The Secret Rescue (16 page)
Authors: Cate Lineberry
By mid-August 1943, SOE had trained some eight hundred Albanian men of the First Partisan Brigade and outfitted them with weapons to help them wage war against the Italians. By October, after the German invasion, twenty-four British special operations men worked in the country and were organized into seven small missions—all of which faced constant danger. Of the first fifty men sent into Albania, sixteen of them were eventually captured or killed. In comparison to the other Balkan countries of Greece and Yugoslavia, however, the number of personnel sent into the country was small. More than one hundred SOE men were stationed in Yugoslavia and nearly two hundred in Greece.
When the Americans arrived in Lavdar and met Smith, they knew nothing of SOE. They only knew that Smith was a captain in the Lancashire Fusiliers, a British infantry regiment. They told him about their long and tortuous route through the mountains and the three nurses who were missing. When they finished, Smith turned to Stefa and asked, “Why did you bring these people all the way here?” Lavdar was so far east that they were now close to Korçë, a town only about twenty miles from the border with Greece and heavily occupied by German troops. It was almost as far as they could possibly be from their intended destination on the western coast and far too close to the enemy for comfort. Stefa’s response was calm and vague. He explained that he needed to avoid the territory controlled by the BK and was looking for villages that could feed and shelter the large party. The Americans stood speechless as Smith reminded Stefa that there were other British near Berat, and if the partisans had contacted them, it was likely that the Americans could have been evacuated within a few days.
The Americans simmered with frustration and confusion at the unnecessary suffering and risk of capture they had experienced since they’d been on the run with Stefa over the past two weeks. Three of the nurses were still missing, and the party wondered if they had been captured or were dead. They weren’t sure what to think. They’d never heard from the messenger Stefa had said he would send to Berat, and now they were hearing that so many of their troubles could have been avoided if the partisans had taken them to the nearby British immediately. Though Stefa had kept them out of German hands and secured food and shelter for them, he had dragged them across the country while putting his own life in danger. Had he done all of that to encourage the people to support the partisans? Was he under orders to do so?
Smith made a list of their names and told the Americans that his team would send a message to the U.S. military alerting them that the group had been located. As the Americans continued to give Smith details of their journey, they explained they’d had little to eat for the past several weeks and showed him the condition of their shoes. He assured them that his mission, or team, at a nearby village called Krushovë would provide them with food and would try to find some replacement shoes. He had already arranged for the party to stay in Lavdar while he went back to his headquarters to make arrangements for them to join him.
After the group followed Smith into the main part of the village to say goodbye, Smith handed several local maps to Baggs, who often took the lead within the party despite not being the senior officer. Baggs looked around for something to put them in and decided that Hayes’s medical kit could serve as a map case. He asked Hayes to give it to him. Hayes had no choice but to hand Baggs the kit, but he was hesitant because he still had the K rations he’d taken from the plane, which he planned only to reveal to the others or use if it seemed like it was a matter of life or death. When he opened the kit and transferred the K rations to his musette bag, he felt the disapproving eyes of the entire group watching him, but no one said a word.
As soon as Hayes, Owen, Abbott, and Wolf, the four medics who’d become so close during their training at Bowman, arrived at the house they’d been assigned to for the night, the other men demanded that Hayes share the K rations. They argued that Smith had assured them the British would give them food so there was no reason to save them. Hayes refused and said they were to be used only if someone was in dire need, but the men told him either he could share them or they would take them. Hayes quickly decided it would be better to share, and they opened two of the rations. They were all so hungry that, for the first time, the K rations tasted fairly good to the malnourished men.
That night, a few of the nurses, including Jens, were assigned a home where they took baths in a shallow, wooden tub the family placed in front of a fire, ate a meal of mutton, and were treated to a bed with a feather mattress. With food in their stomachs and a warm place to sleep, however, all Jens could think of were her three missing friends, nurses Lytle, Maness, and Porter, and what could have happened to them.
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hen Smith returned to Lavdar, the party met him in the center of the village. Several inches of snow had fallen the previous night, and it was still coming down when they left for Smith’s headquarters at Krushovë, where they would stay for the next few days.
They walked for roughly six hours into higher elevations as the snow continued to pile up, and several in their party, including Eldridge, who had taken the rock from the imam, struggled to continue as exhaustion, illness, and sore feet made each step of the strenuous walk that much harder. Many were cold, particularly the three nurses who didn’t have coats and the medics wearing just field jackets. A few in the party rode mules while others tried to keep their minds off the walk with talk of when they would finally escape. Jens even bet Wolf a dollar they’d be home by Christmas. Wolf took that bet, saying he couldn’t lose; he’d either have an extra dollar, or they’d be back behind Allied lines.
As they continued on, they passed three Italian soldiers, who looked even colder and more miserable than they and who were huddled by the remains of a demolished building. It was a desperate and haunting scene of men barely clinging to life. Portions of two walls provided some cover from the wind, but without food or proper shelter, the Americans knew the Italians would most likely not survive for more than a few days.
