RED TAILS

The Tuskegee Airmen and Operation Halyard:

An All-New Update for The Forgotten 500

Gregory A. Freeman

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Since I originally published The Forgotten 500, about the extraordinary rescue mission of five hundred downed airmen in the hills of enemy-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II, a fascinating new side story has come to light involving the famed Tuskegee Airmen and their never-before-told involvement in this rescue operation. During my original research for the book I wanted to tell the story of the aircrews that flew the rescue planes and the fighter pilots who protected them, but little information was available. I knew that they would have been part of the Fifteenth Air Force, but nothing more.

As The Forgotten 500 became popular, veterans, Serbian Americans, history buffs, and other readers realized that they knew additional details and passed them on to me. I was speaking with one of the heroes of the story, the late, great Arthur Jibilian, when he casually asked me if I knew that the Tuskegee Airmen flew fighter cover for the rescues. I was surprised and delighted to hear this and immediately set about researching the connection between Operation Halyard and the first black pilots in the military.

The bravery of the Tuskegee Airmen is a perfect complement to that of the men like Jibilian and his colleagues, many of them first-generation Americans, who risked their lives to carry out the rescue. I’m pleased to complete the story of The Forgotten 500 by honoring the contribution of the Tuskegee Airmen.

GAF

April 2011

Twenty-year-old Arthur Jibilian volunteered for the OSS, the World War II intelligence agency and precursor to the modern-day CIA, because he considered himself expendable. So when an OSS officer visited his base to recruit agents who could speak a foreign language, Jibilian stepped forward.

The fellow from Cleveland could speak Armenian, and as a Navy radio operator he might be valuable to the secret teams that infiltrated enemy territory to gather intelligence or conduct sabotage. The OSS officer warned Jibilian that the missions were extremely dangerous, that agents usually had only a fifty-fifty chance of coming back. This made Jibilian pause, because he didn’t consider himself any braver than his buddies, but then he thought about the young men he worked with every day, the guys he bunked with and shared a beer with on weekends. Most of them had families back home, some even had wives, and they were eager to return. Jibilian didn’t have any of that, so he figured it was better for him to volunteer for the dangerous position and maybe keep one of the other guys from taking it.

I’m more expendable. At least this way, maybe I’ll be more useful than if I’m just working a radio on a ship somewhere.

With that step, Jibilian began a dangerous journey that soon would place him in the middle of one of the most daring rescue operations ever conducted during a war. The slight, humble radio operator would be a key player in the ultrasecret mission known as Operation Halyard. Jibilian was one of three secret agents who parachuted into Nazi-held territory in Yugoslavia to organize an ambitious effort to rescue more than five hundred airmen, young men just like himself, who went down behind enemy lines.

The year was 1944 and much of Europe was firmly in the grip of Hitler’s armies. Yugoslavia had been invaded swiftly and decisively, with cruel punishment for those who dared to resist. The Allies were gaining a foothold in Europe, due in large part to wave after wave of bomber planes that flew for hours to attack targets deep in enemy territory, each one carrying ten or eleven young men who hoped they would survive their time over the target and then the long journey back to their home bases. While the Allies could not move into Yugoslavia without first beating back the Germans on other fronts, American bombers flew over the rugged country nearly every day on the way to bomb the Nazi oil refineries in Romania. The Yugoslav villagers knew the planes overhead were on dangerous missions to fight the Germans where it would matter most, the source of the all-important oil that drove the Nazi war machine. Not long after, they would see the same planes return, fewer in number and many of them badly damaged, limping back across Yugoslavia to their bases in Italy.

When the bomber crews could make it no farther, their only option was to bail out in this largely unknown land controlled by Germans. As 1944 wore on, the number of Americans trapped in Yugoslavia grew larger every day. Some were injured, all were hungry and tired, and it was only a matter of time before Nazi patrols would find them and, at best, make them prisoners of war. Chances were good that the Germans wouldn’t bother taking them prisoner, and the local villagers who aided them had no hope of escaping death.

The airmen had survived so far, some for months, only with the aid of a local Serbian guerrilla fighter, General Draza Mihailovich. At the beginning of the war, Mihailovich was strongly supported by the United States as an ally and revered as a great leader by the Western world. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine as a brave warrior.

But by the time the American airmen started bailing out of their planes by the dozens in the hills of Yugoslavia, Mihailovich was fighting two enemies—the Nazis who had seized his country, and Josip Broz Tito, his opponent in the ongoing civil war for Yugoslavia. Mihailovich suffered a major setback in 1943 when, despite his longtime loyalty, U.S. and British leaders decided that they no longer wanted to put their money on Mihailovich as the future leader of Yugoslavia. They sided with Tito in Yugoslavia’s civil war and labeled Mihailovich a Nazi collaborator—even though his troops were actively resisting the German occupation.

Though he felt betrayed, Mihailovich and his followers were immensely grateful to the young American airmen who were risking their lives, and dying at an alarming rate, to fight the Nazi occupiers. These were men like nineteen-year-old Clare Musgrove, a ball turret gunner in a bomber who found that when it came time to bail out of his crippled plane, the electrical mechanism for raising himself up from the glass bubble under the plane’s belly was shot. As the pilot yelled, “This is it, boys! Bail out! Bail out!” Musgrove realized that he was trapped in the ball turret. His only option was to use a hand crank that would slowwwwly raise the turret into the plane to where he would be able to bail out. As he cranked and cranked and cranked, Musgrove watched the ground steadily rising closer. When he finally got the turret cranked up into the plane, Musgrove was drenched in sweat and shaking with adrenaline. The plane was eerily silent, the engines out and the other nine crew gone.

