For as long as I can remember, I knew my father was a bomber pilot during World War II. Evidence of it pervaded our home. A yellowed photo of a B-24 graced the fireplace mantle. Old uniforms gathered dust in our closets. Vintage garrison caps lay in my parent’s bedroom drawer, and I often borrowed one when I wanted to play soldier. Every autumn, my father dragged out his weather-beaten leather flight jacket to perform outdoor chores.
My siblings and I took all this for granted. Nearly every kid’s father was a World War II veteran. Ours seemed no different except for one thing. He was a bomber pilot who bailed out twice, first over Romania and then over Yugoslavia. Our mother must have told us so, because he never spoke of it.
We also knew our parents had met during the war, and that their wartime letters sat in a box in our attic. Still, we ignored them. None of us wanted to read the lovey-dovey stuff our parents once wrote to each other. We felt even more so as adults after they divorced. My mother said my father had returned from the war a different person than the one she had met. Most of their courtship had occurred via their correspondence. Maybe she had never really known him at all.
For too long, I ignored a clue that should have told me my father had done extraordinary things. During my high school years, I ran across Steve Birdsall’s Log of the Liberators, a classic World War II book about B-24 crews. On a whim, I looked for my father’s name in the index. To my surprise, it was there, along with a brief account of the second time he bailed out. My father was featured in a major historical work and did not know it! Yet when I showed the book to him, he displayed little interest other than to agree the story was roughly correct.
I grew up in the Generation Gap years, when fathers had little interaction with their children. My father felt like a stranger to me, and, no doubt, me to him. Asking him about the war seemed out of the question.
Eventually, I left our hometown to take a job. There seemed to be plenty of time to find out what happened to my father during the war. Decades passed.
In 1999, when my father was 77 years old, I finally examined my parents’ correspondence—1,200 letters in all. Half of them related the story of a green Army Air Forces (AAF) cadet as he learned how to fly and transformed into a battle-hardened bomber pilot. The others conveyed the tale of the girl he left behind and the hardships she and her family endured on the home front.
The letters introduced me to my father as a young man. To my vast surprise, I learned he had once been quite garrulous. Like many in the AAF, he had ample time between flights to write letters and seized these opportunities with relish. His voluminous correspondence presented a vivid, concise, and wryly humorous picture of life in the Army. Incapable of falsehood or bravado, he always portrayed himself in a self-critical and humble way. Somehow, he managed to convey wartime realities without unduly alarming my mother. Oftentimes, he subtly hid meanings between the lines to avoid the censor’s mark.
The letters prompted me to ask my father about his wartime adventures. While his memory proved exceptional, his answers were necessarily limited to his own experiences. His curiosity became as piqued as mine.
The natural next step was to talk to his old crew, so I enlisted my brother Frank—a bloodhound when it comes to such things—to help track them down. We discovered that some of them had recently passed away. I had nearly started too late.
In the beginning, I had no intention of writing a book. The story of my father’s first bailout provided fodder for family legend, or maybe a magazine article, but no more. His B-24 was damaged over Blechhammer, a critical German synthetic fuel plant, and he knew the plane would not make it all the way back to his base in Italy.
The conventional move would have been to head for the Russian lines in Poland. My father knew, however, that heavy fighting awaited him on the Eastern Front. Drunken Russian pilots, untrained in aircraft recognition, often attacked US bombers. The Warsaw Uprising had just been crushed, and the Red Army’s complicity turned his stomach. He would not take his crew to Poland if he could help it.
He also knew of an American delegation in Bucharest processing recently liberated POWs shot down during the Ploesti raids. Romania might be three times as far as Poland, but it was less dangerous and US officials awaited him there.
My father weighed his plane’s altitude, rate of descent, and fuel consumption in his head. He opted to fly to Romania over the strong objections of his copilot.
His gamble paid off, but just barely. His engines failed just after he passed the German lines, and he bailed out from an altitude so low the jump should have killed him.
During my many years of research, I have never found any record of any other pilot who attempted to reach Romania from a target near Poland. Still, my father and his crew were missing for only a week and never faced danger once they reached the ground.
It was only when I researched his second bailout that I realized he had participated in historic, yet previously unexplored events.
I discovered that a dozen crews besides my father’s had abandoned their crippled bombers over Yugoslavia in November and December 1944. Most of these airmen found sanctuary with the Partisan underground forces in a Bosnian town called Sanski Most, but retreating German forces surrounded the area and the airmen became stranded there. The several efforts to retrieve them rank among the largest-scale air rescue operations of that theater during the war.
My research had ventured into unchartered territory. Over four-fifths of the 2,500 Allied airmen downed in Yugoslavia during World War II were aided by Marshall Tito’s Partisans. Nevertheless, most of the literature centered on the help provided by the Partisans’ bitter rivals, the Chetniks led by General Draza Mihailovic. Strangely, no work had yet been devoted to the far more significant assistance rendered by the Partisans.
Despite the myriad histories devoted to World War II, the full story of Allied fliers who bailed out over Yugoslavia during the war remained untold.
