by Orr Kelly
Opposition continued even after the OSS had carried out a spectacular bit of espionage. In February 1943, with no planes available, OSS in Algiers used a Free French submarine to land an agent code-named Tommy on the south coast of France. He obtained the complete German antiaircraft defense plan for France. But, even with this prize in his possession, there was still no aircraft available to land in France and pick him up. He returned the way he had come, by submarine.
For more than a month, during May and June of 1943, the OSS begged for a plane to insert Tommy back in France. Finally, they arranged for a British plane to deliver him.
In August, Spaatz finally agreed to provide three B-17 heavy bombers to operate as a special flight section under the Twelfth Air Force. Operating out of an airfield in Tunisia, bomber crews were retained to fly the low-altitude, nighttime missions needed for this form of special operations. On the moonlit night of 20 October 1943, a single B-17 parachuted weapons, ammunition, and other supplies to a French resistance unit in the French Alps near Lake Geneva. The drop was successful. But on the way back to Africa, the plane was badly damaged by antiaircraft fire. With two of their four engines shut down, the crew limped back across the Mediterranean and landed at an emergency airstrip in Algiers.
In late October, Spaatz provided three more aircraft for OSS’s special operations. But, instead of heavy bombers, he gave them B-25 medium bombers. Although the B-25s looked good on paper, the OSS quickly found that they were almost totally unsuitable for the type of missions they were flying into occupied France. They were too fast for personnel drops; they didn’t have the range to reach most parts of France from North Africa, and they couldn’t carry enough to make their dangerous flights worthwhile. They were also unsuitable for landing and taking off from the rough fields available in occupied France, so they could not be used to bring out agents and members of the resistance.
In December, the B-25s were moved to Manduria, Italy, where the OSS found other uses for them. The three B-17s remained in North Africa, operating out of the Blida airdrome in Algiers—the home base for the RAF’s special operations unit. From there, they were able to make regular visits to drop zones in southern France, although on a limited scale.
Fish recalls that he and Heflin flew down to Algiers in one of their B-24s in late 1943 or early 1944 to share their experience in equipping and training the Carpetbaggers and flying missions with the British. He was not impressed: “They really didn’t have any assets. We briefed a room full of people and then came home.”
What stands out about that trip in his memory is the stop in Gibraltar to refuel on the way back to Britain. As they approached the runway in bumpy weather, the cover on the Joe hole came open, and the crew’s B-4 bags, containing all the clothing they had brought with them, fell out the hole and into the sea.
At about this same time, General Ira Eaker was transferred from command of the Eighth Air Force in England to head of the Mediterranean Allied air forces. He had overseen the successful organization of the Carpetbaggers in England and was sold on the need for special operations support to resistance movements behind the enemy lines. What he found when he moved to the Mediterranean theater shocked him: only three B-17s and half a dozen B-25s available for special operations. In the previous four months, the B-17s had flown only twenty-six missions—and on only eleven of those did they make successful drops.
The situation was a shambles.
Eaker, fresh from England, knew that the invasion of the Continent was only a few months away. General Eisenhower, who was in charge of planning for the landing, desperately wanted full-scale support for the resistance movement, not only in the north of France, where the invasion would take place, but also in the south of France, as a diversion and to “hold” German divisions in place and away from Normandy.
On 31 January, Eaker sent a cable to Washington proposing what seemed a simple solution: he asked for permission to create a special operations unit with a total of fifteen heavy bombers, a unit similar in organization to the Carpetbaggers. His plan was to do this without any additional planes or crews, but something got lost between his headquarters and Washington.
General Arnold, who at the same time was so supportive of Cochran and Alison and their air commandos in Burma, interpreted Eaker’s message as a request for more planes and crews. He turned down the request.
By this time, General Spaatz had been promoted to commander of United States Strategic Air Forces, an important one step up from Eaker in the air force pecking order. He didn’t approve of the request for special operations aircraft when he was running things in the Med, and he didn’t like them any better in his new position in overall command of both the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces.
