The Secret Rescue (9 page)
Authors: Cate Lineberry
By late that afternoon, the Americans had grown hungry, and Baggs asked Gina if there was any food for them. Meanwhile some of the medics thought it would be best to offer the crude toilet to the nurses while they made use of the outdoors. When Gina came back to the room several hours later, he carried a tray filled with chunks of flat cornbread made solely from cornmeal and water. A few of the men helped Shumway sit up so he could eat as they all took pieces. Though Hayes was hungry and grateful for the food, he gagged when he first tried the bread, which he thought tasted like a handful of dried field corn rather than the cakelike cornbread his mother had made in Indianola. Some of the nurses and medics also had difficulty eating the bread, which would end up sustaining them in the coming weeks, but they were glad to have something in their bellies.
As they ate, a young boy came in and played a few notes on a kaval, a long, end-blown flute, doing his best to piece together a song. The group politely applauded him when he was finished, recognizing the efforts the boy and the partisans were making to help them. Gina then brought a tray of small chunks of sour white cheese, which was as unpalatable to the Americans as the cornbread, but they ate it with gratitude.
The evening wore on, and the fire that flickered in the fireplace and cast shadows on the walls helped warm them as the temperature dropped. Some of the nurses gave the liners from their field coats to the medics to use as blankets, since their thinner field jackets didn’t provide much warmth. Hayes stretched out as best he could in the cramped quarters and decided to leave his glasses on rather than risk someone stepping on them. Worn out from the day’s events, he was soon asleep. Jens, one of a few who had to sleep sitting up with their backs to the wall, detached the hood of her field coat and used it as a makeshift pillow. She fell asleep, but was eventually awakened by the sound of a man’s voice. Fearing for a few moments that the Germans had found them, she started to panic but quickly realized that one of the medics, Hornsby from the 802nd, was talking in his sleep. She had to resist throwing a shoe at him. She looked at the glowing dial from her Army watch and saw that it was about one thirty in the morning and wondered how many more nights they would spend in Albania. The room had gotten colder, and she reached across the row of bodies lying next to her to get a piece of wood for the fire. She hoped sleep, which usually came so easily to her, would offer some comfort from the many worries running through her mind.
The same day the plane crash-landed, the 807th in Catania received radiograms from Philip Voigt, the 807th flight surgeon stationed at Bari, and Edward Phillips, the 807th flight surgeon manning the station in Grottaglie, asking again for attendants. It didn’t make any sense to those in Catania, who replied by stating that the plane had left that morning. When word later came that the nurses and medics still hadn’t arrived, worry set in. McKnight flew from Catania to Bari the next day to see what he could learn, while reconnaissance planes searched for any signs of the Americans or the missing C-53D.
As the disheveled and exhausted group woke in the village in the morning and found that the rain had cleared, one of the medics stumbled onto the porch and yelled, “Someone has been in my musette bag!” Others quickly poured onto the porch to see what else was missing. Soap, socks, underwear, razors, toothbrushes, and mess gear had all been taken. Only a few items, like toothpaste, shaving cream, and the nurses’ makeup, were left behind. Though some scissors had been taken, most of the medical kits were intact. Whoever had stolen their belongings, it seemed, had taken only the items he recognized. When the Americans informed Gina, he calmly explained that Albanians didn’t steal and quickly ended the conversation. There was nothing more the Americans could do, and their already uneasy faith in the partisans was deeply shaken.
The Americans didn’t know it, but had the partisans caught the perpetrator, they likely would have killed him. Under the partisans’ code, the penalty for stealing or failing to share what had been captured from the enemy was punishable by death. When five boys who had found and sold drugs in one village had been caught, the partisans had sentenced them to be shot. They had been spared only because of their young ages and the desperate pleadings of their families. A man who had stolen cigarette papers from a fellow partisan wasn’t as lucky and had been immediately executed.
Hayes’s bag still contained the louse powder from the Red Cross, a paperback, his raincoat, and a few other items. Most important, he still had the canteen strapped to his belt, the prayer book his minister in Indianola had sent to him in Sicily in his pocket, and a knit cap, which would help keep him warm if needed. Frustrated that someone had taken things the Americans would desperately need if they were stranded there for any period of time, he decided to keep everything he had with him. He wasn’t going to let any of it out of his sight.
After the excitement subsided, a couple of partisans gave the group a pitcher of water and a basin. It took the Americans a moment to understand that the water the men were offering was to be used by all of them to wash their hands and faces. They each took their turn, hoping that the washing was in preparation for another meal, but more food never came. It had only been a day since the crash landing, and they were already dirty, hungry, and tired. More than anything, they were anxious to find their way back to Allied lines.
W
hen the Americans told Gina their plan to get to the coast and pressed him for information about how he could help them, Gina explained that he needed to consult his commandant in the next village before taking the group anywhere else. He had sent a messenger, and they would soon know more. He added that if they were to pursue their idea, they needed to go to the seaport of Vlorë to get a boat, which was up to a two-week walk. Owen, the former high school football star, replied excitedly to Hayes that they’d have some story to tell the guys back in Catania if they were in enemy territory for that long.
While they waited, Thrasher decided that he, Baggs, and Lebo should go back and destroy the plane to keep the Germans from salvaging anything if they found it. It had been impossible to even consider burning it the day before with the rain and the Germans possibly searching for them. Hayes, Owen, and a few other medics decided to join them rather than sit around waiting, and Thrasher didn’t seem to mind. Before they left, Gina sent a man to scout the area ahead of them to make sure there were no signs of German soldiers.
