World War II Day by Day

Boljanić, German-Occupied Yugoslavia • December 27, 1944

On this date in December 1944 the last 20 U.S. air­men were extracted in a hazard­ous Balkan air rescue cour­tesy of the U.S. Office of Stra­te­gic Ser­vices (OSS), fore­runner to the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency (CIA). Oper­a­tion Hal­yard (aka Hal­yard Mis­sion) began nearly 5 months ear­lier on August 2, though it had been in the planning stage for over a half-month before that. The plan was to para­chute-drop a small team of OSS agents and some medi­cal sup­plies into a remote and rugged part of German-occupied Serbia. There several hun­dred cou­ra­geous Ser­bian villagers and almost 10,000 Chet­nik guer­rillas led by ex-Yugoslav Army colonel, now general Dragol­jub “Draža” Mihai­lović (also spelled Draja Mihai­lo­vich) sheltered and fed U.S. crew­men who had bailed out of flak-damaged air­craft over Yugo­sla­via on round-trip bombing runs from Allied-held Ital­ian air­strips to chiefly Roma­nian oil­fields. Roma­nia supplied as much as 35 per­cent of Axis petro­leum needs and had become Nazi Germany’s single most important fuel source.

Hal­yard’s team members were seconded to the U.S. Fif­teenth Air Force head­quartered on Italy’s east coast at Bari, which pro­vided both the long-range, four-engine bombers that both struck Roma­nian oil­fields and multi­ple refining and storage plants, the most famous being at Ploesti (Ploiești) 37 miles (60 kilo­meters) north of the capi­tal Bucha­rest, and the unarmed twin-engine C‑47 trans­ports that plucked the downed air­men from behind German lines. The covert rescue was the largest, most suc­cess­ful oper­a­tion of its kind in his­tory. Evac­u­ated irreg­u­larly over a 21‑week period were 432 U.S. and 80 Allied person­nel. Miraculously, not one rescue aircraft or person was lost.

After the first parachute insertion into the remote moun­tain village of Pran­jani, Mihai­lović’s head­quarters, by a 3‑man Hal­yard team on August 2, 1944, OSS oper­a­tives and Chet­nik guer­rillas assem­bled over 250 stranded air­men at the nearby newly length­ened Pran­jani landing strip dis­guised as a farm meadow. More air­men streamed into Pran­jani every day adding several hundred more to the head­count of men trapped behind enemy lines. As pre­viously men­tioned, the stranded fliers had been quar­tered in the cottages and barns of locals at great risk to their hosts and dis­persed over a 10‑mile radius. Twenty-six fliers awaiting evac­u­a­tion suf­fered from serious infections or had been injured or wounded.

On the clear but dark night of August 9/10 and twice in broad day­light the next morning, a total of 16 lum­bering C‑47 cargo planes piloted by the fear­less fliers of 60th Troop Carrier Com­mand flew 272 Allied men from enemy-held Serbia to safety in Italy. Separate from the rescued U.S. air­men were 4 French­men, 9 Ital­ians, 6 Brits, and 12 Soviets. The August 10 fighter escort duties for the two day­light streams of Pran­jani-bound C‑47 cargo planes were split between 50 or so single-engine North Amer­i­can P‑51 Mustangs and twin-engine Lockheed P‑38 Lightnings.

Scarcely missing a beat, some 210 additional air­men were evac­u­ated from Pran­jani on August 12, 15, and 18, again in C‑47s with fighter escorts. After that the Hal­yard Mis­sion was forced on its back foot by fes­tering ethnic and polit­ical con­flicts in war-torn Yugo­sla­via. The Chet­niks’ sworn ene­mies under com­mu­nist-leaning Parti­san leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito had, in fighting the German occu­piers, seized con­trol of all Yugo­slav pro­vinces save Serbia and parts of Bosnia. Mihai­lović’s Ser­bian war­riors, along with the Hal­yard team and the remaining downed U.S. air­men, were now in Tito’s cross­hairs as they fled their home base north to West­ern Serbia, taking sanc­tuary in the villages of Kocel­jeva and later Bol­janić, which is in today’s Bosnia and Herze­go­vina—all the while adding to their mot­ley col­lec­tion of stranded air­men. At Kocel­jeva’s impro­vised air­strip 20 air­men were evac­u­ated on Septem­ber 17, and from the Bol­janić air­strip 15 air­men on the first day of Novem­ber and 20 air­men on Decem­ber 27, the day Halyard quietly shut down.

OSS Halyard Mission, August 2 to December 27, 1944

Left: Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović (1893–1946) War I and by the mid‑1930s had achieved the rank of colonel in the Royal Yugo­slav Army. A royalist and nation­alist his whole life, Mihai­lović orga­nized the Chet­nik Detach­ments of the Yugo­slav Army (Chet­niks) into a guer­rilla force following the German inva­sion of Yu­go­sla­via in April 1941. In the long run the charis­ma­tic Serb leader remained anti-Axis but might col­lab­o­rate or merely reach an accom­mo­da­tion with German and Ital­ian occu­piers when he saw an advan­tage for his side; Mihai­lović called it “using the enemy.” At the end of 1943 both the U.S. govern­ment nudged by the British govern­ment, which in turn was nudged by a mole in the ser­vice of the Soviet Union to advance Tito’s cause and exag­gerate claims of Mihai­lović’s supposed trans­gres­sions and weak­nesses, with­drew their favor from what Time maga­zine once called (May 25, 1942) “the greatest guer­rilla fighter of Europe.” Mihai­lović’s unwa­vering desire to care for, safe­guard, and return at any cost downed Allied flyers across the Adri­atic Sea to safety in Italy in an OSS-spon­sored rescue oper­a­tion gar­nered Anglo-Amer­i­can appre­ci­a­tion short of military and financial aid.