Eaker kept pushing for approval of his plan, working the back channel through friends in the Pentagon. Pressure also came from Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, the RAF, and the United States State Department. Finally, after Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, became personally involved, Eaker got permission to put together his special operations squadron. Approval came in a message on 9 March, five and a half weeks after Eaker’s original proposal—not long by peacetime standards, but a terribly long time to wait, considering the fact that the Normandy invasion was only a few months away.
Once he received approval, Eaker moved quickly. He added twelve B-24s to the three B-17s and created a new unit that, after several changes of designation, became the 885th Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) (Special). Colonel Monro MacCloskey was named commanding officer. When the Balkan Air Force was created, with representatives of all the Allies, the 885th became a part of it, working not only with the British but with Polish, South African, Italian, and Russian units.
The new squadron concentrated on supporting the resistance movement in southern France through the late spring and early summer of 1944. And then, in late summer, with the Allies having landed both at Normandy and in southern France and having pushed the Germans back in both areas, the squadron switched to supporting partisan resistance fighters in northern Italy and the Balkans.
Aid to the Italian partisans was a relatively small part of the effort by the Allied air arm until relatively late in the war. Aid went to resistance movements in Albania and Greece and other parts of the Balkans, but by far the biggest part of the effort was focused on helping those fighting Hitler in Yugoslavia.
In the early years of the war, the Allies supported two rival movements. One consisted of the Cetnik forces headed by Gen. Draja Mihailovich, minister of war in the royal Yugoslav government, then operating in exile out of Cairo. The other was headed by Marshal Tito, a Russian-trained Communist who headed a growing movement that was giving the German forces severe problems. At one point, it was estimated that Tito’s two hundred thousand or more partisans were tying down at least seventeen German divisions that might otherwise have been fighting the Allied forces on the eastern or western fronts.
In contrast, Mihailovich’s forces were smaller and seemed, to many Allied officials, more concerned with battling their rivals within Yugoslavia—even if that involved cooperating with the Nazis during the war—than in fighting the German invaders. The evidence that they were in fact collaborating with the Germans became so convincing by the end of 1943 that, as of 1 January 1944, aid to Mihailovich’s Cetniks was cut off.
That date not only marked the end of aid to the Cetniks but roughly coincides with a dramatic increase in aid supplied to Tito. In effect, the Allies provided Tito’s logistical support and his air arm while his guerrilla fighters were the ground forces.
The decision to back Tito was highly controversial because of the fact that Tito was a Communist with strong links to the Soviet Union. But Prime Minister Churchill, speaking to the House of Commons on 24 May 1944, gave this rationale for the decision: “We have proclaimed ourselves supporters of Marshal Tito because of his heroic and massive struggle against the German armies. We are sending and planning to send the largest possible supplies of w
eapons to him and to make the closest contact with him.”
Tito’s partisans not only carried out extensive sabotage and harassment actions against the Germans but also had to defend themselves against repeated attempts to crush their movement. All this meant a growing demand for arms, ammunition, and other supplies, a demand the 885th Bombardment Squadron and other Allied special operations units could not meet by themselves. Particularly needed was the ability to land in the rough fields held by the partisans to deliver supplies and bring out downed Allied airmen and partisans who were sick or wounded or required specialized training.
Until the end of 1943, Tito obtained his arms from a variety of sources. A good deal of material became available when the Yugoslav army collapsed in 1941. More was captured from the Germans, and still more fell into the guerrillas’ hands when the Italians capitulated in 1943. But by the end of 1943, with the size of Tito’s forces growing rapidly, supplies and arms were running dangerously short. In November 1943, the British landed three thousand tons of supplies by sea. But that was only a trickle compared with what was needed in the face of an offensive launched by the Germans in December to solidify control of Bosnia and the Dalmatian coast.
