52 pages • 1 hour read
Gregory A. FreemanThe Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Escaping Yugoslavia”
The scene shifts from Pranjane to Washington, DC, where a “brainy beauty” named Mirjana Vujnovich hears rumors of nearly 100 American airmen gathered in the hills of Yugoslavia (81). Mirjana, who works for the Yugoslav embassy, is the wife of George Vujnovich, an OSS agent stationed in Bari, Italy, and the man who will direct Operation Halyard. Alarmed by the US government’s inactivity on the matter, Mirjana writes to her husband about the airmen. Like most US officials, Vujnovich knows nothing, but unlike most, he is determined to find out if there is truth to his wife’s report.
For the remainder of Chapter 6—as well as Chapter 7 and much of Chapter 8—Freeman tells the story of Vujnovich and Mirjana: how they meet, how they fall in love, and, following the April 1941 Nazi invasion, how they escape Yugoslavia.
A Pittsburgh native and son of a Serbian immigrant steelworker, Vujnovich earns a scholarship to study medicine in Belgrade, then capital of Yugoslavia. He meets Mirjana for the first time in November 1935, but he is too forward, and she rejects him. He sees her again four years later and finally wins over the girl with whom he already has fallen in love. Two blissful years pass.
Meanwhile, the Yugoslavian government openly resists Adolf Hitler’s attempt to enlist their country in his war effort. Anti-German demonstrations erupt in Belgrade, and a German professor at the university warns Vujnovich that the Yugoslavian people must not incur Germany’s wrath. On the morning of April 6, 1941, Vujnovich awakens to the sound of bombs falling and the German Luftwaffe roaring across the skies above Belgrade. Vujnovich races to Mirjana’s house, three miles from his apartment. He finds Mirjana and her brother, Mirko, hiding in the basement. The trio flees the capital by train, arriving after two days at Herzeg Novi, a village on the Adriatic coast. By then, the German invasion is well underway, and the influx of refugees is too much for a small community to accommodate. Vujnovich takes Mirjana and Mirko 12 miles inland to the town of Risan and puts Mirko on a sailboat, believing it will take them to a British cruiser waiting offshore; Vujnovich is confident his American passport will help him escape another way.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Passports, Please”
Vujnovich returns to Herzeg Novi and is stunned to find Mirjana and Mirko waiting there: Italian fighter planes, in league with the Nazis, had attacked the British cruiser before the sailboat could reach it. Seeing no possibility of escape, Vujnovich decides that he must leave and come back for Mirjana as soon as possible. Vujnovich and about 50 other Americans leave the coastal town and head for Sarajevo before moving on to Belgrade and the American embassy. At a hotel, Vujnovich discovers that he is missing his passport, which attracts the attention of the Ustache, a group of terrorists made up of Bosnians and Croats who are collaborating with the Nazis. Before the Ustache can arrest Vujnovich, the chauffeur who drove Vujnovich and his companions to Sarajevo appears with Vujnovich’s passport, which had fallen out in the vehicle.
In Belgrade, Vujnovich learns that it might be possible for Americans to leave Yugoslavia with their wives, though there is no guarantee that the Germans will honor the marriage-related documents. He also learns that the Gestapo—the Nazi secret police—is searching for native Yugoslavians with American or British connections, which puts Mirjana in danger.
Mirjana returns to Belgrade and marries Vujnovich. With documentation from the American consulate, the newlyweds sail for Budapest, Hungary, which is still Nazi-controlled territory. From there, they manage to board a commercial flight for Sofia, Bulgaria, with an ironic layover in Belgrade. On the first leg of the Lufthansa flight, Mirjana grows physically sick when she realizes she is seated next to Magda Goebbels, wife of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister and part of Hitler’s inner circle. Believing that Mirjana is simply airsick, Mrs. Goebbels expresses concern. When the passengers exit the plane in Belgrade, Mrs. Goebbels walks with Mirjana down the aisle and even demands that the Nazi officer checking passports stop what he is doing and help the sick woman. Finally arriving in Sofia, Vujnovich and Mirjana find the Bulgarian capital filled with Nazis, so they take a train to a village on the Turkish-Bulgarian border and then, with the help of locals who know how to avoid the German land mines, walk across the border into Turkey.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Man of the Year”
The first half of this chapter completes the story of Vujnovich and Mirjana’s escape from Yugoslavia. After crossing the border from Bulgaria, Vujnovich and Mirjana have few options, so they settle for a while in Istanbul. When French forces liberate Syria, Vujnovich and Mirjana travel by train to Jerusalem, where they work as translators for the British General Intelligence Service. A year later, they travel to Cairo, Egypt, where they once again are threatened by an advancing German army, this time under the command of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. By chance, Vujnovich meets a Yugoslavian pilot who works for Pan American World Airways, and the pilot offers him a job with the airline if he can secure a visa. Vujnovich uses his British intelligence-service credentials to bluff his way into the British consulate and demand a visa for a confidential assignment in Ghana. When the consul complies, Vujnovich and Mirjana have their tickets out of Cairo.
