Rescue Behind Enemy Lines
By Kevin Morrow

World War II  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Black flak bursts blossomed in the air around Lt. Thomas Oliver’s B-24 bomber as he flew high above the town of Bor, Yugoslavia. The earlier loss of two engines to enemy fire over the railroad marshalling yards at Campina, Romania, was already making it difficult to control the aircraft when a sudden, violent jolt signaled the loss of a third engine.

Oliver knew that the last hit was the straw that broke the camel’s back—there’d be no making it back to the 756th Bombardment Squadron’s Italian base. With two engines dead and a third on fire, he made the only possible decision—he hit the crew alarm button and yelled, “Bail out! Bail out!” over the intercom.

Seconds later, Oliver turned toward the rear of the B-24 and saw navigator John Thibodeau, the only other crewman left aboard, motioning for him to come. Oliver waved to him to get out; he didn’t want anyone in his way when he let go of the wheel to sprint for the escape hatch. Minutes later, the young pilot was floating earthward by parachute, watching helplessly as his plane slammed into the ground and exploded in a massive fireball.

Oliver himself landed almost on top of a Serb farm family eating lunch at a picnic table. The friendly Serbs offered Oliver the eyeballs from a sheep’s head. Queasy enough already, the young officer opted for a glass of wine instead.

Within ten minutes a couple of men in military jackets, carrying slung weapons, arrived on horseback and motioned for Oliver to mount a horse and accompany them. As he rode off with them, Oliver had no idea that his sojourn in this strange country behind enemy lines would last ninety-six days. Nor could he have imagined that the U.S. Army Air Forces and the Office of Strategic Services would rescue him, and hundreds like him, in one of the largest and most daring air evacuation operations of World War II.

Lieutenant Oliver and his fellow downed airmen were frontline warriors in the oil campaign of 1944, an Allied attempt to destroy Nazi Germany’s vast network of petroleum resources. The most vital target was Ploesti, Romania, where a huge complex of oil refineries supplied 35 percent of Germany’s petroleum. In April 1944, bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force began to blast the heavily guarded plant nonstop in an effort to halt petroleum production altogether. By August, Ploesti was destroyed—but at the cost of 350 bombers lost, their crews killed, captured, or missing.

The assault on Ploesti forced hundreds of airmen to bail out over Nazi-occupied eastern Serbia, an area patrolled by the Allied-friendly Chetnik guerrilla army. When the Chetnik commander, Gen. Draza Mihailovich, realized that Allied airmen were parachuting into his territory, he ordered his troops to aid the aviators by taking them to Chetnik headquarters in Pranjani for evacuation.

Mihailovich’s attempts to alert American authorities to the situation initially failed to produce action. But when word of the airmen’s plight reached Mirjana Vujnovich, a Serb employee of the Yugoslav embassy in Washington, D.C., she immediately wrote to her husband, an operations officer at the OSS field station in Bari, Italy. George Vujnovich, the American son of Serb parents, knew what it was like to be trapped behind enemy lines: he had been a medical student in Belgrade when Yugoslavia fell to the Axis powers in 1941, and he and his wife spent months sneaking through minefields and begging for visas before they escaped from German-occupied territory. Vujnovich knew he had to get the airmen out.

Enlisting the help of Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Fifteenth Air Force, and like-minded OSS leaders in Bari, Vujnovich began to formulate a plan. The men agreed that transporting what they believed to be about one hundred airmen, many injured or sick, out from under the Germans’ noses could only be accomplished by making contact with Mihailovich and airlifting the men right out of Pranjani. Since no airstrip existed there, they would have to create their own, under constant risk of Nazi detection.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Aviation History, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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