Rescue Behind Enemy Lines

The last straw came on the sixth try when, just as the Halyard team readied themselves to jump, Musulin spotted a battle in progress directly beneath their plane. That did it. When the team returned to Bari for the sixth time, Musulin demanded an American plane, crew, and jumpmaster be found to undertake the insertion mission.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Oliver and the other Allied airmen in Pranjani were unaware that a plan had been set in motion for their rescue. Deciding that a radio message was their best hope of rescue, Oliver and a small committee of airmen cooked up a message coded with American slang and squadron-specific in-jokes designed to confuse eavesdropping Germans while reassuring Allied radio operators in Italy that the message was from a trustworthy source:

Mudcat driver to CO APO520. 150 Yanks in Yugo, some sick. Shoot us workhorses. Our challenge first letter of bombardier’s name, color of Banana Nose’s scarf. Your authenticator last letter of chief lug’s name color of fist on wall. Must refer to shark squadron, 459th BG, for decoding. Signed, TKO, Flat Rat 4 in lug order.

“It was a shot in the dark,” Oliver said about the last-ditch communication attempt, “especially since for the Chetnik radio operators, no communications were scheduled with the air force. We just hoped someone would pick it up on the other side.”

A Royal Air Force radio operator in Italy picked up the cryptic message, whose telltale signs helped members of the 459th Bomb Group identify the sender as Lt. Thomas Oliver, pilot of the Fighting Mudcat. After answering a request for longitude and latitude using captured German maps of Serbia, Oliver was told to “prepare reception for 31 July or first clear night following.”

August 2, 1944, marked the seventh—and final—insertion attempt for Musulin’s OSS team. This time, receiving correct ground signals at the correct drop zone, Musulin, Rajacich, and Jibilian jumped into the right area and made contact with a group of Chetniks who took them into Pranjani. For the downed airmen, the arrival of the Halyard team turned their hopes of rescue into a reality. “It was a tremendous thrill to see them coming in,” said Oliver, “because we knew that things were underway to get us out of there.”

Fashioning an airstrip was the first and most urgent task for the OSS team and the airmen (who, to Musulin’s dismay, actually numbered 250 and counting). The Serb workers tasked with building the airstrip had only simple farm implements, so clearing and smoothing the makeshift runway had to be done by hand. A 700-yard-long swath had already been hacked out on a narrow plateau halfway up the neighboring mountainside, but the clearing was still too short for a C-47 to land with a comfortable margin of error. Dense woods bordered one side and a steep drop-off loomed on the other side. It promised to be a true white-knuckle experience for the crews of the incoming planes.

The Serb villagers and Chetnik soldiers got cracking. They labored for a week, cutting down trees, hauling away rocks with bare and bloodied hands, bringing gravel in, and tamping down the earth with their feet. According to Oliver, airmen were not expected to work. “I thought it was a good idea, something that ought to be done,” he remembers. “We would have been willing to help, but we weren’t asked. The Serbs were quite willing to do it.” The work stopped only when the approach of German aircraft forced everyone into hiding in the adjacent tree line.

When the field was finished, Jibilian radioed Bari to schedule evacuations for the following night. On August 9, 1944, the first evacuees, their fellow airmen, the Halyard OSS team, and the dozens of Serb villagers and Chetniks who had opened their homes and their pantries to the downed Allies gathered at the airstrip to await the planes. They were surrounded by the four thousand troops of Mihailovich’s First Ravna Gorski Corps, deployed around Pranjani to deflect possible German interference. Tom Oliver was among the group of airmen who were to be evacuated first. “We were a little apprehensive,” Oliver recalls. “Was this thing going to work?”

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