Chapter One
Lawrence of Yugoslavia: An Allied Awakening inside a Civil War
Together we were close to each other in body and soul But did the mountains divide us Or the rivers? As David saith, ye mountains of Gilboa Let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, For Saul you did not save, nor Jonathon, O the mercifulness of David O ye kings, O hear Is it Saul you are bewailing, O Founder? For I found, saith the Lord, A man after my own heart. -Homage to Love, Serbian sacred poetry, Prince Stefan Lazarevic to his brother Prince Vuk Lazarevic, thirteenth century
In the autumn of 1943, a tall, gallant officer from the American wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), crisscrossed the mountains of Partisan-held Serbia and Bosnia on horseback and on foot in search of lost and wounded American airmen who, en route from Allied air bases in Italy to the Axis-coveted oil fields at Ploesti, in Romania, had been shot down by German air patrols. The thirty-two-year-old, Minnesota-born-and-bred major Linn M. "Slim" Farish was a multitalented engineer who specialized in the building of aerodromes and had previously worked all over the world as an oil geologist, but he was known in the OSS as "Lawrence of Yugoslavia," for his epic-worthy stoic heroism in that broken land and his passionate concern for its political and democratic future.
Farish would hardly have described himself in such romantic terms, but others did. His "ability, integrity, loyalty, unselfish devotion to duty and great love for his fellow men caused him to be held in the highest respect, admiration, and affection by Americans, British and Yugoslavs," one OSS report commented on the charismatic leader of the rescue mission. He was so impatient for action that he enlisted in the Canadian army before America''s entry into the war in order to get onto the battlefields of World War II as quickly as possible. Farish''s daring alarmed even his future boss, OSS director William J. Donovan, who was also known for his enthusiastic pursuit of heroic missions. Donovan warned Farish that if he did not stop his search for the downed airmen, the young adventurer would collapse from exhaustion. "Major Farish refused to listen to our protests," wrote one OSS officer in a memo summarizing Donovan''s plea, "because he knew that American airmen (some of them wounded) were in hourly peril and he was confident he could bring them out safely." The stubborn Farish ignored the appeals of the willful Donovan, and into the summer of 1944 he continued to comb the mountains of Serbia in hopes of finding his missing comrades.
For over two and a half years before Farish''s arrival, Yugoslavia had been embroiled in a violent civil war within the larger World War II southeast-Balkan theater. This civil war pitted the Partisan-Communist forces of that country and the royalist-nationalist Chetniks against each other; both of these groups fought against the Axis-controlled terror of the Croatian Ustase, whose main target, in turn, was the Serbian population in general. Farish, Stanford University educated and a former Olympic star, had been named the OSS''s senior American officer in the Anglo-American Mission to Tito''s Yugoslav National Liberation Army, made up that autumn of around 300,000 men organized across eleven corps and numerous divisions, brigades, and squadrons. Farish arrived on that mission by parachute on September 16, 1943, with British brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, serving under the aristocratic Scotsman''s command, while himself serving as commanding officer of a sub-mission to locate downed airmen and organize their evacuation from Yugoslavia. Traveling thousands of miles over mountainous terrain through enemy territory, Farish located and developed the first evacuation landing strips in Yugoslavia within remote, hard-won pockets of anti-Axis resistance. His intelligence gathering would serve as the basis for the Anglo-American supply program to the Partisans. He was "a large rugged man like a bear, with an amiable grin," wrote Maclean of his American mission partner in his memoir Eastern Approaches. "Call me ''Slim,''" said Farish to his equally passionate British counterpart, and thus began what Maclean described as an excellent friendship and working partnership between the two men-although one, it will be seen, quietly rife with Anglo-American rivalry.
The extraordinary distances Farish crossed in the Balkans resulted in his aiding in the rescue of around a hundred American and Allied airmen with the help of fellow mission members and the Partisans themselves. Farish would undertake three missions to Yugoslavia, including additional briefing missions to OSS headquarters in Cairo and to OSS chief Donovan in Washington, D.C., between September 1943 and the early summer of 1944, with one final visit in August 1944. The missions included Farish''s arrival at Tito''s then headquarters at Jajce, in western Bosnia, during September and October 1943 to locate landing grounds for the future evacuation of downed airmen, and again in January and March 1944, when Farish and fellow officer Lieutenant Eli Popovich met with Tito personally to ask for the Partisan leader''s aid in helping the organization of those rescues. Farish would return once again in April through June 1944, this time to Macedonia as part of the OSS''s Columbia mission with Popovich and wireless transmission operator Arthur Jibilian. Despite the constant menace of Axis forces, Farish''s operations in Yugoslavia were successful across the board, owing, as he saw it, to the well-organized Partisans, whom he admired greatly and whom he found, as a resistance movement, to be "comparable with the American revolutionary war."