The group headed back to the crash site with a few armed partisans leading the way. As they revisited the rocky trail they’d been on the day before, they remained on guard. The theft of their supplies had done little to calm their concerns about whether they could trust the partisans, and the threat from the Germans was ever present.
The trip that had taken two hours in the rain while they carried Shumway took only an hour that morning. When they reached the edge of the woods, they waited for a signal from the scout that the area was safe before they ventured toward the plane. Given the all clear, the men climbed on board and looked around to see what they could take. Owen grabbed a blanket and a small tarp from a survival kit, while Hayes took four packs of K rations, or emergency meals, along with one of the canvas first-aid kits fastened to the wall of the plane. No one else wanted to take them, but Hayes figured they might just get hungry enough not to care how unappetizing the rations were, especially if the food they’d already been given was any indication of things to come. Abbott grabbed the D rations, emergency rations made into chocolate bars, and a box of sugar cubes that were also part of the emergency supplies. They also found a parachute in the survival kit that they cut into pieces using someone’s pocketknife and divided it and the ropes that connected the harness to the canopy among them. Hayes and some of the others then tied pieces of the yellow cotton around their necks as scarves.
The survival kit also contained an inflatable raft and a Gibson Girl emergency radio transmitter, so named for its hourglass shape, but the men decided to leave both behind. They probably wouldn’t need the raft, which could not hold all of them, and the Germans would probably be the ones to pick up any emergency signal they sent. They also left behind some of the other first-aid kits attached to the walls of the plane. Had they known just how long they would be in Albania, they might have reconsidered. Either that day or the day before, someone had also unscrewed the clock from the instrument panel and taken it with them.
While they checked for other supplies on the plane, one of the partisans who had climbed in with the Americans picked up a Mae West. When Baggs saw him looking at it, he put it on the man and showed him how to inflate it. The partisan pulled the cord and the vest rapidly filled with air. With a look of surprise and fear, he quickly yanked it off. As new as Albania was to the Americans, much about the Americans was new to the partisans helping them.
When they were sure they had everything they wanted, they were ready to burn the plane. It was disappointing to think of destroying it when it could have easily been fixed with the proper equipment, but they had no choice. Lebo climbed under one of the wings and opened the valve of the fuel tank to let several gallons of gasoline run onto the water under the plane. Baggs found a container on board and filled it with some of the draining gasoline, doused the cockpit with it, and poured it in a trail to the door. He struck a match, but before he could throw it, the fumes ignited, and the explosion knocked him from the ledge of the doorway onto his back and into the mud. He was momentarily stunned, but he wasn’t hurt. While Baggs recovered, Thrasher lit matches and threw them onto puddles of gasoline under the plane, but to his growing irritation nothing happened. He then took a stick, wrapped a piece of cloth around it, soaked it in gasoline, and threw it under the airplane wing. A small flame flickered for a moment but quickly died. Either in frustration or out of curiosity, one of the partisans took an ax and hit the ailerons on the trailing edge of the wing, and the men watched with anticipation to see if it would start a spark, but, again, nothing happened. Having run out of ideas and patience, the men decided to go back to the village to see if there was any word from the man Gina called his commandant.
Shortly after the men returned, Gina’s messenger arrived and said the commandant would be there in the morning. Until then the Americans would have to wait. The partisans had already brought those in the village with ailments to see the nurses, but there wasn’t much the nurses could do for them. A group of female partisans who carried guns and hand grenades had also come to see the nurses and insisted on singing partisan songs. To the Americans’ growing concern, word of their arrival was spreading.
To pass the time while they waited for the commandant, Jens started writing a brief diary using the white space in an English–Italian dictionary she had brought in her musette bag. Others anxiously smoked, talked, or watched the villagers come and go from the second-story porch and hoped for good news.
Thrasher and a few of the men traveled back to the plane that evening, but Hayes thought it was safer to stay with the other medics and nurses in the village rather than going out at night in unfamiliar territory. Having eaten only a few pieces of cornbread that evening, he was hungry and thinking about food. Though he had the K rations from the plane, he wouldn’t allow himself to use them. As the hours passed by slowly, he busied himself using his share of the shroud lines from the parachute to extend the straps on his musette bag so he could wear it as a backpack and tied the first-aid kit to one of the loops on his belt. He then packed the K rations into his now empty medical bag and tucked the bag under his head to keep anyone from getting into it.
When the men returned that evening around eleven, Thrasher proudly announced to the group that they had finally set the plane ablaze. They had once again opened the valve under the wing and let gasoline flow onto the ground before throwing a lit torch into the liquid. This time it had worked. If the Germans found the C-53D now, they wouldn’t be able to salvage much, if anything.
Gina’s commandant, a man named Kahreman Ylli, rode up to the village midmorning on a shiny black horse as the Americans, tired from another uncomfortable night’s sleep on the hard wooden floor in the small room, watched from the porch. Half a dozen men on foot followed on either side of the commandant, and everything from the black cape he wore to the way the partisans seemed to revere him indicated that he was in charge.
Thrasher and Baggs went outside to greet him. Gina, as the only English-speaking Albanian present, interpreted for the commandant, who immediately wanted to know why the Americans were in Albania. Baggs explained they had crash-landed and asked if the commandant could help them get back to Italy. The commandant pulled Gina off to the side to talk privately. When they came back, Gina tried to explain that the commandant was considering two options, though the pilots had trouble deciphering some of Gina’s English. Baggs’s interpretation was that the partisans could take them to a British pilot who had parachuted out of a plane and was hiding in the hills, or they could take them to Berat, which was a two-day walk. Berat was now under partisan control, and the commandant thought they would find additional help there in getting the Americans to the coast.