Musgrove made it out of his plane, and found himself in the same position that hundreds of other young men would experience—drifting down into the hills of Yugoslavia, wondering what fate awaited him. He soon was in the arms of waiting villagers, who took him to a small farmhouse, where he sat at the family table, bewildered and staring back at the children, who seemed fascinated by the American. He didn’t have any idea what they would do with him because no one else spoke English. But when there was a knock at the door and the father got into a heated discussion with another villager, Musgrove could tell that the other villager wanted the American out. Musgrove’s host angrily got rid of the other man and slammed the door, but then he grabbed Musgrove and hustled him into the bedroom and stuffed him under the bed. Musgrove lay there quietly for a long time, not knowing what to expect, and then he heard the door fly open and the children shriek. Then, from his vantage under the bed, all Musgrove could see was a pair of shiny, tall black boots walking around the house slowly, as if whoever was wearing them was looking around. As the heels clicked on the wooden floor, he could hear the man speaking German.

When twenty-one-year-old Tony Orsini bailed out of his bomber on his first mission, after first using a pair of pliers to pull a piece of shrapnel from a crewmate’s skull so he would be able to parachute out, he saw a heavyset peasant woman rushing toward him as he slowly drifted down. Orsini had no idea whether the woman would help him, attack him with a pitchfork, or summon German soldiers. The crews had been warned that some of the Serbs in this area would cut off their ears and turn them over to the Nazis.

Orsini landed hard, bouncing off a tree in the process and breaking his clavicle. He passed out momentarily, and when he awoke, the fat woman was cradling his head against her ample bosom, wiping his face and saying soothing things in a language he didn’t know. He did understand, however, that he was in good hands. Like hundreds of other airmen during the war, Orsini landed in Serbian territory controlled by Mihailovich’s forces. The local peasants were so appreciative of the risks taken by the allied aircrews that any airmen who crashed or parachuted out in their territory were hidden from the Germans, the Serbs doing all they could to feed and shelter the airmen even as they were barely able to feed themselves.

Most of the downed airmen bided their time hiding out in haylofts and root cellars as Nazi patrols searched for the Americans, but others put the time to good use and worked alongside Mihailovich’s forces as they fought the Germans.

Sabotaging Nazi operations was a good way for Richard Felman, a New York City native and son of Jewish immigrants from Romania, to spend his time in Yugoslavia. A navigator on a B-24 named Never a Dull Moment, Felman learned how to conduct “soft sabotage”—sabotage that would have a delayed effect so the Germans could not retaliate on local villagers. One night Felman joined a group of seven Serbs sneaking to the railway station in the middle of the night, targeting a train that was to leave the next morning with supplies for German troops. Felman helped guard the area as a fifteen-year-old Serb boy climbed into the train and hid a blackened container of explosives deep in the coal bin behind the engine. Blowing up the train in the station would have prompted the Nazis to kill scores of villagers in return, but this way, the train would not explode until it was almost at its destination and the explosive was shoveled into the engine.

Felman knew well that the German policy was to kill one hundred villagers for every German soldier lost to the resistance, and he had witnessed firsthand the Nazis’ willingness to massacre the Serb peasants. Only three days after he landed in Yugoslavia, a German patrol demanded that the Serb guerrillas hand over Felman and the rest of his bomber crew or they would storm a village of two hundred Serbs, including women and children. Felman and the other Americans immediately insisted that they give themselves up and be taken prisoner, but the Serbs refused to allow it, explaining that they could not submit to the Germans no matter what the price. The next day, Felman stood on a hillside and wept as he watched the village burn.

The brutality of the Germans made Felman, who became a de facto leader of the downed airmen, determined to get help from the Allies. It was only a matter of time before the Germans found the hidden Americans. Though some airmen adamantly opposed any radio contact because it could lead the Germans right to them, Felman managed to send a radio message to the headquarters of the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. Using radio equipment salvaged from downed bombers, they broadcast a desperate message:

SOS . . . SOS . . . 150 members of American crew waiting for rescue . . . There are many sick and wounded . . . Call back . . . SOS . . . SOS

There was no reply for days. Surely the Allies had heard the radio call, but they probably were suspicious that it was a German trick, an effort to lure rescue planes in for an ambush. To convince the Allies that the rescue call was legit, the airmen invented their own code based on information that could only be known to their buddies back at their home bases. For the letter A, they used the third letter of the place of birth of a bartender in the Officer’s Club in Lecce, Italy. For B, they used the fourth letter of the name of an intelligence officer stationed in Brindisi, and so on. They explained this code on another radio call, and thereafter all the messages were coded.

In Bari, Italy, the plea for help made its way to the OSS office of George Vujnovich, a senior officer in charge of intelligence and clandestine operations in parts of Europe, including Yugoslavia. A Pittsburgh native of Yugoslav descent, Vujnovich had already led a life of high adventure before becoming an OSS officer. A young college student visiting Belgrade, Yugoslavia, when the war broke out in 1941, Vujnovich and his newfound fiancée, a local girl, were trapped behind German lines and spent two years trying to get out of occupied territory and to safety—rushing to cross borders before the Nazis shut them down, tiptoeing through minefields, forging identification papers, dodging bombs during air raids, bribing German soldiers, and even receiving some unwitting help from the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. When the message from the airmen in the hills of Yugoslavia reached him, he instantly felt a connection to the young men who just wanted to get out and go home. And he also felt a strong tie to the local Serbs helping them, any one of whom could be his own relative.

