The Forgotten 500 (36 page)

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 that’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.”

Kraigher finally relented and climbed over the boxes to get into the cockpit. Vujnovich watched the plane depart, comfortable that they were doing the right thing. When Kraigher reached Pranjane and the villagers lined up to receive a pair of shoes, he felt like Santa Claus and had no regrets. Lalich supervised the shoe giveaway and at first worried that the effort might be for naught because most of the shoes were a size 8, when the big Serbs, especially the men, needed something more like a size 12. It was pitiful to see the desperate men trying to shove their cold feet into the too-small shoes, but many made do by splitting the heel in back and forcing the shoe on like a very snug slipper.

Vujnovich was waiting at the airport when Kraigher brought Lalich, Rajacich, and Jibilian back from Pranjane. He couldn’t have been more pleased with the success of Operation Halyard.

 

 

 

When Jibilian finally returned from
Yugoslavia after helping rescue hundreds of airmen, he didn’t ever want to see another bit of goat cheese. His first morning back, he wolfed down eight eggs, close to a pound of bacon, six slices of toast with butter and jam, and he drank more cups of coffee than he could count. He couldn’t help indulging after months of barely surviving in the hills of Yugoslavia, though he felt bad when he thought of the villagers he had left behind, struggling to feed themselves.

As Felman had suspected, the cover-up was well underway by the time the airmen returned to free territory. A conspiracy was already in place to keep the world from knowing that the Allies had just pulled off the biggest rescue ever of airmen in enemy territory, a complete success made all the more amazing by the audaciousness of the mission. While the initial gag order had made sense while the rescue missions were still underway, after its completion the airmen began to wonder why the military still refused to acknowledge their incredible story. The reason, the airmen soon learned, was that the rescue could not be publicized without giving credit to the Serb guerilla leader who had harbored the men and made the whole operation possible. Mihailovich was officially ostracized for his supposed weakness and collaboration with the Germans, and even faint praise for his assistance with the downed airmen would have ruffled feathers in the State Department and the British government. While Operation Halyard was still going on and men’s lives were at risk, no one wanted to jeopardize the rescues by trying to give Mihailovich credit. And after the rescues were completed, it just didn’t seem worth the risk to career and interoffice harmony to challenge the State Department and the Brits in order to let the world know what had happened. Vujnovich, Musulin, and others were willing, even eager, to put their careers on the line to ensure those men were rescued, but afterward there was little motivation to tell the story if it meant bucking the whole military and diplomatic hierarchy.

So the fantastic story wasn’t told. There was no report back home in the newspapers of a huge operation that had saved so many lives, only the occasional item in a hometown paper noting that a local boy had been found and was no longer missing in action. With the initial orders to keep quiet forgotten once the rescues were complete, the men involved in Operation Halyard talked about it in the chow line, in the barracks, on the bus, in the cafés—anywhere they met up with other servicemen—because they were so thrilled to be back in Italy and so thankful to the Serbs who had harbored them. They wanted the other airmen to know what had happened to them, that the Serb people were astonishingly kind and helpful to American airmen, even though the briefings for bomber crews still included warnings that the Serbs would cut off their ears and turn them over to the Germans. Orsini, after returning from several weeks convalescence for his injury, returned to duty and had to sit through briefings in which an officer told him and his fellow crewmates that if they bailed out over northern Yugoslavia they should seek out Tito’s forces and run from Mihailovich’s fighters and the local villagers. It took all of Orsini’s self-control to sit there and listen without earning himself a court-martial by telling the senior officer how wrong he was, and his voice was shaking when the briefing ended and he gathered the rest of the crew around. He would make sure the senior officer was out of earshot and then set the record straight.

“Don’t believe a word of that crap about Mihailovich and Tito,” he told the other men, including some young replacements who didn’t know any better. “I’ve been there. I’ve been
on the ground
with these people, and the fact is that the Serbs will give you the shirt off their backs and every bit of food they have. If we bail out, just come with me and I’ll walk right up and introduce myself again.”

The continued warnings about Mihailovich, and offhand comments by other airmen who had heard only the official story, incensed Orsini and Musgrove and every other man who had experienced the truth firsthand. A few drinks were thrown and tables overturned in Bari as the returning airmen set the record straight on what happened in Pranjane.

After the initial warning, the army did not make much effort to keep the hundreds of returning airmen from talking, but the OSS agents who conducted Operation Halyard were on a shorter leash. Jibilian, like the airmen, wasn’t looking for attention for his participation, but he also wasn’t shy about telling people that Mihailovich and the Serbs deserved thanks. That stopped one day when an OSS officer pulled him aside and said, “Don’t tell anyone. This will just create a big fuss with Tito and Mihailovich, so keep this under wraps.” And after that he did, following his orders and telling almost no one about the rescue mission.

