The Secret Rescue (15 page)

With the rock returned, they moved on to the next village, Faqekuq, where they spent another long night. When they gathered the next morning, Qani was nowhere to be seen. Stefa explained that the partisans in Berat needed him more than they did, and he’d been sent home. It was a disappointment to those who’d been with Qani since the attack on Berat and had taken comfort in his presence and considered him a trustworthy friend.

The group continued once again in an easterly direction rather than heading west toward the coast, but no matter how many times the Americans questioned the route, Stefa assured them they were headed the right way. As they slowly made their way up another imposing mountain, Mount Ostrovicë, the sky grew darker and rain soaked their uniforms. The ground was slippery, and before long the rain turned into a light snow.

Within the hour, as they ascended to higher elevations, the snow grew heavier until they found themselves in the middle of a raging blizzard. Huge gusts of wind blasted every inch of their wet clothes as they stuffed freezing hands into their pockets and kept their heads down to block the cold air. The wind was so strong, it blew Cruise’s hat off his head. Though all of their feet soon felt like blocks of ice and their bodies shivered, they knew they had to keep going. Their uniforms offered little protection from the extreme conditions, but some were better off than others. Shumway, who was still limping from his injury, wore a leather flying jacket, but underneath he had on just a thin summer flying suit; and three of the nurses, Watson, Schwant, and Nelson, were without field coats. The snow was coming down so fast they could barely see the person in front of them, but they had to try to stay together to avoid losing one another in the blinding white storm or stepping too far off the narrow trail and facing disaster. “Some of the girls were sleepy and insisted on lying down in the snow,” Rutkowski later said. “The rest of us slapped their faces and dragged them along. I wiggled my face muscles up and down to keep from freezing.”

The trail was soon covered with a couple feet of fresh snow, and the markers leading the way could no longer be seen. The partisans in the front of the single-file line unexpectedly stopped and, to the surprise of those who could hear them, started singing sorrowful partisan songs. It was too dangerous to keep moving, and the partisans were waiting for the storm to die down so they could once again pick up the trail.

At some point along the way, Dawson, the nurse from Pennsylvania whom the other nurses called “Tooie,” lost her footing and suddenly started to slide down the mountainside. Hornsby, the medic from the 802nd, was closest to her and instinctively grabbed her hand. His grasp stopped her from sliding any farther, and he was able to pull the shaken nurse back onto the trail. There was no question in the mind of anyone who saw it that the young Kentuckian had saved Dawson’s life, but there was little time to celebrate. They knew they had to get off the mountain as quickly as possible.

By early afternoon, after some four hours of trudging uphill through the relentless wind and snow, the men and women reached the summit of the trail and headed down the mountain, their bodies numb with cold. The snow turned into rain, and that, too, stopped within the next hour. It took roughly three more hours, however, of walking in cold, wet clothes before they reached the next village.

When Stefa explained to the village council of Çeremicë who they were and where they had come from, the villagers stared in awe. They couldn’t believe the party had taken the mountain trail at the end of November when others had died trying to cross it in warmer months. As word spread through the village, more people crowded around to see those who had accomplished such a daring, and foolish, feat.

Though Stefa didn’t tell the Americans until later, some of the villagers had argued against the Americans staying. They had watched the Americans come down the mountain and toward the village and had seen a medic walk side by side with one of the nurses. Women and men were prohibited from socializing in many of Albania’s Muslim villages, including this one. Ultimately, however, and to the good fortune of the Americans, the village council decided to let them stay in honor of their having survived such a dangerous journey.

It was during their two-day stay in Çeremicë that the messenger Stefa had sent to look for the British returned with a note from a British officer. The note instructed the party to meet him in the nearby village of Lavdar, where arrangements would be made to escort them to the coast for evacuation. It was the best news the Americans could have hoped for. They still had no information about the three missing nurses, but escaping once again seemed possible—for those who were told of the note. Not everyone knew right away. Because the party was often spread out among several houses, and the officers, which included the pilots and nurses, spent the most time together, they often knew details long before the enlisted men, who had learned to pick up information wherever they could rather than wait for it to be shared.

