The Secret Rescue (20 page)

Lurking Danger

H
ayes and Abbott awoke in a cold, barren room filled with straw on the morning of December 14. Their host brought them some money that Thrasher had given him earlier that morning on behalf of the two men and told them they were to go to the market to buy something to eat. The medics only had to walk a few hundred feet before they found the open-air market and others from their party. No one had eaten the night before, so Thrasher had dispersed some of the money given to him by the British and told all of the men and women to see what they could find. Hayes and Abbott had only been there for a few minutes when someone from their party told them it was time to meet the others. The men quickly scanned the choices, which seemed to be mostly cornmeal and onions, and settled on the largest head of cabbage they could find. They showed it and their money to the merchant, unsure of the value of either, and, to their surprise, the merchant took some of the money and gave the rest back to them.

Those in the market made their way to their meeting point in town, where they found Duffy, Bell, Thrasher, Baggs, and Stefa waiting for them. The only mules with them were the ones loaded down with the wireless gear, so Eldridge, who was still not feeling well despite having rallied a little, would have to walk. It was going to be a difficult day. To get to Sheper, their stop for that night, they had to take steep switchback trails over Mount Nemërçkë, whose highest peak rose more than 8,100 feet above sea level.

They were just about to leave when a group of about six Albanian men and women came out to greet them. One of the women held a jar of honey while another offered a spoonful to each person in the group. They savored the sweet taste, and the honey gave them a needed boost of energy. After weeks of mostly cornbread, onions, and sour cheese, it was a luxury.

After they all had a spoonful, they thanked their patrons and started their climb up the difficult trail, straining already sore muscles. Hayes and Abbott, who’d split the cabbage head in half, tore off leaves until there was nothing left. The steep mountain challenged even Duffy. “It took almost seven hours of what I consider the worst climbing in Albania, which is over the top of Mt. [Nemërçkë].… This was the second mountain of this type the Americans had climbed. The remarks of some of the nurses longing for the plains of their own country were really amusing.” The trail was not only difficult but dangerous. Another SOE officer had a horse slip and fall while on that same trail at a different time. “But by the grace of God I had my feet out of the stirrups and slid off just in time. The horse fell down a clear drop of over 100 feet,” he wrote.

Exhausted after a day of grueling hiking, the weary party arrived at Sheper, a village of about one hundred stone houses and roughly fifteen miles north of the border with Greece. Like every place they had been to, the threat of danger was always present. Just six months later, a bomb splinter at Sheper killed Maj. Philip Leake, head of SOE’s Albania desk at the time, when two German fighter planes bombed and machine-gunned the village. The attack occurred the day Leake was supposed to head for the coast and return to Italy.

The group was soon greeted by forty-five-year-old Maj. Bill Tilman, the stocky and bristly mustached leader of the mission at Sheper, who found “the nurses in good heart and looks, the orderlies—big, stalwart men—tired, bedraggled, and depressed.” The oldest SOE man sent into Albania, Tilman was also a world-famous mountaineer who had been a part of three Mount Everest expeditions and was a decorated veteran of World War I known for being able to walk faster and farther than almost anyone. A fellow officer wrote, “Once his mission had been established he climbed the local mountains every morning before breakfast, to the great discomfiture of his partisan guards who had been given strict orders to accompany him everywhere and not let him out of their sight.”

Tilman and his men had created an organized life at Sheper, which, for a man who craved adventure, was rather “dull and placid” when they weren’t receiving drops of weapons, clothing, and boots for the partisans. “We ate our three good meals a day, ciphered signals, visited neighbouring villages, showed the partisans how to use explosives, and argued more or less amiably with various people who came to see us,” he wrote.

Given Tilman’s expertise in the area and in climbing, Duffy spoke to him about the location of the sea evacuation and his planned route. Expecting another supply drop, Tilman tried to get Duffy to stay in Sheper for the next few days, but Duffy declined because he wanted to get to the coast as soon as possible.