In West Africa, Vujnovich puts Mirjana on a plane that, after a half-dozen connections, takes her to Miami, where she boards a train for Washington, DC, and the Yugoslav embassy. Vujnovich remains in Ghana, where he is recruited by the Office of Strategic Services. He returns to America and trains for a month at an OSS facility north of Washington, DC, where he learns close combat and the other skills of an intelligence agent. After successfully completing a real-world assignment as a final examination, Vujnovich graduates and becomes an OSS officer. First-Lieutenant George Vujnovich arrives in Bari, Italy on November 20, 1943. He is in Bari when he receives Mirjana’s report (see Chapter 6) about the downed American airmen stranded in Yugoslavia.
The second half of this chapter focuses on General Mihailovich. Mihailovich himself does not appear until a later chapter, but Freeman introduces him here in the context of Vujnovich’s investigation into Mirjana’s report.
Vujnovich soon learns that Mirjana is telling the truth and that no one in the US government is doing anything about the downed airmen. Vujnovich also knows from experience that Communist moles have infiltrated both US and British intelligence services, and these moles have spread false information designed to undermine Mihailovich and prop up his rival, Tito, leader of the Communist Partisans. Freeman explains that Mihailovich, at one time, had been a favorite of the Allies, who never questioned the Chetnik leader’s determination to drive the Nazis out of Yugoslavia.
In the war’s early years, the Western press took its cue from Western governments in painting flattering portraits of Mihailovich. A veteran of World War I, Mihailovich was a fierce fighter, but he was also prudent and had no desire to repeat that terrible conflict in which one in four Serbian men perished. He also knew that attacking the Nazi juggernaut with the full force of his Chetnik army would amount to suicide and would only bring terrible retribution against Serbian villagers. Much like Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Tito regarded his soldiers as expendable in the global struggle for Communism. Mihailovich, on the other hand, wanted to preserve his army, harass the Nazis when possible, and then coordinate with the Allies at the right moment to drive out the German invaders. He also wanted to save Yugoslavia from the Communist menace, which he regarded as “no better than the Nazis” (126).
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
After devoting four chapters to the American airmen and their Chetnik protectors, Freeman returns to Vujnovich. At the end of Chapter 1, Freeman depicts Vujnovich reflecting on the “cold terror that gripped his whole body as he held his breath and hoped a German patrol would pass by the young American and the girl he loved” (9). This is important not only as a moment that anticipates the multi-chapter narrative of Vujnovich and Mirjana’s 1941 escape from Yugoslavia but also as a signal that Vujnovich understands from personal experience what the airmen most fear.
Mirjana’s role in the story is more than that of a civilian trying to survive an invasion. Freeman explains that Mirjana’s situation was far more perilous than that of her husband. His American passport protected him from the Nazis and the Nazi collaborators in the Sarajevo hotel. Mirjana, however, was a local woman with connections to Westerners and was therefore a person-of-interest to the Gestapo. Furthermore, had Mirjana lived in a Yugoslav village instead of cosmopolitan Belgrade, she probably would have been a Chetnik: Whereas Vujnovich sympathizes with the stranded airmen, Mirjana identifies with the local Chetniks.
The couple’s escape highlights the international dynamic in 1941-1942, before the war’s tide turned against the Germans. After escaping Yugoslavia, Vujnovich and Mirjana first went to Hungary and Bulgaria, which were Nazi-controlled territories. When they arrived in Turkey, they had no choice but to stay until Free French forces drove Hitler’s allies from Syria. After a year in Jerusalem, they arrived in Cairo, Egypt, just as Rommel’s troops invaded North Africa. In short, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean world of the early 1940s offered no refuge from Nazis. The Vujnoviches’ surprise encounter with Magna Goebbels on the place is the most improbable instance in which Nazis appear, but it nevertheless represents their ubiquity.
Two of the book’s most important figures feature in these chapters. The first is General Mihailovich, who is mentioned earlier in the book, and whose presence looms in Chapters 4-5 but whose story remains untold until Chapter 8. The second important figure, or rather entity, is the OSS. In later chapters, Freeman describes the origins and history of the OSS and the contributions to Operation Halyard of agents Vujnovich, Musulin, and Jibilian, in addition to several others. Despite its role in rescuing the airmen, the OSS remains an ambivalent presence because Communist infiltration contributes to the eventual Allied abandonment of Mihailovich, as well as the State Department’s postwar cover-up.