The British, flying out of an airfield at Brindisi, where the heel of the Italian boot stretches out into the Adriatic Sea toward Albania, stepped up their efforts to help Tito. But they managed to deliver only 524 tons of supplies even though they attempted more than five hundred sorties during the period between 1 December 1943 and the first of March 1944.
In February 1944, two American troop carrier squadrons, with their C-47s, arrived at Brindisi and began flying supply missions to northern Italy and the Balkans, with the bulk of the flights going into Yugoslavia and Albania. In February and March, they delivered a total of 187 tons in spite of persistently bad weather.
On 23 February, the Americans conducted an operation remarkably similar to the one the air commandos carried out a few days later halfway around the globe in Burma. Three C-47s took off from the Allied air base at Bari, Italy. Each towed a single Waco glider. The gliders carried a twenty-three-man Russian military mission and six British officers destined for Tito’s headquarters. The C-47s brought the gliders into position for a safe landing and then parachuted 10,500 pounds of supplies, even though the visibility was practically zero over the target.
The original two American troop carrier squadrons were replaced in late March by four C-47 squadrons, and an additional RAF squadron was added in May. Between April and October 1944, the American troop carriers flew an average of thirty-five missions a night. As Tito’s operations expanded, the partisans were operating more than three hundred drop zones. Most of the locations were known to the Germans, and they were often attacked by air or land. But there were so many of them, and so many were in inaccessible areas, that the enemy had little success in trying to cut off the Allied supply operation.
The first landing—as opposed to supply drop—came on the night of 2-3 April 1944, when two American C-47s landed on a rough strip near Tito’s headquarters. By the end of April, there were three strips available, at least part of the time, in that same area. By July, there were sixteen strips in use, and by the end of the war, there were thirty-six strips in use in Yugoslavia alone. The number of landing operations increased dramatically in mid-1944. There were 13 landings in April; 50 in May; 125 in June; 194 in July; 145 in August; and 128 in September.
The Allies even organized a Balkan Air Terminal Service to coordinate activities on the receiving end. Each BATS team consisted of an officer and five or six enlisted men to select and prepare airstrips, guide planes to the strip, prepare cargo and personnel for evacuation, and organize the partisans to load and unload the C-47s. One group of partisans became so efficient they could unload a C-47 in ten minutes. The BATS teams were a forerunner of today’s special tactics teams.
At the other end of the supply line, at the airfield in Brindisi, the Allies set up a businesslike system for feeding supplies to those fighting behind enemy lines. Stocks were gathered in a warehouse area known as Paradise Camp. Partisans who had been evacuated for medical treatment prepared packages for each plane under the supervision of British officers. Trucks picked up the packages, stopped at a special post office to gather up mail for those in the field, and then delivered their cargo to the planes. Each C-47 carried about 4,000 pounds of cargo, plus 150 pounds of leaflets—or “nickels,” as they were called—to be dropped on each mission. The bigger bombers, which loaded from their own storage area, carried about 6,000 pounds of supplies and personnel plus 250 to 300 pounds of “nickels.”
By the summer of 1944, the Balkan Air Force was able to provide fighter escort for the unarmed C-47s and suppress enemy defenses near the landing zones. This meant the supply planes could operate in the daytime as well as at night. In August, the 60th Troop Carrier Group made 145 successful landings in Yugoslavia. In one case, pilots flew on instruments through bad weather to rough landing zones between two jagged peaks to deliver twenty-four mules and twelve 75mm guns. On their return flights during August, they brought out more than two thousand persons, including wounded partisans and women and children.
In some ways, the demands on aircrews flying into northern Italy and the Balkans were more severe than those faced by the Carpetbaggers. Missions tended to be longer. The bombers, especially when they were flying out of North Africa, flew to targets as much as 600 or 700 miles distant, compared with 300 miles or fewer on most Carpetbagger flights. The C-47s operating out of Brindisi routinely flew to targets 300 miles away and, on occasion, 450 miles away. Navigation was also somewhat more demanding because of long over-water segments and the lack of navigation aids. At times, however, the pilots found they could home in on enemy radio stations, especially in Belgrade.