I set out to remedy the oversight.
* * *
Since I held a demanding job, I knew I would not finish writing until after I retired. Instead, I focused on interviewing all the participants I could find. Over the next couple years, my father—and sometimes my brother Frank—accompanied me on research trips to Ohio, Chicago, and Connecticut.
We discovered one veteran just in time. Fred Scherer was dying of cancer. His family gathered to witness his reminiscences with my father and videotaped the interview for posterity. Scherer died less than six months after the interview.
My father and I also ventured to Maxwell Field, Alabama, where he had trained as a cadet. The base is the site of the Air Force Historical Research Agency (AFHRA). We had ordered a few microfilms by mail, but had not yet ascertained the identities of all the downed airmen. By good fortune, or perhaps Providence, my father was the one who happened upon the mother lode of Escape Statements that documented their stories. I had never seen him so excited in my life.
In April 2004, I telephoned Herman “Herky” Marrone, a pilot who led one of the crews sheltered in Sanski Most. He showed interest in the project, and we agreed I would soon visit him for an interview. A few weeks later, his daughter reached out to me. Marrone’s heart had failed a few days before; his family considered my research to be so important they called me the afternoon of his funeral.
Bad luck, I thought, but the worst was yet to come.
The next month, my father attended the dedication of the long-overdue World War II Memorial at the National Mall in Washington DC, accompanied by his five children and most of his thirteen grandchildren. It was a glorious, sundrenched day enjoyed by all. Veterans signed autographs like rock stars.
The day after he returned home, he died, stricken by a heart attack like Marrone.
It had not occurred to me his end might be so near. Deep in denial, I had ignored the signs of his declining health. I consoled myself that my father did not suffer long and that he died knowing I would someday tell his story.
I would not let him down, though the effort took much longer than I anticipated.
* * *
Over the next couple of years, I traveled all over the country interviewing dozens of other veterans. I could think of no better way to spend my time or my inheritance. After I talked to most of the living airmen, I sought out the families of those who had passed. Luckily, several deceased airmen had been interviewed by others or had written accounts of their adventures.
I also unearthed declassified documents in the National Archives that had remained largely unexplored since the war. I read every available book concerning the air war, the internecine struggle in Yugoslavia, and Allied intelligence activities in that country, including several out-of-print volumes. I assembled what is likely the largest privately held collection of archival data on those topics in the United States.
Every source stressed the unique nature of World War II aerial warfare. At this late stage of the war, anti-aircraft guns were the main sources of danger to bomber crews. The Germans suspended immense fields of exploding flak shells over key targets. To best aim their bombs, the airmen flew straight and steady through the maelstrom. Unlike the ground war, the danger erupted three-dimensionally. Evasive action was not an option. There was no place to hide. There was no defense. Either a red-hot, jagged piece of steel had your name on it or it didn’t. The feeling of helplessness could become overpowering.
And the airmen flew 35 combat missions before they went home—if they could avoid being killed or captured in the meantime.
Unsurprisingly, some of them cracked under the pressure. Two crews had men bail out without orders, actions tantamount to mutiny. In another crew, an airman panicked and blocked the main exit from the plane when his pilot ordered the men to jump. My father was forced to push a reluctant crewman out of his dying aircraft during his second bailout.
I also wanted to know the context of the airmen’s missions. What were they trying to accomplish when they got shot down? How did they help win the war?
Here I encountered another under-researched aspect of the war. The airmen were members of the Fifteenth Air Force stationed in Italy. Often overshadowed by the larger Eighth Air Force based in Great Britain, the Fifteenth’s contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany is one of the lesser-known aspects of World War II.
After the Germans lost the Ploesti oil complex to the Russians in August 1944, most of their fuel was produced by synthetic oil plants converting coal into gasoline. Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, had wisely placed these installations in the eastern Reich, outside the range of the Mighty Eighth. German motorized forces could not function without these facilities, and only the Fifteenth Air Force could reach them.
Most of my airmen participated in the Allies’ little-known Oil Blitz of late 1944, which was designed to destroy Germany’s oil production once and for all. Many of the crews, including my father’s, were downed during raids against the synthetic oil plants—a testament to the ferocious defenses the Germans mounted to protect these vital assets.
The Battle of the Bulge began soon after most of the airmen were shot down. Those sheltered in Sanski Most first heard about the surprise attack via a BBC radio broadcast. The Germans had surrounded an American army in Bastogne. It seemed the Wehrmacht might push the Allies off the continent. These airmen could not know the enemy offensive was beginning to grind to a halt. Due to the Oil Blitz, the Germans had stockpiled only a five-day supply of fuel for the attack. Hundreds of Wehrmacht tanks and trucks were already running out of gasoline. By starving the Nazi war machine, the airmen languishing in God-forsaken Yugoslavia had contributed to the decisive victory won in distant Belgium.
* * *
Beyond the airmen’s experiences in the air, I wanted to understand the situation they encountered in Yugoslavia, a daunting task considering the region’s complex political and cultural landscape.
