The Secret Rescue (2 page)
Authors: Cate Lineberry
O
n a chilly, overcast December day in 1943, Gavan “Garry” Duffy, a tough, no-nonsense twenty-four-year-old special operations lieutenant working for Britain, peered through his binoculars from the cover of an Albanian hillside and watched in frustration as waves of German troops and tanks moved through the steep and winding roads of a town on the valley’s other side. The town was perched high above an abandoned airfield where American rescue planes were scheduled to land that morning in a risky and dramatic mission to evacuate a group of stranded American men and women. The party had been lost for fifty-two days and was barely surviving the treacherous winter landscape while evading capture by the Nazis.
As Duffy continued to watch the activity across the valley, three German trucks and one armored car drove from the town and parked near the main road that ran in front of the airfield. Now he was certain it was too risky for the rescue planes. With no way for him to communicate directly with the pilots, Duffy’s plan had been to signal that it was safe to land by laying out yellow-orange parachute panels from a supply drop to make a large X on the field. Now that the Germans had moved in, there was nothing he could do but wait with the others and watch.
His party of exhausted and ill men and women, riddled with lice and worn out from weeks of traversing Albania’s rugged terrain while eluding the enemy, stood near Duffy and his wireless operator as cold wind cut through their filthy, tattered uniforms and blasted their malnourished bodies. They were now so weak from hunger, sickness, and despair that the several miles they had walked from their village hideouts in the rugged mountains that morning to meet the planes had turned into a slow and grueling journey. Some of the men who had volunteered to help Duffy give the prearranged signal to the planes nervously fingered their pieces of parachute. The others continued a silent vigil.
Then, at half past noon, the sudden roar of multiple planes filled the air. Seconds later, three Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters, nicknamed “fork-tailed devils” by the German Luftwaffe, flew so low over the airfield that the weary group huddled on the hill could see the pilots’ faces. A Vickers Wellington, one of Britain’s most famous and durable bombers, its machine guns poised for action, suddenly appeared as well, and it buzzed down the airfield ready to provide cover for two C-47s that followed behind. Not only were the Americans coming to their rescue, so were the British. More twin-engined P-38s came in threes until twenty-one planes filled the gray sky.
The men and women stood transfixed by the huge display of airpower. It was the most glorious sight they had ever seen. None of them had expected so many planes—certainly not Duffy. They were amazed at the effort being made to save them, but they were even more affected by the stark reality that they couldn’t signal the planes to land. With each passing second their hopes of rescue were further shattered, and they were overcome with feelings that had become inescapable: frustration, loneliness, and heartache.
The Nurses and Medics of the 807th
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ore than ninety personnel of the newly formed 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron (MAETS) piled into two railroad cars in Louisville, Kentucky, on a sweltering afternoon in the second week of August 1943. As sweat soaked through their summer uniforms, the group, including twenty-five female nurses, stashed their heavy field packs and settled into their assigned seats. The officers, including the nurses, sat in one car, while the enlisted men were assigned to another. Both groups talked with the new friends they’d made over the last few months in Louisville; but with officers and enlisted men prohibited from fraternizing, many in the squadron were almost strangers as they started their journey to uncertain fates overseas.
As new members of the Army Air Forces’ MAETS, the men and women were part of an innovative program that transported the wounded and sick from hospitals near the frontlines to better-equipped medical facilities for additional care. In the course of the war, the MAETS would move more than one million troops, with only forty-six patients dying in flight. It was so successful that in 1945, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower deemed air evacuation as important as other World War II medical innovations, including sulfa drugs, penicillin, blood plasma, and whole blood, and credited it with saving thousands of lives.
Among those on board was the 807th’s commanding officer, thirty-six-year-old Capt. William P. McKnight. A medical doctor just over six feet tall with a shock of sandy-red hair and a mustache, McKnight was known for quietly but effectively enforcing his authority and was well-respected by the men and women of his squadron. McKnight and the four other doctors in the 807th had been trained as flight surgeons at the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, Texas, before arriving at Bowman Field Air Base in Louisville and joining the new 807th just a few months before. Despite their titles as flight surgeons, their primary duty when they arrived overseas would be to serve as liaisons between airfields and forward hospitals and to screen patients brought for transport to make sure it was medically safe for them to travel.
First Lt. Grace Stakeman, a thirty-year-old blonde from Terre Haute, Indiana, nicknamed “Teach” by the young women who reported to her, was also finding her seat on the stifling train. As the 807th’s head nurse, Stakeman was in charge of the squadron’s twenty-four other flight nurses, all second lieutenants who were trained as nurses before joining the military. Like Stakeman, the nurses were allotted relative rank, which, since 1920, had given nurses the status of officers and allowed them to wear insignia but at half the pay of their male counterparts, though as flight nurses they earned an extra sixty dollars per month. Military nurses would be awarded full but temporary rank in 1944 and permanent rank in 1947. Though Stakeman’s delicate features gave her a somewhat fragile appearance, she, like the other nurses drawn to volunteer for the Army, was far from frail. After recovering from a car accident in her early twenties that broke six of her vertebrae and required her to wear a full-body cast, she had joined the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) more determined than ever to help others.