The first American flyer to be evacuated from Yugoslavia was a P-47 pilot, Lieutenant Gerald Johnson, who, in January 1944, had been rescued from the Yugoslav mainland by the Partisans and later evacuated from the Adriatic island of Vis, Tito''s Partisan headquarters as of November 1943, under Farish''s direction. When Lieutenant Johnson mentioned that he had not been adequately briefed prior to his mission regarding the free areas in Yugoslavia, Farish obtained some maps and outlined those areas of Yugoslavia where Axis forces had no immediate presence. These became the first accurate escape maps developed for the use of the U.S. Army Air Corps in Yugoslavia.
Farish''s success in evacuating the airmen was largely the result of the OSS decision to enhance its mission presence and its military aid to the Partisans in early 1944, following the general exploration of Partisan territory that Farish undertook in the autumn of 1943 under Brigadier Maclean''s command. Farish was still attached to Maclean''s mission when he returned to Yugoslavia for the third time, on a mission to Macedonia formally under the command of British major John Henniker-Major, on April 16, 1944. Accompanied once again by the American lieutenant Eli Popovich and Arthur Jibilian, Farish parachuted into German-held territory in Macedonia in Vranje, near the border of Bulgaria. Their immediate assignment was to locate areas in enemy territory suitable for use as landing fields that would make it possible to rescue downed American and Allied airmen, whose numbers were starting to reach into the hundreds.
The first four airmen the three encountered were the survivors of an attempted air raid on the Ploesti fields, who had landed near Skopje and were brought to Major Farish by the Macedonian Partisan leader General Mihailo Apostolski, who would accompany Farish, Jibilian, and Popovich during the time they were in Macedonia. When the Partisans around Vranje suddenly came under attack by Bulgarian and Chetnik forces, the party ended up marching six days and five nights "almost entirely without sleep" and under fire for most of that time. After crossing the main Skopje-Nis (Serbia) railway line on April 23, 1944, they passed again through enemy lines at Leskovac, located in southern Serbia on the direct route to Salonika, "in the full light" of Axis searchlights used to protect the entrance to the city, once one of Serbia''s most flourishing.
Confronted with what would become an ongoing threat from Axis forces, the men left Leskovac, crossing enemy lines near the area of Toplica, in the southeastern corner of Serbia, near the Macedonian border and surrounded by the wild Kopaonik Mountains. AtToplica, Farish''s party established a makeshift headquarters in the Radan Mountains, one of the largest mountain ranges in southern Serbia. Ever on the move from hostile Bulgarian troops, the men later passed under a rain of rifle fire through the enemy lines to the Macedonian mountain chain known as the Bela Kamen, where the Serbians and their French and British allies had fought decisive battles at the Salonika Front in 1917 and 1918. Over the course of several miserable weeks in this Macedonian outback, and directing themselves toward the Serbia-Kosovo border, Farish finally found a site he considered suitable for use as a landing field for evacuations: Lipovica, a prominent village with a nearby airfield, located near where the borders of Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia meet.
Farish''s first rescue was of two American airmen who had been wounded in a parachute descent and trapped near a Bulgarian garrison. Farish rounded up horses from the Macedonian Partisans, and he and his small party entered a village near Lipovica where the men were thought to have fallen. Only the sight of modest, beautiful Serbian monasteries typical of Serbia''s "old South" softened the grim poverty of the area. Yet such beauty was obscured by the unexpected and unsightly presence of a large Bulgarian garrison only a few miles away. In an effort to avoid enemy detection, Farish and his team hid themselves in the obscurity of the Bela Kamen Mountains to set up radio contact with OSS headquarters in Bari, Italy, where the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force was stationed, to arrange for Allied transport planes to be sent over. On the way back to their base, Farish and his men found five more airmen who had bailed out of an aircraft in the Toplica valley and who had been escorted by Partisans to Farish''s headquarters. Though Farish and his party were successful in finding downed airmen and reassured by Partisan cooperation, they hardly ever felt a moment''s worth of calm. For the next ten days the area around their mountain base would be bombed and strafed every afternoon by twenty to thirty German ME-109s.
