The Secret Rescue (8 page)

In Enemy Territory

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few in the group, including Hayes, who were still inside the cabin, picked up Shumway as gently as they could and moved him so the pilots could get out of the cockpit and radio compartment and exit the plane. The nurses feared that Shumway had internal injuries and likely gave him a shot of morphine from their medical kits to help manage the pain. There was little else they could do. When the pilots emerged, one of them carried a Thompson submachine gun. The “tommy gun” was the only weapon among the group.

Concerned that the Germans might have spotted the plane when it flew over the second airfield and would send a patrol to investigate, the pilots and several of the medics decided to do a reconnaissance of the surrounding area. If it looked safe, they would head out and see what they could find.

Hayes and the rest of the scouting party had walked several hundred feet away from the plane when they saw a band of rugged-looking men come out of the woods. The strangers carried rifles on their backs and daggers at their sides and wore fezzes, or flat-crowned hats, emblazoned with red stars on the front. Their dark clothing consisted mostly of coarse woolen shirts and drawstring pants that ballooned at the hips and buttoned at the knees. Some wore thick socks with sandals made of old tire carcasses and jackets that looked like short capes with sleeves.

A stocky man with a handlebar mustache stepped forward and began speaking in an unfamiliar language. His face was so weathered it was difficult for the Americans to tell his age, though they would later learn he was only twenty-two years old. He asked in stilted, broken English if they were British. When Baggs, the copilot, replied they were Americans, he smiled and introduced himself as Hasan Gina, the leader of a group of partisans. He then answered the question they’d all been waiting for: they had landed in Albania.

Though the young Americans knew little about Albania, they would soon learn it was a small but wild land that had changed very little over the last several hundred years. The predominantly Muslim country, about the size of Maryland, was made up of countless poverty-stricken villages, a handful of towns, very few roads, and no railways. Deadly blood feuds and thievery proliferated, few homes had running water or electricity, clothes and shoes were mostly handmade, and pack mules and horses remained the main modes of transportation. Winters were especially brutal, and, for many people, starvation was a constant threat. Even so, the Albanians were proud of their homeland, which they affectionately called “the land of the eagle.”

Just two months earlier, thousands of German troops had occupied the country after Italy surrendered to the Allies, adding to a long list of foreign powers that had ruled Albania for most of its history. During the Ottoman Empire, which lasted for some five hundred years, much of the population had converted to Islam, though the country also included members of the Greek Orthodox Church, mostly in the south, and the Catholic Church, predominantly in the north. The country broke away from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 and declared its independence. The Great Powers of Europe—Austria-Hungary, Britain, Germany, Italy, France, and Russia—formally recognized an independent Albania the following year, but they refused to acknowledge the provisional government and appointed a German prince as its ruler. Prince Wilhem of Wied arrived in March 1914, but after just six months and with the outbreak of World War I, his regime collapsed, and chaos erupted throughout the country as local leaders fought for power.

European powers tried to divide Albania among its neighbors at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, but in March 1920, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson blocked the plan, ensuring the country’s territorial integrity. The United States also recognized an official Albanian representative to Washington; and later that year, Albania was admitted to the newly formed League of Nations, further cementing its independence.

Fighting within the country, however, continued until a clan chief named Ahmet Zogu officially became president in January 1925. He rewrote the constitution, eliminated his opponents, and, by 1928, had crowned himself King Zog. In the meantime, Mussolini had made himself dictator in Italy. When Albania needed economic aid and was refused a loan by the League of Nations, Zog turned to Mussolini, whose help came with substantial political and economic strings. Over the next decade, Italy’s influence in the country grew, and on Good Friday, April 7, 1939, more than twenty thousand Italian troops invaded and occupied the country with almost no resistance. King Zog, his wife, and two-day-old son fled to Greece.

