The Secret Rescue (25 page)

After hours of walking, they finally arrived at Karjan in the late afternoon. All who had gotten new shoes and leather vests were more thankful than ever for the comfort these items had already provided.

Despite assurances from the War Department that more information would be forthcoming, and after weeks of waiting for news from their loved ones, the family members of the missing had still heard nothing from them. On January 2, Watson’s husband, Nolan McKenzie, wrote to the Office of the Adjutant General in Washington, DC. “After nearly a full month since your last communication neither her parents have received any communication from her, nor have I. This is a source of great worry to us, as we would like to know if she is under hospitalization, if she is well, whether she is in enemy hands, or just what her status is. I am writing you only in desperation as the terrible anxiety I am under is multiplying itself with each passing day and I am in hopes that there is surely some additional details that you can now release concerning her.” Two days later, Cruise’s brother also wrote the Adjutant General and pleaded for information. “As you can realize, we are very worried because we feel that if he was safe and well he would have sent us some word.” Hayes’s mother contacted the Red Cross, who looked into it but could find no additional information.

While the party braced for another long day of walking in frigid weather, someone brought them oranges, enough for each one of them. Hayes was still hungry after he ate his, so he tried to eat a few pieces of the peel before tossing it, while Schwant, a nurse from South Dakota, accidentally stabbed herself with a borrowed knife while trying to cut the rind. Blood oozed from her wound but she soon bandaged it and continued on with the rest of them.

The trail was fairly level, and they soon arrived at the Drino River, which they had crossed just weeks earlier in the cover of night when the Germans were active in the area. Now that the Germans had moved out, the British felt it was safe to cross the river and the road just beyond it in broad daylight. A couple of Albanian men once again ferried three or four of the party across at a time in the same boat they had taken before, while partisans scouted the road ahead for signs of trouble. When it was determined that it was safe, the men and women each made their way across without any problems.

The trail from the road to the next village of Kolonjë was uphill, straining their muscles and nerves. Though they had planned to stay at this village, and Stefa and Thrasher had already made the arrangements, Duffy decided it was too early in the day to stop. They would continue on to Golem, which they weren’t scheduled to reach until the following day.

As they moved along, the weather turned, and the party faced a torrent of rain. An hour before they reached the village, however, Duffy grew concerned that several of the women were going to “crack up” and was even on the verge of doing so himself. To keep the group moving, Duffy set the pace and then dropped back to keep the nurses walking. When they finally reached the village in the early afternoon, Duffy thought they looked like “a bunch of prisoners on the Russian front.”

Thrasher and Stefa were surprised to see their party, which wasn’t supposed to arrive until the following day, but the two, along with Duffy, talked to the village council, and within an hour they were divided into groups and taken to various homes.

That evening, Duffy and Bell sent a message to Cairo saying that he was “pushing the party through day and night.” He asked that there be as little delay as possible in evacuating the group when they got to the coast, given the exhausted and weakened condition of the party and the extreme hardships they had been through.

Heavy snow fell during the night and continued the next morning as Duffy tried unsuccessfully to acquire more mules from the village. The mules they were using hadn’t eaten in two days and were exhausted. When it was still dark, he called the party together and told them to prepare for another grueling day. At that point, Jens told him that Tacina had a bad ankle. Though Tacina insisted it was fine, Duffy found it swollen, and although he didn’t think she would make it very far, he decided to let her try.

The sun came up, and the party set out in a swirling snowstorm, but after less than two hundred feet of trying her best to walk, Tacina collapsed. Duffy yelled for the others in the lead to stop, but the relentless wind made it impossible to catch their attention. With little choice but to put the injured nurse on a mule, Duffy had to take the gear off one mule and overload the other three. Doing the best they could with what they had, the men and women headed west and before long were climbing up the side of Mount Paradhisë rather than taking the trail they had previously traveled.

As they ascended the mountain, the storm picked up and soon they could barely see anything in front of them. The bitter cold made every step difficult, but the vests Tilman had given them helped keep them warm. After roughly a half hour of walking, the partisan leading the way stopped and sat down in the snow and started singing like the others had when the party crossed Mount Ostrovicë with Stefa. The guide could no longer see the trail and was waiting for the snow to let up. It was too much for Duffy. “For the first time I lost my temper and nearly strangled [him]; at the same time my interpreter verbally conveyed my wish,” Duffy later wrote. The partisan finally got up and continued on, followed by the mule skinners and their mules, who pushed through the heavy snow, making it easier for the others behind them.

The party continued downhill, but then Tacina’s mule suddenly stumbled and Tacina tumbled off. Duffy was behind her and had been holding onto the mule’s tail as they traversed the path. “Below her was a gradual drop of about 15 feet,” Duffy wrote. “I made a headlong dive after her, just catching hold of her belt and we both rolled down the hill together, emerging from the drift just two huge snowballs!”

The exhausted men and women were soon on their way again, yet one of the other mules, which carried the batteries for the wireless, also fell and stayed down for a half hour before getting up again.

As they moved farther downhill, the snow turned into a drizzling rain. They’d been in the thick of the storm for some three hours. More determined than ever to reach the coast, they plodded along despite being cold, wet, and sick. They quickly passed near the village of Kuç and found themselves at a fast-moving stream. While the men used rocks as stepping-stones to make their way across, many of the nurses were so weak that Duffy had to help them. He stood in the middle of the stream and “slung them” over. “Everything during this acrobatic display was going fine, until the last nurse produced a bit more energy than the others and came at me like a tornado,” Duffy wrote. “Down I went backwards in the stream, receiving, as you can well imagine, a substantial drenching. She fared quite well.”

