The Secret Rescue (23 page)
Authors: Cate Lineberry
The men walked back to their village and shared the news with the others, but most simply shrugged their shoulders. Few, if any, expected much good news at this point, and they didn’t want to get their hopes too high.
The day passed slowly, with the men taking turns supervising the kitchen and turning away the partisans who came by until the cook finally refused to continue working if the Americans kept watching him. They left him alone, hoping they had staked their claim to the beef; but when dinner was served, they were each given a bowl of broth with small pieces of meat floating in it. The men asked the cook what it was, and he replied, “Something special. Sheep intestine soup.” They were hungry enough that they ate it, but most of them swallowed it without ever tasting it. When they asked the cook what had happened to the beef, he left the room without replying. Though few of the men were in good spirits after the meal, Abbott coaxed them into singing a few Christmas carols in honor of the day before they spent another uncomfortable night crammed together.
While the Americans in Albania were hoping their luck would change, President Roosevelt’s stirring Christmas message was delivered to the armed forces. “Two years ago Americans observed Christmas in the first dark hours of a global war. By sacrifice and courage and stern devotion to duty, you accepted the challenge boldly. You have met and overcome a determined enemy on the land, on the sea and in the air. Fighting with skill and bravery, you have already destroyed his dream of conquest. This Christmas I feel a sense of deep humility before the great courage of the men and women of our armed forces. As your commander-in-chief I send my greetings, with pride in your heroic accomplishments. For you the nation’s prayers will be raised on Christmas day. Through you at last the peace of Christmas will be restored to this land in our certain victory.”
The 807th in Sicily celebrated the holiday that night with a party at one of the villas outside Catania. As the nurses, flight surgeons, and enlisted men gathered to eat turkey and sing Christmas carols, their thoughts were also with their missing colleagues, whom they had been told several weeks earlier were on their way back to Allied lines. While they waited for the party’s return, several of the enlisted men in the squadron had volunteered to become medics to help relieve the strain on the others and had taken classes from the flight surgeons as part of their training. One medic who was offered the chance to apply for a discharge turned it down out of respect for the missing.
W
hile the miserable weather continued over the next several days, the party waited in the two villages for the rain to clear. Tilman took the opportunity to send a local to escort the enlisted men to a cobbler in their village. When the cobbler declared there was nothing he could do for Owen’s crumbling shoes, Shumway, who still limped from the crash landing, took off his flight boots, which covered his regular GI shoes, and gave them to Owen. The cobbler then ripped the cracked portion of the sole of Hayes’s damaged shoe and used wooden pegs no bigger than matches to attach a new piece of leather to it. It was probably the best gift Hayes had ever received.
During those few days, Duffy got word that the AAF would attempt an air evacuation, despite his reservations about the safety and feasibility of the risky mission. The AAF had asked through SOE Cairo for information on the size of the proposed site of the air evacuation, the terrain, and the prevailing winds, so Duffy had sent the pilots to the valley to gather it. He and Bell forwarded what they had learned. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the weather to clear. “By this time, the weather was filthy, the complete valley was enshrouded in thick soup, ground visibility was not more than a hundred yards,” Duffy wrote. He continued to offer daily reports to Cairo but wouldn’t offer a pickup time for the air evacuation until the weather improved. He also made it known to the pilots that they were responsible if something happened to the aircraft, since they had requested the evacuation without his consent.
On December 27, the already hazardous mission faced a new threat when a small group of German soldiers came from a town south of the valley and looted several shops in Gjirokastër. As the Germans left with their plunder in a truck and motorcycle, the partisans attacked them. Some of the Germans managed to escape, and Duffy and the townspeople knew that it was only a matter of time before more German troops came back for retribution. Duffy and Bell tried to contact SOE Cairo that night to let them know what had happened. Though they could hear Cairo, Cairo could not hear them.
Duffy and Bell tried to reach Cairo again the next day but couldn’t get through. The weather had suddenly cleared, and despite their best efforts, they weren’t able to make contact until that evening. Once again they could hear Cairo, which came “blaring in,” but their signal was not received.
While Bell scribbled down messages, Duffy started to decode the first one: “The following arrangements will hold for [pickup] of Yanks. [Pickup] between 1100 GMT and 1300 GMT Wed Dec 28th. If weather prevents will try again some time next two successive days[.] Have party completely ready at SE corner of field. Permit no person within mile of Airfield except your party and one strong partisan guard group to stay with your party. Confirm OK. QRZ at 2130 GMT tonight.”
QRZ was a Q code, which indicated that Cairo would call again at the designated hour. By the time the two men received the transmission and decoded it, however, the time had passed for the possible pickup and for confirming receipt of the message. If planes had come that day, surely they would have heard them. The attempt had likely been delayed when the British didn’t hear from them.
Duffy and Bell tried again later in the evening to reach Cairo but still could not get through. Duffy also tried to get a man in Dhoksat to go to Gjirokastër and bring back a report on the German activity. At two a.m., he was finally able to convince one local to go in exchange for a sovereign. He and Bell tried again to reach headquarters at eight a.m., their designated time, but were once again unsuccessful. Knowing that the planes were coming, Duffy decided he had no choice but to try the evacuation.