Before the party was split into two for the evening and the medics left for the next village, Tilman announced that they had about a twenty-five-mile hike ahead of them the following day. It would be their longest walk yet.

OSS officer Lloyd Smith waited at Seaview for five days with no word over the wireless on the location of the American party. The conditions at the camp were grim and the days long. Sheep and goats had once lived in the low-ceilinged caves, and the lice they’d left behind were rampant. SOE officer Smiley, who had just been evacuated from Seaview days before, wrote, “We were desperately keen to go, for we were very rapidly running out of food and water. The mule that had carried the wireless set died, and for the week that we were there this was the only meat we ate, eked out one day by some tinned food.… There was no water locally, and we would have run out but for a very fortunate storm one night; after that our only meagre supply was what we could collect from puddles in the rocks with a sponge.” The situation had become worse when a local appeared and tried to convince the men he owned the cave, and if they didn’t pay him a sovereign a day he would turn them over to the Germans.

Unwilling to wait any longer in the bleak caves for word on the Americans, Smith decided to see what he could discover on his own. British Lt. Comm. Alexander “Sandy” Glen, a former Arctic explorer who was working from Seaview for MI6 gathering intelligence and organizing sorties, had told Smith that Tilman was in the village of Kuç and might have some information on the American party. With a .45-caliber handgun, a compass, maps, and a shepherd to guide him through BK territory, Smith set out on his mission through unfamiliar and dangerous terrain.

About noon the following day, he arrived at the village of Dukat, where more than two dozen armed members of the BK argued with him for an hour about why he should not travel through partisan territory, which was necessary to get to Kuç. They told him thirty people had recently been killed in Tërbaç, one of the villages he would pass through, after a skirmish broke out between the villagers and the partisans, and that the Germans were now thought to be occupying it. With Smith’s guide scared and wanting to go back but Smith refusing to alter his plans, the BK offered him three of its men to take with him as long as he guaranteed their safety and escorted them back to BK territory. Smith accepted the arrangement, and he and his new guides headed out later that afternoon.

They had been on a rocky trail for a few hours when they ran into a band of more than two dozen partisans armed with Breda 30s, light machine guns used by the Italians, as well as several types of rifles and British and Italian grenades. Though the large group of men and their weapons must have concerned the BK guides when they first saw them, only one of them stopped and insisted on accompanying Smith and his men the rest of the way to Tërbaç.

They arrived in the early evening, and the partisan led them to a house where Smith was welcomed. As Smith talked to the men with the aid of a female interpreter, the partisans asked him why the Allies weren’t making better progress in northern Italy and told him how well the Russians were doing. It wasn’t long before they also told him they wanted to take the three BK guides as prisoners, quickly introducing Smith to the country’s muddled politics. Smith told them he wasn’t going anywhere without his guides, and if the partisans prevented him from completing his mission he would tell the U.S. government they were the cause. That was enough of a threat for the partisans, who quickly backed off. The female interpreter suggested Smith go talk to the commandant of the Fifth Partisan Brigade, whose headquarters were at Ramicë, village just a few hours to the north.

With ten partisans surrounding him, including the interpreter, Smith and his guides left for the village. On their way the party ran into the commandant, who insisted that Smith ride his horse for the rest of the journey. They finally arrived at Ramicë around midnight, only to have the commandant leave to check on some of his 1,500 men. Smith tried to get more information through the commissar, the partisan’s local representative, but the partisans continued to steer the conversation toward politics.

The commandant still had not returned in the morning, but one of the SOE demolition officers arrived and informed him that Tilman had gone back to his headquarters at Sheper. With few alternatives, Smith decided he would return to Seaview to see if any news had come over the wireless.

