52 pages • 1 hour read
Gregory A. FreemanThe Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Chetnik Loyalty and Love for Americans
The American airmen who parachuted into Yugoslavia in 1943-1944 received love, gratitude, and protection from General Mihailovich’s Chetnik forces and the local Serbian villagers who supported them.
American airmen reported similar experiences once they reached the ground in Yugoslavia. After walking for a while to find help, Clare Musgrove was “grateful” that a group of women invited him to follow them into a nearby village, where “a burly man with a beard” (40) came out to welcome him. Other airmen were still descending from above when they noticed people on the ground running in their direction. After hitting the ground and breaking his clavicle, Tony Orsini awakened to the sight of a “heavyset woman” comforting him, “cradling his head,” and “saying soothing things” in a language he could not understand” (44). Mike McKool was stunned when a group of villagers rushed toward him and began “fighting one another for a chance to kiss him on the cheek” (48). A group of “at least twenty people” ran to Richard Felman and started “hugging and kissing him fervently” before leading him into their village, where he was “greeted like a celebrity” (52). A Chetnik officer later explained to Felman that the locals “felt honored” to have the airman in their village “because they considered American airmen to be brave warriors” (54) who were helping them fight back against the Nazis. Indeed, Chetnik enthusiasm for the Americans never wavered. When George Musulin arrived in August 1944 to direct the evacuation of the airmen from Pranjane, villagers “ran to embrace the returning American, grabbing his round face with both hands to kiss him hard” (205).
During their time on the ground in Yugoslavia, the airmen learned how far the locals were willing to go to protect them and what the Chetnik troops and villagers risked by doing so. General Mihailovich ordered the Americans safeguarded no matter what. On one occasion, he even warned that “if anything has happened to a single one of these airmen, I shall have the man who bears this news executed on the spot” (197). The burly man who welcomed Musgrove to his village also took the American into his home and then hid him under a bed before a Nazi officer arrived. The Germans took 20 villagers hostage and threatened to kill them all unless the Chetniks turned over the Americans, but the Chetniks always refused to do so. On one occasion, Felman wanted to surrender himself, but the Chetnik officer who accompanied him assured the American that “the Germans will not stop killing because they capture you” and that the Chetniks will not give up the Americans to a brutal invader, for the Serbian people have learned through many battles with many enemies “that it is better to live with one leg than to spend your life on your knees” (78).
Chetnik soldiers and local villagers even helped build the airstrip in Pranjane that made the evacuation possible. Before departing, grateful airmen tossed boots, socks, shirts, jackets, and anything else they could find to the people who had saved their lives. Freeman means to convey poignancy in this moment and in the broader story, for while the American airmen remained forever thankful, the American and British governments betrayed Mihailovich and thereby abandoned Yugoslavia to Tito’s postwar Communist dictatorship.
The Nazi Menace
Nearly all of the book’s action takes place in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Although none of the book’s key figures are German or German sympathizers, the Nazi menace remains omnipresent.
For the American airmen in Yugoslavia, the ordeal began with a bombing mission to Ploesti, Romania, where the Germans had set up formidable antiaircraft defenses to protect the oil refineries that helped fuel the Third Reich’s war machine. Once they parachuted out of their damaged bombers, the airmen had to hope that friendly locals would find them before Nazi patrols did. Clare Musgrove later learned that his entire crew had been captured by the Germans. Musgrove also had to watch from under a bed as a Nazi officer searched a villager’s home for the downed airman. While taking a break and cooling off by splashing in a river, Robert Wilson heard his Chetnik guards sound the alarm that Germans were on the way. A similar alarm—“Heidi! Heidi!” (70)—forced Thomas Oliver and two of his crewmates to pull themselves away from three beautiful Serbian girls and then flee into the woods (70). After seeing the remains of a village in which the Nazis had murdered the inhabitants before setting the buildings ablaze, Richard Felman “could only stand on the hillside and weep” (78).
