History is strewn with stories of survival, escape, and rescue,
but one rescue story from the Second World War has been well and truly swept under the rug,
despite it being one of the greatest rescue operations of the war. While at
least the Western world was fixated on the Allied invasion of Western Europe,
something else was going down in that highly tense part of Europe known back
then as Yugoslavia, specifically in Serbia. In this video, we delve into Operation Halyard,
in which the Allies worked with the locals to get stranded airmen out of Axis-occupied Serbia.
After the Allies smashed the Axis forces on the Italian island of Sicily in August 1943,
Mussolini's regime crumbled, Italy capitulated, and Allied forces set up shop in southern Italy.
But they didn't just sit there and gloat. Instead, they used Italy as a launchpad from which they
would wreak havoc in Europe. Specifically, the United States Army Air Force's 15th Air Force
bombed crucial Axis-held infrastructure in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria,
Romania, Croatia, and parts of Serbia — the latter two being constituent states of what
was then Yugoslavia. Some of their juiciest targets included the oil fields and oil
refineries which fuelled Hitler's war machine. Between October 1943 and October 1944, the 15th
Air Force carried out some 20,000 sorties with around 500 heavy bombers and 100 fighter escorts.
In this time, they lost almost half of their bombers and fighters, but merely a tenth of
their airmen. Many of those airmen bailed out of their doomed aircraft, only to parachute
into Axis-occupied territories. As you might have guessed, many American airmen landed in Serbia,
where they were either captured by the enemy or, as was preferable, sheltered by the locals.
The thing is, the locals were at war with each other as well as with their occupiers,
so politics ended up playing a large part in the rescue operations that followed.
Basically, the royalist Chetniks and communist Partisans, each equipped with a guerrilla army of
their own, were at each other's throats, with both sides working with Axis at some time or other,
too. To reiterate, it was quite a hairy situation, but by this point in the war,
the British were basically chummy with the communist Partisans and their leader,
Marshal Josip Broz Tito, and encouraged the Americans to get in on that too.
But American airmen weren't being taken in by Tito's Partisans alone. The Chetniks, led by
General Draža Mihailović, were taking care of them too, eager to maintain favour with the Americans,
who they hoped would ultimately lend them a helping hand in their fight against the
Partisans. In the words of American Rear Admiral Thomas T. Matteson, [...] [I]t
may be difficult to understand how the Chetniks could rescue American Airmen from the Germans,
as they did [...] collaborate with these very same forces. [...] The Chetniks considered the
Partisan communist movement a far greater threat [...] than the German[s] [...]. [...] Allied
support was Mihailović's only means of reversing the Partisan takeover. [...] In fact, evacuated
Americans were a significant source of first rate public relations on behalf of the Chetniks. [...]"
While the Allies had been bombing Europe out of Italy since October 1943, the first time
an American airmen bailed out over Serbia was in January the year after. In the first half of 1944,
rescue operations did occur, but they weren't as well organised as they were from July onwards.
Starting in January, Partisan forces, Chetnik forces, and even plain old Serbian peasants
were risking their lives to shelter Allied airmen, going as far to engage in direct combat
against Axis forces. The Germans were well aware of this, offering monetary rewards to peasants
in exchange for Allied airmen — but few, if any, took the cash. According to author Kirk
Ford, "[...] [The Allied airmen] had seen Chetnik soldiers give their lives to save them from
capture and had been protected and well-treated by Mihailović's forces and by the Serbian peasantry."
In March 1944, Mihailović ordered the construction of an improvised airstrip
in the village Pranjani, from which he hoped the Allies could evacuate their airmen. Unfortunately,
though, most of the 25 Allied airmen waiting nearby basically thought the airstrip was trash,
preferring to go on foot than risk a take-off from Pranjani. In the words of the Chetnik officer who
oversaw the airstrip's construction, "More than a hundred diggers and as many ox-drawn
carts were used to build. Because of the greater secrecy we worked mostly at night.
The digging, levelling and cutting-down of trees created blisters on hands." Later that year,
following some much-needed media attention, the Allies decided to take things up a notch.
In July 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services or OSS buddied up with the US 15th Air Force to
create two Air Crew Rescue Units or ACRUs. The first ACRU was tasked with conducting rescue
operations via Mihailović and his Chetniks, while the second was tasked with conducting
rescues via Tito and his Partisans. The first ACRU's mission was codenamed Operation Halyard.
Having spent about a year working with the Chetniks in the past, an OSS officer by the
name of Lieutenant George Musulin spearheaded Operation Halyard, with OSS agent Michael Rajacich
and radio operator Arthur Jibilian as his right and left-hand men. By early August, more than 250
Allied airmen were waiting within a 16-kilometre or 10-mile radius of the airstrip, many expecting
to escape Serbia on one of the Allied planes that were coming to deliver the Halyard team.
Notably, some 3,000 Chetnik soldiers set up in the area, too, ready to waste some Germans if poop hit
the fan. But only one plane arrived, and it didn't even land. Deciding that Mihailović's airstrip was
still, in fact, trash, Musulin, Rajacich, and Jibilian parachuted out of said plane instead,
planning to work with the Chetniks and to do this thing properly. When his feet touched the ground,
Musulin, an absolute bear of a man, was welcomed as a hero. In the words of an American airmen
who witnessed Musulin's arrival, "[...] The Chetniks ... were kissing him and cheering
him with tears in their eyes. He ... was one of the biggest chaps I'd ever seen."
Over the next week or so, Musulin worked with the Chetniks and some 300 local labourers to fix up
Mihailović's airstrip and figure out the logistics of evacuating 250 airmen — all while the Germans
were quite literally flying over their heads. By the 10th of August, the airstrip was good to go,
and as many as 14 C47s began landing at and taking off from Pranjani, from where 237 airmen
were evacuated throughout the day. Clearly, this mission was a great success, but it wasn't over
yet. Hearing that others were escaping Serbia via Pranjani, more Allied airmen came. Between
the 12th and 18th of August, a further 210 were flown out of the country. Mad-lad Musulin
himself got out of Serbia shortly after, but his replacement, Captain Nick Lalich, continued
Musilin's good work, keeping Operation Halyard alive. Between September and December 1944, 20 men
were evacuated from a second improved airstrip in the village of Koceljeva, while a further 35 were
evacuated from a *third* airstrip in neighbouring Bosnia. All in all, over 500 Allied airmen were
evacuated from Serbia via Operation Halyard alone, of which around 68% were American.
As for Mihailović, US President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Legion of Merit. Unfortunately,
Mihailović was not alive to receive it, having been gunned down by a communist firing squad
in 1946. As it turned out, helping to rescue the airmen was not enough to win the unchecked support
of the Allies, nor save the Chetniks from defeat at the hands of the Partisans. After the Partisans
liberated Serbia, the communists governed the country until the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1990.
As always, though, we're keen to hear what you think. Had you heard of Operation Halyard
before this video? Were you aware of the complex political climate inside of what was Yugoslavia?
Do you feel a little sorry for Mihailović? Please share your thoughts in the comments.