The Secret Rescue (17 page)

When he completed his training, he was ordered to travel to the OSS base in Bari and then to Sicily, where he would determine which weapons and ammunition in an enemy supply dump could still be used. He would then bring the weapons and ammunition to partisans in Yugoslavia, where he would observe the weapons in action. Accompanying Smith on the trip to Bari was Hollywood actor and OSS officer Sterling Hayden. Hayden had run away to sea at the age of seventeen and sailed around the world several times before signing with Paramount in 1940, where he was dubbed “The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies.” He joined the Marine Corps in 1942 with hopes of being stationed overseas and was commissioned a second lieutenant. When he learned he would be assigned to the States for two years, he volunteered for OSS using the name John Hamilton. Because of his experience with boats, Hayden was on his way to work on seaborne operations run out of Bari.

The two men traveled from Cairo to Alexandria in a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier before boarding a Liberty ship headed to the port of Taranto in Italy. When they finally arrived, Hayden was ordered to stay on board to look after several OSS vehicles, while Smith took a boat to shore and hitchhiked to Bari, roughly sixty miles away.

Smith arrived at OSS headquarters in Bari in the afternoon and reported to the commanding officer, Maj. Robert Koch. Koch told him to get a room at a local hotel and either come back that evening or the following morning, depending on what he preferred. With nothing else to occupy his time, Smith returned at six that night, upon which Koch said, “We have a priority job. How would you like to volunteer to go to Albania?” Though Smith knew little of the terrain or the language, he agreed to the mission to find the Americans and bring them to the coast for a sea evacuation with just a three-hour briefing under his belt.

Smith received his orders on November 30, and by the evening of December 2, he had already made two attempts to cross the Adriatic by boat from Brindisi, another port city southeast of Bari. When his second attempt had been canceled that day because of the discovery of German mines in Brindisi’s port, he decided to go back to the OSS office in Bari to wait until the area was cleared; he had just arrived when the Germans unleashed a massive air attack on the harbor only three blocks away.

Dubbed “the second Pearl Harbor,” the nighttime assault on the crowded port under British jurisdiction was entirely unexpected. In fact, British Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham had held a press conference that afternoon telling reporters that the Luftwaffe had been defeated in Italy. “I would regard it as a personal affront and insult if the Luftwaffe would attempt any significant action in this area.” At seven thirty p.m., however, 105 German Junkers Ju 88s began their attack on the well-lit port where crews planned to unload cargo into the night. By the end of it, the Germans had sunk seventeen Allied ships and damaged several more. The deadly strike also killed at least one thousand people, including civilians, and left countless injured—in part because of an Allied secret. The SS
John Harvey
was delivering poison gas to Italy in the event that it was necessary to strike back against the Germans. Roosevelt had condemned the use of chemical warfare, but he had made it clear that the United States would retaliate in kind if attacked first by the enemy. When the SS
John Harvey
exploded in the harbor, it was carrying about one hundred tons of mustard gas. All those on board, most of whom never knew about the lethal cargo, were killed, and the deadly poison spread through the air.

Doctors treating casualties immediately after the attack were unaware that patients had been exposed to a chemical agent. It wasn’t until local hospitals were flooded with people suffering from skin lesions, irritated eyes, and difficulty breathing that they began to suspect what had happened. Neither the British nor the American military revealed to the public the role poison gas had played. As a result, some of the affected civilians never knew they’d been exposed and suffered without receiving help. Despite the secrecy, American-born Mildred Gillars, dubbed “Axis Sally” for infamously broadcasting Nazi propaganda, learned of it and taunted the Allies on the air for gassing themselves.

After witnessing the massive attack just a few blocks away and unaware that a chemical weapon had been unleashed, Smith focused on preparing for his mission to find the missing Americans.

