The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  Kraigher finally relented and climbed over the boxes to get into the cockpit. Vujnovich watched the plane depart, comfortable that they were doing the right thing. When Kraigher reached Pranjane and the villagers lined up to receive a pair of shoes, he felt like Santa Claus and had no regrets. Lalich supervised the shoe giveaway and at first worried that the effort might be for naught because most of the shoes were a size 8, when the big Serbs, especially the men, needed something more like a size 12. It was pitiful to see the desperate men trying to shove their cold feet into the too-small shoes, but many made do by splitting the heel in back and forcing the shoe on like a very snug slipper.

  Vujnovich was waiting at the airport when Kraigher brought Lalich, Rajacich, and Jibilian back from Pranjane. He couldn’t have been more pleased with the success of Operation Halyard.

  When Jibilian finally returned from Yugoslavia after helping rescue hundreds of airmen, he didn’t ever want to see another bit of goat cheese. His first morning back, he wolfed down eight eggs, close to a pound of bacon, six slices of toast with butter and jam, and he drank more cups of coffee than he could count. He couldn’t help indulging after months of barely surviving in the hills of Yugoslavia, though he felt bad when he thought of the villagers he had left behind, struggling to feed themselves.

  As Felman had suspected, the cover-up was well underway by the time the airmen returned to free territory. A conspiracy was already in place to keep the world from knowing that the Allies had just pulled off the biggest rescue ever of airmen in enemy territory, a complete success made all the more amazing by the audaciousness of the mission. While the initial gag order had made sense while the rescue missions were still underway, after its completion the airmen began to wonder why the military still refused to acknowledge their incredible story. The reason, the airmen soon learned, was that the rescue could not be publicized without giving credit to the Serb guerilla leader who had harbored the men and made the whole operation possible. Mihailovich was officially ostracized for his supposed weakness and collaboration with the Germans, and even faint praise for his assistance with the downed airmen would have ruffled feathers in the State Department and the British government. While Operation Halyard was still going on and men’s lives were at risk, no one wanted to jeopardize the rescues by trying to give Mihailovich credit. And after the rescues were completed, it just didn’t seem worth the risk to career and interoffice harmony to challenge the State Department and the Brits in order to let the world know what had happened. Vujnovich, Musulin, and others were willing, even eager, to put their careers on the line to ensure those men were rescued, but afterward there was little motivation to tell the story if it meant bucking the whole military and diplomatic hierarchy.

  So the fantastic story wasn’t told. There was no report back home in the newspapers of a huge operation that had saved so many lives, only the occasional item in a hometown paper noting that a local boy had been found and was no longer missing in action. With the initial orders to keep quiet forgotten once the rescues were complete, the men involved in Operation Halyard talked about it in the chow line, in the barracks, on the bus, in the cafés—anywhere they met up with other servicemen—because they were so thrilled to be back in Italy and so thankful to the Serbs who had harbored them. They wanted the other airmen to know what had happened to them, that the Serb people were astonishingly kind and helpful to American airmen, even though the briefings for bomber crews still included warnings that the Serbs would cut off their ears and turn them over to the Germans. Orsini, after returning from several weeks convalescence for his injury, returned to duty and had to sit through briefings in which an officer told him and his fellow crewmates that if they bailed out over northern Yugoslavia they should seek out Tito’s forces and run from Mihailovich’s fighters and the local villagers. It took all of Orsini’s self-control to sit there and listen without earning himself a court-martial by telling the senior officer how wrong he was, and his voice was shaking when the briefing ended and he gathered the rest of the crew around. He would make sure the senior officer was out of earshot and then set the record straight.

  “Don’t believe a word of that crap about Mihailovich and Tito,” he told the other men, including some young replacements who didn’t know any better. “I’ve been there. I’ve been on the ground with these people, and the fact is that the Serbs will give you the shirt off their backs and every bit of food they have. If we bail out, just come with me and I’ll walk right up and introduce myself again.”

  The continued warnings about Mihailovich, and offhand comments by other airmen who had heard only the official story, incensed Orsini and Musgrove and every other man who had experienced the truth firsthand. A few drinks were thrown and tables overturned in Bari as the returning airmen set the record straight on what happened in Pranjane.

  After the initial warning, the army did not make much effort to keep the hundreds of returning airmen from talking, but the OSS agents who conducted Operation Halyard were on a shorter leash. Jibilian, like the airmen, wasn’t looking for attention for his participation, but he also wasn’t shy about telling people that Mihailovich and the Serbs deserved thanks. That stopped one day when an OSS officer pulled him aside and said, “Don’t tell anyone. This will just create a big fuss with Tito and Mihailovich, so keep this under wraps.” And after that he did, following his orders and telling almost no one about the rescue mission.

  Many of the rescued airmen returned to the United States sooner than they would have if they had not spent so long in enemy territory. Richard Felman and his crew returned to the United States soon after being rescued, and they were told that the early return was partly due to fears that they would be executed as spies if they were caught behind enemy lines again. Two sojourns on the ground could make you a spy in the enemy’s eyes, not just an unlucky flier, the theory went.

