The Forgotten 500 (25 page)

Knowing that horrors like that awaited them, many OSS agents carried “L” pills hidden somewhere on their persons. The “L” stood for “lethal.” The rubber-coated capsule could even be carried in the mouth for long periods, ready to use if the SS came through the doors. Biting down on the pill would spill its contents and bring nearly instant death.

 

 

 

Most of the field agents
had been recruited through the army, so they had substantial military training and often some experience in the war before joining the OSS. The OSS administrators, on the other hand, tended to be the businessmen, the overeducated and the well connected. They usually were recruited because they possessed skills that were of use to the OSS, and there is no disputing that they served their country admirably. But inevitably, the agents risking their lives in the field developed a disdain for the “bourbon whiskey colonels” in Washington and other OSS posts who thought they could tell them how to do their jobs. Even the field agent who had led a sedate life before becoming a spy quickly developed disdain for someone who was giving him orders from the comfort of London or Cairo while he infiltrated German units and slept in pigsties. Unfortunately, these disputes sometimes went beyond the typical griping that comes from all soldiers in the field who think their commanders are out of touch. Arthur Goldberg, who worked for the OSS and later became a Supreme Court justice, complained after the war that Donovan had made a major mistake by selecting “men for the higher echelons of the organization who by background and temperament were unsympathetic with Donovan’s own conception of the necessity of unstinting cooperation with the resistance movements.” The men and women in the field shared Donovan’s enthusiasm for supporting the insurgents and guerilla movements throughout Europe, but the OSS administrators in between were not always as consistent.

The OSS also had an ongoing feud with the State Department that would rear its head later in the Mihailovich affair. Part of the dispute was an old-fashioned turf war, the type that can be found in a thousand permutations around Washington, DC, but the State Department did have good reason to fear Donovan and his clandestine army. The freestyling ways of the OSS were a sharp contrast to the hidebound, stodgy, protocol-driven ways of the State Department. Where the OSS did whatever it felt would work in a given situation, the State Department was hobbled by tradition and diplomatic niceties. An analyst moving from the OSS to the State Department would be moving from a politically liberal, dynamic, intellectually driven agency to one that was conservative and driven largely by the career ambitions of bureaucrats. State Department officials knew that meant Donovan could always come out ahead when the president looked for results.

 

 

 

Musulin’s confirmation about the number
of airmen with Mihailovich, and his outrage at the abandonment of Mihailovich, built on the emotions the letter from Mirjana stirred in Vujnovich. When he started looking into the possibility of rescuing the downed airmen in the hills of Yugoslavia, he knew immediately that political concerns would be the first challenge. A year earlier, the same rescue mission would have been a very different proposition. It would have been a question of logistics mostly, a routine sort of decision about if, how, and when such a large rescue could be made. The answer might be no, but it would be for realistic reasons, not political ones.

In the spring of 1944, however, the logistical question took a backseat to politics. When Vujnovich presented his plans for rescuing the downed airmen in Yugoslavia, his superiors in the OSS knew there would be trouble getting approval from Washington. Aside from the risks of the mission, the Allies were now locked into their stated position that Mihailovich was a Nazi collaborator and could not be trusted. All Allied aid was given to Tito’s forces, which ended up using the guns and ammunition against Mihailovich as much as against the Germans.

If Vujnovich could not get past the political impediments it didn’t matter whether he could come up with a way to get those men out. The mission could never take place without approval from very high up, especially a rescue this large and one that would have to be so daring. Vujnovich worked with other OSS leaders in Bari and started formulating a plan. The OSS met with General Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Fifteenth Air Force, and at that meeting Musulin emphasized the need for an immediate rescue. The group discussed how such a large rescue might be accomplished, and then they sent the request up the chain of command. The OSS in Bari and the Fifteenth Air Force were in agreement that they wanted to go ahead with a rescue mission, but every time the request went across another bureaucrat’s desk, the response was the same: We’d love to rescue those men, but how can we do that now that we’ve written off Mihailovich as a Nazi collaborator? If he really can’t be trusted, this would be a suicide mission. And what if it’s all a trick? What if he doesn’t have a hundred airmen waiting to be rescued?