Those in the 807th who were evacuating patients from Bari also found themselves in the middle of the attack. Commanding officer McKnight, flight surgeons Voigt and Simpson, and some of the nurses were watching a movie at a local theater when they felt the building shake. They soon heard a loud crash, the power went out, and suddenly everything around them was covered with shattered glass and plaster. The roof of the theater’s bar had been hit and destroyed. When the attack was over, the rattled but unharmed medical personnel walked back to their hotel and saw that the three tall buildings next to it had also been demolished in the raid. The wall in the nurses’ room was “caved in, and the window frames were lying helter-skelter over the beds. Had any of the nurses been in their room during the raid, they most surely would have been seriously injured if not killed.” With the area in ruins, the team decided to stay in the schoolhouse outside the city that functioned as their holding unit for patients waiting to be evacuated. As they drove past the harbor and saw numerous ships burning, they felt lucky to have survived unscathed.

Explosions continued throughout the night as one magazine after another exploded. Even when the members of the 807th boarded the plane the next day after hearing rumors about mustard gas, they could still hear and feel more explosions.

With word from the British that the Americans were still alive, the War Department sent new telegrams over the next few days alerting the family members that the lost personnel had been found. Though the telegrams offered welcome news, they provided little information except to say that the missing were “now safe and accounted for” and that the found men and women would be in touch with their family members soon to offer more information. Jens’s parents received their telegram at their farmhouse in Stanwood, Michigan, on December 3—her twenty-ninth birthday. Watson’s parents received their telegram on December 5 and immediately sent word to her new husband, who wrote them back expressing his happiness. “It is certainly the best piece of news I have ever received. I’m so happy and so thankful, although still weak from the whole thing.” Watson’s parents and husband, however, like the other families of the missing, would not hear anything more for weeks and would be left to wonder if something had happened to their loved ones to prevent them from contacting them.

The American party spent several days in Krushovë. The medics in Hayes’s group of enlisted men lived on cans of oily sardines supplied by the British and dark bread given to them by the villagers. Hayes’s host also brought them an armload of straw and showed them how to make tea by putting the dried grass in water and heating it by the fire. They sipped it from a tin can someone had with them, since they’d all either lost their canteen cups or thrown them out when they’d started to corrode. The fare was far from what they had hoped for, but it was at least a change from the cornbread they’d lived on for so long.

The men and women all had time on their hands as they waited for the British to alert them to their plans for getting them out. In the meantime, the British found a couple pairs of shoes for the nurses who needed them the most, including Watson, whose soles were almost completely gone. The hobnails in the shoes, however, made them “heavy as lead.” As men’s shoes, they were also far too large for the women, who had to don several pairs of woolen socks, also supplied by the British, in order to walk in them. The rest had to carry on with the gear they had, though the British gave Thrasher gold sovereigns so the group could buy food and other items as they made their way to the coast. Thrasher handed out some of those coins to at least a few of the nurses. Jens was given one that was dated 1913, which depicted George V’s profile on one side and Saint George on horseback slaying a mythical dragon on the other.

Though the British had dropped more than twenty tons of materials into Albania by the fall of that year, most of it had gone to supplying the partisans, including uniforms, weapons, and the British gold sovereigns used to finance the missions. Gold sovereigns hadn’t been widely used in daily circulation in Britain since World War I broke out and the government started issuing treasury notes, but the sovereigns could still buy whatever the men might need.

Twenty-six-year-old Maj. David Smiley, who was second in command of the first group of British sent into Albania, reported that his mission received over thirty thousand sovereigns by parachute. “Some of the bags in which they came bore the Bank of England seal and certificates stating that they had been checked over forty years ago—the dates were stamped on them—and most of the coins bore the head of Queen Victoria.” While the gold helped them buy supplies and assistance, the British also knew the dangers that came with it. The night Smiley was to receive his first supply drop, the local commissar hired two men to work as Smiley’s bodyguards. Smiley gave one of the men two hundred sovereigns to pay his band of partisans, but before the night was over, the other bodyguard had shot and killed the man for the money and fled.

