The Secret Rescue

by Cate Lineberry

  When he woke the following morning, he learned from the commissar’s messenger that the commissar had taken Smith’s three guides as prisoners and would not allow Smith to leave with them. The unexpected news didn’t sit well with the American, who immediately marched down to partisan headquarters. After the two men argued, the commissar eventually agreed to let the guides go into Smith’s custody with the provision that they would not be allowed to leave until the commandant gave his approval.

  Those plans changed, however, when the Germans unexpectedly showed up. Smith, who had earlier noticed the villagers “getting nervous and jittery,” heard gunfire that afternoon coming from a village just north of them. The commissar rushed to find Smith and tell him the Germans were coming and that he and his three guides were free to go. Having learned nothing new about the American party’s location but much about Albania’s civil war, Smith and his guides headed back the way they had come.

  A partisan guided the enlisted men the half hour back to Tilman’s mission at Sheper on the clear morning of December 15 to meet the rest of the party before they started on their grueling twenty-five-mile walk to Gjirokastër. With no place in between to stop, Duffy set a brisk pace as two in the group rode mules.

  For roughly the first half of the nine-hour trip, the trail followed a river and the party passed various bands of partisans coming and going. By late afternoon, the Americans were exhausted and stopped on a hillside to rest. The hillside overlooked a large, flat valley that Duffy said had previously been used by the Italians as an airfield. As they rested, someone in the party asked Duffy why they couldn’t be evacuated by air from the field rather than walk all the way to the coast. To the Americans’ frustration, he replied that the plans had already been made and would not be changed.

  It was about six in the evening when the party crossed the field and a wooden bridge that took them into partisan-controlled Gjirokastër, a well-preserved Ottoman town, similar to Berat, of about twelve thousand people. Set on a steep hillside with narrow cobblestone streets, it was topped by a large Byzantine castle. The town, just miles from the Greek border, was the birthplace of partisan leader Enver Hoxha, Albania’s future dictator, and previously had been occupied by the Italians. It was now in partisan hands, but that would soon change.

  Just seven months later, the Germans, who had gained control of the town, would hang two young partisan women in one of the town’s squares with the cooperation of the locals. Twenty-year-old Persefoni Kokëdhima had been sick and wounded and was hiding in her village to the west of Gjirokastër when she was caught. The Germans had demanded that the villagers shoot her for fighting against the Germans and betraying them, but they refused. She was eventually imprisoned in the castle in Gjirokastër while awaiting sentencing and there met fellow prisoner, twenty-two-year-old Bule Naipi, who had grown up in the town. The two were sentenced to death by a panel of local men and one German for their partisan work. On July 12, Kokëdhima was brought before the gallows in front of Naipi in an attempt to force Naipi to name other partisans and was hanged. Six days later, after Naipi refused to give up any of her fellow partisans, she too was executed.

  The Americans walked through the empty streets in the dark until they reached the center of town, where they ran into a group of partisans who talked with Stefa and Duffy. The partisans then led the party to a meeting room, where they waited for several hours while partisan leaders decided where to put them for the night.

  A guide led Hayes’s group of six enlisted men, which included Owen and Abbott, through twisting cobblestone streets in the chilly night air until they came to a stone wall with a massive wooden gate. The guide yelled “Haki! Haki!” and a lone voice replied from behind the gate. The two men spoke through the door in Albanian before the man behind the gate asked, “English?” Owen responded, “No, we’re Americans.” As soon as the words came out of Owen’s mouth, they heard the man start sobbing. The man rushed to unlock the gate and push open the door. When it was open, he shouted, “My friends! Come into my house” and the Americans followed him inside.

  The dark-haired man named Haki led them past rooms packed with corn and finally to the guest room, where they sat on a padded bench. He continued to sob as he told them his story. Like their friend George in Berat, Haki had left Albania to seek his fortune and also ended up in Pennsylvania as a cook. When he came back to retrieve his wife and two sons, the Italians invaded, and he and his family had been trapped. Haki’s wife and sons, however, refused to live with him now. As Haki told the Americans, his family had left because they didn’t believe the stories he told about American luxuries—hotel rooms with private baths, milk delivered to doorsteps, and telephones in each room of a house, and they accused him of being mad. The Americans asked Haki about the piles of corn stored in the other rooms, and he explained that his tenants who farmed some of the land he owned could only pay him with part of their crop. He had been unable to sell it and had no other place to store it other than his home.

  When Haki finished his story, Allen, the youngest in the group, asked Haki if he could have a pan to soak his feet, lifting his shoes so Haki could see they were in bad shape. Both of Allen’s shoes had large, gaping holes in the soles, and his feet had been wet and dirty for days. Haki begged their forgiveness for being a bad host and said he would get them some water. When he came back, he brought two large pans and told them all to take off their shoes and socks. Each of the six sat in astonishment as he washed their feet, which ached from the long day’s journey.

