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WWII OSS member receives Bronze Star medal
World War II OSS Veteran Gets Bronze Star Medal
Published October 17, 2010
Associated Press
NEW YORK -- The U.S. government has recognized the World War II architect of
a mission to rescue more than 500 U.S. bomber fliers shot down over
Nazi-occupied Serbia -- the largest air rescue of Americans behind enemy
lines in any war.
George Vujnovich, a 95-year-old New Yorker, is credited with leading the
so-called Halyard Mission in what was then Yugoslavia.
On Sunday, he was awarded the U.S. Bronze Star Medal, presented by Rep.
Joseph Crowley, at Manhattan's St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral. Vujnovich
received a standing ovation from a crowd of several hundred church members,
supporters, friends and officials.
"Better now than never," says Vujnovich, a retired salesman who lives in
Queens.
He was an officer of the OSS, the precursor of today's CIA, when about 500
pilots and other airmen were downed over Serbia in the summer of 1944 while
on bombing runs targeting Hitler's oil fields in Romania, according to U.S.
government field station files, stored in the National Archives.
The airmen were hidden in villages by Serbian guerrilla fighter Draza
Mihailovich, leader of the Chetniks, whom Yugoslav communist officials
considered to be Germany's collaborators.
"This mission would not have succeeded without the great courage of Draza
Mihailovich and his brave men," said Vujnovich, a Serbian-American and a
Pittsburgh native who was stationed in Bari, Italy.
It was no small feat to convince American officials to allow him to work with
Mihailovich on the clandestine mission, dubbed Halyard, meaning a rope used
to hoist sails. By then, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had decided to
follow British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's lead, abandoning support
for Mihailovich in favor of the Yugoslav communists, the strongest
grass-roots guerrilla force fighting the invading Nazis and Italian fascists.
Mihailovich had been a prewar military officer who launched the first Balkan
resistance to the Nazis in 1941, before also turning against the communists
led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito.
"Vujnovich is the one who sold the mission to U.S. officials, he pushed
hard," said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steven Oluic, a former West Point professor
who prepared the award submission for the Department of the Army.
On Aug. 2, 1944, three OSS agents strapped with radio transmitters were
airdropped near Mihailovich's headquarters to set up the operation.
Dozens of U.S. military cargo planes flew in over the months to pick up the
airmen as they were downed. Serbian villagers had helped them build an
airstrip by the village of Pranjani.
"We owe Vujnovich big time," says Charles L. Davis III, 91, a retired U.S.
Air Force lieutenant colonel who was rescued.
As a bombardier navigator, he was part of a crew of 10 on a B-24 Liberator
plane crippled after losing three of its four engines.
The fliers parachuted into a mountainous region where local farmers brought
them to their houses and barns. During the next 66 days, the Americans moved
each night to a different location so as not to be captured by the occupying
Germans.
Yugoslavia's postwar communist authorities convicted Mihailovich of
collaborating with the Nazis in a hasty trial in 1946, and he was executed.
In 1948, U.S. President Harry Truman posthumously bestowed the Legion of
Merit on the Serb for the rescue -- an honor classified secret by the U.S.
State Department for decades, so as not to disrupt the rather friendly U.S.
policy toward Yugoslavia.
The secrecy underscores long-lasting divisions in Serbia stemming from World
War II; some Serbs still believe Mihailovich was a victim of communist
repression, while others view him as a traitor.
The story is told in a 2007 book titled "The Forgotten 500," by Gregory
Freeman.
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