At first the OSS thought there were about 150 airmen to be retrieved because the message had made reference only to those in the immediate area where Felman was hiding. They would soon find out that there were more than 500 airmen in the surrounding countryside, all men who had been listed as MIA, missing in action, when their planes went down. Vujnovich and his fellow OSS agents started planning a way to pluck them out of Nazi territory without the rescue turning into a bloodbath. They realized right away that no matter how they did it, the operation would be incredibly risky. If it went badly, the Germans might attack the rescue site and kill hundreds of airmen, and even more of the villagers who had helped hide them.

It didn’t take long for Vujnovich to settle on who should carry out the mission. He had three men at his disposal he could trust. Two had the right language skills and all had some familiarity with the Yugoslav people. He selected George Musulin to lead the three-man team, partly because he was a trusted agent who already had proven himself in the field, but also because he spoke the Serbian language. Though Musulin himself was born in New York, his father had immigrated from Yugoslavia. Musulin looked the part, too—a big brawny fellow who could easily pass for one of the scary-looking local fighters once he grew out the requisite bushy beard.

The second team member would be Michael Rajacic, an American of Yugoslav descent who, like Vujnovich, had been studying at the University of Belgrade when war broke out in Europe. The third member of the team needed to be a radio operator, and Vujnovich turned to the “expendable” Jibilian to fill that role. Though his second language was Armenian instead of the Serb language, Jibilian had already been on a mission behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia and had performed heroically. He had proven himself far from expendable.

But before Vujnovich could send the team in, he had to get approval from the highest levels. The OSS plans met resistance and outright interference from the British, who insisted that Mihailovich could not be trusted—based on evidence from a British operative who would be revealed years later as a Communist sympathizing with Tito. The rescue was supposed to be a joint operation with the British, but the Americans came to believe that the Brits were actively sabotaging the effort. On one of the first attempts to send help, the British plane crew instructed the American OSS agents that they were over the jump site where they would parachute down to meet up with the airmen. The Americans looked out the plane hatch and saw that they were directly over a raging ground battle. Jumping into the battle would have been suicidal.

After the questionable (at best) experience with the British crew, mission leader Musulin demanded an American plane, an American crew, and an American jumpmaster. Soon the all-American team got Musulin on the ground with Rajacic and Jibilian. Once on the ground with the downed airmen, they set to figuring out how to accomplish the airlift of so many people.

The first problem: The hundreds of Americans had to be gathered together in one place from where they were scattered all over the region, in hiding. Second: they had to secretly build an airstrip capable of landing huge C-47 transport planes—with no tools other than crude farm implements—without alerting the Germans. Third: They had to get the big cargo planes in, land them on the makeshift runway, and take off and get back to Allied territory without the Germans shooting them down. This was a tall order, and no one was sure it would work.

After weeks of frantic building and trying to keep the project secret from the Nazi planes overhead, the long-awaited night came. The plan was to bring the cargo planes in at night to make them less of a target for German fighters, but that made the risky landing even riskier. Hundreds of airmen, ragged and hungry from their time in the hills of Yugoslavia, waited in the dark, crouched in the brush and trees along their newly made airstrip. They were eager and hopeful, but they were worried, too. The whole plan seemed so ambitious. Could it really work?

Success would depend on not only meticulous planning and preparation in both Bari and Pranjane, but also on flawless execution by the pilots asked to make this dangerous mission. Vujnovich knew that he could find skilled C-47 pilots who were used to flying into dangerous territory. About two thousand of the all-purpose cargo and troop transport planes had played a key role in the D-day landings in Normandy only a couple months earlier, dropping thousands of paratroopers behind enemy lines. The Air Crew Rescue Unit (ACRU), commanded by Colonel George Kraigher, Vujnovich’s good friend from their days together at Pan American airlines, would be responsible for assembling the planes and crews to make the rescue, and they had carte blanche to call on anything they needed from the Fifteenth Air Force. Kraigher would be able to tap veterans of the invasion of France to fly the missions to rescue the airmen stranded with Mihailovich, though still, this assignment would push their skills to the limit. Flying over enemy territory and dropping paratroopers is dangerous enough, but landing on an improvised airstrip that is just barely long enough, in the dark, and then taking off from that minimal runway, all without the nearby Germans attacking you . . . well, that would be a different challenge altogether.

Kraigher’s contacts pointed him toward a unit that had shown considerable skill—the 60th Troop Carrier Group of the Twelfth Air Force.[1] Operating from bases in Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy, these C-47 pilots had experience transporting paratroops from England and dropping them at Oran during the early hours of the invasion of North Africa, then participating in the battle for Tunisia, and they had towed gliders to Syracuse and dropped paratroops behind enemy lines at Catania when the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943. If any C-47 pilots could pull off this mission, it was these guys.

There was some debate in the OSS offices at Bari about whether to send in fighter planes to provide cover for the C-47s. The goal was to make the mission as stealthy as possible so as not to stir up any resistance from the Germans, so consideration was given to sending the C-47s in on their own. Every additional plane made the rescue party larger and noisier, plus any mechanical difficulties experienced by one plane could give away the position of all the others.

But on the other hand, this was already an extremely risky plan, and the idea of sending in unarmed C-47 planes—stripped down cargo planes essentially, with none of the defensive weaponry found on bombers and other planes—didn’t sit well with Vujnovich or Kraigher. Getting into Pranjane would put the C-47 crews at risk if they had no fighter escorts, but God forbid they were attacked by the Luftwaffe on the way back when they were loaded with the rescued airmen. Hundreds of men could be shot out of the sky.