Delivering supplies to the men often proved difficult because of bad weather, last-minute cancellations, and poor communications. SOE personnel in the field often stood outside for hours in freezing temperatures waiting for the sound of the planes before lighting signal fires. If the sortie was canceled because of dangerous weather conditions or other problems, the mission wasn’t alerted until much later, because the Royal Air Force in Derna, Libya, first had to get word to SOE headquarters in Cairo, which then notified those in Albania. Often supplies landed so far from drop zones that desperate locals were able to reach them before the British.

One of these supply drops was attempted while the Americans were in Krushovë. Included in the drop were extras like peanut butter, soap, and feminine products specifically sent for the American party. The supplies, however, never reached the mission. Locals ransacked the container before SOE officers could retrieve it.

The feminine products for the most part were no longer needed. For the first few weeks in Albania, the nurses who had their periods made do using gauze from medical kits and other makeshift supplies, but by now most had stopped menstruating because of the stress on their bodies.

Early on the Americans’ fifth day at the British mission in Krushovë and nearly a month after crash-landing in Albania, Major Palmer asked the whole party to gather in front of his headquarters, where he introduced Lt. Gavan Duffy and Sgt. Herbert Bell to those who had not yet met them over the past several days. Duffy, whose dark hair, slight build, and Clark Gable mustache gave him a distinguished appearance and made him look older than his twenty-four years, was with the Royal Engineers and had been a builder for three years before enlisting in the British Army in November 1939. Bell, a quiet, baby-faced young man with blond hair from North London, also twenty-four years old, was with the Royal Corps of Signals and had been trained as a wireless operator. Though both men were working for SOE like the others at Krushovë, no mention was made of that to the Americans.

Originally from Leeds in West Yorkshire, England, Duffy was a demolitions expert who had been working in the Middle East since 1940. He was also part of the first SOE mission, a team of four men sent into Albania in April 1943 by parachuting into Greece and pushing north on foot. Along with Duffy, the men included Lt. Col. Neil “Billy” McLean; Smiley, whose bodyguard had been murdered for gold sovereigns; and a wireless operator named Willie Williamson. The men knew very little about the country, though Margaret “Fanny” Hasluck, a widowed anthropologist in her fifties who wore her gray hair swept into a bun, had briefed at least some of them on Albania’s customs and language. At the time she was the sole member of SOE’s Albania desk in Cairo and had lived in Albania for sixteen years before the Italians expelled her in 1939 as a suspected spy. She referred to the men sent into Albania as “her boys,” and they called her Fanny, a witty reference to the much younger women in the SOE office who were part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and who decoded messages from the field.

One of Hasluck’s boys who was sent in later was British actor Anthony Quayle, who would go on to star in movies like
The Guns of Navarone
and
Lawrence of Arabia
and who would encounter the Americans along their journey. Of Hasluck he wrote, “She was an enthusiast, but gave us little instruction in the kind of questions we were most likely to need—questions such as: ‘How deep is the river? Can the mules get across? Where [is] the enemy?’ ” She did, however, have them translate and memorize fairy tales she’d learned while in Albania. One story told of an old couple who had adopted a mouse as their son and found that he had fallen into a pot on the stove. Though Quayle thought the exercise was useless at the time, he would later blurt out a few lines, the only Albanian words he could remember, during a tense moment with the commandant of the Fifth Partisan Brigade in which the man started to “loosen his revolver from its holster.” The absurdity of Quayle’s words at that moment eased the tension, and Quayle credited the lines with saving his life.

Duffy’s team had also taken an escape course from Jasper Maskelyne, a famous British magician. One SOE officer who was sent into Albania in December 1943 recalled Maskelyne hiding “all sorts of items on his person” and asking his students to find them. When they finished, he would then “produce about twenty things [they’d] failed to find.” The men also had “magnetic fly-buttons, mini-compasses concealed in buttons, pencil clips that pointed north when balanced on the tip of the pencil, files, silk maps, and money” sewn into their clothes along with gold sovereigns.