The Secret Rescue

by Cate Lineberry

  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. 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 he had when he first returned to Allied lines 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, after her children were grown 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, as did Bob Owen, to the woman 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.

  Rutkowski, who was proud that her daughter had followed her into the military by becoming a reserve officer with the 917th Tactical Fighter Wing, wrote a letter to her in the 1990s about her time in air evacuation and the lessons it taught her. “I learned that although I could get scared, I didn’t freeze, but gave it my best shot. I had wondered what my reaction to severe stress would be. Without military experience I may not have known I could do it. I made the decision that fear would not be permitted to decide my action. Through the years it has served me well.”

  Jens, who died in 2010 and is inurned at Arlington, was so moved by her experience in Albania that when she was almost eighty-five years old, she published her memoirs of that time. She, like some of the other nurses, continued to wear the gold sovereign given to her by the British agents, made into a necklace, as a reminder of their remarkable journey and their secret rescue.

  Acknowledgments

  When I started this book, I had no idea that writing about the extraordinary journey of thirty stranded Americans in World War II and those who saved them would lead to such an incredible journey of my own on which I would meet countless people willing to help me uncover this remarkable story.

  I am deeply grateful to medic Harold Hayes, the one remaining survivor of the fateful flight, who spent countless hours recalling events in incredible detail and sharing stories, articles, memorabilia, and photos he’d collected over seven decades. No matter how many questions I asked, Harold always answered. A special thanks goes to Betty, Harold’s wife of sixty-eight years, who was as welcoming to me as Harold and who also shared her memories of those in the 807th whom she met after the war. I am thankful to nurse Agnes Jensen Mangerich and medic Lawrence Abbott for their memoirs of these harrowing events.

  Dr. Roderick Bailey, historian and author of The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle, was incredibly generous with his time and answered numerous questions during the writing of this book. Rod’s research and expertise on the British and Americans serving in Albania during World War II and Albania’s complicated political situation proved invaluable.

  I want to thank Jon Naar, who at the time of the rescue was a Royal Artillery Captain with SOE working in Cairo and Bari, and who graciously shared his recollections of the events of 1943–44.

  The many children, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren of those in the story, from the stranded Americans to the Albanian partisans, were generous with their time, memories, and photos, and I am truly grateful to them. I am particularly thankful for the assistance of Karen Curtis and Jon Mangerich, the children of nurse Agnes Jensen Mangerich, who not only shared in person and through e-mail memories, letters, photos, videos, and articles related to the story, they, along with their spouses, Bob and Beverly, continuously offered their support. My sincere thanks also extend to Hunter Baggs, nephew of copilot James Baggs, and James’s son, Jim Baggs; Craig Lebo and Gayle Yost, the children of radio operator Richard Lebo; Sue Lonaker, niece of nurse Wilma Lytle; Nelson McKenzie, husband of nurse Lois Watson; Phyllis McKenzie, daughter of Lois Watson; William McKnight, Jr., son of the 807th’s commanding officer, William McKnight; Bob Owen, son of medic Robert Owen; Bill Shumway, son of medic Willis Shumway; the family of partisan Kostaq Stefa, especially his wife, Eleni Stefa, daughters Elda Stefa Naraci and Vitore Stefa-Leka, and grandsons, Kostaq Stefa and Dr. Pjetër Naraci; and Lee Whitson, daughter of nurse Eugenie Rutkowski. I also thank Clint Abbott, son of medic Lawrence Abbott, who published his father’s memoirs; Leka Bezhani, grandson of Tare Shyti, who helped lead the three nurses from Berat to the coast; Vojsava Bezhani, daughter of Tare Shyti; Elva Brooks, daughter of medic Gordon MacKinnon; Denis Cranson, son of medic Robert Cranson; Jim Cruise, son of medic James Cruise; Hasan Gina’s family, including his children Akil Gina, Cesar Gina, Donika Gina, Luiza Gina, and his granddaughter Marjola Llogoni; Karl Hayes and Virginia McCall, siblings of medic Harold Hayes; Koli Karaja, nephew of Nani and Goni Karaja, who hid the three nurses in their home in Berat; Mary Ann Adams Lofland, daughter of medic Charles Adams; David Mitchell, nephew of pilot Charles Thrasher; Bette Newell, daughter of nurse Elna Schwant; Dana Ramsey, daughter of Charles Thrasher; Hal Smith and Karen Smith, children of OSS officer Lloyd Smith; Rudy Stakeman, brother of the 807th’s head nurse Grace Stakeman; Joe Turnage, son of nurse Ann Markowitz; Paul Voigt, son of flight surgeon Philip Voigt; and Kristin Zeiber-Pawlewicz, granddaughter of medic Charles Zeiber. I am also grateful to the many distant relatives of those in the story who helped me locate these family members.