The danger from antiaircraft fire and night fighters was generally less than in most of the area covered by the Carpetbaggers, although both fighters and flak were a constant worry.
On the night of 8–9 August, for example, 2d Lt. Sam O. Painter, a C-47 pilot, was attacked by a night fighter while he was in the pattern for his third approach to the drop zone. Painter completed his drop and then turned to face the fighter head-on. The startled enemy pilot blinked first in this aerial game of chicken and turned away. Painter escaped in the dark.
The rugged terrain in much of the Balkans was usually much more of a worry than the enemy. On most drops, the pilots flew at about six hundred feet, and, often, this meant flying three to five thousand feet below surrounding peaks and ridges. If a plane arrived at the designated drop zone and the crew did not see the expected signal lights down below, they could “stooge around” for as long as an hour, waiting for the lights—and dodging the rocks and trees the whole time.
On the night of 20–21 June 1944, while circling near a drop zone, Capt. Robert H. Snyder, operations officer of the 28th Troop Carrier Squadron, was confronted by a cliff rising out of the darkness. He banked sharply, stalled, and crashed with the loss of the entire crew.
Although the primary goal of the air operations was to keep the resistance fighters supplied so they could continue to battle the Germans, thousands of persons were evacuated to Italy by the troop carriers. In the year from 1 April 1944 to 30 April 1945, an estimated nineteen thousand persons were flown out of the Balkans—almost ninety-three hundred of them by the Americans in a six-month period in mid-1944.
One of the most dramatic—and important—evacuation efforts occurred in early June 1944.
At 4:30 A.M. on 25 May, German dive bombers hit Tito’s headquarters at Drvar, a village surrounded by three-thousand-foot mountains in western Yugoslavia. Two battalions of Germans swooped down on the area by parachute and glider. But Tito, suspicious because of increased air activity in the days immediately before the attack, had pulled part of his staff back into a mountain ravine. The British and Russian military missions had their own camps in nearby ravines, and a small American meteorological team was also located t
here.
Tito’s thousand-man force resisted the initial attack. But, on the afternoon of the day after the initial assault, a German armored column and additional infantry joined in. Along with the British, Russians, and Americans, Tito’s headquarters party fled the area just before they were surrounded and escaped to a nearby town. On 3 June, a BATS team prepared an emergency landing strip. At ten o’clock that night, a Russian C-47 from a base in Italy picked up Tito and a group of key officers and flew them to Italy. On the next two nights, the Americans evacuated the rest of Tito’s staff and the members of the foreign missions, saving them from almost certain capture.
While the troop carriers were flying their supply and evacuation missions, the heavy bombers concentrated on drops to more distant targets, mostly in south-central Yugoslavia and, later, in northern Italy.
In December 1944, the bomber force was augmented by the arrival in Brindisi of the Carpetbaggers’ 859th Squadron from England.
Relations between the newcomers and the 885th Bomb Squadron—and especially its commander, Colonel MacCloskey—were strained. Al L. Sharps, a tail gunner on one of the B-24s sent down from England to help out, later gave this humorous account of their relationship:
“We did the job the 885th BS couldn’t or wouldn’t do. The 885th BS flew, to the best of my knowledge, into soft Greek and Italian targets or on milk runs over southern France or the western slope of Austria.
“Which gave the 859th BS plenty of room—the eastern slopes of Austria, Yugoslavia, Albania, the rough box canyons of the Alps, Moravia, Montenegro, etcetera.
“I don’t think we should be overly concerned about MacCloskey’s dislike of the 859th BS. We did sort of ruin his claim to being the inventor of Carpetbagging. We also terrified him. For on his one visit to the 859th BS area, he reamed out the guard at the entrance and told him to shoot at the next person who entered the area who failed to stop upon challenge. He then entered the officers’ section of our just-finished hard-pine privy.