 

 

 

Many of the rescued airmen
returned to the United States sooner than they would have if they had not spent so long in enemy territory. Richard Felman and his crew returned to the United States soon after being rescued, and they were told that the early return was partly due to fears that they would be executed as spies if they were caught behind enemy lines again. Two sojourns on the ground could make you a spy in the enemy’s eyes, not just an unlucky flier, the theory went.

When Felman returned to New York, the Red Cross came aboard his ship and handed out coffee and doughnuts to the returning servicemen before they disembarked. They also distributed local New York newspapers, and Felman was pleased to find an article about the destruction of a major ammunitions warehouse and railway station in Gornji Milanovac by guerilla forces resisting the German occupation in Yugoslavia. The only problem was that the paper attributed the guerrilla action to Tito’s Partisans. Felman knew better because he had actually participated in that raid with Mihailovich’s men, with not a single red star of the Partisans around for miles. Felman was livid to see Tito get credit for the work of Mihailovich’s men, but it fit the pattern he had already started piecing together.

Orsini flew another thirty-three missions after recuperating from his shoulder injury, and then he was wounded again. While lying in the hospital, a doctor stopped by and asked him how many missions he had flown. Orsini replied that he had flown thirty-four, meaning he still had another sixteen to go before hitting the magic number of fifty, which usually was the point where the military said you’d done your duty and could go home. The doctor thought Orsini had made enough missions through hell for one man, so he authorized his return to the States. He was scheduled to return home on a hospital ship in April 1945, but one evening he found a note on his bunk that said,
You are returning to the States by plane in the morning
. With no time to notify his family that he would be home within days instead of months, Orsini flew back to the United States and made his way to the family’s three-story apartment building on Beacon Street in Jersey City, New Jersey. Once he had reached the States, he decided not to call home first so he could surprise his mother.

When he reached home, he rang the bell for his mother’s apartment, but there was no answer. He rang the bell for his aunt, who lived on the second floor and enjoyed a jubilant reunion with her for a moment before being able to get the excited woman to hear his question. “Where is my mother?” he asked. Orsini’s aunt explained that his mother was at church, which didn’t surprise Orsini much because he knew she went almost every morning. With another kiss for his aunt, Orsini dashed out of the building and onto the street, first walking quickly and then barely able to stop himself from breaking into a run as he headed toward the church. He hadn’t gone far when he spotted his mother far down the street, about four blocks away, walking toward him with another woman. The two were returning from church and they didn’t see Orsini yet. He kept walking toward them, his eyes fixed on the mother he had thought he would never see again, waiting for the moment when she recognized her son.

They kept walking toward each other, Orsini’s heart beating faster and faster as they closed the distance, but his mother saw only another young serviceman walking toward her. He kept his eyes on her, wanting so much to scream out to her, but he waited, wanting to see the look on her face when she realized it was him. When they came to within a block of each other, Orsini saw his mother pause briefly, stopping on the sidewalk as she looked more closely at the man in uniform coming toward her. Then she put her hands to her face and cried out as her companion looked at her quizzically.

“Anthony?
È quello voi?
” his mother cried, at first questioning, and then as Orsini started running toward her, she knew. “
Il mio Anthony! Il mio Anthony! È il mio Anthony!
”

His mother ran toward him, her arms reaching, trying to get her son back in her arms faster than her feet could carry her. Orsini could run faster and came to her quickly, scooping his mother up in his arms and hugging her tightly as she sobbed, saying his name over and over and kissing him on the cheek.

“
Sono indietro, Mama,
” he told her.
“È giusto, io sono indietro.” I’m back, Mama. It’s okay, I’m back.

 

 

 

The first hint in the
press of the remarkable success of the rescue mission came on February 20, 1945, more than six months after the first C-47s landed in Pranjane. A five-paragraph story on page 2 of the
Washington Post
carried the headline RADIO SIGNAL AIDS RESCUE OF 250 FLIERS. The story reported that, “A mystery radio message, picked up and recorded by RAF radio operators in Italy, led to the rescue recently of two hundred fifty Allied airmen, mostly American, who had bailed out over the Balkans.” The article went on to explain that the airmen sent a specially coded message that eventually led to the rescue operation. “Translation of the messages indicated that a large number of Americans, some of whom were sick, were stranded in Yugoslavia. They were awaiting rescue anxiously, for enemy troops were not far distant.” There was no mention of Mihailovich.