OSS Airlines, Serbia: A Rescue Story
Black puffs from flak bursts began blossoming in the air around Lt. Thomas Oliver’s B-24 bomber, high over the town of Bor, Yugoslavia. Suddenly, he felt a violent jolt. The plane had gotten hit…again.
Earlier over the target, the railroad marshalling yards at Campina, Rumania, enemy fire had eviscerated engines, #3 and #4. Now, #2 engine was engulfed in flames, the third one to be destroyed that day.
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. There’d be no making it back to the 756th Bomber Squadron’s base in Italy with only one engine.
Oliver hit the bailout alarm button. “Bail out! Bail out!” he cried over the bomber’s intercom system.
He looked out the window to check #2 one more time. Still burning. Looking behind him, he saw John Thibodeau, the navigator and the last crewman left, motioning for Oliver to come. Oliver waved to him to get out: he didn’t want anyone in his way when he let go of the wheel to sprint for the hatches. Minutes later, the young pilot was tumbling earthward by parachute, watching helplessly as the plane slammed into the ground below, exploding in a massive fireball.
When Oliver himself touched ground, he landed almost on top of a Serb farm family seated at a picnic table eating their lunch. The friendly Serbs offered Oliver the eyeballs from a sheep’s head. Queasily, Oliver declined, but he did accept a glass of wine instead.
Within ten minutes, a couple of men on horseback wearing military jackets and caps and guns slung over their shoulders came by and motioned for Oliver to mount a horse and accompany them. As Oliver rode off with them, he had no idea that his sojourn in this strange country behind enemy lines would last ninety-six days, much less that the Air Force and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) would rescue him and hundreds like him through one of the largest and most daring air evacuation operations of all World War II.
It was an operation that would be code-named Halyard.
Lt. Tom Oliver and his fellow downed airmen were front-line warriors in the so-called “oil campaign” of 1944, an attempt by Anglo-American air forces to destroy Nazi Germany’s vast European network of petroleum resources. A particularly vital target was the huge complex of oil refineries at Ploesti, Rumania, which provided 35% of Germany’s petroleum supplies. In April, 1944, bombers of the U.S. 15th Air Force began blasting Ploesti nonstop to totally halt petroleum production. Success came by August, but success had cost the loss of three hundred fifty bombers, their crews killed, captured or missing.
Throughout the assault on Ploesti, hundreds of missing airmen bailed out over eastern, Nazi-occupied Serbia, an area patrolled by an Allied-friendly guerrilla army called the Chetniks. When the Chetnik commander, former Serb army officer Drazha Mihailovich, became aware of the airmen coming down in his territory, he ordered his men to give the airmen refuge and bring them to Chetnik headquarters in the town of Pranjani on the Ravna Gora plateau near Belgrade for evacuation.
Attempts by Mihailovich to alert American authorities to the situation initially failed to produce action. By a strange twist of fate, though, word of the airmen’s plight reached the ears of a Serb employee of the Yugoslav embassy in Washington, D.C., Mirjana Vujnovich, through contacts in Washington’s Yugoslav community. She immediately wrote her husband, Capt. George Vujnovich, an operations officer for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at its field station in Bari, Italy.
Had he heard too? she asked. George, himself an American son of Serb immigrants and a former refugee who had escaped Yugoslavia with Mirjana his wife, had not, but the news gave birth to a burning determination to find a way to get them out.
Shepherding Vujnovich’s plan through to approval would be tough. The British SOE (Special Operations Executive, the British equivalent to OSS) had gained formal control over the planning and staffing of covert operations in Yugoslavia in agreements struck in mid-1942, a prerogative they jealously guarded against OSS attempts to run operations independently. Additionally, relations within the Anglo-American intelligence community were extremely riven by suspicion, uncooperativeness and occasional outright antagonism.
Also, by late 1943, the British had dropped their initial enthusiastic British support of Drazha Mihailovich in favor of the Croat leader Tito (real name Josip Broz), formerly the general secretary of the Yugoslav communist party and now commander of a rival guerrilla force, the Partisans. Mihailovich ultimately proved reluctant to call for a general uprising across Yugoslavia in the face of horrific Axis reprisals against Yugoslav civilians provoked by his initial guerrilla activities. He felt that confrontation should await the arrival of stronger Allied ground armies who could join him in ejecting Axis forces and restoring a royalist, federal Yugoslavia.
Tito on the other hand favored exactly the kind of direct confrontation with the Germans which Mihailovich opposed as suicidal. While Tito was known to favor a Soviet-style communist future for Yugoslavia, his vigorous opposition to the Axis impressed the Allies, especially in the light of negative reports alleging Chetnik inaction and even collaboration with the Germans.
Numerous careless public comments by Mihailovich also created suspicions among the British that fighting the Germans numbered a distant second in priorities to prosecuting the vicious civil war with his Partisan rivals. All these factors served to decisively sink Mihailovich’s future with the Allies.
