The Secret Rescue (22 page)

The party turned back from Gusmar and arrived in Kolonjë as rain turned the roads into mud. They would be stuck there for two nights as Duffy and Bell tried to figure out their next move. On their second day in the village, Hayes and Owen started getting restless and hungry. They hadn’t eaten in almost forty-eight hours and wanted to see if any of the others had been any luckier. Some of the enlisted men, including Hayes, were convinced the officers were getting more food than they were. Cruise even tried to stay with the nurses because he thought the villagers were more generous when the women were present.

As the two men walked through the village, Allen, the youngest of the group, called to them to come over to the one-room house where he and another medic had stayed. When the men entered the tiny house, they saw two women standing in the back, while two men lay by the fire. None of them spoke English. Hayes and Owen asked Allen if he’d had anything to eat, and Allen told them he’d only had a little corn that the family had heated for him in the fire. Hayes picked up one of the pieces of hard field corn lying on the dirt floor and started to roast it. When the kernels were brown, he removed it and took a bite. Though it was tough and tasted like scorched popcorn, it was something to eat.

When he finished, one of the women walked over to a chest and took a key from a cord around her neck and unlocked the box. She reached in and pulled out something wrapped in a rag. As she removed the cloth, the surprised Americans saw a skinned sheep’s head. The woman placed the head in the coals, where it roasted for about an hour. With nowhere else to be, Hayes and Owen stayed to watch. The woman eventually removed the head from the heat with a stick before she took an ax and split it into two with one solid whack. The Americans watched wide-eyed as the two women each took one-half of the head and ate everything, including the eyeballs. Nothing was wasted. Though the Americans were famished, this was one time when they were glad to have not been offered food.

After the Americans spent a second cold and wet night in Kolonjë, Duffy told them that the fighting had gotten even worse over the past few days. Instead of going back to stay in Gjirokastër, they were going to travel to the far side of the valley, which included crossing a road that the Germans had started using in the past week as well as the Drino River, where a small boat would be waiting for them. It was too risky to cross either the road or the river in the daylight, so they would travel to a nearby village and wait until nightfall.

It was still raining when they started walking that afternoon. The soles of Allen’s and Owen’s shoes and some of the nurses’ shoes were almost entirely gone. The leggings that Owen wore over his shoes and pants were keeping the soles of his shoes from completely falling off. They stayed on the muddy trail until they arrived at the village shortly before dark and waited.

As night started to fall they headed out, and by the time they reached the road, it was completely dark. The relentless rain continued to drench them as Duffy told them he would send them across one at a time. When they reached the other side, they were to keep walking until they reached the riverbank, where a few at a time would be taken across in the boat. When it was finally Hayes’s turn, he felt more alone than he ever had in his life. He couldn’t see anyone ahead of him or behind him, and it felt to him like the rest of the world had disappeared. He walked as fast as he could in the blackness of night until he reached the riverbank, where another medic was waiting for the boat. They couldn’t see anything, but they could hear the oars slicing through the water as others joined them. When the boat arrived, it was a simple vessel made of wooden sides and a bottom constructed out of sheet metal. Though Hayes was sure it would leak, it proved its sturdiness, and he and the others were safely escorted across. The boatman motioned for them to continue on a trail, where a villager from Kolonjë met them and took them to a nearby house.

Duffy and Bell, who likely carried the wireless set across in the boat and arranged for fresh mules to carry it the rest of the way, soon joined the party at the house. Each person was given his own plate and silverware for the first time since they’d been at the hotel in Berat, and they enjoyed a meal of boiled potatoes. It wasn’t long, however, before Duffy told the party they had to keep going. The village was too close to the road to be safe.

They finally stopped for the night a couple of hours later at the village of Karjan, and Hayes, Owen, and Wolf were once again placed together. When their hosts gave them blankets, and their son told them in stilted English to take off their wet clothes, Owen had to convince Hayes to part with his. The men spent a warm night wrapped in blankets in front of a fire, and when the family gave them their clothes the next day, the men were overwhelmed to find they were not only dry but clean.