By early afternoon, Hayes fell back from the party and stepped off the trail to relieve himself in the bushes. He could hear the party talking as they moved away, but as their voices faded, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the extreme sense of loneliness he’d encountered the handful of times he’d been by himself in Albania. It made him grateful for the others, and he hurried to catch up with them. Passing a lone man who offered him the partisan salute, Hayes walked for a few minutes before he caught up with the rest who had stopped along the trail. As he got closer, he could see they were talking to a bearded man wearing a U.S. Army uniform that included a captain’s insignia on his cap and an AAF shoulder patch. Around his waist was a pistol belt that held a .45 automatic, and the smiling man carried a cane with a round handle. The bearded man was Capt. Lloyd Smith, the OSS officer.

When Smith received the message that he should continue with the original plan of locating the Americans, he decided to move from Seaview to Tërbaç, where he and his three BK guides had been taken after passing a band of armed partisans on the trail. With the Germans no longer active in the surrounding villages, and intelligence indicating that the Americans were once again heading toward the coast, he could set up camp there and send out scouts to find the party.

He arrived on January 2 and, with the help of an English speaker in the village, hired six men to venture out in three different directions. The men were paired up and instructed that if they found the party, one man would stay with them while the other would report back to Smith.

The scouts returned within a few days and informed Smith that the Americans had been in Golem, just east of Kuç. With only one route between Kuç and Golem, Smith felt confident he would find them, and he left as soon as possible. By January 6, he was on his way.

At about two o’clock that afternoon, he saw the weary group. “As the party came up I had noticed that it was extended over a distance of 500 yards with those in the rear very much perturbed over not being able to keep up,” he wrote. “Those in the rear were kept back because of sprains, blisters, and illness.” As he got closer, Smith halted and introduced himself, leaving out any mention of his work with OSS. “They were as surprised at our meeting as I was,” he wrote. “They had heard that I had been recalled to Italy.” Some, in fact, had never heard of him at all.

Smith smiled as the group peppered him with questions, and he did his best to answer. The very sight of Smith gave the party a much-needed morale boost. Not only was he a connection to the outside world and an American, but also he had just come from the coast and knew the terrain. Though Smith had somehow been injured and was now limping and using a cane, his presence was so commanding that the Americans immediately felt reassured. As a captain, Smith was the senior ranking officer and now in charge. Duffy had already been recommended for promotion to captain, but promotions and awards for SOE officers in Albania took as long as six months. He would finally be awarded the rank of captain in June 1944.

Smith spoke with Duffy and the pilots and decided to continue with their original plan of going to the village of Kallarat that day, which was just an hour away. Thrasher and Stefa were sent ahead to secure arrangements, while Smith moved those in the party who had been in the back to the front so they could set the pace and keep the party more together. “After this reorganization the morale of the party seemed to be much better,” Smith wrote. They were all anxious to get to their destination, and though those in front were slower than the others, they “made great efforts to set a good pace for the remainder of the party.”

By six thirty that evening, the party arrived in Kallarat. With the arrangements already made with the village council by Thrasher and Stefa, the group was quickly sent to various homes for the evening. In the meantime, Smith and Duffy learned that, since the Germans had moved out, they could safely proceed to their next stop, Tërbaç.

The news would save the weary group several days of traveling. If they had learned the Germans had returned to the village, they would have taken a different route that included crossing mountains to get to a cave where Smith had stored emergency rations on one of his previous trips. From there, they would have hiked the difficult coastal route while leaving behind the mules, which three of the weakened party now relied on. It seemed that the party’s luck had finally changed.

Another thick frost coated the ground as they left Kallarat around nine o’clock the next morning. Thrasher and Stefa had been sent ahead once again to organize lunch for them, and the three members of the party who couldn’t walk, including Tacina, were given mules to ride.

Just as they left the village, they saw four partisans running to catch up with them. The breathless men who spoke some English told Smith that the party had one of their mules, which they needed right away to haul ammunition. Smith replied that though he was sorry, he could not give them the mule unless they were able to find another at the next village. The men continued to argue with him, but they finally realized Smith wasn’t going to give in and took off in the direction the party was headed.

The Americans’ journey to the next village was slow-moving. One of the mules kept falling, knocking off the gear it carried as it went down, which then had to be repacked. By the time they arrived, the partisans whom Smith had just argued with had a mule waiting for them, and they traded animals. Though some of the nurses asked if they could rest at the village, Smith told them they had to keep moving.

When they arrived at Tërbaç, their destination for the day, in the midafternoon, they found that the Germans had almost completely destroyed the village. Only women and children remained. Hayes’s group of four was taken to a home, but the room they were put in had a hole in the wall almost big enough to walk through. They were offered olives from a barrel in the corner of the room and ate a few, until they realized they were rotten. With the temperature outside dropping, they wondered how they would make it through the night with essentially no shelter.

Smith suggested to Duffy, Thrasher, and Baggs that they should continue on, given that the village had no blankets and almost no food. It was a cloudless night with almost a full moon, and if they left soon they would be able to cross the coastal highway in darkness. The three men opposed the idea but agreed with Smith that they should let the whole party decide. Smith gathered the group together on a hillside and presented his proposal. He explained that if they left then, there would be no stopping until daybreak; if they didn’t go then, they would have to wait until the following night. Though most were unaware of just how close they were to the coast, the entire party voted to keep going.

While Smith talked, he noticed one of the mule skinners starting to take off the radio equipment from one of the mules at the bottom of the hill. Despite his limp and the cane he was using, he took three giant steps forward and took his .45 out of its holster. When he reached the Albanian, his gun was underneath the man’s chin. Without concerning himself with a translator, Smith said the mules were going with them to the next village. If the man wanted his mules, he could come with them or he would wait here and they would send them back. Despite the language barrier, the mule skinner immediately started retying the lines that secured the equipment to the packsaddle.