Chetnik supporters in the OSS including Vujnovich, on the other hand, firmly believed that an anti-Mihailovich smear campaign conducted by communist-leaning Partisan sympathizers in SOE had unduly influenced the decision to dump Mihailovich. Whatever the truth, the decision was final: no more aid and comfort would come to Mihailovich from the Allies.
Not surprisingly, the British bitterly opposed Vujnovich’s plan. The somewhat less hostile, but still skeptical Americans speculated that Mihailovich’s motives for protecting the airmen from the Germans might be so that he may say that by helping the Allied airmen, he could use the men as exhibits to prove his Allied sympathies.
In the end, this determined opposition forced the OSS to go all the way to the top to get the green light. In a meeting with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in early July, 1944, the famously straight-talking head of OSS, Major General William Donovan reputedly summed up his case for Operation Halyard by telling Roosevelt, “Screw the British! Let’s get our boys out!” FDR agreed.
Planning now began in earnest. As the OSS team, Vujnovich chose as leader Serbian-American Lt. George Musulin, an experienced Allied liaison agent formerly assigned to Mihailovich. Joining Musulin would be Sgt. Mike Rajacich (also a second-generation Serb-American) and radio operator Arthur Jibilian. The OSS and the Air Force decided that transporting what at this point was believed to be 100 airmen (some injured and sick) right out from under the Germans’ noses would demand going into Pranjani to get them with C-47 transport planes at night. No airstrip at all existed at Pranjani, so the airmen themselves would have to make one themselves in broad daylight under constant risk of detection.
When all was ready, the British alerted the Chetniks to a possible agent drop between the dates of July 15 and 20. Numerous snafus in the attempt to come in at the assigned drop zone, though, delayed the Halyard team’s infiltration long past this window.
First insertion attempts had to abort for a number of reasons: the absence of ground signals at the drop zone, wrong coordinates given to the pilot, bad weather, heavy anti-aircraft fire. Still another try aborted when Musulin, now suspecting that the British were attempting to sabotage the mission, found that the drop coordinates given to the pilot lay in Partisan territory.
The last straw came on the sixth try when the mission pilot tried to drop them over an area where a battle was in progress. That did it. As soon as the team got back to Bari, Musulin demanded from Vujnovich an American plane, crew and jumpmaster.
They got it.
Meanwhile, a Royal Air Force radio operator in Italy received a cryptic radio message that put the spur to the rescue effort: “Mudcat driver to CO APO520. 150 Yanks in Yugo, some sick. Shoot us workhorses. Our challenge first letter of bombardier’s name, color of Banana Nose’s scarf. Your authenticator last letter of chief lug’s name color of fist on wall. Must refer to shark squadron, 459th BG for decoding. Signed, TKO, Flat Rat 4 in lug order.”
From the message’s telltale signs, officers from the 756th Bomber Squadron identified the messenger as Thomas Oliver, the now missing pilot of the B-24 named the Fighting Mudcat. The Air Force answered back, requesting longitude and latitude of their position, to be coded by adding the serial number of Oliver’s radio operator, Donald Sullivan, which Oliver did, using captured German maps of Serbia. The 15th Air Force immediately replied back, “Prepare reception for 31 July or first clear night following.”
A seventh and final infiltration attempt came on the night of August 2. This time, receiving correct ground signals at the correct drop zone, Musulin, Rajacich and Jibilian made their jump and quickly made contact with a group of Chetniks, who brought them into Pranjani.
Fashioning an airstrip was the first, most urgent task for the OSS team and the airmen (who, to Musulin’s dismay, now numbered 250 and counting). The workers had no tools but simple farm implements, so clearing and smoothing the space would have to be done by hand. The airmen had already begun hacking out a 700-yard slot on a narrow plateau halfway up the neighboring mountainside, still too short for a C-47 to land with a comfortable margin of error. Dense woods bordered one side, a steep dropoff on the other side. It would be a white-knuckle landing for the pilots indeed.
The 250 airmen, joined by 300 Serb villagers and Chetnik soldiers using oxcarts, got cracking. Cutting down trees, hauling rocks away with bare, bloodied hands, hauling gravel in, and tamping down the earth with their feet, the work crews labored for almost a week, stopping only to rush into the woods for cover when German warplanes approached.
By August 8, the field was finished. Musulin told Jibilian the radio operator to radio Bari that evacuations could start the following night, August 9.
Shielded from possible German interference by the 4,000 men of Mihailovich’s First Ravna Gorski Corps deployed around Pranjani, the first designated evacuees, their fellow airmen, the Halyard team, and dozens of Serb villagers and Chetniks all gathered at the airstrip after dark to await the planes. All were excited and optimistic, but also tense and anxious as well.