Right: Center in photo, Chetnik resistance leader Gen. Draja Mihai­lović (1893–1946) con­verses with a group of his senior com­man­ders, May 1943, in the Lim River valley after a narrow escape from a failed German-Italian joint oper­a­tion (Case Black) against Tito’s Parti­sans and Mihai­lović’s Chet­niks in South­eastern Bos­nia and Her­ze­go­vina and Monte­negro. By the end of World War II, the Chet­niks’ ranks had been seriously depleted in a brutal civil war with their left-leaning Par­ti­san rivals. (To be fair, many Par­ti­sans were anti-German and nothing more.) Just a hand­ful of Chet­niks found sanc­tu­ary in a moun­tain­ous area. The hold­outs, including Mihai­lović, were cap­tured by troops of the new Tito govern­ment’s inter­nal security appa­ra­tus on March 13, 1946. The 50‑year‑old Chet­nik hero of Ser­bian resis­tance was tried and con­victed of high trea­son and war crimes in a Stalinist-style dog-and-pony show attended by over 1,100 spec­ta­tors and jour­nalists. Four months later Mihai­lović was exe­cuted by firing squad in Yugo­sla­via’s capital Belgrade and buried in an unmarked grave.

Left: In Operation Tidal Wave on August 1, 1943, an air armada of 177 four-engine B‑24s Liberators lifted off Libyan airstrips to bomb Romania’s Ploesti oil complex, the Wehrmacht’s “tap­root of German might,” said British Prime Minis­ter Win­ston Chur­chill. German and Romanian fighter air­craft and flak bat­teries shot down 54 planes, each with 10 or 12 crew­men. Another 53 planes were heavily damaged, most beyond repair. On their return flight many other air­craft were lost over land and sea. Though Allied recon­nais­sance flights con­firmed that damage to the Ploesti com­plex was signi­fi­cant, it was a hollow vic­tory. Allied bombers con­tinued hitting Ploesti over and over again until August 19, 1944, a week and a half before Soviet soldiers captured the oil complex.

Right: Hiding from German patrols while awaiting air rescue via Oper­a­tion Hal­yard, a group of weary U.S. fly­boys get some sleep in a hay­loft some­where in Yugo­sla­via. A coop­er­a­tive OSS-Chetnik effort to get downed air­men out of Nazi-occu­pied ter­ri­tory, Oper­a­tion Hal­yard was a remarkable success.

Left: At an airfield in Yugoslavia airmen load a wounded man into a C‑47 for trans­port to Italy, a 2‑hour flight away. (C‑47s were the milit­ary ver­sion of the DC‑3 pas­sen­ger plane.) During the course of their rescue oper­a­tions, the OSS and Chet­nik sol­diers suc­cess­fully returned over 500 downed air­men from Nazi-controlled territory in Yugoslavia to Allied bases.

Right: Smiling in anticipation of their return to Allied terri­tory, a group of downed air­men sit on hard metal seats aboard a C‑47 trans­port plane. This photo was taken during a flight from an air­strip at Kocel­jeva, North­western Serbia, on Septem­ber 17, 1944, when 17 air­men were flown to safety. Presi­dent Harry S. Truman, on the recom­men­da­tion of Gen. Dwight D. Eisen­hower, former supreme com­man­der of Allied forces in Europe (Decem­ber 1943 to Novem­ber 1945), post­hu­mously awarded Mihai­lo­vić the Legion of Merit Chief Com­man­der—the highest mili­tary award confer­red on a foreign national for ser­vice to the coun­try—for the rescue of U.S. and other Allied air­men by the Chet­niks. “Gene­ral Dra­gol­jub Mihai­lo­vich,” the cita­tion dated March 29, 1948, read “distin­guished him­self in an out­standing manner as Com­mander-in-Chief of the Yugo­sla­vian Army Forces and later as Minis­ter of War by orga­ni­zing and leading impo­rtant resis­tance forces against the enemy which occu­pied Yugo­slavia from Decem­ber 1941 to Decem­ber 1944. Through the undaunted efforts of his troops, many United States air­men were res­cued and returned safely to friendly con­trol. Gene­ral Mihai­lo­vich and his forces, although lacking ade­quate sup­plies, and fighting under extreme hard­ships, con­trib­uted materially to the Allied cause and were instru­mental in obtaining a final Allied victory.” The award and the story of the air­men’s rescue were classi­fied secret by the U.S. State Depart­ment so as not to offend the Yugo­slav government of President Tito (in office 1945–1980). The secret was revealed to the world in 1967.

Operation Halyard: The Greatest Rescue Mission of U.S. Airmen Behind Enemy Lines in History