The Secret Rescue

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For the forgotten heroes

Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. America will never forget their sacrifices.

—P
RESIDENT
H
ARRY
S. T
RUMAN
, A
PRIL
16, 1945

A Note to the Reader

W
hen survivors of an American transport plane that crash-landed in Nazi-occupied Albania in November 1943 returned to the United States after months trapped behind enemy lines, they were forbidden from sharing details of their harrowing ordeal with anyone outside the military. On February 15, 1944, however, British Lieutenant Gavan “Garry” Duffy, who helped save the party, gave a guarded account to the press. Two days later, Allied headquarters finally released Associated Press correspondent Hal Boyle’s story on the grueling journey of the thirteen female nurses, thirteen medics, and four-man flight crew. The story had been delayed by the military for weeks.

Though the piece mistakenly declared that all in the party had been rescued and offered enough details to capture the public’s imagination, it could not reveal the full story in order to protect those left behind, future downed airmen needing assistance, and the heroic people who helped the Americans escape—including Albanian partisans, villagers, and British and American officers working for clandestine organizations. The media and even friends and family of the survivors wanted to know more, but the men and women who had lived through the nightmare refused to provide any additional information, as they had been ordered. One nurse told a reporter, “Too many lives might be taken, too much is at stake to reveal our benefactors or the terrible happenings of those terrible weeks.”

When the war ended, Albania fell under the power of the ruthless dictator Enver Hoxha, and the Americans who had escaped from Albania knew that sharing the full story with the public could still jeopardize the brave men and women who had helped them and who now lived in terror. Over the many decades that followed, the survivors continued to keep the specifics of their journey private, sharing their memories only with each other, mostly when they reunited twice in the 1980s, sent cards in the mail, or visited one another.

Those concerns changed after communism in Albania began to crumble in late 1990. In 1999, former nurse Agnes Jensen Mangerich, at almost eighty-five years old, published her memories of the ordeal. Eleven years later, the son of Lawrence Abbott, one of the deceased medics, self-published his father’s long-lost memoir.

I stumbled across an old newspaper story about this event in 2011 while doing other research on World War II and was intrigued by many aspects of it. I read the two books and began thinking of telling the larger story. Though the memoirs, along with other materials I collected—including declassified American, British, and German documents, photos, letters, stories passed on to family members, and even military footage of the group returning from Albania—helped tell the story, only someone who had experienced it firsthand could answer the many questions I still had. I then learned that Harold Hayes, the only living member of the original thirty on board the plane, was living in a retirement community in Oregon. At eighty-nine, his memory was as sharp as ever, and he was interested in helping me capture the vivid details he remembered and had collected from the others in the years since their fateful journey. Most important, all of the information and leads he provided that could be corroborated proved accurate. (If significant details from sources differ and could not be confirmed, I have noted them in the back of the book.) Hayes shared with me his own unpublished memoir, invited me to spend a week with him and his wife at his home, and invited me back again when I still had more questions.

For the next year and a half, we communicated almost daily by phone and e-mail, and I shared with him my photos and experiences from when I traveled to Albania in early 2012 to see the places relevant to the story, including the crash site and villages that seemed to have changed very little over the years. While there, I presented a letter to Albanian President Bamir Topi from Hayes thanking the Albanian people for risking their lives to save the group and interviewed some village men who had been just boys when they met the Americans.

With the extraordinary help of Hayes and so many others, here is the untold story, seventy years later, of a band of ordinary Americans facing a series of nearly unbelievable but true challenges and the heroes who helped them along the way.

—Cate Lineberry

Those On Board Army Air Forces Aircraft 42-68809 on November 8, 1943