Cheers erupted when the crowd first caught the sound of C-47 motors approaching. Mike Rajacich rushed out onto the field to give the identification signals with an Aldis lantern (a lantern built to send focussed pulses of light). He squeezed the trigger three times with the predetermined signal: Red, Red, Red. The lead C-47 responded with the same signal: Red. Red. Red. Rajacich gave the go-ahead signal for landing, Nan, to which the plane replied X-ray.
“We’re on boys! This is it!” Musulin shouted to his men, who again erupted into cheers. On Musulin’s orders, the edges of the field flared to life with hay bales and flares.
Now came the trickiest, most terrifying part of all for the pilots of the 15th Air Force’s 60th Troop Carrier Group: landing in near darkness. The first plane overshot the runway, forcing it to take off again to avoid a crash. The other planes coming behind it touched down successfully, followed again by the first plane on its second try. The only mishap was a crash with a haystack which dented the wingtip of one of the planes.
Within half an hour, emotional farewells between the airmen and their Serb rescuers had been said, and the first evacuees were loaded on the planes ready to go. Seconds before takeoff, the side doors of all four planes suddenly opened up to reveal the homegoing airmen unlacing their boots and holding them up for the villagers to see.
“Here!” they cried. “For you!” One after another, the airmen cast their boots out the open doors to the Serb villagers, a final expression of profound gratitude to their caretakers, many of whom had nothing more than the traditional Serb felt slippers for shoes.
Takeoffs, like the landings, were successful…just barely, though. Nervous about the dangers and difficulties of night landings, Musulin ordered Jibilian to request a daytime pickup from Bari.
Two more flights of C-47s came the next morning, this time with a strong escort of P-51 and P-38 fighters. While the fighters peeled off to shoot up neighboring German garrisons as a diversion, the C-47s were able to land much more safely than the night before.
Halyard’s initial success was soon marred by trouble for George Musulin. Disobeying the ban on Chetnik aid, Musulin approved the evacuation of two seriously wounded Chetniks to receive medical attention. Two Partisan soldiers waiting on the other end in Bari recognized them as Chetniks, and before the end of the day, Musulin’s superiors had ordered him home for aiding the forces of the officially disgraced Mihailovich.
Musulin returned to Bari on August 27 after resisting two weeks of repeated demands for his return. Lt. Nick Lalich, who had arrived in Pranjani on the first flight in early August, now took Musulin’s place as mission commander.
While the evacuation operation was getting rolling, outside events in the rest of Yugoslavia conspired to interrupt it. Marshal Tito, now firmly in control of all of the Yugoslav provinces but Serbia and parts of Bosnia, launched a final drive in September 1944 to crush Mihailovich’s forces and solidify his grasp on power.
Partisan forces, closing in on Chetnik headquarters fought with Chetnik units outside Pranjani for several days. Finally, on September 10, the Chetniks were forced to evacuate the town, the Partisans hot on their heels. From this point forward, Operation Halyard would a traveling road show throughout Serbia and Bosnia.
Evacuations over the next three and a half months were carried out on an improvised basis, using whatever broad, flat spaces were available and close by, mostly farmers’ fields. And still, even as the Chetniks moved into Bosnia, they collected airmen to be brought for evacuation: not only Americans, but some British, French, Italians and Russians aviators as well.
By December, the OSS decided to close down Operation Halyard. They had rescued as many airmen as they could while the stream of incoming aviator refugees lasted. But now, with the Ploesti campaign over, there were no more planes flying over, and no more airmen.
Halyard’s job was finished. They had airlifted out a grand total of 512 downed Allied airmen, without the loss of a single airman or plane, truly an impressive accomplishment. The last evacuation flight, also carrying the Halyard team, left on December 27, 1944 from Boljanic in the Ozren area of Bosnia, but not before delivering 600 pairs of boots for the raggedly-dressed Serbs, which George Vujnovich had cleverly recquisitioned from the British in defiance of the ban on aid to Mihailovich.
In a final and surprising gesture of generosity, Nick Lalich’s OSS superiors radioed Drazha Mihailovich an offer to be evacuated on this last flight out. Though in desperate straits due to the ban on material aid and support, Mihailovich declined, preferring to share the fate of his own people.
The closing act of Operation Halyard was yet to come, though. In March, 1946, news of Mihailovich’s capture and impending trial for war crimes by the new Tito government of Yugoslavia reached former Halyard participants in the United States. Outraged and strongly convinced of Mihailovich’s innocence and loyalty, they immediately mounted a public campaign to clear Mihailovich’s name. A meeting with Secretary of State Dean Acheson secured State Department aid in forwarding an offer to Tito of evidence of Mihailovich’s innocence from the men.
It was rebuffed. Mihailovich was tried and convicted, then shot on June 17, 1946 and buried in an unmarked grave.