  For their invaluable expertise and assistance, I thank Col. Nancy Cantrell, Chief Nurse of the 94th Combat Support Hospital and former Army Nurse Corps Historian; Dr. Dixie Dysart, Historian, Air Force Historical Research Agency; Dr. Robert Elsie, Specialist, Albanian Studies; Britta Granrud, Curator of Collections, Women’s Memorial Foundation; Ajet Nallbani, Historian, Berat Enthographic Museum; Art Reinhardt, OSS Veteran (China) and OSS Society Treasurer; and Judith Taylor, Senior Historian, Air Force Medical Service.

  I am also grateful to Albana Droboniku and Blerin Rada for their generous assistance as guides and interpreters during my trip to Albania and their continued help once I returned to the States, as well as to Zeqine Droboniku and Valmira Frasheri for their hospitality in Tiranë.

  Aleksander Sallabanda, former ambassador of the Republic of Albania to the United States, arranged for my meeting with Albanian president Bamir Topi, my meeting with Kostaq Stefa’s family and mayor of Berat Fadil Nasufi, and my meeting with Elbasan prefect Shefqet Deliallisi. I am sincerely grateful to him, to President Topi, and to the others for their time and efforts on my behalf. My thanks also go to Albanian journalist and researcher Dr. Monika Stafa, who put me in touch with the family of partisan Hasan Gina and who shared a document from the Albanian archives on partisan Kostaq Stefa’s arrest.

  Many of the villagers I met, particularly Foto Prifti in Dhoksat, and Vesel Ibrahimi and Xhevit Elezi who live near the crash site, proved to me that Albania’s time-honored tradition of hospitality remains alive and well. When I showed up at their doorsteps unannounced, they welcomed me into their homes, offered me raki, and shared their stories. My thanks also extend to Klevis Haxhiaj, the grandson of Foto Prifti, who made a separate trip to Dhoksat on my behalf to ask follow-up ques
tions.

  For helping me search various archives in the United States and around the world, I thank Dr. Roderick Bailey, Dr. Gregory Geddes, Marisa Larson, Kevin Morrow, Dominik Naab, and Sim Smiley. Thanks also to author and Brig. Gen. Philip D. Caine, USAF (Ret.), and researcher Steven Kippax for sending me files. I am grateful to several people who found related newspaper articles and information on my behalf, including Betty Menges at the New Albany–Floyd County Public Library, Julia Muller at Savannah News, Maureen Nelson at the Mecosta County Genealogical Society, and Holly Peery at the Bolles School. For fact-checking sections of this book, I thank Michelle Harris. My thanks also go to the sons of the late John Graham, an SOE officer in Greece and a friend of Lt. Gavan Duffy after the war, who generously shared research materials on the story gathered by their father in the 1990s, to Jim Graham of the 1st Fighter Group who shared copies of mission reports, and to Robert Vrilakas of the 1st Fighter Group who shared his experiences as a P-38 pilot assigned to rescue the Americans.

  I am very fortunate to have the support and guidance of my agent, Ellen Geiger, partner at Frances Goldin Literary Agency, who found the perfect home for my book at Little, Brown. I am extremely grateful for the talent, support, and wisdom of my Little, Brown editor, John Parsley. I would also like to thank my former editor at Little, Brown, Christina Rodriguez, who believed in this story from the very beginning, and publisher Michael Pietsch. My gratitude extends to Morgan Moroney and Miriam Parker as well as Malin von Euler-Hogan, Peggy Freudenthal (and freelance copyeditors Carolyn Haley and Alice Cheyer), and the rest of Little, Brown’s consummate team.

  I consider myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with and learn from an extraordinary group of people, including those at National Geographic magazine, Smithsonian magazine, AARP The Magazine, and the New York Times as well as my teachers and fellow students at Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am especially grateful for the continued support of Don Belt, Ken Budd, Molly Crosby, Whitney Dangerfield, Allan Fallow, Nancy Perry Graham, Gary Krist, Jess Ludwig, Candice Millard, Austin O’Connor, Leslie Pietrzyk, Bob Poole, Clay Risen, Tim Wendel, and Frank Yuvancic.