The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II, by Gregory Freeman (Penguin, 2007, 313 pages, $16.00)
Human Compassion. Loyalty. Redemption. Heroism. Self-Sacrifice.
It is the rare nonfiction book indeed that reads like a fast-paced novel, but The Forgotten 500 is one such book. An exciting adventure with breathless twists and turns.
Too Thrilling?
It is World War II and American bombers were shot down over enemy territory, many of them over Yugoslavia on their way to or from bombing oil production sites in Romania. Parachuting from their wounded plane before it crashed, they were welcomed by the overwhelming generosity of Serbian people in small, isolated mountain villages. American crews were kissed and hugged, fed and given overnight accommodations before being escorted onward, away from German-occupied areas. And other groups of guerrillas escorting other Americans would run into each other and join up until there were hundreds of Americans hidden in the mountain villages.
Their next mission: how to get word out that they were still alive and how to get back to their base to fight again.
Meanwhile, mothers and wives back home would receive telegrams. . . .
Cliffhangers on Every Page
Author Gregory Freeman has done an incredible amount of research and interviewed surviving members of Operation Halyard. The Forgotten 500 is non-fiction that reads like fiction: it is that spellbinding. If only Freeman had written my history textbook. . . .
I changed my mind about some of World War 2's participants. I learned about diplomatic spats between the Brits and the American State Department (at times at war with the Pentagon). I changed my mind about Croatian Tito: it's true he and his partisans united the various factions to make Yugoslavia after the war (later, Communist) but his rival Serbian Mihailovich and the monarchists also fought the Nazis and would not undertake missions if they were too risky. It was this latter group that saved and shielded the airmen for many months yet because of a spy in British Intelligence, the Free World preferred Tito's group and stopped supporting Mihailovich, incorrectly believing erroneous information about his collaborating with the Nazis.
"You Were There" for the Birth of the OSS
Chapters alternate between the growing group of airmen and a few individuals of Wild Bill Donovan's OSS (the precursor to the CIA). One such individual, an American of Eastern European descent, was attending college for a few years in Belgrade when he fell in love with a young Yugoslav woman when war broke out in Europe. Nevertheless, they married but spent two harrowing years trying to flee from Nazi-held territory, a chapter that you will read with bated breath as the young couple split up to travel alone and later met, over and over again, barely escaping one thrilling Nazi encounter after another. Truly, truth is stranger than fiction.
You know how the book ends, hundreds of Americans are rescued, but you will read on to find out exactly how (a small part of the narrative) and what led up to such an improbable mission.
The airmen even managed to create a secret code and transmit information to their base in Italy about their numbers and location.
What We Would Change
The title: the 500 or so airmen were not really forgotten. . . .
(And for the locals, Pittsburgh was mentioned and even Ft. Meade)
