The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II

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.

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.