The Forgotten 500 (9 page)

Hours later, Oliver’s B-24 was in the middle of a hell fight over Ploesti, flak rocking the plane and German fighters attacking with a vengeance. Soon after the call of “bombs away,” the number three engine was hit and started losing oil pressure. It wasn’t long before the engine seized up, followed soon by number four. The crew jettisoned anything that could be heaved overboard, but the plane could maintain only eight thousand feet of altitude, barely enough to clear the Dalmatian Alps near the Adriatic Sea. Maybe they could make it back to Italy. Maybe.

The navigator, John Thibadeau, was trying to keep the plane on a course that would avoid any antiaircraft batteries, but it turned out that one German battery near the Yugoslavian town of Bor was not on his maps. A direct hit of antiaircraft fire took out their number two engine and set the plane on fire. Oliver hit the bailout bell and told his crew over the intercom to abandon ship. He was the last to bail out, watching the bomber dive nose first into the ground and explode in a massive fireball as he hung under his parachute.

Oliver was alarmed at how slowly he was descending, figuring there would be plenty of time for a German patrol to spot him and meet him on the ground. As it turned out, he drifted directly down on top of a family of Yugoslavs who were having lunch at a wooden table outside their small farmhouse. Oliver immediately noticed from his high vantage point that there was an entire sheep’s head sitting on the table, staring up at him. The family looked up in time to see an American crashing down on them and were able to jump up and grab Oliver as he came closer. Like the other airmen, Oliver was greeted warmly with hugs and kisses and words he couldn’t understand. Though uninvited, he felt like an honored guest at their picnic, which was confirmed when they offered him the eyeballs right out of the sheep’s head. Oliver politely declined, but he eagerly accepted a glass of wine.

Oliver had been at the table for only ten minutes when two men approached with rifles over their shoulders, leading a horse. They talked briefly to the family and to Oliver, and he thought he heard them mention Draza Mihailovich. One of the men motioned for him to mount the horse, and after more bear hugs and kisses from the family, Oliver was off.

Another pilot blamed Dinah Shore when he found himself in trouble over Yugoslavia. In 1942 the New York native was full of patriotic fervor and envisioning a glorious military career as a pilot, and hearing the wholesome blond beauty sing “He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings” was all it took to push Richard Felman over the edge. Humming the song the whole way, he immediately went out and volunteered for the air force. He soon found himself piloting a B-24 from a base in Lecce, Italy, leading a crew of ten men who had trained together and bonded like family.

In just over two months, the crew of the “Never a Dull Moment” had flown twenty-three missions and counted up 212 hits all over the plane. Yet not one of the crew had suffered even the slightest injury. But then came a mission in July 1944. At three a.m., the duty officer woke Felman and his crew and told them to report for a mission briefing. They found out they were flying that day to bomb Ostro Romano, the most well-defended oil refinery in Ploesti. After the usual briefings about the target, the bomb load, expected resistance and so forth, the crew was given one more bit of advice, with the now-common warning to protect their ears: “If you go down over Yugoslavia, look for the Partisan fighters, the supporters of Tito. They wear caps with a red star. Stay away from the Chetniks, the local peasants who support Mihailovich. They’ll cut your ears off and hand you over to the Germans.”

Felman thought that sounded odd. He didn’t know much about the warring factions in Yugoslavia, but he knew that Mihailovich had been on the cover of
Time
magazine not too much earlier, profiled as a heroic American ally.
Now he’s going to cut off my ears?

The warning was curious but overshadowed by all the other dangers of the mission. At 5:13 a.m., Felman’s B-24 took flight and joined a wave of two hundred and fifty bombers headed to Ploesti. Felman and his crew had seen rough times over Romania before, but on this mission they saw hell open up before them when they were ten minutes away from their target. The antiaircraft fire was intense; Felman watched bombers explode in front of him and drop out of the air. He and his crew were scared and wanted so badly to just turn the plane around and run, but they knew they had to get to their target and drop their bombs. After what seemed an eternity, Felman finally heard the bombardier call, “Bombs away.” The plane jumped up abruptly as the five-thousand-pound payload was released, and Felman took the controls to turn the plane back toward home.

