The Secret Rescue (14 page)
Authors: Cate Lineberry
Filled with a mixture of frustration and excitement, the Americans decided the best course of action was to send a messenger to find a British officer and bring a note from them saying who and where they were. Stefa immediately dispatched a man with the note signed by Thrasher, but they all knew it could take days or weeks before the messenger returned with news.
With their plans in place, the Americans learned that the villagers would not only let them stay one more night, they would kill a sheep for a meal in honor of the party being reunited. While the mutton was being prepared, the Americans were led to a house and taken inside to a well-kept room with wooden floors and white plastered walls. Their host indicated they should sit on the floor by the fire in a semicircle. He briefly left the room, and when he came back a few minutes later, he carried a bottle of raki and a shot glass and moved to one end of the seated party. He filled the shot glass, swirled the raki around for a few seconds, and then threw the liquid into the fire, where it burned in a blue flash. He refilled the glass and offered it to the first person in line and then repeated the ceremony for each person in the group before setting the glass and the bottle on the floor for those who wanted more. Though most of the men and women continued to dislike the strong drink, they took a sip as custom dictated.
Baggs found another use for raki a few days later when he poured some in his Zippo lighter after it ran out of lighter fluid. He found that it worked just as well. Several in the group smoked and had run out of tobacco within a few days of landing. To their relief, villagers had given them rolls of dried tobacco on a couple of occasions. The tobacco was sliced into shreds with a pocketknife, shared with those who wanted some, and rolled with paper from books the party had brought with them.
When the mutton was ready, the party was divided into three groups and taken to separate houses, where they ate. Despite the villagers’ generosity, it was a hollow celebration for the Americans, whose thoughts were with the missing nurses and their own futures.
Those who had been in Qani’s group spent their first night in Dobrushë and soon learned what the other party already knew: some of the blankets offered to them to ward off the cold night air were infested with fleas and lice. Hayes still had the louse powder he’d been given while on board the
Santa Elena,
and he started using it diligently. Many in the group, however, had left behind their medical and musette bags in the chaos of the attack on Berat and would have to do without. Watson was embarrassed by the lice that ran “foot races” across her middle anytime she sat by a fire to warm up, and though she constantly wanted to scratch, she didn’t want to offend her hosts. The loss of the bags also meant they now had to function with even fewer supplies, including iodine ampoules to sterilize water, cigarettes, and the books whose pages they’d also used for toilet paper.
After they had crossed two mountain ridges that day, Stefa told them that they would reach the coast in two to three days, which was incentive enough for them to keep going. Stefa also told the party that the walking would continue to be difficult because they still had to cross six more mountain ridges, but the route was necessary to avoid territory controlled by the rival BK.
Owen had announced that morning that when they finally got to a place where he could see the Adriatic, he was going to lie down and roll all the way to the water. They were all weary from the constant walking as well as the perpetual search for food and water, and now they were getting into higher mountains and colder temperatures. Since they’d crashed, most of them had been unable to bathe, aside from splashing some water on their faces and arms from mountain streams or an occasional basin, and they were all filthy and now battling fleas, lice, and the GIs.
The men had grown patchy beards, and many of the group members’ shoes were starting to show wear and tear, particularly the nurses’, which were made of lighter leather than the men’s. The galoshes that some of the nurses had on over their shoes had helped protect them, but they wouldn’t last much longer. Hayes was fortunate enough to have on a brand-new pair of shoes, and Shumway wore a pair of fleece-lined winter flying boots over his regular pair, which protected them. If the Americans didn’t find their way out of Albania soon, however, some in their party would be walking over the rugged terrain with shoes full of holes.
Stefa, Qani, and other partisans continued to lead them up steep trails that left their muscles aching and their spirits diminished, but despite the difficult trek, the nurses kept up with the men. To the group’s great concern, they also seemed to be heading eastward, rather than west toward the coast and their hopes of escape, but Stefa assured them they were on the right path.
When they arrived at the village of Vërzhezhë that night, the exhausted men and women were separated into groups of five or six. A nurse in one group was so happy to have clean bedding after a small meal of bread and raki that she decided to slip under the linens and take off her filthy uniform despite being in mixed company. The rest soon followed, leaving behind another formality of their former lives that no longer seemed to matter.
They continued the difficult walk the next day, as they tried to push away thoughts of their hunger as much as they could. A few in the party were so hungry, they ate some red berries from bushes along the trail without worrying they might be poisonous and stopped only when Stefa told them the berries would add to their troubles with the GIs. They made their way around the side of a mountain to avoid nearby BK territory, and in the afternoon they stopped at a village to eat.
Hayes and Abbott were assigned with a few others to a home where they were served cornbread covered with the same sweet liquid they’d had in another village and liked so much. It made the dry bread much tastier, and the medics wanted to add more. Their hosts didn’t speak any English, so Abbott grabbed off a nail on the wall the tin cup that the woman had used to pour the liquid over the cornbread, and he pretended to do so. The woman then understood what he was asking for, refilled the cup, and gave them more as the medics thanked her repeatedly in Albanian. When the group gathered together once again, Stefa told them he was ashamed because the medics had asked for more food—something that was never done in Albania. The men took what Stefa said seriously and didn’t do it again.