Smith and his guides headed back to Tërbaç. When they arrived that afternoon, they learned that the partisans and Germans were fighting in the Llogora Pass, a winding road that cut through the mountains. His planned route was now blocked. With darkness only hours away, it was too late to try to cross the mountains north or south of the pass, so Smith decided he and his men would camp where they were. As he waited in the village that evening, he noticed partisans carrying German boots, army rifles, a machine gun, and three Luger pistols. “I estimated that at least ten Germans must have been killed to secure this quantity of arms, and equipment. Every Partisan I met claimed that he alone had killed from eight to ten Germans.”

When he woke the following morning, he learned from the commissar’s messenger that the commissar had taken Smith’s three guides as prisoners and would not allow Smith to leave with them. The unexpected news didn’t sit well with the American, who immediately marched down to partisan headquarters. After the two men argued, the commissar eventually agreed to let the guides go into Smith’s custody with the provision that they would not be allowed to leave until the commandant gave his approval.

Those plans changed, however, when the Germans unexpectedly showed up. Smith, who had earlier noticed the villagers “getting nervous and jittery,” heard gunfire that afternoon coming from a village just north of them. The commissar rushed to find Smith and tell him the Germans were coming and that he and his three guides were free to go. Having learned nothing new about the American party’s location but much about Albania’s civil war, Smith and his guides headed back the way they had come.

A partisan guided the enlisted men the half hour back to Tilman’s mission at Sheper on the clear morning of December 15 to meet the rest of the party before they started on their grueling twenty-five-mile walk to Gjirokastër. With no place in between to stop, Duffy set a brisk pace as two in the group rode mules.

For roughly the first half of the nine-hour trip, the trail followed a river and the party passed various bands of partisans coming and going. By late afternoon, the Americans were exhausted and stopped on a hillside to rest. The hillside overlooked a large, flat valley that Duffy said had previously been used by the Italians as an airfield. As they rested, someone in the party asked Duffy why they couldn’t be evacuated by air from the field rather than walk all the way to the coast. To the Americans’ frustration, he replied that the plans had already been made and would not be changed.

It was about six in the evening when the party crossed the field and a wooden bridge that took them into partisan-controlled Gjirokastër, a well-preserved Ottoman town, similar to Berat, of about twelve thousand people. Set on a steep hillside with narrow cobblestone streets, it was topped by a large Byzantine castle. The town, just miles from the Greek border, was the birthplace of partisan leader Enver Hoxha, Albania’s future dictator, and previously had been occupied by the Italians. It was now in partisan hands, but that would soon change.

Just seven months later, the Germans, who had gained control of the town, would hang two young partisan women in one of the town’s squares with the cooperation of the locals. Twenty-year-old Persefoni Kokëdhima had been sick and wounded and was hiding in her village to the west of Gjirokastër when she was caught. The Germans had demanded that the villagers shoot her for fighting against the Germans and betraying them, but they refused. She was eventually imprisoned in the castle in Gjirokastër while awaiting sentencing and there met fellow prisoner, twenty-two-year-old Bule Naipi, who had grown up in the town. The two were sentenced to death by a panel of local men and one German for their partisan work. On July 12, Kokëdhima was brought before the gallows in front of Naipi in an attempt to force Naipi to name other partisans and was hanged. Six days later, after Naipi refused to give up any of her fellow partisans, she too was executed.

The Americans walked through the empty streets in the dark until they reached the center of town, where they ran into a group of partisans who talked with Stefa and Duffy. The partisans then led the party to a meeting room, where they waited for several hours while partisan leaders decided where to put them for the night.

A guide led Hayes’s group of six enlisted men, which included Owen and Abbott, through twisting cobblestone streets in the chilly night air until they came to a stone wall with a massive wooden gate. The guide yelled “Haki! Haki!” and a lone voice replied from behind the gate. The two men spoke through the door in Albanian before the man behind the gate asked, “English?” Owen responded, “No, we’re Americans.” As soon as the words came out of Owen’s mouth, they heard the man start sobbing. The man rushed to unlock the gate and push open the door. When it was open, he shouted, “My friends! Come into my house” and the Americans followed him inside.