Smith, the American OSS officer, along with his three BK guides who had been released from the commissar as the Germans approached Tërbaç, left to go back toward Seaview. After climbing a snow-covered mountain about sixty-five hundred feet high, the men finally arrived in the late afternoon on the outskirts of Dukat, the village where Smith had first met them. He had fulfilled his promise to their commander to return them unharmed.

He sent one of the guides into the village to find an English speaker, and when the two returned, they informed him that thirty German soldiers now occupied the village. They were sure, however, that they could get Smith through so he could continue on to Seaview. They dressed him in a shepherd’s hat and cloak, and he boldly walked through the village, where he passed a German squad before he reached a truck that drove him to safety. It was a risky move, but it worked. Had he been caught out of uniform, he would have been executed as a spy.

After spending the night at a house owned by a man known to those at Seaview, he made his way back to the sparse base camp. That afternoon, he received word over the wireless from Cairo that the American party had left Progonat and were expected to be at Kuç on December 21.

As he had done just nine days earlier, Smith once again set out the next morning with hopes of finding the party. This time he headed southeast on the coastal trail rather than using his first route, which would require him to go through villages now in German control. The new course was difficult but passable, and he ended the day finding shelter from the cold night air in a shepherd’s cave.

The next morning he met the commissar from Vuno, who had a car and offered Smith a ride to his village. Smith spent the night in Vuno, where he arranged for two guides to accompany him the rest of the way in the unfamiliar terrain. They left the next morning, but when he and his guides were within a mile of their destination, the partisans informed them that the Germans had just occupied the village that morning. The men had no choice but to retrace their steps on the rough trail in heavy rain. After spending the night in another small village, they backtracked the following morning.

When they were once again close to Vuno, Smith studied the village and the road from a hill using field glasses and observed two German tanks moving through the village. He continued to watch until he was sure the Germans were just passing through before he headed to the partisans’ headquarters. He stayed in the village for several hours, where he observed “six heavy trucks drawing 75mm guns and one command car full of Germans pass through going north.” He left Vuno that evening and spent the night at the next village.

His clothes were still wet from the rain, and he decided to stay put the next day as the bad weather continued. Late that afternoon, he received word that the Germans were searching every home in Vuno looking for partisans. Concerned that the Germans would make their way to his village next, he positioned himself in a house at the western edge of town so that he could get away quickly if necessary. His instincts were right. At around ten p.m. that night, he was alerted that about eighty Germans had entered the village and were conducting house-to-house searches. He immediately fled and spent another night sleeping in a cave that he shared with a shepherd and his flock.

He arrived the next day at Seaview, having spent more than two weeks in the cold and treacherous landscape of Albania—no closer to finding the Americans than when he first arrived.

The party continued on in the rain until they arrived in Dhoksat, a mountain village overlooking the valley, late in the afternoon on December 23. There they once again met Tilman, the famous mountaineer, based at Sheper. They also were introduced to a wireless operator named Willie Williamson. The twenty-eight-year-old Scot had been among the first group of men, including Duffy, into Albania. The last few months for him had been particularly difficult since Smiley and McLean had left, and he was hoping to be evacuated soon. Just two weeks earlier, Williamson had written in his diary, “The long wait here with no certain knowledge of what is to happen to me is getting on my nerves. I feel so miserable and fed up. These wet days too. I am confined indoors with nothing whatever to occupy my mind.” The arrival of the Americans, however, offered him some distraction, and he considered the nurses “the finest women [he’d] ever met.”

That night, Duffy and Bell stayed with the other British in a stone house operating as their headquarters, while Thrasher, Baggs, Stefa, and the nurses were divided among the houses in Dhoksat. The enlisted men were sent to Qeserat, another village about fifteen minutes up a steep mountain trail.