As soon as the British officer received the note from the partisans, he informed SOE headquarters in Cairo, who then relayed the information to American officials that the party was safe and in contact with the British. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—America’s first national intelligence agency and a counterpart to SOE—was then informed, including those working at the new OSS base station in Bari. On November 27, twenty-three-year-old David Brodie, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in charge of OSS Communications at Bari, received word. Brodie had sent a wireless operator over to Albania just ten days before, and his men were ready to help in whatever way they could.

British Brig. Edmund Davies, one of the senior SOE officers in Albania, had been at his makeshift headquarters in Bizë, east of the capital of Tiranë and farther north than the Americans, on November 28 when his Albanian interpreter informed him that he had heard “an American aircraft containing many doctors and nurses to help the partisans had landed the day before at Berat.” The tough yet well-liked Davies, a balding and stout forty-three-year-old who had spent most of his career with the Royal Ulster Rifles and had twice been awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in the field, had laughed and told him it was “a Balkan rumour as usual—that there was nothing to it.” Though he’d only been in the country since October, Davies had quickly learned that false rumors were rife in Albania. But the next time he and his men heard from SOE headquarters in Cairo, they received “a top priority signal” that informed him a plane of Americans, including thirteen nurses, had crash-landed. He was to “take all steps to rescue the downed Americans and get them to Italy by sea as soon as possible.”

A day later, a copy of a radiogram received from the Air Service Command at Bari was sent to Eisenhower’s chief of staff at Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) in Algiers recommending that Eisenhower and other senior officials be notified that the Americans were believed to be in Albania and attempting to reach the coast. That same day, newspapers across the United States ran a front-page wire story from AFHQ in Algiers that a transport plane carrying thirteen nurses had been missing since November 8. The story was brief and offered only a few details: The last word from the plane was thought to have come while it was over the Adriatic, the nurses were part of an air evacuation unit, and next of kin had been notified.

The families of the lost personnel had received devastating telegrams issued by the War Department over the previous few days. Beginning with the infamous words “Regret to inform,” the terse message sent to each family by Gen. James A. Ulio, the Army’s chief administrative officer, offered little solace or hope regarding the young women and men. It indicated that they had been missing in the North African area for three weeks, and that the families would be promptly notified if “further details or other information are received.”

Nolan McKenzie, Watson’s husband of just a few months, was at a flight training school in Oklahoma when he received a telegram from Watson’s father alerting him to the heartbreaking news. McKenzie immediately wrote a letter to Watson’s parents. “I don’t know what to say. I’m so grief stricken that nothing now seems to matter except the thin thread of hope that always exists when the word is ‘missing.’ ” His mother also wrote to Watson’s parents, whom she had not yet met. “Your grief is mine too. All the tears I shed do no good. I am trying to get hold of myself and be brave.… I am worried and fear for Nolan. When he heard my voice, he went to pieces and could not talk. I fear he might lose control of his plane. Then our grief will be doubled.… Let’s keep praying and hoping yet our darling will be safe. Altho’ I prefer death rather than know she must suffer as a prisoner.”

For weeks, Hayes’s mother had been experiencing nightmares and premonitions that something had happened to her oldest son. Her deepest fears were confirmed when the call from the telegraph office came to the Hayeses’ Cape Cod–style home in Indianola. She and her husband were in such shock they sent their sixteen-year-old son, Karl, who had just received his driver’s license, to pick up a copy of the telegram at the Western Union office in the train station. When he returned to the house, the shaking boy handed the telegram to his parents, who read it over and over, as if in doing so the message might somehow change.

For the parents of Adams, from Niles, Michigan, whose brother was a Japanese POW, and of Schwant from Winner, South Dakota, whose brother was missing, this was their second horrific telegram in a matter of months.

