“Operation Halyard: The Untold WWII Rescue So Unbelievable the Allies Buried It for 50 Years”

 

By the summer of 1944, the war in Europe was burning at full fury.

Allied bombers were pounding Hitler’s oil supply in Romania’s Ploesti fields, the lifeblood of the Nazi war machine.

But the cost was devastating.

German flak and fighters tore through American squadrons.

Planes limped north into Yugoslavia, crash-landing in mountains controlled by resistance fighters—or worse, the Gestapo.

For months, reports filtered back to Allied command: pilots alive, scattered, starving, and hunted like animals.

Locals were hiding them at risk of execution.

But the terrain was deadly, the politics worse.

Yugoslavia was a fractured nation—split between two resistance groups: Tito’s communist Partisans, backed by Stalin, and General Draža Mihailović’s royalist Chetniks, backed—and then betrayed—by the West.

The Allies had once supported Mihailović, a Serbian general who resisted Nazi occupation since 1941.

But by 1944, Western intelligence had shifted their allegiance to Tito, seduced by propaganda that painted Mihailović as unreliable.

His supply lines were cut.

His radio contact severed.

He was marked for death by both the Germans and his former allies.

And yet, while abandoned by Washington and London, Mihailović was still protecting hundreds of downed American pilots—men he could have traded to the Germans for his own survival.

Instead, he hid them in barns, fed them from his people’s meager harvest, and guarded them with his dwindling army.

When word of this reached the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime intelligence agency—they realized the impossible truth: the forgotten general in the mountains was saving their men.

That’s when Operation Halyard was born.

On the night of August 2, 1944, three Americans dropped from a C-47 over the mountains near the village of Pranjani.

Their orders: find Mihailović, locate the airmen, and bring them home—or die trying.

The team hit the ground hard.

Within hours, they were surrounded by Chetnik fighters—armed men loyal to Mihailović but suspicious of any foreigner.

Then, from the darkness, a tall figure in a ragged officer’s coat stepped forward.

“Welcome to Yugoslavia,” he said in accented English.

It was General Draža Mihailović himself.

What followed was one of the most astonishing collaborations in military history.

The OSS agents discovered that over 500 American flyers were scattered across the region, living in barns, caves, and shepherd huts.

The villagers had hidden them for months—at unimaginable risk.

German troops patrolled nearby roads, executing entire families if a single Allied pilot was found.

Yet not one Serbian peasant betrayed them.

When American intelligence asked why, a local woman replied simply: “We could not give away God’s children.

With limited tools and under constant threat, the villagers and Chetniks began to construct something insane: an airstrip, built entirely by hand.

In a remote valley flanked by enemy positions, men, women, and children dug through the night, hauling rocks with bare hands and oxen carts.

They flattened a field nearly 500 feet long, wide enough for transport planes—while German reconnaissance planes flew overhead.

By late August, the strip was ready.

Against every rule of logic and war, Mihailović and the OSS radioed a single word to Allied command: “Send planes.

”

On August 10, in broad daylight, the first C-47 transport appeared over the mountains.

To everyone’s disbelief, it landed smoothly, loaded with rescued airmen, and took off again without a shot fired.

The Germans never saw it.

Over the next six months, more missions followed.

Pilots were guided to Pranjani by villagers under cover of night, fed, and hidden until evacuation.

By the end of Operation Halyard, 512 Allied airmen had been flown out—without a single loss during extraction.

The mission remains the largest air rescue behind enemy lines in World War II history.

But the miracle had a bitter end.

When the war ended, the politics turned poisonous.

The Western Allies, eager to appease Stalin, recognized Tito’s communist regime and abandoned Mihailović—the man who had saved their sons.

In 1946, he was captured, tortured, and executed by firing squad after a show trial branding him a traitor.

Washington did nothing.

His execution was buried in history.

His name erased from military records.

Even the pilots he saved were ordered to stay silent.

“We were told to forget,” one of them later recalled.

“But how do you forget the man who saved your life?”

Decades later, those same rescued airmen fought to tell the truth.

They lobbied for Mihailović’s recognition, writing letters to Congress and testifying about his heroism.

In 1948, U.S.President Harry Truman quietly awarded General Mihailović the Legion of Merit—the highest American honor that can be given to a foreign national—for his “contribution to the Allied victory.

” But the award was kept classified for 20 years, hidden from public view until 1967.

By then, most of the heroes of Operation Halyard were gone.

George Musulin died in 1987, never fully recognized for leading the mission.

Arthur Jibilian, the radio operator who called down the C-47s, spent his final years touring schools to tell the story no one wanted to hear.

“It wasn’t just a rescue,” he said.

“It was a miracle.

Ordinary people did the impossible—and we abandoned them.

In the mountains of western Serbia, the airstrip at Pranjani still exists, overgrown with grass.

Every August, the villagers gather to honor the memory of the Americans they once hid and the man who protected them when the world turned its back.

For decades, Operation Halyard was erased from textbooks, censored by Cold War politics, and ignored by historians.

But its legacy endures—not just as a tale of courage and rescue, but as a reminder of the human cost of betrayal.

Five hundred twelve airmen walked out of hell alive because one man and one nation refused to surrender their humanity.

And though the world forgot General Draža Mihailović, the wind over Pranjani still whispers his legacy—a truth carved not into marble, but into memory:

He saved them all.

And we let him die.