The Secret Rescue (13 page)

Hayes, Owen, and Ebers heard the shots, too, and soon realized they were coming from two places: from behind them in the village they were in, as well as a village on the other side of a ravine ahead of them. They were caught in the crossfire and had to get out of the way fast. The main road going through the village was lined on either side with stone retaining walls that had brief openings for steps, and the men ducked into these openings as they looked for more cover. Going back would be too dangerous; the partisans in the village didn’t know them and could easily fire.

Hayes spotted a stone building about five hundred feet behind him and downhill, as well as a boulder about halfway between him and the building. He yelled to Owen and Ebers that he was going to make a run for the boulder and then the house. He had only made it a few feet down the mountainside before gunfire from the other side of the ravine exploded around him. Hayes dove and slid down the rest of the slope, while his medical and musette bags slapped against his body. Puffs of dirt from bullets hitting the ground followed him until he finally reached the boulder. Out of breath, he waved to Owen and Ebers to let them know he was okay.

The other two medics soon followed. Owen went first and took Hayes’s approach of rolling and sliding, while Ebers crouched down and ran as fast as he could. Bullets followed both men until they were safely behind the boulder. After catching their breath, they all made another separate dash under fire to the building, where they barged in the door and found the rest of their small party. Someone said, “Here they are!” while another asked, “Where have you been?”

With only one small window, the building was dim despite it being early afternoon. In addition to the Americans and Qani, Hayes noticed one partisan lying on the floor and covered with a blanket. He’d been brought in earlier by other partisans after being shot and was still but conscious. Rutkowski told Hayes she didn’t think the man would make it through the day. There wasn’t much they could do for him except try to make him as comfortable as possible.

The group was anxious to know what was happening outside, and Qani explained that it wasn’t the Germans in a shoot-out with the partisans; it was the BK in a neighboring village. Qani warned them to avoid the BK at all costs, as he suspected its members would turn them over to the Germans. It was the first time the Americans had heard of the rival group, and they were beginning to realize they were in as much danger from the country’s internal battle as they were from the Germans.

The afternoon wore on and sporadic shots continued to pierce the air as the party remained trapped in the small building. They had hoped they could wait for the battle to end, but it didn’t look as if it was going to stop anytime soon. Qani finally decided he had to do something to get them out while there was still some light. He went to talk to four partisans firing at the other village, who were camped about fifteen feet behind the stone building and down the mountainside. When he returned, he told the Americans that the partisans had agreed to barrage the BK with as much gunfire as they could an hour before sundown to provide enough distraction for Qani to lead the Americans away from the village and farther south. The gunfire exploded as planned, and the group scurried out of the building. With no way to help him, the men and women had to leave behind the dying man they had been unable to help. They hurried past the shooting partisans and made their way down the mountain.

As the afternoon light quickly faded, they noticed that the Italian soldiers they’d seen earlier in the day were following them, likely imagining that Qani and the Americans would lead them to food and shelter. The Americans and Qani weren’t interested in having any company, as they already had a large enough party, and they started climbing the next mountain with hopes of losing the Italians. A steady rain soon turned the trail into a slippery and muddy mess. Shivering from the damp clothes that clung to their bodies, the men and women were forced to hold on to the belt of the person in front of them to stay together as the blackness of the night enveloped everything around them.

The rain finally let up after several hours, and when they stopped for a moment, someone shouted, “Look back there!” They turned and saw the lights of Berat glimmering in the distance. The town appeared much closer than some expected, considering how much had happened to them in the day and a half since the attack that had scattered the group.

They could still hear the Italians behind them, and the party continued to ascend the mountain as fast as they could until they reached a village called Kapitonë and found an empty stone barn. It was close to midnight, and the temperature had plummeted. Exhausted from the day’s events, the men and women fell asleep on piles of hay covering a cement floor. Most of the nurses had thicker field coats, and the pilots’ leather jackets helped ward off the cold, but they were still wet. Hayes’s piece of silk parachute he wore around his neck as a scarf and his knit cap provided some warmth, but he was grateful to Owen, who shared the blanket he’d pulled from the plane as the cold pierced his field jacket.

They’d only been asleep for a few hours before Qani woke them and said they had to go. He was certain the Italian soldiers had wandered off, and he wanted to leave the area right away. Though the men and women wanted nothing more than to sleep, the idea of finding their friends and getting home kept them going as they started a march that would last most of the next day.

At every village they passed through, they continued to prod Qani to ask if anyone had seen or heard of any Americans in the area. The answer was always no. Occasionally their walking was interrupted with the curious sounds of someone yelling from a far-off mountain, which would then be repeated by another voice. Qani explained that this was the Albanian system for relaying news, a mountain telegraph of sorts that spread important information quickly over vast areas of land that would take days to transmit by foot. Since the Germans were as likely as the Albanians to hear anything they yelled, it made it useless to the Americans in finding the rest of their party.

As night neared and they looked for a place to sleep, the first village council Qani asked refused to let them stay, but he soon found another willing to house them for a single evening, the village of Bargullas. The group knew they were fortunate to have Qani with them. He was not only arranging for food and shelter, he was teaching them more Albanian words for necessities like fire and wood that could come in handy if they too were somehow separated.

The party stayed in a one-room house with their hosts, who gave them what the Americans affectionately called “onion strudel.” Aside from the extra piece of cornbread some had stashed in their pockets and eaten later, this dish was their first food in two days. They ate it quickly, marveling at how good the flaky dough and chopped onions tasted, given their hunger. When they went to sleep that night with a fire and quilts to warm them, they could only hope the twenty missing members of their party along with their guide, Stefa, had met with as much good fortune.

