Posted on 03/09/2008 8:42:14 AM PDT by Ravnagora
WWII airman recalls series of narrow escapes from behind enemy lines
By Bob Bauder, Times Staff
Published: Saturday, March 8, 2008 11:38 PM EST
Carl Walpusk has a soft spot in his heart for Serbia.
In 1944, Walpusk, of Moon Township, parachuted out of a sputtering B-24 bomber into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and the hands of a rag-tag band of Serbian guerilla fighters known as Chetniks.
For 33 days, the Chetniks escorted Walpusk and nine other members of his crew from one Serbian village to another — risking their lives and those of collaborating villagers — to keep the airmen safe from the German army.
Walpusk says he owes his life to the Serbs.
“The people there were poor,” he said. “They were mighty poor — chickens roosting in rafters over their kitchen table, dirt floors — but they’d give you anything they had.”
Led by Gen. Draza Mihailovich, the Chetniks and Serbian civilians did the same for hundreds of other downed American fliers during World War II. They later helped evacuate them from August to December 1944 in a series of secret airlifts known as Operation Halyard.
Orchestrated by the former U.S. Office of Strategic Services, Operation Halyard was the largest rescue of American soldiers from behind enemy lines during the war, according to Gregory A. Freeman, author of “The Forgotten 500, The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II.”
The mission was organized in Bari, Italy, by OSS control agent George Vujnovich, a 1933 graduate of Ambridge High School.
In all, 512 American and Allied soldiers were flown out of Yugoslavia during Operation Halyard.
Survivors of the mission — including Walpusk — have long maintained that Mihailovich and the Serbs never got the credit they deserved.
They blame that on politics aimed at placating Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s communist dictator, after the war. Tito and Mihailovich, who supported the abdicated Serbian monarchy, were sworn enemies. In 1946, Tito’s administration executed Mihailovich by firing squad.
“There was no reason not to support Mihailovich, and Tito was a known communist,” said Walpusk, 83. “It just goes to show you what politics can do, and that’s all it involved was politics. That and people getting the wrong information.”
‘You sat there and sweated’
Walpusk had one thing on his mind when he volunteered for flight duty aboard a B-24 bomber: getting home. The more missions he flew, the quicker he would be back home, and the 15th Air Corps base in Italy offered him the best opportunity of getting there.
In 1944, the 15th was making daily bombing runs over the Balkans.
One of its main targets, the most dangerous, was Romania’s Ploesti oil fields, which fueled a large portion of the German army.
To get there, the bombers had to cross the Adriatic Sea and a mountainous expanse of Yugoslavia. Then they had to contend with enemy fighters and artillery. Ploesti had plenty of both.
Walpusk, a machine gunner, could handle Messerschmitts. He was too busy to worry when the enemy planes attacked. But the artillery gave him chills.
Known to airmen as flak, the bursting shells jolted airplanes like bumper cars and sent sharp chunks of fiery steel slicing through fuselages. Pilots had no choice. They had to fly through it.
“Nothing you could do,” Walpusk said. “You sat there and sweated.”
Never a Dull Moment
Flak was so heavy around Ploesti that it was typical to return from a mission with several hundred holes in a bomber.
“That damn flak was so heavy that you thought you could get out and walk on the damn stuff,” Walpusk said.
It sent the bombers limping back to Italy. Many of them never made it. The crews ditched in the mountains of Yugoslavia. That’s what happened to Walpusk, but it was enemy fighters, rather than the flak, that disabled his plane, “Never a Dull Moment.”
They attacked after a bombing raid on July 14, 1944, disabling the rudder and hydraulics on Walpusk’s plane. It was dead in the sky. The pilot rang a bell that meant “get your butt out,” and Walpusk scrambled for a rear hatch. It was his first parachute jump.
“You don’t think. You just go,” he said. “You don’t have any time.”
Serbian Allies
Ten crew members made it out safely. The 11th was killed aboard the plane.