After escaping the target area, the crew was relieved to see that, once again, they had made it through Ploesti without any injuries, and the plane was still flying just fine. Then Felman heard one of the gunners call out, “Hey, look at that P-51 over there. What a beauty.” A P-51 was an American fighter plane, and bomber crews always welcomed the sight of one coming alongside to provide protection. The problem was that this gunner, known to the crew as Sergeant Carl, actually was a quartermaster sergeant the crew met in Italy who had never been trained to fly. The crew unofficially adopted him as a sometimes member because he had grown bored of his ground duties in Italy and wanted some air experience that might hasten his rotation out of the unit. They taught him how to man the fifty-caliber machine guns and were satisfied with his performance. Unfortunately, Sergeant Carl had never been trained to recognize enemy planes from the air, so the P-51 he thought he saw was actually a German Messerschmitt, a German fighter that could pounce on a bomber with little warning. And it wasn’t the only one eyeing them.

Within minutes, the Messerschmitts tore the bomber to bits from nose to tail. Fuel was pumping into the fuselage from broken lines and Felman could tell right away that the flight was doomed. It all happened so fast that there was no time for discussion, no time to warn anyone. Felman issued the command to abandon ship, hit the bailout button, and he was flying out the side hatch before he had time to think about how scared he should be. He waited as long as he could stand it before pulling the rip cord on his chute, not wanting to hang in the air and make himself a good target any longer than necessary. When he landed hard, he first thought he might have broken his leg. It took a moment to realize he had been shot in the leg. Until now, he’d been too focused on other matters to notice. He tried to stand but couldn’t.

Suddenly it seemed that villagers were coming out of every bush and from behind every tree. He looked all around him in shock, and with great trepidation, as at least twenty people came running toward him from all directions—men, women, and children. Before he could decide whether it was worth trying to defend himself, they were on him, hugging and kissing him fervently, smiling from ear to ear. More women and children stood at a distance, watching eagerly and trying to get a look at the American.

Felman realized immediately that these people were Chetniks, the locals he was supposed to avoid. But they weren’t making any moves to cut off his ears. In fact, they were actually lining up so they could each take a turn at hugging and kissing him.

After everyone was satisfied that they had greeted the airman sufficiently, several of the bigger men picked Felman up and carried him on their shoulders for about half a mile to a grouping of three small cottages, the rest of the group following and chattering excitedly. As they arrived, another thirty villagers started streaming in from the countryside, having heard that an American dropped out of the sky. With each new villager, Felman was greeted like a celebrity and accepted more hugs and kisses. He couldn’t understand exactly why they were treating him like royalty, but he wasn’t complaining.

The Chetniks were in a festive mood and brought out fruits, flowers, and a bottle of
rajika
, the plum brandy that could be found in most villages. Someone started playing music and children danced. After offering Felman a toast of
rajika
, a burly Chetnik man quickly poured the rest of his cup over Felman’s leg wound without warning. The American winced as the alcohol seared his open flesh, but the man offered another drink of brandy and Felman soon forgot the pain. When he next looked down at his leg, there was a clean bandage covering the wound.

The party continued for some time, and later Felman was resting in one of the cottages when an older villager approached him cautiously. The old man seemed as if he didn’t want to intrude on Felman, but he pointed outside the cottage, gesturing as if he were asking Felman to go with him. Felman wasn’t sure what he meant, and he was too tired to go outside for more festivities, so he only smiled in return. Then the meek man put his hands together as if praying and nodded toward the door. Felman understood and nodded yes.

The old man gave Felman a stick to use as a crutch and then helped him hobble over to the village’s small church. Felman knelt with the man and prayed, each of them speaking to the same God in a language the other could not understand. The American could not tell what the Chetnik was thanking God for, but he was thanking the Lord for delivering him into the hands of the very people he had been told to avoid.

