The Secret Rescue (30 page)

Of the British men attacked on the day the large party of Americans was evacuated, not all survived. Lt. Col. Arthur Nicholls—Brigadier Davies’s second in command whose feet were already in bad shape—and a captain eventually made it to some shelter where they stayed for five days, but their condition rapidly deteriorated. Nicholls, who could no longer walk, told the captain to leave him. Though the captain survived after being on the run for more than a month, Nicholls did not.

Unable to move on his own, Nicholls sat on his coat and had two partisans pull him down the mountainside as they looked for shelter. He later found a mule and traveled at night for weeks until he finally located British major George Seymour, who was thought to be nearby. Seymour had heard of Nicholls’s plight by January 14 but had been unable to locate him, while he and his men were also on the run. When the two men finally met, Seymour reported that Nicholls “was more than half-starved, verminous, exhausted, and gangrene had obtained a firm grip on his feet. He had also had an accident having fallen down a mountainside and his shoulder was dislocated. His feet were in an almost unbelievable condition. Both were festering masses and the only indication of where his toes were was where bare bones showed through gangrened flesh.” Seymour was able to secure a surgeon and a doctor from Tiranë who removed toes from both of Nicholls’s feet. He was too weak, however, to recover, and on February 11, five days after he turned thirty-three, he died, most likely from septicemia. Nicholls was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his actions of extreme gallantry not directly in the face of the enemy.

The British sergeant who had collapsed from exhaustion in the snow was captured by the BK, but he eventually managed to elude them shortly before they planned to shoot him by escaping from a bathroom. After weeks of hiding during the brutal winter, he made his way back to the British in March.

The wounded major, the sergeant who had stayed behind to help, and Davies were captured and handed over to the Germans a few days later. The Italian colonel and wounded partisan were separated from them while they were being transported to the Germans, and they never saw them again. The three Brits were taken to a hospital in Tiranë, and ultimately the major and sergeant were sent to a prison in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where they were held in underground cells for six weeks before they were moved to Germany. The sergeant was then sent to a camp for captured aircrew, while the major was sent to Colditz Castle, a high-security prison.

Davies, who required multiple surgeries at the hands of German doctors and eventually recovered from his wounds, was sent to Belgrade for interrogation and then to Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria, a near-certain death sentence. When he arrived, the commandant tried to impress Davies by citing his long career as a soldier, but Davies refused to cower. Miraculously, the commandant told Davies he would not be responsible for him and would send him away. Davies refused to leave without the other Allied men who had come with him and was granted his request. He was eventually sent to Colditz Castle and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner until the U.S. 9th Armored Division liberated the castle on April 15, 1945.

Davies remained in the British Army after the war and posted the final draft of his book,
Illyrian Venture,
about his experiences in Albania, to his publishers the day before he died in 1951.

Hayes returned to the States on February 5 and briefly reunited with three nurses, Watson, Markowitz, and Nelson, when they traveled from Miami, Florida, to Washington, DC, to report to the Prisoner of War Office for another interrogation on February 8. There they signed more papers agreeing to not offer any details of their experience. Like the others in the Albanian group, they were then granted a thirty-day leave.

It was during their leave that Duffy’s interview hit the papers. He told of the attempted air evacuation, the crossing of mountains, and fighting between the Germans and partisans, but he refused to disclose their whereabouts or how the group was rescued. “Those nurses were brave,” he said. “They showed no signs of fear, even in the tightest spots.” When asked if there was any “love interest,” Duffy said, “Listen, if you’d been on that trip you’d have forgotten all about romance.” A day later, the military announced the group’s safe return; and two days later, Associated Press correspondent Hal Boyle’s story, held since January 9, made the presses.

The media tracked down several in the party, who granted interviews in light of the military’s official announcement, though they kept names and places to themselves. Kopsco was on her parents’ farm in Hammond, Louisiana, when she was interviewed. “If you mention the Germans to any member of a Partisan family from the children to the great grandparents,” she said, “they make signs of slashing the throat.” When a reporter from the
Des Moines Tribune
interviewed Hayes, he offered much of the same information already given by others and added, “If it hadn’t been for Duffy and his connections with the Partisans, I doubt that we would have gotten out of there.” After the article came out, people in town who didn’t know him treated him as a friend and those who did know him invited him to dinner. “The owner of a gasoline service station quietly told me, ‘If you need any gas come to my station. You won’t need any [ration coupons].’ ”

When their leave was over, they spent brief stints in redistribution centers before they were stationed in various places in the country. Only Watson, who served in the 197th General Hospital in Saint-Quentin, France, during the Battle of the Bulge, was again sent overseas.

A few, like Jens, Rutkowski, Maness, and Porter, were sent back to Bowman Field as instructors. Jens also helped sell war bonds and found herself in another crash landing when one of her plane’s engines failed while they were flying over Spirit Lake, Iowa. She and the others on board walked away uninjured. In July 1945, Jens visited Stefa’s brother in Cleveland, as she had promised Stefa she would when they last saw each other in Albania more than a year earlier, and told him what she knew about Stefa, unaware that he had been tortured when he returned to Berat.

After Hayes’s required time at the Army Air Forces Redistribution Station in Miami Beach, Florida, he was assigned to the station’s medical unit. In May 1945, he graduated from Officer Candidate School at Carlisle Barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and, as a second lieutenant in the Medical Administrative Corps, became a hospital registrar at Camp Cooke, California. By then the war was almost over.

