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.
Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Freeman opens with a dramatic description of Operation Halyard, the 1944 rescue of 512 Allied airmen trapped in the mountains of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, as “a story of adventure, daring, danger, and heroics followed by a web of conspiracy, lies, and cover-up” (xi). Agents from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) planned and executed the rescue, aided by Chetnik General Draza Mihailovich and local Serbian villagers who risked their lives to protect the downed airmen. Freeman then provides an overview of the region formerly known as Yugoslavia and its troubled 20th-century history. The brief introduction concludes with a reference to the few airmen and agents who survived into the early 21st century and who were eager to tell Freeman their long-neglected story.
Chapter 1 Summary: “We’ll Get Them Out”
The narrative begins in Yugoslavia, August 1944. Clare Musgrove, a US airman who had been forced to bail out of his damaged B-24 bomber, receives an armed escort from sympathetic Chetniks who have been moving him and a group of downed US airmen from village to village, evading Nazis along the way. Prior to their ill-fated mission, Musgrove and his crewmates were told that these Serbian locals supported the Nazis, but the villagers’ treatment of the Americans suggests otherwise.
Musgrove enters a villager’s home and enjoys a meal. There, he learns that he will be moving on to a place where more Americans are gathered. A week later, Musgrove and his companions arrive at Pranjane, where they are greeted by a man on horseback who turns out to be an American OSS agent, George Musulin. Musgrove learns that Musulin is overseeing the construction of an impromptu landing strip that will accommodate enough C-47 cargo planes to evacuate the stranded Allied airmen.
The scene then shifts to Bari, Italy, where George Vujnovich, the OSS agent in charge of the entire operation, contemplates logistics. Vujnovich feels a personal connection to the men in Pranjane, for he too was once trapped behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Abandon Ship!”
Chapter 2 focuses on the story of how Musgrove arrived in Yugoslavia. In 1943-1944, hundreds of American bombers took off from Italy. Their target was Ploesti, Romania, site of a Nazi-controlled network of oil refineries that were essential to the German war effort. Antiaircraft guns and elite fighter pilots guarded the approach to Ploesti. The low-level bombing runs that began in 1943 were so dangerous that the entire operation required the personal approval of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The caution proved merited: Of the 177 B-24 bombers that launched the first major attack on Ploesti, more than 60% were either shot down or badly damaged.
A Michigan native, Musgrove developed an aptitude for aerial gunnery and even served as an instructor, teaching younger recruits how to operate the B-24’s ball turret gun. Working as a gunner meant “hanging in a Plexiglass sphere from the belly of a bomber” while “curled up in a fetal position” (16). This left the gunner both vulnerable to enemy fire and helpless if the sphere failed to retract prior to landing.
Musgrove’s ill-fated flight begins on July 28, 1944. His B-24 drops its bombs on the target, but flak from German antiaircraft guns knocks out two of the four engines. The damaged bomber escapes Ploesti and makes it across the Yugoslavian border, but the pilot gives the order to “abandon ship” (23). Musgrove’s ball turret will not retract, so he has to crank it by hand, which takes 10 minutes. Then, he has to find his misplaced parachute. When he finally jumps from 10,000 feet, his parachute does not open, so he must deploy it by hand.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
In the Introduction and first two chapters, Freeman establishes three of the book’s key elements. First, he situates the story in the context of 20th-century Yugoslavia. The former multiethnic state had a long history of civil war and ethnic violence. Had the Americans parachuted into any other Nazi-controlled territory, they would have encountered the same difficulties in evading German patrols, but they would not have found themselves in the midst of a civil war. Freeman cites the Bosnia and Kosovo wars of the 1990s as more recent conflicts that characterize the violence the airmen faced.
Second, Freeman emphasizes that The Forgotten 500 is primarily the story of a major rescue operation. In Chapter 1, he introduces Clare Musgrove, George Musulin, and George Vujnovich. It makes sense to introduce Musgrove here because the B-24 gunner’s back story appears in the next chapter. Introducing Musulin and Vujnovich in Chapter 1, however, serves only to alert readers to their significance in Operation Halyard, for neither of these leading OSS agents appears in the narrative until later in the book.
Third, Freeman describes Musgrove’s background, ill-fated mission, and how the airman arrived in Yugoslavia. This sets a narrative pattern for the book’s early chapters. Musgrove is only one of the hundreds of airmen whom US and Chetnik forces helped evacuate from Pranjane, so his story is representative of what the rest of the airmen experienced, rather than unique in that context. The fact that he survived into the 21st century means that Freeman could share Musgrove’s story, and in doing so, share the experience of the other airmen as well.
While Freeman’s narrative pattern becomes more focused on the events of Operation Halyard in Chapters 3-5, the early chapters establish a broader context: He introduces not only Yugoslavia’s World War history, II but the entire 20th-century history of a region that once included Yugoslavia. He then introduces several key figures involved in Operation Halyard before focusing an entire chapter on a single airman. This shift from broad context to the details of one person’s story highlights the book’s central tragedy: the chasm between the Allied leaders’ distorted view of circumstances inside Yugoslavia and the reality of those circumstances as experienced by the airmen.
