By the summer of 1944 the Fifteenth Air Force had lost 350 bombers over the Ploiesti oil fields, and a great many of the men who fell out of them came down in occupied Serbia. They were not captured. They were hidden — in barns, in hayricks, in villages where the Germans hanged people for far less.

The problem was what to do next. There were hundreds of them, scattered across the hills, being fed by peasants who had almost nothing to give. And the only way out was up.

What followed was the largest airlift rescue of Allied airmen from behind enemy lines in the Second World War, and one of the least known.

A runway dug by hand

On the night of 2 August 1944, three men dropped into the hills near Pranjani: 1st Lieutenant George Musulin of the OSS and two enlisted men, one of them a U.S. Navy radio operator named Arthur Jibilian. Jibilian would stay for the entire operation, from the first night to the last.

What Musulin found was a strip on a narrow mountainside plateau, far too short for a loaded C-47. So the villagers made it longer. Around 300 workmen and sixty ox carts widened and extended the dirt runway to roughly 1,800 by 150 feet, working largely at night. It was still, by any reasonable standard, marginal.

There was no radar, no approach lighting and no diversion airfield. For the first night lift the runway was marked with kerosene lamps; for the daylight lifts, with strips of parachute silk. The men who flew it knew exactly what they were being asked to do.

The first night

Six C-47s left Italy on the evening of 9 August 1944. Two turned back with engine trouble. The remaining four found the field, landed on the dirt, loaded twelve men apiece and left. Six more came at dawn on 10 August, and another six an hour after that, this time taking up to twenty men each.

Twenty-five P-51 Mustangs escorted the morning wave, strafing targets in the area so the whole thing would read to German ears as a routine air strike rather than an evacuation. It worked. Not one aircraft was lost across the entire operation.

What the villagers gave

The airmen were not hidden by an army. They were hidden by farmers. That distinction is the heart of the story, and the men who came home never stopped saying so.

The lifts continued through the autumn from two further strips, and the last two C-47s came in on 27 December 1944, escorted by sixteen P-38 Lightnings, landing on ground frozen just hard enough to take the weight. One of them was flown by Colonel George Kraigher, who commanded the rescue unit and chose to fly the final trip himself.

How many, exactly

This is where the story gets slippery, and it is worth being straight about it. The archival flight records used by the official U.S. Air Force history and by a 1977 Air War College study total 417 people flown out: 343 American airmen, 8 British airmen, and 66 others — civilians who had escaped German labour camps, plus French, Italian and Yugoslav personnel.

A 1946 OSS summary gives 512, made up of 432 Americans and 80 other Allied personnel, and that is the figure repeated in most books, on memorial plaques and in U.S. government commemorations. Both numbers are honestly sourced. Neither is a fabrication. The lower one comes from the loading records; the higher one from a wartime intelligence tally.

The best-known documentary account of the operation is below.

The politics afterwards were ugly. Mihailovic was executed by the postwar Yugoslav government in 1946. President Truman awarded him the Legion of Merit in 1948, but the citation was classified and was not handed to his daughter until 2005. The airmen he sheltered spent decades campaigning for that recognition.

A longer treatment, with veteran interviews, follows.

And the field itself is still there, in the hills above Pranjani, looking like nothing at all.

Sources: William M. Leary, Fueling the Fires of Resistance, Air Force History and Museums Program, 1995; Cdr. Thomas T. Matteson, Air War College study, 1977; U.S. Department of Defense / DVIDS; Fifteenth Air Force Association.