Walpusk, who lost his boots when his parachute opened, landed on a hill covered with low brush and boulders, spraining his ankle. He looked around and saw three guys with rifles.
Walpusk was behind enemy lines in a strange land. He couldn’t speak the language and had no idea how he might escape. He thought briefly about pulling his .45-caliber pistol, but then considered those rifles.
“One of them waived a white flag. Then I felt a little better,” he said.
For days, the shoeless Walpusk hiked the Serbian countryside with the Chetniks, picking up members of his crew along the way. They communicated with the Serbs through grunts and gestures until they met a crewman who could speak the language.
They slept in farmhouses and small villages. Walpusk said people who barely had enough to feed their families went without food to feed the Americans. They let the airmen sleep in their beds while they slept on dirt floors and in barns.
“I often wonder if the people here would be like that if the situation were reversed,” Walpusk said.
The group never stayed in one place more than a day. They had to keep moving to avoid Germans, and the villagers could not afford to feed them for much more than a day.
After walking for about three weeks — in some cases missing German patrols by a scant 30 yards — the group found its way to the village of Pranjane.
‘Lord, let us make this one’
Vujnovich was the head of OSS operations in Bari, Italy, when he heard about American airmen trapped in Yugoslavia. The Ambridge native, who had barely escaped the Nazis in Serbia before the war broke out, said there was no question in his mind about bringing them out.
“You had to do it,” he said.
Vujnovich, 92, who now lives in New York City, said the plan was to send in several OSS agents to coordinate the daring operation and secure a landing area, then send in planes to fly the soldiers out.
Arthur Jibilian of Fremont, Ohio, was one of those agents.
“We were sent in specifically to bring out allegedly 50 airmen,” he said. “It turned out to be more than 250.”
Before Jibilian left Yugoslavia six months later, he had a hand in evacuating 512 fliers.
Walpusk said he was in Pranjane about two days before the rescue operation. He was on the ground 33 days, but met others who had been in Yugoslavia for more than 100. Some of them were sick, wounded and starving.
On Aug. 9 and 10, the OSS evacuated 272 men, flying them back to Italy.
Walpusk said it was one of the happiest moments of his life and one of the scariest.
“You took off and you could barely make it up,” he said of the flight out of Pranjane. “Then you went down a long valley to pick up speed, and it was so narrow it looked like you would hit the trees. I said, ‘Lord. let us make this one.’ “
His prayers were answered.
Over the next six months Jibilian and other OSS agents continued collecting downed American and Allied fliers and flying them to safety. The last flight was around Dec. 26, 1944.
“We didn’t lose a plane. We didn’t lose a guy,” Vujnovich said 64 years later.
Salute Mihailovich
Walpusk said he will remain forever grateful to Mihailovich and the Serbian people for saving his life.
After the war ended, he re-enlisted in the Army and spent the next 30 years serving on active duty and full time in the National Guard. He retired as a colonel in 1984.
During those decades, Walpusk and others involved with Operation Halyard, including Vujnovich and Jibilian, lobbied fiercely for America to publicly commend Mihailovich.
They volunteered to testify during his trial in Yugoslavia before he was executed.
They petitioned the federal government to have a statue of Mihailovich erected in Washington, D.C.
All of their pleas were ignored.
Walpusk blames it on politics.
“They didn’t want to piss off Tito,” he said.
Bob Bauder can be reached online at bbauder@timesonline.com.
Great article, thanks from a life long Serb supporter and friend.
Clinton and NATO REPAID the enormous DEBT to the SERBIAN people by ganging up on a small nation of 10 million people bombing them for 79 days days dropping 23000 bombs killing thousands..
The injustices - the lies - the Orwellian propaganda disseminated——have destroyed the credibility of both organizations.
Mihailovich was a Mason.
BUMP for hero remembrance
There are so many myths out there about Mihailovich that it’s mind boggling. This is one of them. Mihailovich wasn’t a Mason. He was a Christian Orthodox Serb. And believe me, it cost him.