  They later asked him if he had anything to eat, and again he apologized for being a poor host and asked them if they liked flapjacks, an offering that made their mouths water. When they assured him they did, he said he’d be right back and went outside. He returned minutes later with a sack of sugar—a true extravagance in war-torn Albania that must have cost him a considerable amount. They went to the kitchen, where he lit a fire on the stone floor, set a ring stand over it, and added fat to a pan. He then mixed water and wheat flour into small clumps of batter and dropped them into the hot grease. When each deep-fried flapjack was ready, he took it out, dropped it briefly into the sugar, and handed it to the ravenous men. They each ate three before Haki ran out of batter.

  The men slept better than they had in a long time. In the morning, when Haki woke them from the padded benches they’d slept on, he said he was going out to see what he could find for breakfast. He came back a short time later holding a large orange for each of them. The men had not had any fruit since they’d been in Albania other than the quinces some of them had shared after the attack on Berat, and they thanked him profusely as they ate the juicy, sweet oranges, and asked him where he had found them. When he told them he bought them in town but they came from an orange grove just beyond the nearby mountains, Hayes thought for a brief moment about going to find the grove so he could have as many as he wanted.

  After they’d eaten, Haki told them it was time to meet the rest of the Americans, but before he finished, he started sobbing again and begged the Americans to take him with them. They explained that the British were helping them and decided who could go, but he continued to plead. “I’ll clean your floors. I’ll wash your clothes. I’ll do anything for you if you will take me with you. You see what my life is like here. You see how I cook here. I think of my fry kitchen in America. I wonder what has become of it. Please, take me with you.” It was an awkward and difficult moment for the young men who wished they could help the man who had been so kind to them, but they were powerless to do anything for him.

  A layer of frost covered the ground that morning as they followed a somber Haki to a neighbor’s house where some of the other enlisted men had stayed and were now eating breakfast at a cloth-covered table. Hayes’s group was still hungry and they looked longingly at the others eating, but the host never offered them any and they had learned from Stefa not to ask.

  When the others were ready, Haki led them to a meeting place at the northern edge
of the city. The rest of their party was waiting there along with some three hundred and fifty troops from the First Partisan Brigade who were organizing for a mission. Some of their leaders shouted orders and men scrambled in response, while mules were loaded down with various parts of a cannon and other supplies.

  By midmorning, the partisans moved out, heading north. Duffy, who had stayed up well into the night decoding several messages from Cairo with Bell, told the Americans he was staying in Gjirokastër but was sending them to Mashkullorë, a village about three hours away, that he thought was safer. The road that ran in front of Gjirokastër and the wooden bridge connecting it to the town made it too easy for the Germans to reach it. He assured them he would catch up with the group the following day. Several of the American men who had heard that a member of the Gestapo in Gjirokastër had sent word for German troops to come and capture the Americans wondered if the rumor was true.

  At Duffy’s order, Stefa and the Americans, who were headed the same way as the partisans, waited until late morning to leave so the two parties wouldn’t be traveling together. If the partisans ran into the Germans or the BK, Duffy didn’t want his group in the middle. The trail was fairly level and the pace relaxed as the temperature rose.

  When they arrived at Mashkullorë, however, they found that only about a dozen houses were still standing from previous Italian and German attacks. The town had very little food, though Thrasher was able to buy some fresh meat for the group before they were split among houses for the evening. The party decided to move on to the nearest village, Zhulat, in the morning, but they soon found that it too had seen its share of war.

  Duffy and Bell had received messages from Cairo while waiting at Gjirokastër that indicated there was a new German drive from the seaport of Vlorë headed in the same direction as their evacuation point at Seaview. Despite the grim news, Duffy was pleased to learn that Cairo indicated he should continue to press on with the party but to “take all precaution.” When he and Bell left Gjirokastër in the morning, it took them longer to find the party than they had expected because the men and women had moved on to Zhulat. When the two groups finally reunited, Duffy decided they would stay in the village for another night.

  CHAPTER 12

  Breaking Point

  In the brutally cold morning, the party continued on the trail toward the coast. The Americans had already spent five weeks in Albania, but they were still hopeful that the end was near. They were also growing impatient, and more and more of their shoes were giving out after walking so far for so many days. The stitching that held the soles onto Owen’s shoes was coming apart just as the group’s endurance was also giving way. In one of the villages they had just passed through, the partisans saluted the Americans in Albanian with “Death to Nazis!” instead of the usual “Death to Fascists!” Hayes, who’d had enough of the salute and the politics that were holding them hostage, on top of being exhausted and hungry, came very close to replying, “Death to Communism!” Fortunately for everyone, he stopped himself.

  As the hours passed they continued to make progress, briefly marveling at two women dressed in long, black dresses, each carrying large bundles of firewood on their backs while spinning wool and walking. The group eventually arrived at another badly damaged village that afternoon, and Duffy and Stefa tried to arrange housing, but the village council refused to allow them to stay. A band of partisans had arrived the night before and eaten all the villagers’ food.