For Vujnovich and his girlfriend Mirjana, Belgrade was the scene of much joy and excitement. In March 1941, however, as the Yugoslavian people protested their government’s effort to appease Adolf Hitler, Vujnovich, a university student, had several chance encounters with a German-born anatomy professor named Mueller. Each time, Mueller warned Vujnovich that if the Yugoslavian people persisted in their defiance, bad things would happen to them. “You people are going to suffer,” Mueller told Vujnovich, so “[d]on’t provoke Germany” (93). The story of Vujnovich and Mirjana’s escape from Yugoslavia is fraught with peril, ending with a chance encounter Magda Goebbels, wife of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, on their plane.
If the Americans managed to evade capture by German patrols on the ground, they nonetheless had to fear detection from above. Jibilian spent nearly a week running and hiding from German aircraft after the Nazis had homed in on his radio signals. Hours before Operation Halyard was set to begin, Musulin spotted three German aircraft approaching the hastily-constructed airstrip, including a Stuka dive bomber, which was equipped with a “screaming siren” because “Hitler wanted to maximize the terror” (216). Fortunately, “a most providential herd of cows” (217) made its way onto the airstrip, giving it the appearance of an ordinary Yugoslav farm and raising no suspicions among the German pilots.
Without including any Nazi characters among the story’s major actors, Freeman nonetheless ensures that the Nazi presence looms throughout the book.
Communism, Allied Intelligence, and a Conspiracy of Lies
The men who parachuted into Yugoslavia found themselves in the middle of a civil war between Tito’s Partisans and Mihailovich’s anti-Communist Chetniks. That same civil war between Communists and anti-Communists played out at the highest levels of American and, especially, British intelligence.
Musgrove recalled having been “warned that some of the Yugoslav people were Nazi sympathizers who might turn them over to the Germans” (2). Tony Orsini was told to “avoid the Chetniks” and instead “[s]eek out the Partisans” (27). These briefings nearly always came from Allied officers who were repeating what they had heard from their superiors. Upon reaching the ground in Yugoslavia, the airmen were relieved to discover that the briefings had been false. Still, even after Operation Halyard, the false briefings continued. Back in Bari, following his evacuation from Pranjane, Orsini once again heard an officer urge the airmen to run from Chetniks and villagers, and it required “all of Orsini’s self-control to sit there and listen without earning himself a court-martial by telling the senior officer how wrong he was” (246).
The intelligence briefings were not simply wrong: They were falsified on purpose. Communist moles had infiltrated Allied intelligence to such a degree that even Churchill and Roosevelt were working under false assumptions about the situation in Yugoslavia. Declassified reports released in 1997 prove, for instance, that Soviet agent Klugmann directed the anti-Mihailovich campaign from inside British intelligence. Beginning in March 1944, Klugmann operated out of Bari, which meant that the “most influential Communist spy in Europe was working practically alongside [George] Vujnovich and his colleagues” (145). Vujnovich knew from experience that the OSS “was not nearly as inhospitable to Communists as other branches of the military or the government” (158) and that having a Communist presence inside the agency was not uncommon.
Operation Halyard did nothing to change the official narrative of Mihailovich and Tito. Returning airmen were told to keep quiet about the rescue. Richard Felman suspected that a “cover-up was well underway,” for any favorable reports of Mihailovich’s aid to the Americans “would have ruffled feathers in the State Department and the British government” (245). Even after the war, the US State Department emerged as the primary obstacle to truth. America’s top diplomats refused to publicize Mihailovich’s involvement in the rescue even after Tito took control of Yugoslavia. Even after General Eisenhower convinced President Truman to grant Mihailovich a posthumous Legion of Merit award, officials in the State Department insisted that the award be kept secret.
Between the lies of Communist moles in Allied intelligence and the lies of US officialdom, Mihailovich’s tragic fate was sealed, as was the fate of Yugoslavia.