That image so disturbed Vujnovich and Kraigher that they agreed the planes must have a fighter cover. But who? The Fifteenth Air Force could provide fighter planes and experienced pilots, but for this rescue, Vujnovich and Kraigher wanted more. They wanted fighter pilots who would not shy away from such a dangerous mission and who could be trusted to stay with those defenseless C-47s no matter what. They had heard about an oddball unit in the Fifteenth made up entirely of Negro pilots—an outlandish idea to most in the military. In 1944, black men were relegated to service and support roles in the military, and they were never seen in the cockpit of an airplane.

But this unit of Negro fliers had made a reputation for themselves. They were damn good pilots, they were thought to be fearless, and they never, ever left the side of a damaged bomber. Most impressive was their record of never having lost a bomber to enemy fighters.[2] They sounded exactly like the pilots for Operation Halyard. Vujnovich and Kraigher wanted the Red Tails.

Given the nickname because of the distinctive red vertical tail fin on their fighter planes, the Red Tails were better known in later years as the Tuskegee Airmen. This group of black men volunteered to fly for their country and were allowed to do so only after a long and contentious debate. Even as America was gearing up in the early 1940s for what seemed certain to be a major war, the idea of allowing black men to fly airplanes was outrageous to many. Flying planes, especially fighters, was one of the glamorous jobs in the military, and up to that point blacks weren’t even allowed in the more typical positions in the ranks. More than 350,000 black men served in World War I and about 700 of them were officers, but as World War II approached, almost all officers were white, and most black troops were allowed to serve only as truck drivers, stevedores, and in service positions, such as waiters and janitors.[3] The U.S. military had considered the question of integration years earlier, but a series of studies on black soldiers’ performance in World War I—most of them of dubious scientific quality—concluded that segregation was necessary to maintain the quality of the military. The most influential of the studies came from the Army War College and was titled “The Use of Negro Manpower in War.”[4] That report noted that the black man is physically qualified for combat, but “the negro is profoundly superstitious” and “he is by nature subservient and naturally believes himself to be inferior to the white.” It went on to warn that while the black man is “jolly, trustable, and lively by nature,” the military cannot “expect to draw leadership material from his race.” The report also noted that “he has not the physical courage of the white. He simply cannot control himself in fear of some danger in the degree that the white can.” And “the negro is unmoral. He simply does not see that some things are wrong.”

Black leaders in the 1930s and 1940s considered aviation the primary target for integrating the military, in part because the field was the most advanced of all military sectors, with the technology improving at a rapid clip and the prominence of the air role in the next war becoming clearer every day. The public also was fascinated with the romance and adventure of flying. Pilots were the subject of comic books, movies, and radio shows, and the world thrilled to the exploits of Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and other aviators. The freedom of flight also appealed in a special way to black men, who had to contend with the everyday racism and Jim Crow laws of the time. Red Tails pilot Harvey Alexander said he could not escape the discrimination on the ground, “but up in the air, I was free as a bird because I was in control. I decided what to do and when to do it and how to do it. Each time I landed, that good feeling left me because I was back on the ground and back into the same old–same old.”[5]

The threat of war gave momentum to the effort by black leaders and some military officials to expand the role of blacks. Mobilization efforts would force the nation to realize that some long-held traditions would have to change, with one of the most prominent being the role of women. With most able-bodied men busy with the military in some capacity, the women of America had to step into the previously all-male dominion of the factory. At a time when production of planes, munitions, and other war materiel could mean the difference between winning and losing the war, the country could not be held back by the impropriety of women doing the dirty, hard labor traditionally reserved for men.

In the same vein, the military might have found it hard to say no to black men who wanted to risk their lives flying airplanes and fighting the enemy. But it did say no, stubbornly and with little second-guessing. The separation of the races was such a strong societal imperative—nationwide, not just in the South, where Jim Crow laws formalized the discrimination—that the military could not bring itself to allow black men the same stature as whites. President Roosevelt had announced in 1938 his plan to greatly expand the country’s aviation training program in anticipation of wartime needs, but in 1940, the Army Air Corps—renamed the Army Air Forces the next year—was content to have blacks make up only 2 percent of its personnel, all of them engaged in menial labor around the bases. The Air Corps was particularly resistant to any attempt to integrate the armed forces, excluding blacks more than any other branch of the military except possibly the Marine Corps. But with the dogs of war howling over the horizon, black community leaders, newspapers, and black colleges pressed relentlessly for the Air Corps to accept black men as pilots. Using the threat of a future war to their advantage, they asked how the country could exclude young, eager, able-bodied men from putting themselves in the line of fire for their country. How could the country claim to be doing everything possible for victory when it was turning away volunteers?

With a close presidential election coming in November 1940, Roosevelt realized that he could lose the black vote and announced on September 16, 1940, that the Air Corps would soon begin accepting black pilots. They would not train or serve alongside white pilots, but most in the black community still saw this as a major step forward.[6] The Tuskegee Institute, a black college in Tuskegee, Alabama, volunteered to have the black pilots training program near its school, and thus the Tuskegee Airmen were born. The War Department would build hundreds of pilot training facilities across the country by 1945, but Tuskegee Army Air Field was the one that drew the attention of black Americans. White Americans scarcely knew it existed and gave it little thought if they did. Even leaders in the Army Air Forces dismissed what was going on in Tuskegee as “the experiment” and did not expect much from the results. The men training in Tuskegee knew they were being watched—by the black community hoping they would succeed and break down more barriers, and by the military establishment that was not at all convinced these men could fly airplanes like white pilots.

