It was Tsar Lazar's choice, was it not my Balkan brother?
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.
Today the fascist threat is coming from Moscow, which supports islamofascist jihad all over the world from Sudan to Iran. Your fascist hero Vladimir Putin has riled up ethnic Russian minorities in former Soviet Republics just like Hitler did with Sudeten Germans. He has persecuted Russians of Georgian descent as well as other ethnic minorities and he has nationalized Russia's energy industry, just like his comrade Hugo Chavez in Venezeula. Putin has armed the antisemitic nazi Chavez as well as Iran and Hizballah to help them wipe Israel off the map. Fascist Russia is a menace to the whole world.
Anything to say about the video and what it says about that man Bush and what he supports in America’s name?
If there were time left, and I understand there isn’t, do you think a president who supports the destruction of Christian communities, who this year will pay over $375,000,000.00 of the taxpayers’ dollars to finance that Mohammedan destruction should be impeached and tried and convicted in the Senate of high crimes and misdemeanors? If not, why not? Is the financing of Mohammedan terrorism a crime against humanity which might be actionable in some tribunal?
I’m not sure if you mean “The Serbian nation in a nutshell” as a compliment or as sarcasm in reference to the quoted statement in the article you are referring to.
But you are right. That is how the Serbs are. If they are guilty of anything, it is that they will always treat strangers better than they treat each other and themselves. That includes their enemies. If any group of people ever lived the Christian command to ‘forgive those who have trespassed against them’ and ‘love thy enemy’, it is the Serbs.
And they have paid and paid and paid for it.
But, God sees everything and in the end everything will come out in the wash.
Thanks very much for posting this portrait of General Mihailovich. It was painted by Wisconsin portrait artist Jim Pollard.
The main menace to the stability of the world is Saudi Arabia not little ‘ol Venezuela FGS! Russia is moving to the side of the Saudis and leaving the Iranians in the dust. We are being morally bankrupted by our foreign policy based on a narrowly defined business model and a romantic idealization of the Muslim world and has been further undermined by cold war dinosaurs who are incapable of understanding the world before the Bolshevik revolution.
Very sad.
“Thanks very much for posting this portrait of General Mihailovich. It was painted by Wisconsin portrait artist Jim Pollard.”
I think it captures the innate nobility of the man. At one point the portrait hung in the +Sava Center in Milwaukee. I don’t know if it still does.
I had never thought of that Eleni mou, but you are absolutely right. Bush and Clinton and their crowd really have absolutely no appreciation of that world at all and certainly no understanding or acceptance of the fact that that 2000 year old Orthodox Christian culture is still very, very much alive and filled with an intention to continue to live despite the best efforts of arrogant Western sodomite secularists and their allies the savage Mohammedans. Looked at from the long view of Orthodox history, the present disastrous conduct of Bush foreign policy looks not only destined for failure, but also both silly and pretentious.
I’m pretty sure it does.
“Innate nobility” is so right. General Mihailovich was not a vain main. He didn’t wear fancy uniforms and medals and such. He was not a Prima Donna. If you weren’t paying attention, you could easily mistake him for one of his guerrilla fighters. He was also a man of his people. But he was also an educated, insightful and wise man. He was warning his countrymen and leaders before the war ever came what the long term consequences would be for Yugoslavia should the war come to their homeland.
He was right.
It was Tsar Lazar's choice, was it not my Balkan brother?
Great insight, Eleni121.
If one studies the pre-World War One world one would discover that it was quite modern and progressive in many ways. Though “progress” is often viewed through a post WWI prism (and indeed, the Great War was responsible for much modernization) there is a great deal to be said for the “old civilization”.
Serbs have been around for a long, long time. And they have behaved in a far more civilized way than those who would condemn them as “barbaric”.
To understand Kosovo, one must know the story of Tsar Lazar. He chose the kingdom of heaven over the earthly kingdom when the Turks attacked the Serbs in 1389 on the fields of Kosovo. It was in that righteous defeat, a defeat that relegated the Serbs to 500 years of Ottoman Empire rule, hence the emergence of the “Bosnian Moslems”, where the history and soul of Kosovo lies.
No one said it better than British historian William Harold Temperley in 1918:
“There is no race which has shown a more heroic desire for freedom than the Serbs or achieved it with less aid from others or at more sacrifice to itself.”
“To understand Kosovo, one must know the story of Tsar Lazar. He chose the kingdom of heaven over the earthly kingdom when the Turks attacked the Serbs in 1389 on the fields of Kosovo. It was in that righteous defeat, a defeat that relegated the Serbs to 500 years of Ottoman Empire rule, hence the emergence of the “Bosnian Moslems”, where the history and soul of Kosovo lies.”
The rootless people who populate the elites of this country haven’t a clue about that sort of history. For those of us with an ancestry from the Orthodox world, 1389 or a Tuesday in May, 1453 are as real as yesterday. Some of us even know the names of our ancestors who participated in the events of those days. These were our bedtime stories and are the stories we have passed on to our children.
But not the Bushes or the Clintons of this world and even less so the people who advise them. They are lucky if they comprehend the week old dynamics of inter-county rivalries 5 miles beyond the outer limits of Peoria. Kyrie Eleison!
And you support the burning of Christian Churches in Kosovo, apparently.
Closing your eyes to the Islamofascist threat.
Maybe when the next 9/11 happens, if you lose someone you care about, you’ll realize your errors.
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