The squadron also included twenty-four enlisted men who had just been trained as medics and been promoted to the rank of technician third grade, or T/3. The medics came from a variety of backgrounds and places, with some just out of high school and others with a host of jobs under their belts. While some had enlisted, others had been drafted. The rest of the 807th was made up of a medical administrative corps officer in charge of supplies and dozens of enlisted men who would serve as the squadron’s cooks, clerks, and drivers and held ranks between private and master sergeant.
Twenty-one-year-old Harold Hayes, a reserved but inquisitive medic with wire-rimmed glasses, dark hair, and a deep voice that rivaled any radio announcer’s, sat in the enlisted men’s car and was as anxious as the rest of the squadron to learn of their destination overseas. They were now headed to their port of embarkation, where they would undergo last-minute preparations before shipping out.
Hayes had volunteered for the 807th after working under McKnight at a dispensary at Bowman Field Air Base and was one of the first four medics to join the squadron. He and the three other young men sitting in the car that morning had become fast friends. Twenty-year-old Robert “Bob” Owen from Walden, New York, was a tall, lean, and handsome young man with hazel eyes who still looked like the star high school football player he’d been only a few years before and whose favorite topic of conversation was “Red,” the beautiful woman he’d recently met at a USO club in Louisville and would eventually marry. John Wolf from Glidden, Wisconsin, twenty-one years old, was a quiet outdoorsman and avid hunter who had married at seventeen. The oldest at twenty-three and the shortest at just five foot six was Lawrence “Larry” Abbott from Newaygo, Michigan, whose childhood nickname was “Windy” because he liked to talk so much. The four had been nearly inseparable at Bowman and spent their free time swimming, watching movies, drinking beer at Louisville bars, and attending USO dances. These new friends referred to one another fondly as Brother Owen, Brother Wolf, and Brother Hayes, while Owen dubbed Abbott “Little Orville,” a reference to his middle name and short stature.
Agnes Jensen, a twenty-eight-year-old brunette with blue eyes and high cheekbones, from Stanwood, Michigan, took her place in the car reserved for the 807th’s officers. Nicknamed “Jens,” she and Helen Porter, another fresh-faced nurse who was two months shy of turning thirty, from Hanksville, Utah, had been last-minute additions to the 807th after being reassigned from another squadron just ten days earlier. The two considered it a lucky break that they would get to travel overseas earlier than expected.
Also among the nurses was twenty-seven-year-old Eugenie “Jean” Rutkowski, a former airline stewardess raised in Detroit, who had joined the military in May after her fiancé went missing while ferrying a plane to England. Nearby was newly married twenty-three-year-old Lois Watson, a blonde with hazel eyes from Chicago, Illinois. Watson had been a senior in nursing school with plans to become a stewardess when hundreds of Japanese planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, trying to destroy the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet. She and the rest of the country had reeled from the shock and horror of the assault, which left thousands dead, including one of the residents she used to go with on double dates. When she and her father had stopped in an enlistment center in downtown Chicago only to inquire about her joining the Army, she signed up.
By the following December, Watson had found herself at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin and away from home for the first time. Within days of arriving, she met Nolan McKenzie, the young man she would marry just a few months later. Both were interested in flying, and he left in April for training to become a B-24 pilot, while she joined the MAETS in May.
All of the 807th’s nurses and medics had just completed a six-week training course in air evacuation at Bowman Field Air Base and were ready to put their skills into practice. The air evacuation program—the first of its kind anywhere in the world—was only months old. The first two MAETS squadrons, the 801st and 802nd, had been activated in early December 1942 and were in demand before they could even finish the training the Army Air Forces (AAF) had rushed to put together. The 802nd had begun its journey to North Africa on Christmas Day, while the 801st left for New Caledonia in the South Pacific in January.
By the time the 807th started its training, the nurses’ program included everything from aeromedical physiology and enemy plane identification to chemical warfare and religious procedures in an emergency. They were taught survival skills for the arctic, the jungle, and the desert to prepare them for wherever the war might take them and learned how to unload patients in the event of a water landing. To give them experience in the air, the nurses were flown over the Ohio River. Watson kept telling herself “I won’t get airsick” as one flight twisted and turned so much that one of the nurses became ill. To learn what happened to the body without oxygen at ten thousand to fifteen thousand feet, they were put into a low-pressure chamber and watched the dizzying effects on one brave volunteer who went in without an oxygen mask. These training procedures were powerful reminders of the challenges they would face in the air as the unpressurized transport planes traveled at a range of heights and in a variety of weather conditions.