The Tuskegee Airmen trainees responded by going beyond what was expected of them, racking up exceptionally high test scores and proficiency ratings, the first steps toward what would become their reputation for excellence. As the first group of pilots completed training, the 101st, 301st, and 302nd fighter squadrons, together making up the 332nd Fighter Group, transferred to Ramitelli Airfield on the Adriatic coast of Italy to join the Fifteenth Air Force in May 1944. The base was isolated, used by no one but the black airmen, and it did not appear on the maps provided to other American fliers. Not only were the Tuskegee Airmen segregated from whites, but few in the Fifteenth even knew that black pilots were among their colleagues. Those who did encounter the black fliers away from Ramitelli responded with skepticism to these pilots from “the experiment,” and the Tuskegee Airmen encountered more of the usual discrimination regarding housing and socializing. But it was not long before the black pilots began proving their mettle in the air. They began flying escorts for the Fifteenth’s bombing missions in July 1944, and soon the bomber crews were happy to see the brand-new P-51 Mustangs with the bright red tail fin flying alongside.

The Red Tails had clear instructions from General Nathan Twining, commander of the Fifteenth Air Force.[7] His bombers were flying deep into enemy territory to destroy industrial targets, but too many of the planes weren’t making it back. Twining had concluded that the high losses were the result of fighter escorts doing too much “happy hunting”—breaking away from the bombers they were escorting to engage Luftwaffe fighters and score kills. The general explained to Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the commander of the 332nd Fighter Group, that happy hunting wasn’t necessarily contrary to the pilots’ mission objectives, as the German planes posed a threat to the bombers if they came in too close, but that it still could be a bad strategy. In many cases, the Luftwaffe intentionally sent up a couple of planes to draw off the fighter escorts, and then other German fighters would swoop in to attack the bomber formation. The American fighters usually survived—in some ways it was less dangerous to go hunting than to stay with the formation where all the enemy attacks were concentrated—but by the time they returned to their bombers, many might have been lost. And even if the fighter planes had shot down a German fighter or two while happy hunting, they weren’t worth the risk to the bombers. Aside from the threat to the mission, Twining explained, it just wasn’t cost-efficient to lose so many bombers.[8]

Losing one fighter plane—German or American—meant losing about $50,000 and one man, Twining explained. When a bomber went down, that was $225,000 and a crew of ten or eleven men. He recounted how one squadron had shot down nine enemy fighters one day while happy hunting during a bombing run—costing the enemy $450,000 and nine men. But while the American fighters were away, they lost seven B-17s from their formation—$1.5 million and seventy-seven men.

Davis got the message. His men had to stay with the bombers, no matter what. They weren’t to strike out on their own in search of kills that would boost their individual careers, and their top priority had to be protecting those bombers at all costs to themselves. On more than one occasion, Davis told his fighter pilots, “Don’t come back if you lose a bomber.”

The Tuskegee Airmen carried out Davis’s orders, knowing all the while that being as good as the white pilots wasn’t good enough. If they were to prove to the military and the public that this program for black pilots was more than just a social experiment or politicians throwing a bone to black community leaders, they had to go beyond what anyone expected of them. Like his fellow Tuskegee pilots, Roscoe Brown, with the 100th Pursuit Squadron, knew that his job was to protect the bombers and not to become heroes by scoring as many kills as possible. “We knew that if we let the bombers get shot down, even if we shot down a lot of fighters, we would probably lose our opportunity to fly,” he said. “The race factor was there all the time.”

For the next five months, the 332nd Fighter Group flew bomber escorts and other missions in which they struck rail traffic and other infrastructure in Europe, including flights to accompany bombers targeting the German oil production sites in Ploiesti, Romania. By December of 1944, the reputation of the 332nd was growing among the all-white bomber crews.[9]

“Unofficially you are known by an untold number of bomber crews as the Red Tails, who can be depended upon and whose appearance means certain protection from enemy fighters,” Davis told his men. “The bomber crews have told others about your accomplishments, and your good reputation has preceded you into many parts where you may think you are unknown.”[10]

Alex Jefferson, a Red Tail pilot who was shot down on his nineteenth mission, was greeted like a celebrity of sorts when he arrived at the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III, which held five thousand American and British air officers.[11] The prisoners were allowed to select their new bunk mates from among the incoming prisoners, and Jefferson suddenly found himself popular. The Germans often tried to sneak in English-speaking spies masquerading as captured American airmen, but the POWs could be pretty certain that the one black man in the lineup wasn’t German. Jefferson found his new bunk mate when a man walked up and, in the strongest Southern drawl he had ever heard, said, “Ah think I’ll take this boy.” Jefferson was bemused by how the same airman probably would have shunned him back in the States but now saw him as an asset.

Many of the POWs were shocked to see a black American pilot because they had been prisoners so long that they hadn’t heard of the Tuskegee Airmen. The Tuskegee program didn’t get much publicity outside of the black community, and the Air Forces made no effort whatsoever to promote it within the ranks. But some who had been shot down only recently knew of the Red Tails’ courage and had heard the rumors that the pilots were black. One prisoner greeted Jefferson warmly. One man ran up to Jefferson soon after his arrival and hugged him tightly, yelling, “You’re a Red Tail!”[12] Letting go of the somewhat embarrassed Jefferson, the man continued. “You goddamn Red Tails are the best damn unit! If the Red Tails had been with us, we’d have made it back home. You guys saved our asses so many times!”