In spite of the hardships that Farish and his team endured, they were not insensitive to the beauty of the terrain around them or to the spirit of camaraderie that tended to pervade these missions, whether assigned to Partisans or, elsewhere, to their monarchist rivals, the Chetniks. Dobrica Cosi, in his beautifully written memoir of Partisan life, Far Away Is the Sun, wrote of the mountains of the Morava valley in the evening as seen by his otherwise emotionally detached protagonist, describing "the beauty of the night ... a beauty made purer and sterner by the sharp frost ... as though the moonlight was drinking up all his anxieties and fears, all his ceaseless, prolonged and tormenting pre-occupation with the company and the struggle." Farish, like his OSS and SOE colleagues in Yugoslavia and the American airmen awaiting rescue, lived such Balkan nights with a sense of relief, sleeping under the stars with hay as a blanket, silently enjoying, if only for a few hours, this eerie and mysterious land that also knew how to pause on occasion from the devastation of war.
But those pauses were indeed brief. The Germans and the Bulgarians had learned about Farish, and Axis forces kept a constant lookout for him through patrols and police; seldom could he move about freely. In addition to being under almost constant attack from small-arms fire, he was subjected to heavy machine-gun fire as well as artillery shelling. He also faced the burning of villages and underbrush near where he hid at times. On at least seven occasions Farish passed through heavy concentrations of German and Bulgarian forces, and yet "[t]he high morale of Major Farish and his party was contagious especially among the natives who joined him in the face of knowledge that they would be tortured to death if discovered by the enemy," reported one OSS memo on Farish''s exploits.
About a month before the men were able to organize any rescues, they had made their way from Macedonia to Serbian Partisan headquarters, where they met the Partisan commander, Petar Stamboli (who would become prime minister of Yugoslavia in the 1960s), to ask for Partisan cooperation in saving downed Allied airmen. Stamboli "gave every possible aid," placing at Farish''s disposal the Yugoslav Air Force personnel who knew the territory. With the aid of these officers, three airfields were located (two of which were subsequently lost to the Axis). Yet still more attacks were to come. On May 18, 1944, an American heavy bomber was shot down. Axis gunfire prevented Farish and his men from reaching the three wounded American airmen left stranded where the bomber crashed, and ten days passed before Farish received word that the three were still alive.
On May 31 Farish''s group tried to get through enemy lines once more. Taking a circuitous route, they spent three nights and four days on the move under constant Bulgarian attack until crossing enemy lines on June 3. They located the three men around the village of Lipovica, all of them wounded, one very seriously. The next morning, Farish and his party managed to escape with the wounded men on an ox-drawn cart, while Bulgarian forces heavily attacked the village. A day or so later, Farish and Jibilian set out to return to Partisan headquarters in order to make contact with Allied forces in Bari, Italy, to let them know that planes would be needed for evacuation-once the men could remain in place at a landing strip for at least one day, that is.
This would be their most arduous trip yet. Traveling for nearly forty-eight hours without rest or sleep, they arrived at the base of the Radan Mountains, where they were once again involved in an attack on another village, "barely escaping by running their horses under fire from mortar and machine guns," according to one OSS report on the mission. In the meantime, Popovich stayed behind to take care of the wounded, and he managed to do the impossible by leading them through enemy lines. He, Farish, and Jibilian all ended up at Partisan headquarters in Serbia at the same time around June 7, only to find that the wounded airmen had wandered off in the direction of Lipovica, where three of the men had been picked up and where there was an airstrip; the men were somehow under the impression that an evacuation plane was to arrive that night.
However exhausted Farish and Jibilian were, they set out once more to find the men who were headed to Lipovica. As it happened, Axis bombing of villages in the area started up almost immediately, with the Germans eventually occupying the airfield. Farish, Jibilian, and one of the airmen in good condition withdrew to the Bela Kamen Mountains-where, it will be recalled, Farish''s team had picked up two wounded American airmen earlier-to figure out another evacuation alternative. Farish decided on one of the other landing strips he had discovered at the beginning of his mission, in the Jastrebac Mountains, in south-central Serbia. Popovich, meanwhile, was dispatched to round up the wounded airmen. Farish thus went to work on the landing strip''s preparation. Jibilian, who had sent out a total of 259 wire messages to Bari over the course of his journeys and ordeals, made arrangements for evacuation planes to retrieve the thirteen men, whom Popovich, "with innumerable hardships and difficulties," would eventually find and bring back to Avidlovac on June 14. The planes arrived on June 16 in poor weather conditions, until a last-minute, sudden clearing of the weather allowed a successful rescue effort of the thirteen men, while a large enemy garrison loomed some five miles away.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shadows on the Mountainby Marcia Kurapovna Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
