The Secret Rescue (26 page)
Authors: Cate Lineberry
Though the man and the other mule skinners gave them the use of their mules, they would not go any farther because they were approaching BK territory. No amount of arguing would convince them, and the men left. Determined to get the party to the coast as quickly as possible, Smith found other partisan muleteers from the village after a local told the men that Smith had protected his BK guides from the partisans and would do the same for them.
Late that afternoon, with the new mule skinners ready to go, Smith briefly accompanied the party on the trail before he and a guide raced ahead to the next village to make sure that German soldiers hadn’t suddenly returned. The others walked as fast as they could, but their progress was slow, as the trail seemed to get steeper with each step and the night air grew colder. They were soon trudging through snow, and by the time they reached the crest of the mountain trail around eleven o’clock that night, they were wading through knee-deep snow.
The crest was the dividing line between partisan and BK territory, and Stefa stepped to the side of the trail and said it was time for him to turn back. He shook hands with each member of the group as they passed by him. He had been with them since their time in Berat, and despite their suspicions of him and the long journey to the east, he had secured food and shelter for them and kept them out of German hands at great risk to himself. He had helped save their lives, and they were grateful to him for what he had done. Jens felt particularly close to him, since she and Lytle, one of the three missing nurses, had been to his home. Jens gave Stefa the pin she had received when she became a flight nurse and told him to give it to his young son who had admired it when she met him. Stefa then passed along the addresses of his family in the States and asked her to let them know he was safe.
Only a few days later, members of the BK would arrest Stefa and torture him for two days. His sister’s husband finally won his release by speaking to a German officer, who agreed to let Stefa go if he left Berat immediately.
Smith and his guide had been at the village of Dukat for nearly four hours before Duffy and the others arrived with the help of two additional mules Smith had sent back to help those who were in the worst shape. He had already met with the BK’s commissar to arrange for food. Smith kept his word to the partisans as well, and after the men and the mules were fed, they were allowed to return to their territory.
The group gathered in the middle of the village in the early morning hours after they’d been given some food and were overjoyed to see a truck that Smith had found to carry them to a safe house along the Vlorë–Sarandë highway. The truck, which had high side rails but lacked a canopy, would save the party four and a half hours of walking. Smith told them they would take two trips with the nurses going first, but he quickly learned that there was only enough gasoline for one trip, and they all had to pile in as best as they could. They squeezed in by standing shoulder to shoulder. Smith then explained that since the Germans frequently used the road, it was very possible that they would encounter them. If they did, the truck would briefly stop and the party was to quickly jump off and hide far enough from the side of the road not to be seen. The truck would come back for them when it was safe. If something happened to the truck, they were to follow along the path of the road far enough away not to be seen until they came to the next village. Hayes and Wolf volunteered to carry the radio and the generator if they had to leave the truck, since Duffy, Smith, and Bell would be manning their weapons.
It was just after two in the morning when Smith and Duffy hopped into the cab with the driver, and the truck barreled down a rough and winding road leaving the village behind. They were soon on a wider and smoother road and continued on for a few more minutes until they spotted a light ahead of them. The truck stopped, and Smith told them all to get out and hide. As they waited in the brush and crouched behind a few boulders, hearts pounding, a German soldier drove by on a motorcycle. They waited a few minutes before getting back on the truck but soon had to repeat their efforts when another light was spotted. The truck driver stopped about a half mile down the road and pretended to have engine trouble as the others hid, and the vehicle eventually passed by. They crammed themselves into the back of the truck once again, only to have to scurry for cover a few minutes later at the sight of a German truck. This time the truck stopped where the group had gotten out, and a passenger used a large spotlight mounted over the cab to twice pore over the area they were hiding in as they all attempted to stay as still as possible. The seconds passed slowly before the light was extinguished and the truck continued down the road. When the party got back on the truck for the third time, the driver went at breakneck speed for the next half hour until they reached the safe house.
They parked the truck and the men and women walked about a quarter mile through high weeds as Wolf and Hayes carried the radio and generator, which seemed to get heavier with each step. They finally reached a stone farmhouse owned by Xhelil Çela, an English-speaking Albanian who had worked with the American and British officers to establish Seaview. Like many of the group’s benefactors along the way, Çela too had attended the Albanian Vocational School. He frequently brought the men at the base camp additional food from his home, and his house was often used as a stopping point for those being evacuated by the Allies, including hundreds of Italians. The recently arrived Quayle, who was sleeping in a back room when the party arrived, had immediately liked Çela and trusted him, as did many of the Allied officers.
The party’s rest at the safe house was brief, and Smith instructed those who still had musette bags to leave them and the radio behind. They left the farmhouse in the dark and almost immediately faced a steep switchback trail. The hike was grueling, but they couldn’t stop to rest. They had to climb as far up the mountain as possible before sunrise in hopes that the Germans wouldn’t spot them from the road. As they made their way up, Rutkowski asked, “What are all those lights?” Smith calmly replied, “That is [Vlorë].” That’s when many in the party realized they were finally nearing the coast, their long-awaited destination. The higher they went, the more snow they encountered underfoot, until they finally reached the summit at nine thirty the next morning.
T
he shimmering waters of the Adriatic reflecting the morning light meant one thing: they had made it. After sixty-two days of setbacks and near catastrophes, they were overjoyed to reach the summit—and the coast. As soon as Owen saw it, he was so sure that their rescue was imminent that he asked Hayes to give him back the flight boots that he wanted to take home as a souvenir. The two men sat in the snow and traded shoes as Hayes reminded Owen of his promise to roll all the way to the water when they got to the coast. Owen replied, “That was seven weeks ago. Now I’m too tired.” They were all tired. In the past four days they’d only been able to sleep for a total of about eight hours as they pressed toward the coast, but the promise that they would soon be escaping Albania had kept them going.