Later that afternoon, Felman was introduced to Colonel Dragisâ Va sić, a senior officer under Mihailovich who had come to meet the downed American. Felman was immediately struck by Vasić’s appearance. Unlike the burly, rough-looking soldiers and villagers he had met so far, Vasić had a more refined, almost courtly air about him. He was in his mid-seventies, with snow-white hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. Vasić was dressed in a clean, handsome uniform. His wife accompanied him, and Felman was relieved when she introduced herself and Vasić in English. She was the first English-speaking person he had met in Yugoslavia.

The three of them sat under a large tree, with soldiers standing guard nearby and the villagers watching with interest from a polite distance. With his wife acting as interpreter, Vasić explained that he had been a prominent writer before the Nazi invasion but had left his home in the city to join Mihailovich’s forces in the mountains. He was serving as a political counselor to Mihailovich himself.

Vasić was warm and cordial, explaining to Felman that Mihailovich would do everything in his power to protect the downed airmen. Felman expressed his gratitude and related that the villagers had been very kind to him already. The local people felt honored in his presence, Vasić explained, because they considered American airmen to be brave warriors who were risking their lives to help them beat back the German invaders. And for most of them, Felman was the first of these heroic fliers they had ever seen.

The colonel went on to explain how he and others had retreated into the mountains after Yugoslavia fell to the Germans in 1941, following Mihailovich, who had been minister of defense under King Peter the Second. Though the guerilla forces were poorly armed, they were determined to fight the Nazis with whatever they had. Felman was inspired by Vasić’s demeanor, the look of determination in his eyes when he spoke of beating back the German occupiers. As they wound up their discussion, Vasić’s wife explained that there was one more thing the colonel needed to tell Felman.

“Our soldiers found ten parachutes,” she said, translating Vasić’s quietly spoken words. Felman knew he was talking about the crash of his own plane, and that there had been eleven crew members onboard that day—the usual ten plus a photographer on a special assignment. “The Germans reached the plane first and the other man was dead. We do not know his name because the Germans took his identification tile. The Germans took everything valuable in the plane and then started looking for you and your friends.”

Vasić explained that Mihailovich’s orders were to protect the Americans at all costs, which Felman understood to have real meaning when the cost might include retaliation against the local villagers. He then called over a young soldier who had been standing nearby and introduced him as Miodrag Stefanovic.

“He will be your bodyguard,” Vasić’s wife explained. “He is one of the best fighters. He will protect you.”

From that day forward, Stefanovic stayed by Felman’s side day and night, never leaving him unguarded for a moment. The next morning, after a sound sleep on a straw mattress, Felman awoke to a hard pounding rain. When he looked outside the door of the little cottage where he had been put up, he saw Stefanovic huddled with nine other soldiers out under a nearby tree, shivering in the downpour. Felman called his guard over and asked, through hand gestures since Stefanovic understood no English, why the soldiers had not come inside. Stefanovic mimed the answer: They had been afraid of waking their special guest.

Later that morning, the rest of Felman’s crew started arriving in the village, brought in by soldiers a few at a time, and in one case, by two boys who led a couple of horses on which the flight engineer Leonard “Tex” Pritchett and radio operator Israel “Bronx” Mayer rode with flowers in their hair and stuck in their uniforms by the villagers they had met earlier. Another crew member abandoned his hideout in the woods, where he was following his training by laying low and waiting for rescue. Unable to stand the cold and hunger any longer, he just walked down to the nearest village and was shocked to see Felman and the rest of his crew there, being treated like royalty.

Eventually all of the surviving members of Felman’s crew made it to the village. After an initial celebration that included rolling around on the ground, wrestling one another, and laughing wildly with each new arrival, the crew soon came to realize who was missing. It was Tom P. Lovett, a nose gunner from Roxbury, Massachusetts. Once they saw he wasn’t among them, they remembered that he had delayed bailing out of the plane, staying at his position while the others bailed out, yelling that he wanted to stay just a moment longer to kill another Nazi fighter. Apparently he never left his post and went down with the plane.