The end of the line for an unlikely savior

Not many people are aware of the Halyard Mission, a World War II operation to rescue hundreds of US airmen who had been shot down over Yugoslavia.  The man who planned it – but who was forbidden to lead it himself – died last month.

George Vujnovich, the intelligence agent who organized a World War II mission to rescue more than 500 U.S. bomber crew members shot down over Nazi-occupied Serbia, has died at his home in New York. He was 96.

. . .

The Serbian-American and Pittsburgh native was an officer of the OSS, the precursor of today’s CIA, when about 500 pilots and other airmen were downed over Serbia in the summer of 1944 while on bombing runs targeting Hitler’s oil fields in Romania, according to U.S. government field station files.

The airmen were hidden in villages by Serbian guerrilla fighter Draza Mihailovich, leader of the Chetniks, whom Yugoslav communist officials considered to be Germany’s collaborators.

“This mission would not have succeeded without the great courage of Draza Mihailovich and his brave men,” Vujnovich said at a 2010 ceremony in which he was formally awarded the U.S. Bronze Star Medal.

. . .

“Vujnovich is the one who sold the mission to U.S. officials. He pushed hard,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steven Oluic, a former West Point professor who prepared the award submission for the Department of the Army.

. . .

The story is told in a 2007 book titled “The Forgotten 500“, by Gregory Freeman.

There’s more at the link.

Historynet.com has a very interesting article about the Halyard Mission.  Here’s an extract describing how the plan was developed and approved.

Mihailovich’s attempts to alert American authorities to the situation initially failed to produce action. But when word of the airmen’s plight reached Mirjana Vujnovich, a Serb employee of the Yugoslav embassy in Washington, D.C., she immediately wrote to her husband, an operations officer at the OSS field station in Bari, Italy. George Vujnovich, the American son of Serb parents, knew what it was like to be trapped behind enemy lines: he had been a medical student in Belgrade when Yugoslavia fell to the Axis powers in 1941, and he and his wife spent months sneaking through minefields and begging for visas before they escaped from German-occupied territory. Vujnovich knew he had to get the airmen out.

Enlisting the help of Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Fifteenth Air Force, and like-minded OSS leaders in Bari, Vujnovich began to formulate a plan. The men agreed that transporting what they believed to be about one hundred airmen, many injured or sick, out from under the Germans’ noses could only be accomplished by making contact with Mihailovich and airlifting the men right out of Pranjani. Since no airstrip existed there, they would have to create their own, under constant risk of Nazi detection.

But shepherding Vujnovich’s plan through to approval would be no easy task, and not just because of the convoluted logistics. Relations within the Anglo-American intelligence community had become increasingly characterized by suspicion, a lack of cooperation, and occasional outright antagonism. The British Special Operations Executive controlled the planning and staffing of all Allied covert operations in Yugoslavia , a prerogative they guarded jealously against any OSS attempts to run an independent operation.

Moreover, by 1943 the British had dropped their initial enthusiastic support of Mihailovich … [who] grew increasingly reluctant to call for a general anti-Nazi uprising across Yugoslavia, fearing German reprisals against civilians, and the British government became frustrated by his inaction. A letter from Winston Churchill to Yugoslav prime minister Slobodan Jovanovich warned, “Unless General Mihailovich is prepared to change his policy towards the Italian enemy and towards his Yugoslav compatriots who are resisting the enemy, it may well prove necessary for His Majesty’s Government to revise their present policy of favouring General Mihailovich to the exclusion of the other resistance movements in Yugoslavia.” And after Mihailovich engaged in an ill-advised public rant against the British, that’s exactly what the Allies did, throwing their support behind the Croat leader Josip Broz, also known as Tito.

. . .

Chetnik supporters in the OSS, Vujnovich included, suspected that an anti-Mihailovich smear campaign conducted by communist moles and sympathizers in the SOE had unduly influenced the decision to dump the Chetnik leader. But the decision was final: no more aid or comfort would come to Mihailovich from the Allies.

Not surprisingly, the British bitterly opposed Vujnovich’s rescue plan, by now code named Halyard. Determined resistance from both the SOE and the State Department ultimately forced OSS director William “Wild Bill” Donovan to go straight to the top. In a July 1944 meeting with President Roosevelt, the straight-talking Donovan summed up his case for Halyard by saying, “Screw the British! Let’s get our boys out!” FDR agreed, and the British were ordered to cooperate.

Though Halyard had gotten the green light, a telegram from Roosevelt put an end to Vujnovich’s plans to lead the OSS team himself: “Former naval person objects to George Vujnovich going into Mihailovich’s headquarters. Therefore he will not be sent.” “Former naval person” was Winston Churchill (who had been first lord of the Admiralty before he became prime minister); clearly, word of Vujnovich’s pro-Mihailovich leanings had reached Churchill.

Again, more at the link, and very worthwhile reading it is, too.

The picture below shows a C-47 transport that landed in Italy on December 28th, 1944.  Flying as part of the Halyard Mission, it had just brought from Yugoslavia the 17 US airmen shown in two rows before it.  Then-Captain Vujnovich stands on the right, smiling.

I imagine most of those rescued are no longer with us:  but one hopes they’d prepared a warm welcome in the hereafter for the man who planned their rescue, and was ultimately responsible for bringing them home.  May George Vujnovich’s sins be forgiven him, and may his soul rest in peace.

Peter