The airman’s enthusiasm for the Red Tails was not unusual, though many aircrews didn’t realize who was flying the planes. Larry Fleischer, a navigator-bombardier in the 777th Bomb Squadron based near Ramitelli, told of how the Tuskegee Airmen stayed closer to their bombers than their white counterparts.[13] “They didn’t get way out,” he said. “A lot of times, those other guys were so far out that if some aircraft came out of the clouds, they wouldn’t have been able to get over there quick enough. But [the Red Tails] escorted us.” Fleischer and his crewmates couldn’t figure out why the Red Tails were such good escorts. “All the [other] guys just come out there, leave early, before we’re completely out of enemy territory. And here are these guys. I mean, when we would see them we’d say, ‘Man, we got it made today,’ because they were right there, all the time. They were our lifesavers.” The copilot on Fleischer’s crew, George C. Barnett, said, “They just gave us comfort, where the other escorts didn’t. You know, we were glad to have the other escorts but we would have preferred to have the Red Tails escorting us.”

Fleischer and Barnett never knew until near the end of the war that the Red Tail pilots were black. “I mean, you can’t tell what the color of the pilot is when he’s got his helmet on and everything, but we never knew that they were black. We just knew that they were there.”[14] They didn’t learn the identity of their saviors until Fleischer and Barnett’s bomber was damaged badly and couldn’t quite make it back to their home base, and they decided to land on what they thought must be an abandoned airfield because it wasn’t on any of their maps. After landing they were surprised to see a row of Red Tail P-51s lined up there, and even more shocked to see black pilots and other crew arriving in American trucks, wearing American uniforms. The sight was so startling that for a moment the crew members were befuddled and weren’t sure in what strange place they had landed. “So we land there at Ramitelli and see those Red Tails. Man! And these are all black guys! It was complete shock,” Fleischer said. “Because in my experiences up to that time, as far as black people, the only black people I ever saw in the military was when I was at Ellington Field [in Texas]. They were in the kitchen. They were cooks, and they served food, and that’s the only black guys I ever encountered in the military.” Fleischer says the existence of black pilots was “more secret than the atom bomb. I mean nobody knew about it.”[15]

By the end of the war, the Tuskegee Airmen would fly more than 15,000 individual sorties in 1,500 missions, including 311 bomber escort missions. In all, they would destroy or damage 136 German planes in the air and 237 on the ground, not to mention the thousand or so rail cars and even a German destroyer. Sixty-six Tuskegee pilots would be killed in action and another thirty-two taken prisoner.[17]

The racial barriers in the military fell further when all-black units proved themselves on the ground as well. The Red Ball Express—a convoy system that supplied troops in Europe and which was made up almost exclusively of black truck drivers—was famous for being the only supply forces that could keep up with the rapid advances of General George S. Patton’s troops as they raced across France. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower found himself severely short of replacement troops for existing military units in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, he made a controversial decision that his own senior officers strongly opposed. He decided to allow black soldiers to pick up a rifle and join the white military units to fight in combat for the first time.[18] Their contribution is credited with helping win the Battle of the Bulge.

Vujnovich and Kraigher knew the Red Tails were right for the job. Kraigher inquired with Twining and was told he could have the 332nd whenever they weren’t assigned to bomber escorts. That would likely mean that the Red Tails could fly some cover for Operation Halyard and the other fighters in the Fifteenth would do the rest. The 332nd already was active in the Balkans escorting bombers, and dive-bombing and strafing Nazi positions that were slowing the advance of the Russian army.[16]

Twining and Kraigher explained the mission to Colonel Davis and impressed upon him the importance of protecting the C-47s, no matter what that meant for the Red Tails. In the cold logic of war, everyone understood that the pilots of the 332nd had to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice if necessary to make Operation Halyard work.

Davis briefed his pilots on Operation Halyard and, as he always did before an escort mission, reminded his men that their one and only role was to stay with the other planes and protect them. Two of the pilots listening to the instructions were Lieutenant Hubron Blackwell, from Baltimore, and his squadron commander, Captain Melvin Jackson, a quiet man from Warrenton, Virginia, who seemed to have no fear of death.[19] They would be among a group of fighters that would rendezvous with the rescue planes and the other fighter escorts to provide more substantial coverage on the way back from Pranjane.

“You will be escorting planes loaded with American pilots and crewmen who were shot down in Yugoslavia,” Davis told the pilots. “This mission is particularly risky because the enemy holds this territory. To reach this site, it will be necessary to navigate accurately. A slight error in navigation will mean the mission is lost.”

When the briefing was complete, the colonel turned to Jackson and said sternly, “Captain Jackson, you will complete this mission successfully.”[20] Jackson knew that was an order, not a prediction.

Blackwell and Jackson set out with other Red Tails to meet the C-47s over Pranjane.[21] En route, Blackwell was amazed to see Jackson navigate so accurately. But when their formation approached a lake that was to be their last checkpoint, Jackson’s voice came over the radio. “Do any of you fellows see the lake?”

Hutchins replied: “Damn, Jack, I was just admiring your navigation, and now I find you don’t know where the hell you are. I know it is a little hazy, but if you cock the wings of your plane, you’ll see we are flying over the lake.”[22]

Hutchins waited for Blackwell to confirm sighting the lake, then he radioed again with a friendly warning that one of their friends, Freddie Hutchins, was ready to take over the squadron if Davis sacked them for failing to protect these rescue planes. “Now this mission will be completed successfully or, tomorrow, little Freddie will be your squadron commander.”[23]

With that, they flew past their last checkpoint and on to the hills of Yugoslavia, searching for a little plateau near a town called Pranjane.

