Bronze Star is awarded to WWII hero at age 95
10/18/2010NEW YORK — The U.S. government Sunday 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, 95, of New York is credited with leading the so-called Halyard Mission in what was then Yugoslavia.
He was awarded the U.S. Bronze Star Medal, presented by Rep. Joseph Crowley (D., N.Y.) at Manhattan's St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral.
Mr. Vujnovich received a standing ovation from a crowd of several hundred church members, supporters, friends, and officials.
“Better now than never,” said Mr. Vujnovich, a retired salesman who lives in Queens.
He was an officer of the OSS, the precursor of Monday'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. field station files.
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 Mr. Vujnovich, a Serbian-American and a Pittsburgh native who was stationed in Bari, Italy.
It wasn't easy to convince U.S. 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.
“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, of Church Falls, Va., 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 farmers took them to their houses and barns. During the next 66 days, the Americans moved nightly to a different location to avoid capture 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.
The story is told in a 2007 book titled The Forgotten 500, by Gregory Freeman.