The enlisted men, who were growing tired of being in the same cramped room together, were adding wood to the fire that morning when a partisan delivered a note. One of the medics read it and yelled to the group, “The airplanes are coming today! We’re supposed to be in Dhoksat at seven thirty!” before he took off running. Those who still had their musette bags grabbed them, and the men immediately ran down the trail, cutting the fifteen-minute walk in half. When they arrived in Dhoksat, the British, Stefa, and the rest of their party were waiting. Thrasher asked the men what had taken them so long, and they responded by asking him why he hadn’t sent the message earlier. He had. In fact, he had sent a partisan to deliver it the night before.
The group listened with excitement as Duffy explained that if he thought it was safe for the airplanes to land, they were to make a signal on the field. They would create a large X with yellow-orange parachute panels from supply drops that the British in Krushovë had given the party. The panels were about twenty feet long and several feet across at their widest point. Hayes and Owen, who had kept theirs in their musette bags, were among those who volunteered to help.
Duffy instructed the group to meet him later, and he went ahead to the airfield. When he arrived, he surveyed Gjirokastër with his binoculars and to his frustration he “saw the place alive with Germans, tanks, armed cars, trucks and troops. They had occupied the Castle.”
The Americans along with Stefa and Bell arrived at the last hill between the village and the airfield later that morning—their fifty-second day in Albania. They were still about a quarter mile away from where the planes would land, but Duffy had picked this spot to prevent any chance of the Germans seeing them.
The several-mile journey from Dhoksat to the valley had been grueling for the exhausted group. Malnutrition and the GIs continued to weaken them and slow them down. Though the cobbler had repaired some shoes, others were in bad shape. Many in the party still had blisters and sore muscles, and Shumway was still limping from the crash landing. Keeping all of them going that chilly morning was the idea of getting on a plane and getting back to freedom.
When Duffy joined them on the hill, he told them that one of the messages he and Bell had received referenced multiple planes. The two men had decoded it several times to make sure they hadn’t made a mistake. They didn’t know what kind or how many aircraft were coming but if he thought it was safe for the planes to land despite the German forces now in Gjirokastër, the nurses would be the first to board.
Around noon, the messenger he’d sent to scout Gjirokastër in the early morning returned with details that confirmed what Duffy had seen earlier. Duffy then noticed “three trucks and one [armored] car” driving down from the town. He watched as they parked near the main road that ran in front of the airfield. With this new development, any chance the air evacuation once had seemed to have suddenly disappeared. Duffy decided it was too dangerous for the rescue planes to attempt a landing and refused to put out the signal. He and the heartbroken group waited on the hillside to see if the planes came.
About a half hour later, they heard the roar of planes coming from the north. Thirty-one Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters, a British Wellington bomber, and two C-47s had left Italy that morning. Ten P-38s had been assigned to escort the Wellington and would patrol the road near the field when they arrived in Gjirokastër, while another twelve P-38s had been tasked with providing cover for the Wellington and the C-47s when they landed. One of those planes had been forced to turn back when the pilot was unable to raise the flaps as they approached the Albanian coast and crash-landed on its return. Nine additional P-38s would fly to the airfield near Berat to strafe the field and prevent any enemy aircraft from taking off. It was the same airfield the Americans had crossed with Gina weeks earlier.
Those on the hillside in Gjirokastër watched as twenty-one P-38s filled the sky, circling the area in a precise pattern. The Wellington flew fifty feet over the airfield followed by two C-47s. It was the most beautiful sight many of the Americans had ever seen, and they were overwhelmed with emotion as they watched the powerful planes. “If I live to be 100 years old I shall never forget nor be able to express my feelings when I saw that swarm of planes sent out by the 15th Air Force just to rescue us,” Jens said. “We were told ‘planes with escort were coming’ but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t believe there would be more than a transport with 6 P38’s. It was almost sickening to think we couldn’t fill our end of the bargain by signaling them to land after they had gone all out for us.… We could only lie on that hill… and watch [the planes] fly low over the field as if they were just begging for the signal to land.”
The experience was as difficult for Duffy, who felt the weight of his responsibility for the group. He wrote, “One or two of the nurses did break down after seeing this too perfect air display, just imagine the feeling, seeing the transports make three passes at the field, so near and yet so far—it almost seemed you could touch the planes, they were so low. The nurses had unquestionably suffered a very hard time—this was indeed too much. The planes flew around for over 15 min., but I would not bring them in, never in my whole life have I been faced with such a decision.”
None of them had expected so many planes, including Duffy. After several minutes of watching the display of airpower, he suddenly shouted to the men who were to help him give the signal that if he had known so many planes were coming, he would have had them ready on the airfield. At that moment, he changed his mind; with so much firepower to back them up, they would attempt to signal the planes after all. He yelled that there wasn’t enough time to create the signal, but the pilots might notice the bright yellow-orange parachute panels if they started running down the hill. Duffy took off, and the others followed. Hayes was so focused on running as fast as he could that he was no longer watching the planes, but he could hear them.
By the time he and the others reached the edge of the field, however, it was suddenly quiet. The planes were gone. “If they had tried, the Germans could have rounded us up then as easy as picking sweet corn in August,” Abbott wrote.
The men walked back up the hill feeling more dejected than ever and found some in their group sobbing. Though all the Americans were disappointed, some eventually took comfort in the massive effort that had been made to save them. Watson wrote, “There were so few of us yet those fliers risked their lives to attempt to rescue us. After that we just had to get back to our army.”