Albania remained under Italy’s control until Italy’s surrender to the Allies in September 1943. Germany, Italy’s former partner, immediately invaded the country with little resistance from the Italian divisions still stationed there or from the Albanian people. To curry favor with the ruling elite, the Germans quickly set up a regency council made up of prominent Albanians from the country’s major religions and offered Albania a level of self-governance much greater than it had under the Italians.

With the arrival of the Germans, tensions between the two main resistance factions, both of which had developed within the country during the Italian occupation, escalated quickly. Communists such as former schoolteacher Enver Hoxha, the country’s future ruthless dictator, and Mehmet Shehu, who had bragged that he had “personally cut the throats of seventy Italian [military police] who had been taken prisoner,” had created the partisan movement known as the Lëvizja Nacional Çlirimtarë, or National Liberation Movement. They were estimated to have a force of up to five thousand troops and could rally up to ten thousand. Those who were anticommunist and antimonarchist, many of whom were part of the ruling class, had created the Balli Kombëtar (BK, or Ballists), or National Front, in response and were thought to be able to muster about three thousand soldiers. The BK fought for a return to a Greater Albania, which would bring together all ethnic Albanians. A newly formed third group, the Legality Party, wanted to reinstate King Zog, but only numbered between one thousand and two thousand forces.

In early November, the differences between the partisans and the BK had erupted into a bloody battle—largely to see who would control Albania after the war. Meanwhile the Germans were launching the first of several antipartisan operations in what would become known as the Winter Offensive. The Americans of the 807th didn’t know it yet, but they were not only trapped behind Nazi lines, they were also caught in the middle of a civil war.

As the Americans tried to recall anything they knew about Albania, Baggs asked Gina and the other partisans if they were friends of Draža Mihailović, the leader of a resistance group battling the Germans in Yugoslavia. Though Mihailović was fighting the Germans, he was also fighting the communist-dominated partisans in Yugoslavia, Gina’s brothers-in-arms. Gina frowned in disapproval at the question and turned away to speak to his men. When he addressed the Americans once again, he responded sternly that the partisans were not friends with Mihailović, and if they thought the Americans were they would shoot them.

The severe reply shocked the Americans, who were still trying to take in the surreal scene before them. Just that morning they had been at headquarters in Catania, and now they were in the hands of Gina and his battle-hardened men who could easily kill them without anyone ever knowing their fate. Though they knew they were hardly the first military personnel to be stranded in enemy territory, the gravity of their situation was becoming apparent.

Gina, who had a habit of adding “my dear” to all of his statements regardless of whom he addressed, further revealed to the men and women that he and his men had been preparing to shoot down their plane with a machine gun they had in the woods until they saw a white star painted on the fuselage. Gina thought the white star might be a symbol used on American planes, as he’d seen in newspapers and magazines, and had ordered his men not to shoot.

The Americans later learned that Gina had learned English at the prestigious Albanian Vocational School, which, for many years, had been run by American Harry T. Fultz and was often referred to as the Fultz School. When the American Junior Red Cross founded it in 1921, Albania had only two secondary schools, neither of which offered technical or vocational courses. The Albanian Vocational School and other schools, however, were later nationalized to diminish foreign influence on the country, but by then Fultz’s school had produced more than one hundred and fifty graduates, including Gina, who were versed in some English.

Though everything Gina had said unnerved them, the Americans recognized that the partisans may have information they could use, and they asked Gina about the last airfield they had flown over. He confirmed it was in German hands and agreed that the Germans might come looking for them, and they should leave the area immediately. He and his men offered to lead them to a village about two hours away where they would take care of them while they decided what to do next. Though the Americans had no idea if they could trust them, they had few options. The pilots and the others surmised that their best chance of finding some shelter, some food, and maybe a way out in the unfamiliar terrain stood with these strangers.

As they prepared to leave, Thrasher yelled to Lebo, the radio operator, to turn off the IFF. Lebo walked to the back of the plane and activated a charge that set off a small explosion and destroyed the classified equipment that sent coded signals.

