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

In 1943-1944, American B-24 bombers also conducted regular raids on Ploesti. Nearly all of the US fliers stranded and rescued in Yugoslavia had been B-24 crewmen. Unlike the B-17, the B-24 featured a system that used electric power to raise and lower the ball turret. Clare Musgrove served as a ball turret gunner on a B-24.

US B-17 and B-24 bombers featured a ball turret, a rotating and retractable sphere from which a single crewman worked in cramped quarters and operated two guns with 250 rounds of ammunition each. Clare Musgrove, one of the airmen rescued in Operation Halyard, had served as both an instructor and a ball turret gunner on combat missions. While the B-24’s ball turret could be lowered and retracted electrically, Musgrove’s ball turret malfunctioned on the day of his ill-fated flight, which required him to crank the turret manually, delaying his jump from the damaged plane and probably ensuring that he ended up in friendly Serbian hands instead of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp.

OSS agents carried out Operation Halyard with the help of C-47 cargo planes, which began landing at Pranjane on the night of August 9. Each C-47 evacuated a dozen downed airmen. The OSS agents marveled at the skill of C-47 pilots who landed on an impromptu airstrip in the hills of Yugoslavia and then took off again without losing a single plane or a single life.

The Luftwaffe was the German air force that terrorized Europe in World War II. George Vujnovich saw and heard the Luftwaffe roaring across the skies above Belgrade when the Nazis attacked Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941. American airmen and their Chetnik friends hid from the Luftwaffe while constructing an impromptu airstrip at Pranjane.