  When Felman returned to New York, the Red Cross came aboard his ship and handed out coffee and doughnuts to the returning servicemen before they disembarked. They also distributed local New York newspapers, and Felman was pleased to find an article about the destruction of a major ammunitions warehouse and railway station in Gornji Milanovac by guerilla forces resisting the German occupation in Yugoslavia. The only problem was that the paper attributed the guerrilla action to Tito’s Partisans. Felman knew better because he had actually participated in that raid with Mihailovich’s men, with not a single red star of the Partisans around for miles. Felman was livid to see Tito get credit for the work of Mihailovich’s men, but it fit the pattern he had already started piecing together.

  Orsini flew another thirty-three missions after recuperating from his shoulder injury, and then he was wounded again. While lying in the hospital, a doctor stopped by and asked him how many missions he had flown. Orsini replied that he had flown thirty-four, meaning he still had another sixteen to go before hitting the magic number of fifty, which usually was the point where the military said you’d done your duty and could go home. The doctor thought Orsini had made enough missions through hell for one man, so he authorized his return to the States. He was scheduled to return home on a hospital ship in April 1945, but one evening he found a note on his bunk that said, You are returning to the States by plane in the morning. With no time to notify his family that he would be home within days instead of months, Orsini flew back to the United States and made his way to the family’s three-story apartment building on Beacon Street in Jersey City, New Jersey. Once he had reached the States, he decided not to call home first so he could surprise his mother.

  When he reached home, he rang the bell for his mother’s apartment, but there was no answer. He rang the bell for his aunt, who lived on the second floor and enjoyed a jubilant reunion with her for a moment before being able to get the excited woman to hear his question. “Where is my mother?” he asked. Orsini’s aunt explained that his mother was at church, which didn’t surprise Orsini much because he knew she went almost every morning. With another kiss for
his aunt, Orsini dashed out of the building and onto the street, first walking quickly and then barely able to stop himself from breaking into a run as he headed toward the church. He hadn’t gone far when he spotted his mother far down the street, about four blocks away, walking toward him with another woman. The two were returning from church and they didn’t see Orsini yet. He kept walking toward them, his eyes fixed on the mother he had thought he would never see again, waiting for the moment when she recognized her son.

  They kept walking toward each other, Orsini’s heart beating faster and faster as they closed the distance, but his mother saw only another young serviceman walking toward her. He kept his eyes on her, wanting so much to scream out to her, but he waited, wanting to see the look on her face when she realized it was him. When they came to within a block of each other, Orsini saw his mother pause briefly, stopping on the sidewalk as she looked more closely at the man in uniform coming toward her. Then she put her hands to her face and cried out as her companion looked at her quizzically.

  “Anthony? È quello voi?” his mother cried, at first questioning, and then as Orsini started running toward her, she knew. “Il mio Anthony! Il mio Anthony! È il mio Anthony!”

  His mother ran toward him, her arms reaching, trying to get her son back in her arms faster than her feet could carry her. Orsini could run faster and came to her quickly, scooping his mother up in his arms and hugging her tightly as she sobbed, saying his name over and over and kissing him on the cheek.

  “Sono indietro, Mama,” he told her. “È giusto, io sono indietro.” I’m back, Mama. It’s okay, I’m back.

  The first hint in the press of the remarkable success of the rescue mission came on February 20, 1945, more than six months after the first C-47s landed in Pranjane. A five-paragraph story on page 2 of the Washington Post carried the headline RADIO SIGNAL AIDS RESCUE OF 250 FLIERS. The story reported that, “A mystery radio message, picked up and recorded by RAF radio operators in Italy, led to the rescue recently of two hundred fifty Allied airmen, mostly American, who had bailed out over the Balkans.” The article went on to explain that the airmen sent a specially coded message that eventually led to the rescue operation. “Translation of the messages indicated that a large number of Americans, some of whom were sick, were stranded in Yugoslavia. They were awaiting rescue anxiously, for enemy troops were not far distant.” There was no mention of Mihailovich.

  The rescue itself was described succinctly: “Full arrangements were soon completed and the airmen congregated at a secret airfield. There they were all picked up and brought back to their bases.”

  Two days later the newspaper ran a lengthy letter to the editor from Konstantin Fotić, former Yugoslavian ambassador to the United States, in which he said that, because of the report of February 20, apparently there was no more need to keep the rescue secret. Fotic provided a more complete account of the operation, the scope of the rescue, and the key role played by Mihailovich. He closed by noting that:

  Even this action did not prevent a continuation of slanderous accusations against General Mihailovich and I am not aware what recognition was given him for this contribution to the Allied cause. Probably the general did not expect any recognition, because he felt that he was merely carrying out his duties as an ally. Nevertheless, today, when the story of this rescue is disclosed, credit should be given to those who deserve it, and should not be presented as an anonymous action which occurred somewhere in the Balkans.

  Tito, meanwhile, was completing his takeover of Yugoslavia and doing exactly what many feared he would do: He all but gift wrapped Yugoslavia for Stalin and ensured that Communism would threaten Eastern Europe for decades. Churchill and Roosevelt already were acknowledging, mostly privately, that they had made a grave error in siding with Tito over Mihailovich, but the full truth about how Communist moles and spies had misled them would not come out until long after Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945.