The bloodletting in Yugoslavia was the most savage in Europe during the war. Most of the country’s million casualties—many of them civilians—resulted from genocidal internecine infighting among the Communist Partisans, the mostly Serbian Chetniks, Muslim militias and Croatian extremists. The deep passions of these ethnic, religious and ideological divisions continue today.
I traced the shifting relations between the Allies and the two rival resistance groups, the Partisans and the Chetniks. Early in the war, the British embraced General Mihailovic as the heroic leader of the Yugoslavian resistance. Soon, however, they realized he was reluctant to fight and often colluded with the Axis powers. Meanwhile, Marshal Tito’s Partisans proved to be a far more willing and able guerilla force.
For a time, the British tried sending aid to both factions, but soon learned they were more likely to use the arms against each other than to fight the Italians and Germans. Churchill needed to pick one side or the other. Eventually, he supported the Communist Partisans over the conservative Chetniks, a decision that remains controversial today.
A recent bestseller, The Forgotten 500, along with a few other revisionist texts, postulates that a Communist spy ring in Cairo duped Churchill into backing the Partisans by feeding him false information.
My research clearly refutes this claim. It proves that Churchill used multiple sources of intelligence to astutely assess the relative strengths and will-to-fight of the two competing factions. He correctly chose the side which met his test of “killing the most Germans.”
These machinations had a direct impact on my airmen as they struggled to avoid capture or death behind enemy lines. One of the reason Churchill decided to back the Partisans is that they controlled far more territory and were thus in a better position to aid downed Allied fliers.
But not all my airmen found sanctuary with the Partisans in Sanski Most. About a third of them were killed, captured, or were picked up by General Mihailovic’s Chetniks. I followed their paths as well. This research allowed me to compare the very different treatment of the downed airmen by the Chetniks as opposed to the Partisans.
* * *
Whatever their fates, the airmen I studied were a remarkable group of individuals. Each volunteered for their elite branch of the service and passed rigorous physical and mental standards. Only the “best of the best” became officers. The quality of their intellects illuminated their interviews. Unfailingly, their recollections proved to be clear and unembellished. They rarely contradicted each other. Most of their claims withstood meticulous fact-checking.
Many of them stemmed from interesting backgrounds. Jim Martin, for example, grew up in a deeply religious family. His brother, Paul, requested a conscientious objector exemption from the draft, an extremely unpopular moral position at the time. While Jim flew missions against Nazi Germany, the US government confined Paul to a work camp where he labored without pay because Congress would not appropriate any funds to support the objectors. Their father, a missionary, liked to say that Jim was fighting to protect Paul’s right to religious freedom.
Over one-tenth of the downed airmen spoke foreign languages because they were immigrants or the sons of immigrants. Tom Tamraz’s family had fled from Persia to escape the Assyrian genocide. His ability to speak Turkish helped the airmen negotiate with the many Muslim merchants in Bosnia. Cletus Kramer survived as a POW only because he grew up speaking German and he was able to talk his captors out of shooting him. Jan Wroclawski fled from occupied Poland to escape arrest by the Gestapo. The several languages he picked up while crossing Nazi-controlled Europe enabled him to elude capture after he bailed out into Yugoslavia. Various airmen who spoke Italian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, and Ukrainian aided interactions with the locals in Sanski Most.
* * *
My mother liked to remind me that her correspondence with my father told her story as well as his. While the home front was not my main focus, I always asked my interviewees if they had stories about their families receiving the MIA telegrams. Often the veterans’ wives sat in on the interviews, and those who knew their husbands during the war offered their perspectives on the events of the time.
Most of the airmen were downed just before the Christmas of 1944. Universally, they worried the news would ruin their families’ holiday. Tom Stack had failed to tell his mother he was flying combat missions. He knew the MIA notice would be doubly shocking because he had not prepared her.
Ted Keiser’s mother awoke in the middle of the night to discover her husband was not in bed. She found him sitting in his favorite chair in their living room. “Ted’s in trouble,” he lamented, “and I can’t help him.” Accounting for the time difference, their son had just bailed out over Yugoslavia.
* * *
I was surprised to learn that—contrary to popular belief—World War II veterans did not return home to a plethora of victory parades after the war. While they received a warm welcome from their families, everyone just wanted to get on with their lives. The veterans were so ubiquitous they stood as unnoticed as trees in a forest.
Many of my airmen took advantage of the GI Bill, entered professions, businesses, or trades, and enjoyed prosperous careers and successful personal lives. Several became career Air Force men or joined the reserves.
Others fared less well.
While a certain amount of help was available from the Veterans’ Administration, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not as understood then as it is today. Several of my airmen felt its effects. They suffered a high mortality rate as they grew older. A quarter of those who survived the war died before they could collect social security.
My father married my mother as soon as he was discharged from the service. She wore a wedding dress made from the parachute he carried across Yugoslavia. A local newspaper printed their story and an accompanying photograph on its front page. The wire services picked up the article and it appeared in other papers across the country.
It would have been a nice fairy tale ending if they had lived happily ever after.