Thrasher then called to the copilot, who was in the cockpit turning off switches. “Hey, Baggs, hurry it up!” With their nerves already frayed, some of the nurses still in the plane, who, like the rest of the passengers, were unaware of the flight crew’s names, thought Thrasher was referring to them. After a few indignant moments, they realized their mistake and prepared to leave, grabbing their personal gear and exiting by the passenger door.

The rest of the medical personnel grabbed their musette and medical bags from the plane. All but three of the nurses had water-resistant field coats with them, and most of the medics had stashed their raincoats in their musette bags, which they pulled out and put on. Before they could leave, however, they had to figure out a way to transport Shumway, who was unable to put any weight on his hurt leg. Hayes helped other medics unbolt three attached bucket seats in the aircraft to make a stretcher for him. It was clumsy, but it would work. They placed him on it, and several men hoisted it onto their shoulders. One of the medics found a blanket in the plane’s survival gear, which he used to cover Shumway from the cold rain, but they couldn’t do much for his feet, which dangled off the edges.

With Shumway ready to go, the nurses and medics joined the flight crew and the band of partisans. Baggs carried the machine gun in a sling on his shoulder as the thirty apprehensive Americans, now bonded in their struggle for survival, followed their new guides into the wooded hills beyond the lake. With them, they carried desperate hopes that they were in trustworthy hands and that the Germans weren’t searching for them.

They walked through the dark woods as the medics took turns carrying Shumway on the makeshift stretcher. The slippery terrain led them uphill, and their pants and shoes were wet from the rain and covered in dirt. With each step, their unknown futures loomed ahead of them.

After about an hour, the partisans stopped at a small stone hut built into the hillside, which housed a lone ox. To the surprise of the Americans, the partisans hitched the ox to a nearby cart with oversized wooden wheels and slatted sides made of tree saplings and motioned for the medics carrying Shumway to put him in the cart. It was an unnecessary but kind gesture, and it offered some reassurance to the Americans that they could trust these men.

Just as the weather was clearing, they arrived at a simple, two-story house with a roof covered in overlapping stone. This single building with about two dozen residents made up the Muslim village, thought to be Gjolen, which Gina had mentioned earlier. It was certainly much smaller than the Americans had pictured when he’d spoken of a village, but they welcomed the chance to rest and get out of the rain.

Male partisans already at the house escorted the Americans to the second floor using an outside staircase, while some of the medics carried Shumway up the steps. The Muslim women of this particular village, who kept their distance from the Americans, wore long black dresses, headscarves, and face veils, though the party would learn that not all Muslim women in Albania followed the custom.

When the partisans told the Americans to leave their musette and medical bags on the porch at the top of the steps, the weary Americans did so without much thought. They walked past a primitive bathroom that consisted of a hole in the wooden floor before entering a barren room furnished only with a fireplace and a dirty, handmade woolen rug that looked as if it had once been white. It was difficult to breathe in the room, which was still smoky from previous fires and barely big enough to hold them all. They squeezed in the best they could, discarded their wet jackets, and collapsed onto the cold wooden floor. They sat wherever they could find room as a partisan brought in a simple lamp made from a flat dish filled with oil and a wick and placed it on the mantel.

It was the first time the Americans had been alone since the crash landing, and there was much to discuss. A few of the nurses tended to Shumway and examined Watson’s cuts, while conversations about what had happened and what to do were intermingled with people learning each other’s names. They knew there were no American troops in Albania, and it would likely be some time before anyone in their squadron realized they were missing. Most of the communication between the evacuation stations was hand delivered by medics or nurses traveling between them. They also knew that though they had landed in a place that felt as foreign to them as almost any place could, they were not that far from Italy, which was just across the Adriatic Sea. The partisans seemed to be doing their best to help them, and going it alone in such a rugged country didn’t seem safe or even possible. After a long discussion, the group figured its best chance of escape was to get to the coast with the aid of the partisans and find a boat that could take them back to Italy.