Back in Bari, Vujnovich and Kraigher hoped the Red Tails would be enough to make this rescue mission a success. A risky plan like this needed the very best doing their very best.

At the appointed hour, the men on the ground in Pranjane heard the drone of a plane. Everyone waited, wondering if it was a German fighter, and then they realized it was the deep growl of a big cargo plane from the 60th Carrier Group—the first of many if it could successfully land and take off again. Everyone held their breath as the airmen showed the predetermined light signal, three flashes of the color of the fist in the emblem on the wall back at the Fifteenth Air Force’s home base—red. The plane returned the same signal. Then it came into view, and in the moonlight they could see the white star painted on the tail—American!

The plane still had to land, and those on the ground knew exactly how hard that would be. They were all experienced pilots and aircrew themselves, so they knew it would be a challenge for the big planes to land in the dark, with crosswinds, on a makeshift airstrip that might not be long enough. The airmen watched intently, the whole field of men silent, as the big plane circled around for the right landing angle and began its approach. Like everyone watching on the ground, the pilots in the air were petrified, fearing that the lumbering plane would hop badly on the rough airstrip or continue off the end and into the trees. The young men held their breath as the tires touched down with a thump and the pilot cut back on the engines. They watched the plane race down the rough field, hoping it could stop in time. Maybe this will work. Maybe we are going home. And then they heard the plane rev its engines again and saw the nose pick up, the plane lifting up and over the tree line, then disappearing into the darkness. Within a minute, the sound of the engines faded away and the night was still again. The men were devastated, all their hopes dashed in a single moment. “Too short, too short,” one young man muttered to himself. “They can’t do it. This’ll never work.”

But then . . . there was the sound of engines again. A loud rumble, more than just one plane. The first rescues were carried out that night, and then the next morning, everyone wondered if the Americans would dare bring in another rescue mission.

And then they saw the planes come into view. They weren’t American bombers or German fighters. They were American P-51s and P-38s, some of the most fearsome fighter escorts a C-47 could have, and there were the cargo planes right behind them! And there were the Red Tails! The rescuers had come back in the daylight and in full force! The fighter planes flew over the Americans and wagged their wings in salute, then they peeled off and went down into the surrounding valleys to attack the German strongholds while the C-47s landed.

American and Serb both shed tears as they hugged each other good-bye, the Serbs relieved that their charges would make it back home alive, and the Americans sorrowful that the people who had gone to such extraordinary lengths to help them would remain behind enemy lines in such desperate conditions. As a final gesture of gratitude to the Serbs who had sheltered and fed them at great risk to themselves, many of the airmen took off their shoes and threw them out of the plane to the villagers, who were making do with nothing but felt slippers.

One after another, the big cargo planes touched down in the field, loaded up with dozens of airmen, and took off again for freedom. More than 250 airmen were rescued that day, and all made it back home safely. Though the rescued airmen received a warm welcome home, the story of their rescue was not formally reported to the world—not right away and not ever. For political reasons the story of Operation Halyard was officially suppressed for years, the only hint of the truth coming when the rescued airmen and the OSS agents talked about their incredible experience.

American bomber crews continued to risk their lives flying over Yugoslavia until Russian troops, aided by both Tito’s and Mihailovich’s resistance, liberated the country from German control at the end of 1944. Operation Halyard had rescued nearly all the stranded American airmen by then, leaving only a small number who bailed out of their planes in the months just before the country was freed from the Nazis.

When the forgotten five hundred airmen heard in 1945 that Mihailovich had been arrested by Tito and would be put on trial, they implored the State Department to help them go to Yugoslavia and testify on his behalf.

The State Department said no, and Tito sent word that he had no interest in hearing from the airmen. The airmen were brokenhearted to see their benefactor on trial for his life in a Communist country, and they were devastated that they could do nothing for him.

“Even if we couldn’t save him, we just wanted him to know that we remembered what he did for us, that somebody appreciated how much he risked,” said airman Robert Wilson. “We thought that might bring him a little comfort.”

Mihailovich was executed in 1946 and buried in an unmarked grave. The airmen continued their efforts to recognize his brave act, and later that year President Harry S. Truman, on the recommendation of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, posthumously awarded Mihailovich the Legion of Merit, the highest medal that can be awarded to a foreign national.

But for the first time in history, this award and the story behind it were classified Secret by the State Department so as not to offend the Communist government of Yugoslavia. The medal and proclamation were stored in a drawer at the State Department as Tito’s Communist government continued to slander Mihailovich as a Nazi collaborator.

Sixty years after their rescue, on May 9, 2005, the airmen presented the Legion of Merit to Mihailovich’s daughter Gordana. Old and frail by then, the surviving airmen and OSS agents gathered around Gordana and thanked her, with tears in their eyes, for all that her father and her people had done for them.

She cried and touched their hands, softly speaking words they could not understand. But her eyes showed her heart, and she reminded them of all the women who ran to greet the scared young American boys parachuting down to an uncertain fate.

“Amazing . . . riveting.” —James Bradley, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Flags of Our Fathers

THE FORGOTTEN 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II

Available at booksellers everywhere from Greg Freeman and NAL Caliber

Here is the astonishing never-before-told story of the greatest rescue mission of World War II—when the OSS set out to recover more than five hundred airmen trapped behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia.