The following day Qani and the ten men and women traveled through the mountains looking for water to refill their canteens. The only food they’d had was a handful of walnuts they bought from a villager and shared among them. The constant begging for food and shelter as they went from one village to the next added to their growing sense of helplessness and frustration, and they were desperate for some control. When one villager offered to sell Thrasher a few figs for an exorbitant price, Thrasher refused, despite having enough Albanian money. Thrasher was willing to pay for the figs but he refused to be taken advantage of. It seemed that word had spread that the Americans had money, which also put them at greater risk of being attacked and robbed.

That afternoon, their worries eased a bit when the news they’d been hoping for finally came. An old man in one of the villages told Qani that he’d heard about some Americans in Dobrushë, a village about three hours away. It was the first lead they’d had. They set out immediately, trying to keep their enthusiasm measured in case the information was wrong or the other Americans had already moved on.

With their hopes pushing them forward, they made good time, and within a few hours they had reached the top of a ridge and could see a village of about forty or so houses in the distance. They continued down the mountain, and as they got closer they saw some of their missing party, who spotted them in turn. The other nurses, medics, and Stefa ran toward them. With cheers, hugs, and handshakes, they reunited as if they were all old friends. Those in Qani’s group also marveled at Shumway’s recovery. He was now able to walk on his own, though with a very pronounced limp.

Their celebration, however, was short-lived. They took a head count and realized there were only twenty-seven Americans. As questions and comments flew through the panicked group, they determined that three nurses—Lytle, Maness, and Porter—had not been seen since the night before the attack in Berat. In the chaos of that morning, no one had noticed they weren’t there, though they couldn’t have done much if they had.

Determined to try to help the three women, they explored the idea of one of them going back to Berat to see what could be learned while the others remained in the village. Stefa argued it wasn’t possible. His party had been camped at the village for the past few days, and the village was running out of food. They had to move on. Another worry was that the Germans were sure to have noticed the pictures in the shop window and would recognize anyone who went back. Their fears had been fueled by rumors they’d heard that the Germans were looking for them. When Stefa suggested that he send a partisan to Berat who would later catch up with the group as they made their way to the coast, the Americans agreed it was their best hope.

Though Stefa had gotten them out of Berat, the Americans’ suspicions about his willingness to help them had grown over the past few days. Those who had traveled with him immediately after the attack were frustrated that he seemed more interested in showing the villagers that Americans were in Albania than in helping them find the rest of their party. Stefa told them that he wished he could show all the people of Albania that they had Americans with them so the people would join the partisans’ fight. Despite his constant reassurances that he knew where the others were and that they would be reunited shortly, Qani’s group had been the ones to find them. Those who had been with Qani had their own suspicions about Stefa. An older man in one of the villages had tried to tell Jens something as he shook his finger back and forth. When Jens asked Qani what he was trying to say, he told her the man thought Stefa was a friend of the Germans and would turn them in. Jens found it hard to believe, but it seemed anything was possible in war, and they would have to stay on guard. Stefa was still their best hope of finding a way out, and she was grateful for the kindness he and his family had shown her and Lytle in Berat.

Stefa also suggested that they contact some of the British working with the partisans, who could alert the American military and possibly help evacuate them. It took a few moments for the Americans to fully understand what he was saying. He had never mentioned that British officers were operating in Albania. They had only heard that perhaps a British pilot was hiding in the woods somewhere. Had any of the partisans told them about the British, the Americans would have searched until they found them.

The British had first sent in a handful of highly trained men who worked for Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine organization also called Churchill’s “secret army,” in April 1943 to help the main resistance groups fight the Italians. Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill had approved the formation of SOE shortly after Germany invaded France in 1940 and ordered it to “set Europe ablaze!” SOE’s mission was to carry out sabotage and subversion and aid resistance groups behind enemy lines. In addition to its London headquarters, SOE had set up other offices around the world, including a section in Cairo and, by late 1943, one in Bari. To the growing frustration of the British sent into Albania to work with the resistance groups, however, the partisans and BK often seemed more interested in killing one another than anything else.

In early November, months after the Germans had invaded, Churchill addressed the situation in Albania in the House of Commons, and, for the first time, admitted that British officers were operating in the country. “Thousands of Albanian guerrillas are now fighting in their mountains for the freedom and independence of their country.… The Germans are employing the usual methods by which they seek to subdue all warlike peoples; already they have bombed Albanian villages and killed Albanian women and children, but the Albanian guerrillas continue to harass the enemy and attack his communications.… The British liaison officers who are with these guerillas have paid high tribute to their fighting qualities.”

These British officers, as well as British noncommissioned officers, or noncoms, also working in the country, often paid a high price for their efforts. The day before the Americans crash-landed, several SOE personnel came under attack by German machine guns as part of an assault on the partisans. As the British crossed a riverbed trying to get away, the mission’s wireless operator was shot in the head and torso. A sergeant who had volunteered to parachute into Albania after growing bored as a Royal Air Force machine gunner grabbed him and dragged him to cover, but he was already dead. The group’s commanding officer sent two men away to report what had happened, while he, the sergeant, and a corporal remained in the area. That evening, the Germans ambushed them. Though the commanding officer and sergeant got away, the Germans captured the corporal. They took one of his weapons, but he managed to keep a second pistol hidden in his sock, and he eventually escaped by shooting one of his guards and pushing another over a cliff. When a British officer finally found the corporal weeks later with the partisans, he was ill from malnutrition and exposure and died shortly afterward of pneumonia.