Smith immediately dispatched a shepherd to Seaview with a message to tell the men to prepare for the party’s arrival before he and the others slowly made their way down the mountainside. Jens’s knees threatened to buckle under her as they descended the trail. Watson’s knees gave in and she tumbled several times.
When they reached the caves, the men at Seaview rushed to greet them, and at least one gave out chocolate and cigarettes to celebrate with the weary but ecstatic party. “I cannot remember any group ever looking happier,” Smith wrote later.
That happiness didn’t last long, however. The British told them that a boat probably wouldn’t be sent right away because the bright moonlight expected that night made boats easy targets for the German patrols. Burdened with the sudden bad news on top of their exhaustion, many of the nurses fell asleep in the cots the British kept in the caves, while the men found places to sleep outside. Hayes settled himself in the sun on a large rock outside the caves until one of the British offered him his own bed made from some boxes covered with a thin mattress and blanket. Hayes fell asleep right away.
American lieutenant David Brodie, who was in charge of communications at OSS headquarters in Bari, was lying in a bed at his station recovering from the infectious hepatitis that had swept across the Mediterranean when an operator at the base yelled, “Lieutenant! They have arrived at the pinpoint!” Brodie had been on alert for days waiting for the message, and his two operators at the base, as well as Orahood, whom Brodie had sent to Seaview, had been pounding away at their keys for some forty-eight hours.
After hearing the operator’s announcement, Brodie jumped out of bed and grabbed a Handie-Talkie, a newly invented portable radio that could fit in his hand rather than in a backpack, which he had planned to use for the operation. He had already sent a courier over to Albania to deliver two handheld radio transceivers to Orahood along with plans to signal the boat. “I… instructed our operator that, on the night we came over, to pull [the receivers] out, and when we were approximately a mile away, I would start counting ‘one-two-three’ in German and he should answer ‘three-two-one’ in German.”
With his radio in hand, Brodie and his driver hopped into a jeep and headed for the armed boat that had been held in port waiting for word from the party. Though the crew was mostly British, Lt. Jack Taylor, an American working for OSS who had first delivered Lloyd Smith to Albania in early December, was in charge of the operation.
While the Americans celebrated their arrival at the coast that afternoon, disaster befell Brig. Davies, who had first learned of the stranded party through his interpreter, and other SOE men working near Bizë. They were under attack and fighting for their lives after several devastating weeks on the run. The men had been camped out at a mountain hideout belonging to one of the local village council members, a large, bearded man who was a Muslim priest. About midday, a partisan had reported that the Germans were in Kostenjë, a village about an hour away down a steep trail. Realizing it would take the Germans some time to reach them, Davies ordered everyone to stay where they were while they finished cooking precious meat that was too valuable to abandon. About an hour later, the local commissar told Davies he had not received any reports of Germans. “It is impossible, my General, we have spies in every village, every track is watched, we are bound to get at least two hours’ warning. I have heard nothing.” Just then, a burst of machine-gun fire came from a ridge about six hundred yards away as two large groups of BK, led by Germans, climbed toward them from the south.
Davies gave the order for everyone—British personnel, partisans, Albanians, and a few Italian soldiers—to climb the ridge to the northeast, which would lead them to a forest that would provide cover. They struggled single file through heavy snow up the ridge, while thirty-two-year-old Lt. Col. Arthur Nicholls, Davies’s chief of staff, leaned on a stick for help. His feet were so badly blistered and infected that he could barely walk. Some of the partisans and mule skinners fired occasionally toward their pursuers to slow them down, but Davies wanted to wait to reach higher ground before making a stand. As they continued to climb, bullets hit the snow on each side of them, but miraculously no one was hit. They were nearing the forest and it seemed they were going to make it when a round of machine-gun fire came from their right front. “I felt as though a horse had kicked me hard in the ribs,” wrote Davies, who had been shot twice in the stomach and once in the heel. “I spun round and fell into a snowdrift in a gully on my right.” A British major was hit in the thigh, an Italian colonel took a bullet in the neck, and a partisan was shot through both thighs. All three fell into the gully with Davies. “We were all struggling to avoid being smothered in the drift, the snow stained scarlet in patches from our blood,” Davies wrote. Another British sergeant collapsed in the snow away from the others.
Davies yelled for Nicholls to take charge, and though Nicholls was shaken by the turn of events and still very weak and in severe pain, he followed Davies’s orders and replied, “Very good, sir, goodbye.” Davies had made it clear to his men earlier that they would only end up wounded or captured if they stayed behind with an injured man in a situation like this one, and they would have to leave him behind. A British captain stopped briefly, as if contemplating what to do, but Davies yelled at him to keep going.
In a few moments, the same sergeant who had risked his life in early November trying to save a wireless operator when he was shot in the head and torso was at Davies’s side. Despite Davies barking at him to leave, he stayed. “Brig, you’re in no position to give me orders,” he said. “I’m your bodyguard and I’m stopping with you. You’ll need me before you have finished.” Realizing the young man wasn’t going anywhere, Davies told him to look for some shelter to get them out of the cold. The sergeant left for a few minutes and came back with news that he’d found a sheep pen down the gully. Two Italians from their party also joined them as the sergeant “started a small avalanche, so that all the wounded tobogganed down the gully.”