germans made Felman, who became a de facto leader of the downed airmen, determined to get help from the Allies. It was only a matter of time before the Germans found the hidden Americans. Though some airmen adamantly opposed any radio contact because it could lead the Germans right to them, Felman managed to send a radio message to the headquarters of the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. Using radio equipment salvaged from downed bombers, they broadcast a desperate message:
SOS . . . SOS . . . 150 members of American crew waiting for rescue . . . There are many sick and wounded . . . Call back . . . SOS . . . SOS
There was no reply for days. Surely the Allies had heard the radio call, but they probably were suspicious that it was a German trick, an effort to lure rescue planes in for an ambush. To convince the Allies that the rescue call was legit, the airmen invented their own code based on information that could only be known to their buddies back at their home bases. For the letter A, they used the third letter of the place of birth of a bartender in the Officer’s Club in Lecce, Italy. For B, they used the fourth letter of the name of an intelligence officer stationed in Brindisi, and so on. They explained this code on another radio call, and thereafter all the messages were coded.
In Bari, Italy, the plea for help made its way to the OSS office of George Vujnovich, a senior officer in charge of intelligence and clandestine operations in parts of Europe, including Yugoslavia. A Pittsburgh native of Yugoslav descent, Vujnovich had already led a life of high adventure before becoming an OSS officer. A young college student visiting Belgrade, Yugoslavia, when the war broke out in 1941, Vujnovich and his newfound fiancée, a local girl, were trapped behind German lines and spent two years trying to get out of occupied territory and to safety—rushing to cross borders before the Nazis shut them down, tiptoeing through minefields, forging identification papers, dodging bombs during air raids, bribing German soldiers, and even receiving some unwitting help from the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. When the message from the airmen in the hills of Yugoslavia reached him, 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.
At first the OSS thought there were about 150 airmen to be retrieved because the message had made reference only to those in the immediate area where Felman was hiding. They would soon find out that there were more than 500 airmen in the surrounding countryside, all men who had been listed as M
IA, missing in action, when their planes went down. Vujnovich and his fellow OSS agents started planning a way to pluck them out of Nazi territory without the rescue turning into a bloodbath. They realized right away that no matter how they did it, the operation would be incredibly risky. If it went badly, the Germans might attack the rescue site and kill hundreds of airmen, and even more of the villagers who had helped hide them.
It didn’t take long for Vujnovich to settle on who should carry out the mission. He had three men at his disposal he could trust. Two had the right language skills and all had some familiarity with the Yugoslav people. He selected George Musulin to lead the three-man team, partly because he was a trusted agent who already had proven himself in the field, but also because he spoke the Serbian language. Though Musulin himself was born in New York, his father had immigrated from Yugoslavia. Musulin looked the part, too—a big brawny fellow who could easily pass for one of the scary-looking local fighters once he grew out the requisite bushy beard.
The second team member would be Michael Rajacic, an American of Yugoslav descent who, like Vujnovich, had been studying at the University of Belgrade when war broke out in Europe. The third member of the team needed to be a radio operator, and Vujnovich turned to the “expendable” Jibilian to fill that role. Though his second language was Armenian instead of the Serb language, Jibilian had already been on a mission behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia and had performed heroically. He had proven himself far from expendable.
But before Vujnovich could send the team in, he had to get approval from the highest levels. The OSS plans met resistance and outright interference from the British, who insisted that Mihailovich could not be trusted—based on evidence from a British operative who would be revealed years later as a Communist sympathizing with Tito. The rescue was supposed to be a joint operation with the British, but the Americans came to believe that the Brits were actively sabotaging the effort. On one of the first attempts to send help, the British plane crew instructed the American OSS agents that they were over the jump site where they would parachute down to meet up with the airmen. The Americans looked out the plane hatch and saw that they were directly over a raging ground battle. Jumping into the battle would have been suicidal.
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