America in WWII - (Page 66) A BOOKS AND MEDIA The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II, by Gregory A. Freeman, Penguin, 336 pages, $23.95. T untold stories of World War II is dwindling fast, but author Gregory Freeman has come up with one that, in his retelling, is full of romance, action, and adventure. It is the story of how the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) rescued 500 downed Allied airmen, mostly Americans, far behind enemy lines in a daring and seemingly impossible operation. One of the great strategic priorities of the war was to deny the Nazis access to oil. They relied on the refineries of Ploesti, Romania, for most of their petroleum needs. Destroy the 19 square miles of refining facilities there, and the Germany army would grind to a halt. Once the Allies were in southern Italy, Ploesti topped the list of strategic targets for British and American bomb crews. They flew thousands of sorties over what was the most heavily defended target outside the Reich itself. Inevitably, the B-24 Liberators and B-17 Flying Fortresses got through, but at great cost. Clouds of flak and swarms of Nazi fighters took their toll HE NUMBER OF OCTOBER 2007 of machines and men. Hundreds of aircrew were obliged to bail out of their craft over German-occupied Yugoslavia, where the Nazis battled the most widespread and vigorous resistance organizations in Europe. Crews were told that their best bet would be to bail out over territory controlled by Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito and his Partisans, who could be relied on to take good care of downed Americans. The airmen were warned that if they landed in territory controlled by the anti-communist Yugoslav general Draz ˇa Mihailovic and his Chetnik guerilla army, ´ they could expect to be turned over to the Nazis with their ears cut off. Nothing could have been less true. Mihailovic´ and his men were more than just pro-American; they revered the fighting men of the US Army Air Forces, who brought the war to the enemy under the most hazardous of conditions. Far from having his ears cut off by angry peasants, the American airman parachuting into Serbian territory could count on receiving all possible aid from the impoverished inhabitants. They would feed and care for their American friends, even if it meant going without adequate food for themselves. They would risk their lives and the lives of everyone in the region to keep the American airmen out of the hands of the hated Germans. Mihailovic´ went to great pains to safeguard his guests, to gather them in a central and well-protected location, and to ceaselessly petition the Allies to rescue their own men. Those pleas fell on deaf ears. Minds were closed to Mihailovic and ´ the Chetniks because they were fighting a double war, one against the Germans and one against Tito’s Partisans, who meant to establish a communist dictatorship in Yugoslavia at the end of the war. Communist moles in both the OSS and the British secret services propagandized their governments from within, painting Mihailovic as ´ a collaborator with the Nazis who only pretended to fight the Germans. The intelligence moles meanwhile heaped great praise on Tito and the Partisans, puffing up their achievements and even crediting them with successes that rightfully belonged to the Chetniks. In the end, the communist moles got their wish. The British government, which deeply interfered in Yugoslav affairs, backed Tito and turned Mihailovic´ into a non-person. At the insistence of Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt concurred and cut off all American aid to the Chetniks. Despite this massive betrayal by the 66 AMERICA IN WWII
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