Had he truly been a Mason or whatever else he’s been accused of being, he would have met a very different fate.
The stories are amazing. These guys lived war when war was still somehow noble in all of its destruction.
They were truly the Greatest Generation and I’m priviliged and honored to have known many of them in my lifetime. I wish they would live forever.
Ping
I certainly have no direct knowledge as I was one year old at the time.
;O)
No worries, mate ! (I’ve always wanted to say that - ever since I saw “Crocodile Dundee” :)
There is a TON of disinformation out there about General Mihailovich, the primary of which is the whole “Collaboration” charge. People must never underestimate the power of propaganda and smear campaigns to get integrated into “history” and pass for “real” historical documentation. Nobody knows that better than the Serbs, both then and especially now.
Just pay attention to how often the same “buzz words” are used when the media or politicians and policymakers discuss the Serbs. Whenever you start hearing the same “buzz words” you know the “information” is suspect. Same applies for General Mihailovich and his Chetniks.
By the way,you being one year old at the time means you were alive when it was all happening which I cannot claim !
And it is shameful how the US has repaid the Serbs by betraying them to the Jihadists in Kosovo.
Things have never been made right. Imagine how the American veterans who were saved by the Mihailovich Serbs have felt all these years.
The U.S. policymakers throughout the 1990s and even today condemn Slobodan Milosevic (now deceased) and used Milosevic as the pretense for attacking the Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo.
HOWEVER, and this is a big HOWEVER, U.S. policymakers had no problem appeasing Josip Broz Tito after WWII until his death in 1980. Tito made Milosevic look like a pussycat.
This is one of those “Ironies” of foreign policy that is going to be difficult to reconcile.
The Serbian nation, in a nutshell.
Meanwhile, the Bosnians and the Albanians joined in the hunt for the American flyers.
And those are the people are government has chosen to support against the Serbian people.
Pure idiocy in a nutshell.
Well, TGJ, you’ve been squawking all over the place that those of us who support or are Serbs, Orthodox Christians, or Greeks are “treasonous” and not “loyal Americans”.
Do you say that about the WWII veterans (including the Serb-American OSS agents) in this article?
What is REALLY treasonous is handing our country over to the Muhammadans, their fifth columnists, and their shills, and helping them in their evil plots to conquer more and more Christian lands such as Kosovo !!!!
I know all about this, because we have a large fifth-columnist mosque in our area that spews anti-Serb and Russian, anti-Christian, and antisemitic hatred, and funds jihad all over the world. Yet the dhimmi and Dhimmwit politicians and “mainline” clergy cozy up to it.
It’s time to cut out the islamist and Dhimmwit cancer, and to support our Christian civilization, especially the Orthodox!!!!
BUMP for the greatest generation and how we have BETRAYED those who helped them survive.
Here’s something I hadn’t seen yet. It appears to be a mob of Mohammedan Bush/McCain supporters burning a Serbian Orthodox Church... a part of Bush’s legacy which Orthodox Christians will not soon forget. Notice them ripping down the crosses. This is what we are supporting with our money and what our troops are under orders from the Christian hating, Mohammedan dhimmi Bush to protect.
http://natapoume.pblogs.gr/2008/03/205798.html
TGJ, what precisely is the American interest being furthered here? What is your “loyal American” justification for this? Is it still your position that refusal to zombie-like salute the Bush policy which makes this possible is treason?
The Soviet Union was also America’s ally during World War II. The Soviets were well known for destroying Christian churches. Was it wrong to be an ally of the Soviet church-burners in World War II?
You really don’t see the difference? The greater enemy was German national socialism on the march in alliance with fascist movements all over Europe.
Now we stab our allies in the back—the same Serbian allies who are the staunchest defenders against Islamofascism. We prop up what Josef Broz fabricated.
Makes a lot of sense -— God help us.
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