  The party carried on and came to the village of Progonat about an hour later—the only place in the nearby area that was still intact. The villagers welcomed the Americans, and Owen, Wolf, and Hayes were soon led to the guest room of their assigned house. In the corner of the room with bare walls and piles of straw on the floor stood an ancient-looking cot with missing springs and no mattress. Their host, another man who had learned English at the Albanian Vocational School, served them cornbread and sour cheese and excitedly asked them who wanted to sleep in the bed he proudly owned. Though they didn’t want to insult their host by refusing the cot, it looked so uncomfortable that they each preferred the hard floor. Finally Owen piped up and said, “We’ll draw straws! Short straw gets the cot.” Owen picked up a few blades, and, after each took their chance, they held the results in front of one another. Hayes cringed at the small piece of straw he held in his hand, while Owen and Wolf both grinned.

  The three medics awoke the next day to a Muslim imam chanting a call to prayer. The family they’d stayed with the previous night had no other food to offer, so the men were moved to another house. With no word that the party would be leaving the village soon, the men gestured to their new hosts that they were going out for a walk.

  The dirt streets were muddy from the rain the night before and few people were out, though they passed a group of men sitting outside and talking as they held prayer beads in their hands. As the medics milled about, they came across Baggs, who told them that Duffy and Bell had left that morning to find out if the local partisan leaders had gathered any new information.

  Duffy and Bell returned that night, however, without having been able to locate the local leaders. While the two men sent and received their daily messages from SOE Cairo, Hayes, Owen, and Wolf were in their assigned house watching a young boy as he stoked the fire, giggled at the American men, and played the kaval for them. The long day ended with Owen going outside to go to the bathroom and being attacked by a dog, from which he managed to escape without any injuries.

  Duffy told Thrasher the next morning that he was going ahead of the group and would meet them in Gusmar to the west of Progonat two hours later. When he arrived, however, he found the village in chaos. The improvised partisan hospital was being evacuated in anticipation of the German drive. Duffy knew then that he had no choice but to stop the party’s progression to the coast and backtrack. It was too dangerous to continue forward.

  When the party arrived, they told Duffy of passing dozens of badly wounded partisans. Some were unable to walk and had to be carried. Stefa had learned that these were the men from the First Partisan Brigade they had seen gathered at Gjirokastër a few days before. They had run into a German patrol of roughly twenty-five soldiers, and the ensuing battle left them with the casualties they were now seeing.

  Duffy gathered the group together and explained as calmly as he could that they had no choice but to turn back. “They were at this point only two days from their goal—so heartbreaking surely,” he wrote. The change in plans was hard for the group to grasp, since everything had gone according to their plans since they’d met the British officers. They thought they were finally on their way home, though they didn’t realize just how close they were. “We were washed up,” Abbott later wrote. “We could climb mountains on our hands and knees, we’d done it; we could live on cornbread and sour milk, we’d done that; we could sleep with the lice and fleas chewing us, march in the rain and go barefoot if we had to. All these things we could do, where there was ahead of us the hope of the blue sea, the hope of getting back to our lines, the hope of home! Now that hope was gone…. There was nothing left in us that said, ‘Keep on.’ We’d made a good fight of it, but, the fight was over.”

  Though the group was devastated by the turn of events, Duffy’s decision likely saved them from disaster. “As events proved later, the German drive was an avalanche, dispersing the first brigade,” he wrote. The dejected party moved eastward to another village about a half hour away.

  At some point that day, Monday, December 20, the Americans’ forty-third day in Albania, Thrasher asked Bell to send a message on his behalf over the wireless while Duffy was on a reconnaissance mission. Like many in the party, the pilot’s patience had run out. Thrasher’s message, which he asked to be sent to the commanding officer of the Twelfth U.S. Army, said that the road to the coast was completely blocked and the entire party was exhausted. Half of them were sick and their shoes were nearly gone. He asked for a C-47 with an escort to pick them up at the airfield in
Gjirokastër on Wednesday and added that he could ensure that there were no enemy aircraft in the area, and they would have partisan protection at the field, which was in perfect condition. Cairo received the message and forwarded it to the AAF with the following message: “Inform most urgently (one) airforce view as to feasibility (two) airforce signal and other requirements (three) dates on which pick up sortie possible. Have asked Duffy’s views.”

  If the air evacuation happened, it wouldn’t be the first in the Balkans in recent months. OSS’s Cairo branch had conducted a special operation in Greece in October when it evacuated fourteen American fliers by air. It wouldn’t be the last, either. The following summer, Operation Halyard, an Allied airlift operation, began after downed airmen constructed a landing strip for a fleet of C-47s. More than five hundred Allied airmen trapped in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia were rescued.

  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.