As the party started on the trail again, the weather turned to rain and they had to cross a crude bridge, roughly thirty feet long and made out of tree trunks that connected one cliff to another. The bridge lacked any railing and traversed a rushing river that quickly descended into a steep waterfall. Their worn shoes, particularly the nurses’, made the journey even more dangerous. Had any of them lost their footing on the slick, wet wood, they would have met with certain disaster.
The afternoon was occasionally interrupted by the sound of gunfire, though no one knew where it was coming from. They also heard various voices repeating what others yelled across the mountains. Before they knew it, one of the partisans in their group was yelling, too. Stefa told the men and women that the message said the Americans had invaded Albania. Excited by the prospect, the party pressed him for more information in hopes that if the Americans had invaded, the group could find a way out. Stefa knew nothing more, but he offered to send a partisan to see what he could learn.
The men and women were parceled out to various homes in small groups that night in a village called Leshnjë, and Hayes, Owen, and Wolf found themselves in a small house with no windows and a door made out of rough planks. They were taken to a room with a dirt floor, a fire pit with a small flame, a few rugs, and a hole in the roof that allowed the smoke to escape. Their host brought out a bottle of raki, and they all took a sip to be polite. As the hours passed, their host brought another man into the room, and the two men continued to make toasts and drink more raki. They served the Americans onions and bread, and when the men were busy making more toasts, the three medics slipped extra food into their pockets.
On their fourteenth day in Albania, the Americans awoke to a light dusting of snow and renewed concerns that the winding path they were on seemed to be taking them away from the coast. As they trudged onward, the snow melted and the trail became muddy. By midafternoon they walked up another mountainside and into the next village as it started to rain.
It was the third week of November, and the weather was growing as bitter as they felt. A heavy rain continued for the next three days, and the villagers of Turbëhovë agreed to let them stay until the weather improved. To pass the long hours in the various homes they were scattered among, the men and women played cards, swapped stories, thought of their families, and wished they were someplace else. Cruise told some of the other medics about showing one villager a photo of his father that he kept in his wallet. When the man asked his father’s age, Cruise told him he was in his sixties, but the man refused to believe him, because no one he knew lived that long. Owen, meanwhile, kept busy by repeatedly trying to trade a tarp he had from the plane’s survival kit for his host’s coat, a short, gray jacket made out of wool, but the host refused.
Despite being bored and miserable, the Americans thanked their hosts in Albanian as often as they could. They knew their presence was taking a severe toll on the village’s food supply and putting their lives in danger from the Germans.
While the party camped in the village, highly trained German soldiers from the 100th Jäger Division, whose name means “hunter” in German, found what was left of the American plane. Because the pilots had burned the C-53D and nearby villagers had salvaged anything they could from it, the only item the soldiers were able to retrieve was a damaged radio.
A
fter three nights in Turbëhovë, the heavy rain turned into a mist, and the party headed out. They covered several mountain ridges that gray day but didn’t see another village until they came across one as the sun peeked through the clouds in the late afternoon. The village council of Krushovë granted them permission to stay, and they were divided up into parties of three or four to spend another night wondering if they’d ever get back to Allied lines.
When the Americans awoke the next morning, it was Thanksgiving, and though they were miserable and exhausted, they were grateful to still be alive. Thoughts of their families and what they’d possibly been told by the AAF had started to run through their minds as they sometimes walked more than ten miles a day, and the days had turned into weeks. For Hayes and some of the others, the idea of their parents suffering as they wondered what had happened to them was one of the most difficult challenges they faced.
That morning, rather than meeting somewhere outside as they had at other villages, guides brought them all to a stone building. As they filed into a large room, a bearded man wearing a long, black robe and black hat sat in a large wooden chair with a high back and arms that resembled a throne. Through Stefa, he explained that he was a Muslim imam who had been to the holy city of Mecca and required their respect. The pilgrimage to Mecca, or hajj, is one of the five pillars of Islam and is required of all adult Muslims at least once in their lifetime if they are physically and financially able. The meeting with the imam was short, and the Americans were unclear as to the purpose of it, but they had grown to accept that there was much about this country they didn’t understand.
They were soon back on the trail, which led them down the mountainside. When they reached the bottom about four hours later, the sound of someone running behind them caught their attention. It was a man from the village. As he spoke to Stefa for several minutes in Albanian, the Americans knew from his tone of voice that something was wrong. Stefa turned to the group with a stern look on his round face and explained that someone had taken a sacred stone from a shelf in the imam’s room and was to return it immediately. An awkward silence filled the air for several tense moments. Then, to the surprise of the group, Eldridge, a ruddy twenty-four-year-old medic from Kentucky, sheepishly pulled a flat stone out of his pocket. It was about three inches wide with a sharp edge. He replied that he had thought it was just a rock. The man who had come looking for the stone snatched it from Eldridge and spoke harshly to him in Albanian. Stefa told Eldridge the man said he had sinned and placed a curse on him, but Eldridge simply shrugged his shoulders. Had it been a partisan who had taken the stone, violating the partisans’ policy on stealing, he most likely would have been shot.