Vujnovich suspected the real motivation was fear that Mihailovich
did
have the airmen and really was protecting them. That could create an awkward situation if the man that the Allies accused of collaborating with the Nazis actually was protecting the downed airmen. If they went in and rescued the airmen, how could the Allies continue calling Mihailovich a collaborator?

The British, still operating on the false information fed to them by their spy James Klugmann, were vehemently opposed to anyone going into Mihailovich’s territory for any reason, as were the Russians. The British insisted that Mihailovich could not be trusted and that no rescue mission be attempted. It was easy for them to say that, Vujnovich thought. There were maybe a few British fliers among the downed airmen in Yugoslavia, but there were a hundred or more Americans trying to get out, and the Brits were willing to let them stay in Yugoslavia until the Germans found them, they succumbed to injuries and disease, or in some other way were no longer a problem.

Vujnovich and the others in Bari kept pushing and eventually the debate went all the way to the top. On July 4, 1944, Donovan sent a letter to President Roosevelt asking for permission to send in a team of agents to conduct the rescue, working the request into a larger discussion about how Donovan and his subordinates were not happy about losing their presence in the territory controlled by Mihailovich. He noted in the letter that Musulin had been withdrawn at the request of Churchill, but he explained that the changing fronts of the war made it imperative to gather more intelligence from the region. Donovan was careful to acknowledge the delicate dance that had to take place between the United States and Britain when discussing intelligence operations in Yugoslavia, noting that there was “a basic difference between clandestine agents sent in for the purpose of obtaining general information and operational reconnaissance directed to the preparation of military movements.” His interpretation of the current arrangement with the SOE was that the first could be carried out by either the Americans or the British without each other’s approval, while the second required coordination.

Donovan’s letter had been carefully crafted to convey the proper respect for diplomatic channels and the propriety of international relations during wartime, the bureaucratic language striking all the required notes. But he was much more direct when speaking to the president in person a few days later. As they were discussing the issue, Roosevelt made it clear that he wanted to rescue the airmen but was concerned about how the British would respond.

Wild Bill Donovan, a man known for mincing no words and doing whatever it took to get the job done, spoke plainly to the president: “Screw the British! Let’s get our boys out!” This was a tactic that Donovan often used when he was fed up with the insanely political maneuvering between the OSS, the State Department, and anyone else who thought they knew better than he did: Just say it in plain English. Get right to the point.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Fortunately the president was in the same no-nonsense mood that day and agreed. Word was sent from Washington to Italy, and on July 14, 1944, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, the commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force, signed an order creating the Air Crew Rescue Unit (ACRU). The unit was assigned two B-25 bombers to use as needed, and the Fifteenth Air Force was on call to provide whatever other air resources ACRU wanted. The order creating ACRU specified that its work would be carried out by OSS agents and that missions would be coordinated from Bari. ACRU was commanded by none other than Colonel George Kraigher, Vujnovich’s old friend from Pan American.

Kraigher’s involvement gave Vujnovich some degree of confidence that this was a team he could trust. Vujnovich and his men could go ahead with his risky plan. Whether they could pull it off was still very much in doubt.

The British were none too happy when they heard about
the formation of ACRU and the impending mission to Mihailovich’s headquarters, suspecting that it was really just an attempt by Donovan to reestablish an OSS presence in that part of Yugoslavia. They were at least partially right. Donovan wanted to rescue the airmen for humanitarian reasons, but he was far too savvy to overlook the strategic potential of sending in a mission.