  By then, Churchill knew that Tito could not be trusted and that Stalin controlled Yugoslavia from Moscow. On February 9, 1945, Churchill and Roosevelt met with Stalin in an effort to encourage at least limited democracy in the portions of postwar Europe controlled by Russia, and though he did not promise much, Stalin did assure the world leaders that he would persuade Tito to recognize all prewar political parties—including Mihailovich’s and his followers—and to have a freely elected Constituent Assembly. Churchill did not trust Stalin, and on February 21, 1945, it was clear to his closest staff that he was “rather depressed, thinking of the possibilities of Russia one day turning against us, saying that [former British Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain had trusted Hitler as he was now trusting Stalin.” Churchill was disillusioned with the Russian leader and regretting his decision to abandon Mihailovich.

  Churchill’s fears were well grounded. On April 5, 1945, scarcely a month after Stalin’s assurances and a week before Roosevelt’s death, Tito signed an agreement with Russia to allow “temporary entry of Soviet troops into Yugoslav territory.” Though Tito would come to have serious disagreements with Stalin, Yugoslavia was for all intents and purposes an arm of Communist Russia.

  Once Tito won the leadership of Yugoslavia, backed by the force of the Red Army, he committed all of the Partisan military to capturing Mihailovich, his hated enemy. Mihailovich committed himself to a path of voluntary martyrdom. He could have saved himself by accepting offers to leave Yugoslavia and exile himself in another country, his absence probably satisfying Tito and ending the manhunt. By the time the last American officers left Yugoslavia in December 1944, they were reporting that Mihailovich had an aura of saintliness about him, which seemed to grow stronger as the Partisan manhunt closed in on him. Indeed, his people already treated him nearly as a saint. Wherever Mihailovich went, the peasants came from miles around to see him. Old women knelt and kissed his hands, while children brought him eggs and apples.

  Mihailovich was able to evade capture for seventeen months. When Mihailovich contracted typhus and was near death, Chetnik soldiers carried him on a stretcher from village to village and through the mountains, always running from the Partisans. Friends in Switzerland contacted him in 1946, urging that he leave the country at least long enough to recover, but Mihailovich refused.

  Jibilian was discharged from the military in 1945 and found a job as a purchase-order writer at the Veterans Administration headquarters in Washington, DC. A year had passed since Tito had established Communism in Yugoslavia, and like the rest of America, Jibilian was busy getting on with his postwar life. Reading the Washington Post on the morning of March 25, 1946, he found a small article with the headline MIHAILOVICH UNDER ARREST, BELGRADE SAYS. He was stunned, especially since the article only described Mihailovich as “accused by the regime of Marshal Tito of traitorous collaboration with the Germans during the war, is listed by Yugoslavia as a war criminal.” There was no mention that Mihailovich had been a staunch ally of the United States, much less his role in saving downed fliers. The article predicted a swift trial for Mihailovich, followed by an immediate execution by firing squad.

  Jibilian soon decided he had to do something to let the world know what Mihailovich had done for American airmen. He marched down to the newspaper to tell his story, sitting down with a reporter to explain his involvement in Operation Halyard and what he personally knew of Mihailovich.

  “If he’s a collaborator, I am too,” Jibilian told the reporter. “Draza Mihailovich is a friend of this country and Tito is about to execute him before anyone hears the truth.”

  Jibilian left the newspaper office feeling better, satisfied that he had at least told the story. But the newspaper article that ran the next day was brief and gained little attention. Washington is a tough town, Jibilian thought at the time. It takes a lot to get anyone’s attention.

  Felman saw the same news report in a New York newspaper and, like Jibilian, was stirred to action in defense of Mihailovich. Furious that the airmen’s savior had been captured like a common cri
minal and that the Western press was reporting Tito’s lies about Mihailovich being a war criminal, Felman wrote letters to all the New York newspapers in an effort to correct the record. Nearly all of them ignored his pleas, but then he went to the New York Journal American, a staunchly anti-Communist newspaper, and found an interested editor. An article written by Felman appeared in the Journal American and other Hearst newspapers on March 31, 1946. That article drew the attention of others involved in Operation Halyard, and within a few weeks Felman had letters from more than three hundred airmen who had been rescued and wanted to help Mihailovich. Jibilian received a similar response to the article in Washington, and soon the airmen from Pranjane were all back in touch with one another.

  Orsini also found himself in the odd position of trying to defend a world leader halfway around the globe. One evening at a small party thrown by some friends, a man started talking about the current events involving Mihailovich, not realizing Orsini’s personal connection. The man expounded at some length on how Mihailovich had once been an ally but then collaborated with the Germans, adding that his soldiers and the villagers supporting him were known to be particularly brutal with captured Americans. Orsini felt like he was back in Italy, sitting through a mission briefing. He clenched his drink tighter and tried to ignore the windbag, but finally he couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “That’s not true,” Orsini said, a tinge of anger drawing attention from the clutch of people who had been listening to the diatribe against Mihailovich. “I was there and what you’re saying is just not true. I’m visible evidence that they were helping rescue airmen. I bailed out and they helped me.”