While Tilman and Williamson enjoyed “an excellent lunch with the Yank officers” on Christmas Eve, the enlisted men did not fare as well. After a night crammed together in a single room in a large house without any blankets, the men watched as a few villagers brought a beef carcass into the kitchen and hung it on a hook. The Americans eyed it with great anticipation and wondered when the meal would be served. The man who would prepare it was an English-speaking Albanian cook hired by the British they’d met the night before. Almost immediately, the cook had told them that they would not be given any bedding because the female owner of the home had heard they had lice. The Americans certainly couldn’t deny it; they were all still infested. Even Hayes, who had run out of louse powder, was now scratching as much as the others.

As the men looked forward to the meal, they spent the day watching German trucks drive along the road that ran in front of Gjirokastër. They noticed the partisans coming in and out of the kitchen that afternoon, but they didn’t give it much thought. When they finally sat down to eat, the cook dished out small scraps of meat onto their plates. The ravenous men were incredulous and asked him what had happened to the rest of it. After some back and forth, the cook finally admitted that the partisans had eaten most of it. The men ate what was in front of them, grumbling through much of the meal, and when they retired to the cramped room where they would all sleep, they decided to post two men in the kitchen the following day to keep an eye on the cook. They also decided to send a few men to talk to the British about the food and to remind them how much they needed new shoes.

That same night, the nurses, Duffy, and Stefa joined the pilots at the house where they were staying for a Christmas Eve celebration. Someone had found a small tree branch, decorated it with some red ribbons, and put it in the corner of the room. The group spent the evening singing Christmas carols, talking, and trying to put petty arguments of the past few weeks behind them. One argument had broken out when it was discovered that two of the nurses had kept for themselves cigarettes that the British had given them at their mission headquarters at Krushovë, which others contended were for everyone to share. Some had even recently squabbled over their favorite meal and what they would eat first when they got back to Allied lines. Most wanted steak, but when one nurse said she wanted a steaming bowl of oatmeal with peaches, the others had mocked her.

The next day, Wolf won his bet with Jens. They were still in Albania on Christmas Day. She and some of the others housed with her woke early to attend a church service with their hosts in the small village. Jens had bathed the night before—a Christmas present in itself, as it was only her second bath in seven weeks—but she still had to put on her filthy uniform. Stefa met them outside the small Greek Orthodox church on frost-covered ground. They went inside and huddled in the back while the priest gave the service. It would be the last Christmas service the priest would perform. When the Germans and the BK learned his son was a partisan, they burned the church and killed the priest in an attack the following year.

That night, Duffy and Bell invited the pilots and nurses to the home they shared with Tilman and Williamson. The group ate chicken, drank wine and raki, made toasts, and danced to records on a phonograph to celebrate the holiday.

As the first shift of enlisted men monitored the cook that Christmas morning, Hayes and two others walked down the trail connecting the Americans’ two village hideouts to talk to the British. Hayes carried his musette bag with him. He not only wanted to protect his belongings from being stolen, he also wanted them near in case something unexpected happened and they had to flee.

When they arrived, the British were finishing breakfast, and Hayes couldn’t take his eyes off the honey and jam they had spread on their cornbread. His mouth watered at the sight of food until he remembered why he was there. The enlisted men pleaded their case regarding the cook and their shoes and then asked about the possibility of an air evacuation. They’d heard rumors about it, but no one had told them that Thrasher had sent a message. Tilman said they were on their own to work out the problems with the cook, but he would see what could be done about their shoes. He then showed the men a message he’d received over the wireless from SOE Cairo. The words, jotted down on a piece of white paper, simply said, “Men are expendable. An airplane is not.” Refusing to give up the idea of an air evacuation, the Americans asked if a note could be sent to the AAF, thinking that if the British wouldn’t help them, maybe the Americans would. Tilman told them a request had already been sent to the AAF; they were still waiting for a reply.