Five days after the special ACRU team was created, Donovan sent an urgent message notifying its members that Mihailovich had contacted the Yugoslav embassy in Washington with the news that about one hundred airmen were waiting for rescue. This was not news to anyone by this time, of course, though it may have been the first time that one of Mihailovich’s many pleas for a rescue officially made it to the desk of someone who could act on it. Aware that Vujnovich and everyone else in Bari already knew Mihailovich was hiding the airmen, Donovan nevertheless used the official communication from Mihailovich as an opportunity to move the rescue forward and to pursue his own goals with ACRU. Donovan forwarded the message from Mihailovich as if it were urgent news.

In other words, get the OSS team in there fast, while we have this message from Mihailovich as our reason for going in right away, and before “our colleagues” the British can interfere.

Vujnovich didn’t need to be persuaded. He was in agreement with Donovan’s intentions and he was working hard with the ACRU team to organize the rescue. But as soon as he got the go-ahead from Washington, Vujnovich realized he was facing a big challenge. With the rescues that already had been carried out in Yugoslavia, the idea of going in to pick up downed airmen was not radical in itself, but the situation had changed a lot in the past year, and Vujnovich knew this rescue would not be like the ones before. There was no real support from the British and only a grudging acceptance of the president’s order, unlike previous missions that had been carried out as joint operations between the Allies with complete cooperation. And the previous missions had brought out a few dozen airmen, mostly by shuttling them through Yugoslavia’s underground railroad to a safe zone where they could be picked up in relative safety. As recently as December 1943, OSS Lieutenant George Wuchinich parachuted into Yugoslavia with two other agents and, while pursuing other mission objectives to gather intelligence, managed to rescue ninety downed airmen over a four-month period.

With everything changed in Yugoslavia, and with so many more men awaiting rescue than ever before, this mission would be different.

Musulin had told him there were about one hundred airmen waiting in Pranjane, Vujnovich thought.
One hundred.
That number alone meant that the rescue was exponentially more difficult and dangerous than any that had been carried out before. How do you get one hundred sickly, injured airmen out of enemy territory without the Germans noticing? There were far too many to just try to slip them out on a small plane, and moving them all to a border where they might sneak across was out of the question. They risked being caught if they ventured away from Pranjane, and Vujnovich knew that one hundred men can’t move anywhere with stealth. He decided there was only one way to rescue these men. They would have to go in and pick them up from Pranjane, right where they were. It was the only way, he kept telling himself, partly to convince himself that he wasn’t organizing a suicide mission.
It’s the only way to get them out. We have to go pick them up.

The numbers complicated everything. If it were a dozen airmen needing rescue, it wouldn’t have been such a wild idea to just send an OSS plane to land somewhere nearby and then sneak back out of Yugoslavia. Or you might be able to move through occupied territory until they reached a border that could be crossed. But with one hundred men, how many planes would that take? How many times would they have to land, pick up the airmen, take off, and fly home without being caught? Once was risky, but more than that was just foolhardy, wasn’t it? Maybe so, Vujnovich decided, but there was no other choice. So Vujnovich’s plan began to take shape: The OSS would organize a rescue by first sending in agents to prepare the airmen, and then the Fifteenth Air Force would send in a fleet of planes to land in enemy territory and bring them home. When Vujnovich approached his counterparts in the air force, they had him coordinate with an air force officer who suggested the rugged C-47. The ubiquitous C-47 filled many different roles in World War II—everything from troop transport and cargo delivery to paratrooper drops and rescue missions. The plane’s versatility led to the nickname Skytrain. The two-engine plane had a roomy interior that could be outfitted any way the user wanted, with seats, guns, or radios, or left empty to hold anything you needed hauled from point A to point B. They were the primary utility plane of the American military, serving all over Europe and playing a key role in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. In civilian life, it was known as the DC-1, DC-2, or DC-3. With a wingspan of ninety-five feet and a length of sixty-three feet, the C-47 was a big, bulky plane, but it required a crew of only four. When outfitted with seats as a passenger plane, a C-47 could carry only a dozen people in addition to the crew. The airmen in Yugoslavia would be picked up by C-47 cargo planes with mostly empty interiors, making it possible to carry more. But under the conditions of this rescue, the planes would probably carry no more than a dozen passengers per plane.