“A literary and journalistic achievement of the highest order, a book that illuminates, thrills, and reminds us that heroes sometimes do live among us. It will take your breath away.” —Gregg Olsen, New York Times bestselling author of The Deep Dark

“An exciting tale . . . breathtaking.” —Booklist

gregoryafreeman.com

Available wherever books are sold or at penguin.com

Notes

1: “the 60th Troop Carrier Group of the Twelfth Air Force.”: A complete list of the C-47 pilots has not been found, but one of the pilots on the first night of the rescue operation, and again two weeks later, was Robert D. McCluskey, who retired from the Air Force with the rank of colonel and died in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2008, at the age of 88. McCluskey was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and several air medals, including one for the Operation Halyard rescues. The medal citation notes that “both missions were landing operations on small, partially concealed landing strips, completely surrounded by mountains, requiring exceptional skill on the part of all crew members to make the mission complete. Only men with proven courage were selected for those missions. Because of the proximity of enemy fighter aircraft and a possible attack, allied fighters were furnished for escorts on both missions.”

2: “their record of never having lost a bomber to enemy fighters.” The legend of the Tuskegee Airmen has long included the claim that they never lost a bomber they were escorting, although a 2006 report by a historian with a Tuskegee Airmen veterans association indicated that at least a few bombers were shot down. The story of the perfect record apparently began during the war—at the time Vujnovich and Kraigher were planning the rescue mission—because of the Red Tails’ extraordinary reputation among bomber crews, and it may have been true up to that point. Later the claim was given credence by statements from the War Department after the war extolling the great success of the Tuskegee experiment. The precise success rate of the Red Tails’ bombing escorts has not been established; it was exceptional, not perfect.

3: “serve only as truck drivers, stevedores, and in service positions, such as waiters and janitors.”: Martin Blumenson, Eisenhower (New York: Ballantine Books Inc., 1972), p. 127.

4: “‘The Use of Negro Manpower in War.’”: J. Todd Moye, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 19–20.

5: “‘back on the ground and back into the same old–same old.’” Ibid., p. 13.

6: “but most in the black community still saw this as a major step forward.” The plan was not universally endorsed by the black community. The NAACP insisted that blacks be accepted into the Air Corps training programs in exactly the same manner as white applicants, with no segregated training or service, calling the Tuskegee program “a Jim Crow air squadron.”

7: “clear instructions from General Nathan Twining, commander of the Fifteenth Air Force.”: Moye, Freedom Flyers, p. 112.

8: “it just wasn’t cost-efficient to lose so many bombers.”: Ibid.

9: “the reputation of the 332nd was growing among the all-white bomber crews.” Ibid., p. 113.

10: Ibid., p. 120.

11: “when he arrived at the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III, which held five thousand American and British air officers.” Alexander Jefferson and Lewis Carlson, Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: The Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 64–65.

12: “yelling, ‘You’re a Red Tail!’”: Ibid., p. 76.

13: “stayed closer to their bombers than their white counterparts.”: Moye, Freedom Flyers, pp. 114–15.

14. “but we never knew that they were black.”: Ibid., p. 116.

15: “‘more secret than the atom bomb. I mean nobody knew about it.’”: Ibid., pp. 116–17.

16: “Nazi positions that were slowing the advance of the Russian army.”: Charles E. Francis and Adolph Caso, The Tuskegee Airmen: The Men Who Changed a Nation (Wellesley, Mass.: Branden Books, 2002), pp. 177–78.

17: “including 311 bomber escort missions.”: tuskegeeairmen.org/uploads/stats.pdf.

18: “and join the white military units to fight in combat for the first time.” Blumenson, Eisenhower, p. 127.

19: “who seemed to have no fear of death.”: Francis and Caso, The Tuskegee Airmen, p. 177.

20: “‘you will complete this mission successfully.’” Ibid., p. 178.

21: “Blackwell and Jackson set out with other Red Tails to meet the C-47s over Pranjane.”: The records are unclear as to whether this mission described by Blackwell was on the first rescue of Operation Halyard or one of the subsequent rescue flights, but because the first flight was the riskiest—when success was not at all certain—it is likely that the Red Tails provided fighter cover then. Records of the 332nd Fighter Group confirm that the Red Tails escorted six C-47s in Yugoslavia on August 22, 1944, one of the subsequent rescues in Operation Halyard, but it is conceivable that the initial flights were not recorded accurately because of the top secret nature of the rescue operation. Many OSS operations, including Operation Halyard, left a scant paper trail. In any case, the Red Tail records and the participants in the rescues confirm that the Tuskegee Airmen provided fighter cover for some of the rescue flights.

22: “‘if you cock the wings of your plane, you’ll see we are flying over the lake.’” Francis and Caso, The Tuskegee Airmen, p. 179.

23: “‘little Freddie will be your squadron commander.’”: Ibid.

Bibliography

Blumenson, Martin. Eisenhower. New York: Ballantine Books Inc., 1972.

Francis, Charles E., and Adolph Caso. The Tuskegee Airmen: The Men Who Changed a Nation. Wellesley, Mass.: Branden Books, 2002.

Haulman, Daniel L., Chief, Organizational History Branch, Air Force Historical Research Agency. Personal interviews and correspondence with the author.

Jefferson, Alexander, and Lewis Carlson. Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: The Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Jibilian, Arthur, former OSS agent and Operation Halyard participant. Personal interviews and correspondence with the author.

McCluskey, Robert D. Fort Worth, Texas: Personal effects, courtesy of Mike Morgan.

Moye, J. Todd. Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

———, associate professor of history and director of the Oral History Program at the University of North Texas. Personal interviews and correspondence with the author.

Vujnovich, George, former OSS agent and organizer of Operation Halyard. Personal interviews and correspondence with the author.

Table of Contents

Copyright

Introduction

Text

Praise for The Forgotten 500

Notes

Bibliography