The Forgotten 500 (10 page)

The local villagers recovered Lovett’s body and held a formal funeral, attended by three hundred people, including Felman and his crewmates. The Serbs made a small headstone inscribed with Lovett’s name, military number, and hometown. Later they gave Felman some photographs of the grave and the funeral ceremony to take back to Lovett’s family.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, news of the airmen’s
plight was reaching their relatives back home. All over the country, families were facing the moment that they feared as soon as a loved one left to join the service. They answered a doorbell in the midst of cooking a pie, or they crawled out from under a car they were working on when someone called from the driveway, or they went to the window to see what the dogs were barking at. Their hearts skipped and their throats grew dry in an instant as they saw the Western Union delivery boy standing there with a telegram in his hand.

Tony Orsini’s mother, Angiolina Orsini, was in the kitchen on August 3, 1944, when she heard the knock at the door. Unaccustomed to receiving visitors with no notice, she immediately tensed and wondered if anything was amiss. But it couldn’t be Tony, she thought. She had talked with him on the phone only two weeks earlier when he was in Manches ter, New Hampshire, preparing to go overseas. And she knew he had been in Europe for only about a week. She worried about him constantly, but she had not yet started dreading every knock at the door.

Looking every bit the part of the Italian immigrant mother in the kitchen, Mrs. Orsini wiped her hands on her apron before heading to the front door. As she opened the door, she saw a young boy in a Western Union hat standing there. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. She saw his bike leaning against the front steps. The boy stared down at the floor and mumbled, “Telegram for you, ma’am,” never making eye contact. He had done this many times before, and he wanted to just hand over the telegram and leave.

“Per me? Che cosa è esso?”
she asked, not knowing what the telegram was or why he was handing it to her.

The boy thrust the envelope at her and she instinctively took it from him, freeing the boy to turn quickly and jump on his bike. He pedaled hard and raced away, leaving Orsini’s mother standing there with an envelope that said “Western Union Telegram” and “Mrs. Angiolina Orsini = 28 Beacon St, Jersey City, NJ.” She looked down at it and suddenly realized what it was. She gasped and put a hand to her mouth, then tore the envelope open. She fumbled with the paper folded inside but quickly saw that it was in English. She could not read a word of it, but she knew it was about her dear Anthony.

She began to cry as she stared at the telegram, fearing the worst. Then she looked next door and bolted down the front steps toward a neighbor who was an Italian immigrant like herself but who could read and write English. She went to the side door and pounded hard. When the woman appeared, she saw Orsini’s mother standing there in a panic, tears running down her face and clutching the telegram tightly in both hands.

“Colto esso a me! Prego colto esso a me!”
she cried to the neighbor.
Please read it to me!

Startled, the woman had no idea what the distraught woman was talking about. Then she saw that it was a telegram Angiolina Orsini was holding. She knew immediately that this would be terrible news. She didn’t want to read the telegram.

“No, no, non posso,”
she replied, shaking her head, full of sympathy but not wanting to be the one to give this poor woman such bad news.
No, I can’t
.

“Per favore! Prego, dovete!”
Orsini’s mother cried.
“È circa il mio Anthony!” Please, you must. It’s about my Anthony.

The neighbor couldn’t resist the anguished woman’s pleas. She took the telegram and slowly read it aloud in Italian as Orsini’s mother began to sob into her apron.

“La Segretaria della Guerra lo vuole per esprimere il suo rincresci mento profondo che il vostro tenente Anthony J. Orsini del figlio in Sec- ondo Luogo è stato segnalato I missing nell’azione . . .”
she read.
“The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Second Lieutenant Anthony J. Orsini has been reported missing in action . . .”

Her Anthony had been away such a short time and already he was gone. She prayed that he was still alive, but she knew that this telegram was often followed by another.

Once they were on the ground, the airmen’s only goal
was to survive. Survive right now, survive for another hour, for today, then for another day. They had no way to communicate with their home bases, and there was next to nothing in the countryside that would help them, other than the generous local people who took them in. The rough terrain made any travel difficult, and besides, the airmen didn’t have any idea which way to go. Moving down the mountains into more populated areas might offer more opportunity for escape or signaling for help, but that would mean walking right into areas that were heavily patrolled by Germans. Better to stay hidden in the mountainside even if they didn’t know what they would do next.

Escaping from this Nazi-held territory seemed like an impossibility to most of them. They were airmen used to flying over dangerous country, not special agents trained to infiltrate and make their way through enemy territory on the ground.

After meeting up with his fellow crew members at the military outpost of Mihailovich’s guerillas, Wilson realized that his best bet for survival was to stick with these armed men for as long as they would have him. For the next two months, the Serbian fighters harbored Wilson and his crewmates, feeding them as well as they could manage and taking them along when the group moved from one village to the next by narrow, sometimes overgrown trails—another group of ragtag Americans moving through Yugoslavia, like the groups that included Musgrove and Orsini. Each group had their own adventures and difficulties along the way, and one of the worst parts was not knowing what other Americans were out there and whether they would ever join up.

Occasionally the Chetnik soldiers would hide Wilson and the other Americans in the bushes until a German patrol passed or until they could be certain that a village was safe. Wilson got used to trudging through the mountainous countryside and looked forward to each new village, where the fliers would be greeted as heroes and offered whatever rations could be found. Though the villagers always welcomed them, the soldiers escorting them would allow the group to stay only a day or so before moving on. They knew that the generous villagers would give every scrap of food to the Americans if they stayed too long.