By the time the party arrived in Krushovë, they were trudging through knee-deep snow. Smith assigned the enlisted men to two homes, and the ten nurses shared a single room, while Thrasher, Baggs, and Stefa were housed together. As they had so many times over the past few weeks, the enlisted men slept on hard floors without blankets. This time, however, the villagers had blankets to offer, but they refused to share them because they had heard the Americans were infested with lice. The hardy insects that raced across their bodies throughout the day and night and made them constantly itch had remained the Americans’ constant companions while they continued the fight against hunger and the GIs.
With so many difficulties weighing on them, the nurses and medics were now battling each other as well. “Some individuals grated on one another’s nerves in close quarters,” Jens wrote. “A few were almost blood enemies from earlier arguments over things that would not have mattered back in Sicily.” One argument in Albania left Adams, the medic from Niles, Michigan, whose brother was a prisoner of war, with a black eye.
While the enlisted men adjusted to their quarters, Smith introduced the nurses to twenty-nine-year-old Alan Palmer, a major in the Royal Berkshire Yeomanry and leader of the small mission at Krushovë. Palmer had parachuted into Albania in October along with Smith and several other men; and, like many SOE officers, Palmer had come from a background of privilege and prestige. His great-grandfather was one of the founders of the world-famous British biscuit company Huntley & Palmers, and he had attended the exclusive Harrow public school followed by Oxford University. Palmer told the delighted nurses that through the mission’s SOE wireless operator and their headquarters in Cairo, they had successfully alerted the American military that the party was now with them.
On December 2, on the group’s twenty-fifth day in Albania, the War Department announced to the media that the group had been found and was safe. The premature announcement, which was meant to reassure the public, offered no other details, but by then an American rescue plan was already well under way. Twenty-four-year-old Lloyd G. Smith was being sent into Albania to find the Americans and get them out. A stocky and rugged captain in the Army Ordnance Corps, Smith was on detached service with America’s OSS, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1943, OSS was still a relatively new organization. It had gotten its start in July 1941 when President Roosevelt created the civilian office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) and placed former World War I hero and renowned New York lawyer William “Wild Bill” Donovan in charge. In June 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt reorganized and expanded COI into OSS, which charged civilian and military personnel with gathering and analyzing strategic information, engaging in psychological warfare, and helping to organize resistance movements and carry out sabotage.
To determine how to train the male and female recruits of OSS, Donovan, who had visited SOE training schools at country estates in Britain, had his senior officers inspect Camp X, on 275 acres of Canadian farmland outside of Toronto. At least a dozen OSS instructors and several dozen recruits would be trained at the secret camp. SOE also assisted OSS by providing training manuals and materials, including the use of Axis weapons to study. Eventually, however, OSS training distinguished itself from SOE training by focusing less on strict military discipline and formalities between officers and enlisted men and more on self-reliance and initiative. Donovan said, “I’d rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself.”
Given that the agencies’ missions were similar, OSS and SOE had to determine how they would work together in the various theaters of war. In June 1942, Donovan met with Sir Charles Hambro, SOE’s executive director, in London where they carved the world into zones that would be controlled by one or the other or shared by both. They agreed that the Middle East section, which controlled Albania and other nearby countries, would be run predominantly by the British. It took more than a year of further discussions, however, before the specifics of the agreement were determined.
By March 1943, OSS had established a Cairo office, but it wasn’t until July 1943 that OSS and SOE finally determined that American officers would be sent into the Balkans. Any OSS missions in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania, however, had to be coordinated by SOE Cairo and would share a cipher with SOE. To help ready men for the field, OSS officers would be given access to British training facilities in the Middle East.
It wasn’t until mid-November, just weeks before Lloyd Smith arrived, that Americans were sent into Albania, and Harry Fultz, the former principal of the Albanian Vocational School, was placed in charge of the new OSS Albania desk at headquarters in Bari. Despite the agreement, suspicions and tensions between OSS and SOE units in Albania remained high in 1943 and information was not always readily shared. When one SOE officer learned an OSS team had arrived on the coast, he replied, “They are not under our jurisdiction and we wish to have nothing to do with them. They can only be a public menace.”
OSS officer Lloyd Smith, who had grown up mostly in State College, Pennsylvania, joined the Army in 1940 after deciding during Christmas vacation of his senior year at Penn State that he no longer wanted to pursue a career as an agronomist. He was sent to Wheeler Field, where he was assigned to the 696th Ordnance Company, Aviation (Pursuit), and took a two-month small-arms program before earning several promotions. On December 7, 1941, he was on temporary duty at Bellows Field on the southeast coast of Oahu providing Ordnance service to AAF squadrons when the Japanese attacked.
With the country at war, Smith went to Officer Candidate School at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where he was commissioned a second lieutenant in April 1942. He was placed in charge of machine-gun instruction at the Ordnance training school, and in July he was made commander of a small-arms company of an Ordnance maintenance battalion and was sent to Egypt.
He’d been stationed in Egypt for almost a year and been promoted to captain when he was recruited by OSS in Cairo in early September 1943. An OSS recruiter promised Smith the excitement he craved, particularly because his brother Clayton was headed overseas to serve as a pilot on a B-26 bomber. Smith later wrote, “Unless I did something more exciting than Ordnance, I would have trouble living with him when we got back home after the war.” Within ten days, he had started a two-month paramilitary course with the British 11th Commando Regiment at Ramat David.