Fire Beyond the Mission

On the night of 2 August 1944, three men descended through darkness into occupied Serbia — OSS Lieutenant George Musulin, Master Sergeant Michael Rajacich, and Navy radio specialist Arthur Jibilian. They carried no armor, no reinforcements, and no guarantee of survival. What they carried was a mission: to find hundreds of downed Allied airmen scattered across the hills of Nazi-held Yugoslavia and bring them home. The operation they set in motion — codenamed Halyard — was routed entirely through American hands, over fierce British objection. OSS officer George Vujnovich coordinated the mission from Bari, Italy, navigating inter-Allied politics, communist sabotage attempts, and German patrols hunting the same airmen his team was racing to save. At Pranjani, Musulin liaised with Chetnik General Draža Mihailović, whose fighters disguised a farm meadow as a makeshift airstrip while sheltering over 250 stranded airmen in the surrounding villages. Over five months, C-47 aircraft flew into the Serbian interior in broad daylight, lifting out 432 Americans and 80 other Allied personnel — the largest rescue of American airmen in the history of the war. Captain Nick Lalich later replaced Musulin and continued evacuations through September and December 1944, as German forces and Yugoslav partisans converged from every direction. When the operation ended, the men who made it possible — agents, villagers, Chetnik fighters — were buried by postwar politics and denied their place in the record.