The Allies had accepted the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 7, less than a month after Roosevelt’s death, which formally ended the war in Europe—and ended the drive to pass legislation that allowed nurses to be drafted. Roosevelt had “urge[d] that the Selective Service Act be amended to provide for the induction of nurses into the armed forces” in his State of the Union speech in January 1945, leaving the nation stunned. He explained the “need is too pressing to await the outcome of further efforts at recruiting.” The bill had passed in the House, and on March 28, the Senate Military Affairs Committee recommended it. But in late July, the Allies gave Japan an ultimatum to surrender, and when it was ignored, the United States dropped two atomic bombs: one on Hiroshima on August 6 and one on Nagasaki on August 9. On September 2, 1945, Japan formally surrendered.

As the years passed after the war, some in the group stayed in touch with occasional visits, letters, or phone calls, but many never saw each other again. Eldridge, who became the vice president of an Indiana electric company, was the first to pass away in 1966 at the age of forty-five; and Porter, one of the three nurses hidden in Berat for months, died three years later at fifty-six years old. She had retired just five months earlier from the Air Force as a major.

When Hayes, who became an aeronautical engineer after going to college on the GI bill, learned from Owen of Abbott’s death in 1982, he decided to organize a reunion. In August 1983, six of the nurses—Jens, Watson, Dawson, Tacina, Stark, and Lytle—and five of the medics—Hayes, Owen, Cruise, Zeiber, and Hornsby—along with OSS officer Smith were together again after thirty-nine years. It was then that Smith revealed he had been working for OSS when he rescued them. While they talked of their experiences in Albania and their lives after the war, they also mourned one of their own, lost far too recently. Kanable, the nurse who’d come down with malaria and was the last to leave Catania, was killed in a car accident on her way to the reunion.

Jens, whose diary was mailed back to her after the war, and Maness organized another reunion in 1988, but none of the organizers for either reunion tried to find Duffy, the SOE officer, because, back in 1945, Thrasher, the pilot, had run into Jens at an airfield and told her that Duffy had been killed parachuting into Berlin. In 1993, she learned that he had actually died just three years before at seventy years old. She was distraught at the thought that she and the others could have reconnected with him but comforted by the letters she was then able to exchange with his widow.

In 1995, just a few years after the communist government in Albania crumbled, Jens returned to the country with her two adult children. While there, she met with Stefa’s wife, Eleni, and learned that the communist government had executed Stefa on March 3, 1948, for collaborating with the British and Americans during the war. It had been his youngest daughter’s third birthday. After being arrested in September 1947, he had been given a trial without a lawyer and behind closed doors in January 1948. Eleni had fought for his release and been told that his life would be spared, though he would serve a 101-year sentence. Happy at the news that her husband would live, she had sent her fourteen-year-old son Alfred to the jail in Berat to deliver cake to the guards, who announced to the boy that his father had been executed that morning for being an American spy.

Jens also learned that Gina, the partisan leader who had met the Americans minutes after the plane crash-landed and escorted them to Berat, had already died. He had passed away in 1986 at the age of sixty-five. Gina’s family had paid dearly for his partisan activities. After Gina returned to his home, he learned that the Germans and the BK had tortured his father, a well-known Albanian lawyer, for a week during his absence, and his father had succumbed to his injuries shortly after. The Germans and the BK had been looking to capture Gina and his brother, who they knew to be partisans.

Lloyd Smith, who became close to Jens and her family over the years and had retired from the Army with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1962 after twenty-one years of service, decided to return to Albania in 1996 to see the country again. Shortly after his return, Qani Siqeca, the young partisan called Johnny by the Americans who had led some of them after the attack on Berat, contacted the American Embassy. He was eventually put in touch with several in the group, including Hayes, Rutkowski, and Cruise, and they exchanged letters about their perilous time together.

Hayes, now ninety-one years old, is the only remaining survivor of the thirty personnel who were on board the C-53D the morning of November 8, 1943, and almost all of the men who served in Albania with SOE and OSS have passed away. Hayes remembers the details of his difficult months behind enemy lines clearly and still has many items he carried with him on that journey, including the leather vest Tilman gave him and the yellow scarf he made from a parachute. There are parts of the experience, however, he’d like to forget. When he first returned to Allied lines, he had nightmares of being continually chased. Those faded with time, but as was true of many in the group, he rarely talked about his ordeal over the years, even to his family. Other than with his wife, he never discussed the nightmares or the hunger, loneliness, and frustration he endured in Albania. The experience, however, shaped him when he was a twenty-one-year-old medic from Indianola, Iowa, just as it shaped so many of the others.

Watson worked as a psychiatric nurse at a veterans hospital in Topeka, Kansas, for twenty-seven years and often drew on her experiences in Albania to talk with the men she helped. She told her daughter that she wasn’t the same lighthearted person when she returned to Allied lines because she’d seen too much of human nature. After Watson’s death, her family found a letter to them in which she described being in Albania. She wrote, “One night while I was missing I couldn’t sleep. I remember it as silently crying for my mother—wanting her there. Finally I was able to think more clearly. If she was there what could she do? She’d be only another mouth to feed! So from then on I realized that I was me and I had only myself to depend on. I guess that was the point when I accepted responsibility for my actions and put more thought into what they would be. Probably the reason my mother said when I came home I wasn’t the same. ‘You are so cynical. You weren’t like that before.’ ”

Lebo, the radio operator, returned to the States and almost immediately got married. So did Bob Owen, who married the redhead he’d met at Bowman. Lebo was so impressed by OSS agent Lloyd Smith and what he had done for them that he and his wife spent part of their honeymoon in early 1944 driving to Smith’s parents’ house to tell them he was okay. When Smith died in March 2008, eighty-eight-year-old Lebo attended his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.

Abbott, who died in 1982 from complications after heart surgery, wrote about his experience in Albania as soon as he returned to the States, though he changed names and places in the story to protect the identities of the Americans’ benefactors. His son, who had only heard his father mention his time in Albania once, didn’t know his father had written a book until 2000. Ten years later, his son self-published it.