As the weary party of American men and women left Çeremicë, Stefa stopped them and warned them all to be more careful of their behavior in the Muslim villages or risk their chances of finding shelter and food. It was then that Thrasher told Hayes and some of the other enlisted men that they were going to head northeast in hopes of finding a British soldier, though he didn’t mention the note they had received. He went on to say that if they were unsuccessful, they would split into smaller groups. Finding food and shelter for such a large party was proving too difficult to continue.

Stefa led them through bouts of rain and fog, and they spent the night in the village of Lekas. The trail, which had been steep and rugged since they fled Berat, had finally become smoother and more level, which made it easier for those whose shoes, particularly the nurses, now had gaping holes.

They continued heading east, spurred on by the news of the British soldier, but the GIs, blisters, lice, hunger, and general exhaustion suffered by so many of them was slowing them down.

On the last day of November, after twenty-two grueling days in Albania, they found the British soldier. As they approached the mountain village of Lavdar, they could barely believe it when they saw a fair-haired young man with a boyish face and blue eyes in full British uniform. He was engaged in conversation with the locals, and as he came over to greet them, he was surrounded by the men and women who all wanted to shake his hand. After introducing himself, twenty-three-year-old Capt. Victor Smith escorted the party out of the cold and into a one-room building with a blazing fire.

As an SOE officer, Smith had completed specific training before he’d been dropped into Albania by parachute less than a month before. Like other SOE personnel, he had been instructed in numerous spycraft techniques, including “silent killing” as well as operating traditional arms and explosives.

SOE personnel, who came from a variety of backgrounds, attended paramilitary schools, mainly in the Scottish Highlands. In addition to preparing them physically for the field, the schools taught them skills such as map reading, weapons handling, raid tactics, and demolition training. They were then sent to the Royal Air Force base in Ringway, Manchester, in northern England, to learn parachuting and complete at least two jumps. They ended their training at finishing schools on the Beaulieu Estate in New Forest in southern England, which covered everything from how to maintain a cover story to proper communication in the field, and even honed their skills in lock picking, the use of secret inks, and disseminating effective propaganda.

The majority of the British officers in Albania received the same type of training but at SOE schools in the Middle East, including a requisitioned monastery in the British Mandate for Palestine on the slopes of Mount Carmel, and a jump school at a Royal Air Force station at Ramat David near Nazareth. Though the basic coursework remained the same, there were some specialty courses offered, such as skiing and climbing and mule management at a mountain warfare school in Lebanon. One officer found that the mule management class was “just about the most useful course of the lot.” They had to be prepared for almost anything, and they trained accordingly.

Though SOE officers often entered enemy territory in disguise, the men in Albania wore uniforms that could withstand the harsh conditions of the mountain caves from which they operated. Some added local touches, including curly-toed slippers or fezzes, but battle dress was standard. Given that they worked in uniform rather than undercover, the men working in Albania were often referred to as British Liaison Officers (BLOs).

SOE had sent its first mission into Albania in April 1943 with the goal of organizing the Albanian resistance and destroying Albania’s oil fields and chrome mines. By then, Churchill and his advisors believed that encouraging resistance in the Balkans would help divert enemy troops from other fronts and assist the Allies in any future attacks on German forces in Italy and the Balkans. With the go-ahead to move in, a group of four men had parachuted into northern Greece in the dark hours of an April night and eventually made their way on foot over the Albanian border. Had any of them been captured by German troops, they stood a good chance of being executed following Hitler’s Commando Order of October 18, 1942, which demanded that Allied men caught behind enemy lines be killed before being given a trial—a policy that violated international law. It stated that “all men operating against German troops in so-called Commando raids in Europe or in Africa, are to be annihilated to the last man. This is to be carried out whether they be soldiers in uniform, or saboteurs, with or without arms; and whether fighting or seeking to escape.”