Story of dramatic rescue of over 500 US airmen from Nazi occupied territory in Yugoslavia in 1944. Made all the more interesting for the political intrigue between British intelligence agency, SOE, and American OSS.
The downed airmen were being aided on the ground by the Serbian Chetniks, led by Drazo Mihailovich, who was fighting both the Nazi's and, at the same time, Tito's communist partisans for control of Yugoslavia. Tito was being much more aggressive in attacking the Nazi's, for which the Nazi's retaliated brutally on the civilian populace. Mihailovich aware that the Nazi's propensity for disproportionate retaliation, including massacres of entire villages, had adopted a policy of limiting attacks on the Nazi's while gathering his forces to deploy once an allied invasion into Yugoslavia had started.
British intelligance, which had a number of known communists in positions of influence, was painting a picture of Mihailovich as a Nazi collaborator in order to get Churchill and in turn Roosevelt to throw support to Tito. They were successful in that effort and conducted a campaign of further disinformation about Mihailovich and the Chetniks to the point where they were briefing US airmen flying out of liberated Southern Italy, that should they have to bail out , they should avoid contact with the Chetniks because they would cut the ears off captured US airmen. The truth was that the Chetniks risked their lives and went to extraordinary lengths to harbor and protect the downed Allied flyers for a long period of time. Mihailovich and the Chetniks were ardent supporters of the Allies and hated the Nazi's
When a US OSS agent in Italy found out that hundreds of US airmen were being harbored by Mihailovich in a location in the mountains of Yugoslavia, he worked through active opposition from his British counterparts and his own chain of command to arrange an extremely risky rescue mission. British resistance to the rescue effort was so strong that the British pilots that were to fly an advance OSS field team to parachute into the site where the flyers were being harbored, sabotaged that mission multiple times by flying to the wrong location and finally trying to drop the OSS agents out over an active battlefield at night. The OSS team recognized the attempts to sabotage the mission and finally demanded only US crewed aircraft to take them to the drop site.
Ultimately, they pulled off the rescue under incredible conditions, but the story was kept under wraps intentionally at the time to avoid alienating Tito and swaying popular opinion toward Mihailovich, and for years afterward as part of the communist elements in the British SOE successful efforts to ensure that Tito would control Yugoslavia under his communist regime as a satellite of the Stalinist Soviet Union.
The book is a page turner and sheds light on a little known and mostly forgotten part of WWII. It reveals the sad betrayal of Mihailovich, an ardent supporter of the Allies and democracy, the protector of these hundreds of downed Allied airmen, by the British and US, for reasons ranging from pragmatic to utterly nefarious, and in the course of that betrayal led Yugoslavia to come under communist rule and Soviet dominance.
http://www.gregoryafreeman.com/forgotten500.html
