Americans Helping Croatians

In early 1945 an attempt was made to evacuate American pilots from what was soon to be a war zone. Croatian Air Force General Rubcic saw to it that twelve American pilots were trained in the use of Croatian planes, which tepresented the last hope for the air defense of Croatia's capital. After familiarization on the collection of German, Italian, French, and British manufactured aircraft, fourteen Americans and one Croatian liaison officer flew to Italy. There they tried to convince American forces to land on the Dalmatian coast and meet the Red Army at the Drina tiver.

In 1943, Croatian Lt. Colonel Ivan Babic had flown a similar mission to American occupied Italy to suggest to the Americans that such an invasion would meet no resistance and that the Croatian Army would even establish a beachhead for them. The American command knew that the Dalmatian coast was Hitler's great weakness and that such an attack could split the German armies. Neither the Croatian nor American commanders knew that Yugoslavia had been designated as within the Soviet sphere. Allied forces continued to fight and die moving up the boot of Italy. Babic, working secretly for the Croatian Peasant Party, was thrown into a British prison for his efforts.

Other Americans offered their services to the Croatians in order to try to save Croatian troops from the communists. Lt. Edward J. Benkoski, pilot of the P-38 fighter "Butch," joined Englishman Rodney Woods and John Gray, a Scot, in attempting to negotiate for the Croatians in May 1945. Another American officer accompanied Croatian officials to negotiations at Bleiburg, Austria, at the end of the war to keep Croatians from being returned to certain death in Yugoslavia. They failed. The Americanborn priest Theodore Benkovic who often celebrated Mass for the airmen wrote:

Despite constant American bombings, the Croatians bore no hatred toward the Americans, for in a fatalistic way they held it to be necessary. I saw my countrymen held captive in Mostar, how the people treated them well, even offering the American flyers the few cigarettes they possessed; how they begged me to make known to my countrymen of their hope of liberation by the Americans. None of the airmen interviewed or surveyed recalled any instance of mistreatment and some provided documentary and photographic evidence of very close personal relationships with Croatian officers and members of the Croatian Red Cross. The study failed to lind the name of any Allied prisoner-of-war who was executed and found no "official policy" of executing airmen. Some airmen did recall that they were warned in pre- flight briefings that they would be executed if captured by the Croatians. That information was supplied by Mihailovic's Cetnik who were paid in gold for each airman returned to the Allies.

In January 1966, the Baroness Nikolic visited the United States to attend a showing of her art works. Several of her former "prisoners" welcomed her to Cleveland. One, Gene Keck of Washta, Iowa, travelled nine hundred miles by bus to see her again. "She's my second mother...I was her baby when we were on her estate in Zagreb." Often the mythology is diametrically opposite of the reality.

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