The mood of the Americans changed when they met a man named Bogdan, who greeted them in English as they entered another village. He embraced the fliers and welcomed them, causing the Americans to break into broad grins as they realized that finally they were meeting a Chetnik who spoke English. Maybe they’d find out where they were going and what would happen to them.

They quickly found out that Bogdan had learned English while working in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana. He had returned to Yugoslavia to retire and found himself directly in the path of Hitler’s army. They spoke eagerly with Bogdan, pumping him for any information, but he had little to pass on. All he could tell them was that the soldiers were protecting them until they could figure out somewhere to take them.

“Right now, they will take you from one place to next,” he said. “They will protect you. But I don’t know where you are going.”

Bogdan joined them on their journey, serving as their interpreter, helping the Americans understand what little there was to discuss along the way. If nothing else, he could help the Americans understand how far the next village was, how long it might be before they found some food. As they moved on, the Americans would watch for anything edible along the way, stopping to gather berries or any fruit that looked remotely like something they recognized. Whenever they came across a stream with small minnowlike fish, the airmen used their shirts to weave a seine that would catch the little fish by the dozens. They didn’t seem like much of a meal, but the Americans would take the fish to the next village and ask a local woman to fry them, offering some of the fish in appreciation for the cooking and any butter, goat cheese, or bread she might spare.

When they came to a bigger river, the men sometimes took advantage of the chance to get out of the July heat and cool off. One day the men were drawn to the sound of rushing water, which promised relief from the incessant heat of the day and they couldn’t wait to jump in when they saw the river up ahead. With the blessing of their Chetnik escorts the Americans stripped down and jumped in the cool water, forgetting for a moment that they were in enemy territory and in constant danger. One of the guerillas indicated that he was going off in the direction of the local village to see if they should stop there or keep moving on, disappearing back through the woods and leaving the Americans with a few other Chetniks who sat down in the shade and indicated that it was okay if Wilson and his friends wanted to swim. The young men jumped in immediately, and it didn’t take them long to let their guard down. They were just young men taking a swim, shoving one another underwater and splashing with abandon. Wilson was enjoying himself, immersing himself over and over again to cool down, while trying to scrub off some of the grime that was ground into every inch of his skin. He was scrubbing when he looked downstream and noticed someone else in the water, maybe half a mile away.

Wilson couldn’t see him clearly, but he pointed the man out to the other Americans and wondered aloud who it might be. Everyone calmed down for a moment to take a look, but then the group decided the man must just be a local villager. The man appeared to be naked, like them, and he was standing there staring back at them. Several of the men waved at the other fellow, but he just stood there. One of the Americans got the attention of a Chetnik soldier on the shore and pointed down-river to the other man. The soldier took a look and, seeing nothing to suggest the man was anything other than a local villager, shook his head as if to say there was no problem, then went back to resting under a tree. Wilson and his crewmates shrugged their shoulders and returned to enjoying the cool water.

Suddenly they could hear the Chetnik guerrilla who had gone to the village crashing through the woods, hurriedly returning to the river-bank. He started shouting to the other Chetniks excitedly, yelling something that caused the men with rifles to spring to their feet. They started waving furiously at the Americans in the water. Wilson and his crewmates stopped their horsing around and looked up at the anxious men on the bank, not knowing what was wrong but getting the message that something was. They were starting to slowly make their way out of the water when Bogdan ran over and shouted to them.

“Germans! There are Germans here! You must go! Go now!”

The Americans churned the water as they ran to shore quickly, as fast as they could, grabbing their clothes on the way out and sprinting into the woods on the heels of the Chetniks. They ran for a long time, naked and half naked, struggling to put on some clothes along the way, until finally the guerillas decided they had run far enough. They all sat down in the woods, panting from the exertion, the Americans still soaking wet.

“Where are the Germans?” one of the Americans asked Bogdan.

Their interpreter could hardly speak as he tried to catch his breath. “The village . . . Germans are in the village. Taking pigs, other food,” he said.

Several of the Americans looked puzzled. The village wasn’t all that close to where they were swimming, so why were they running for their lives like that?

Bogdan was breathing better now and could explain more. “That man you saw in the river, he was the commandant of that unit, the Germans,” he said. “He went to the river to bathe while his men went to the village.”

Suddenly the picture became clear to the Americans. They were whooping and hollering like schoolboys just upstream from a German officer who could have had them all arrested or killed on the spot. They had even waved at him. The only reason they were still alive and free, they figured, was that the German officer was by himself and didn’t know how well armed the American group might be.

But surely he had reported the Americans, and he might even be mobilizing his own unit to chase them down. They had to keep moving.

 

 

 

As they marched on and on
, nearly every day, the Americans wondered where they were going. Before long, the wondering became just an idle thought in the back of their minds, not the all-consuming question it had been at first. It was only days before Wilson stopped obsessing about how he was going to get out of Yugoslavia and back to his base in Italy. With each passing day, the question seemed more futile and soon he put it out of his mind. He just kept walking through Yugoslavia. Wilson and his crewmates talked among themselves about everything under the sun because they had plenty of time to pass. Baseball gave way to cars, and then to favorite foods, which led to starlets and pinup girls, which segued into girlfriends, wives, and mothers. No matter how jocular the conversation started, it seemed to always lead to morose longing for those back home. And that led to silence as the men marched on.

All over northern Yugoslavia, American airmen were trudging along, hoping the next turn of the trail would offer more hope. Mike McKool had spent several days at a military camp with Chetnik escorts, waiting while the other members of his crew were brought in from the surrounding countryside. Fortunately for McKool and his fellow crew members, the commander of the Mihailovich army post, known as Captain Milankovic, spoke English. Though he could reassure the Americans that they would be protected, he also explained how serious their situation was.