October 15, 2021
Hello ,
I'm on vacation this week. Enjoy one of my favorite stories from the archives!
On November 8th, the weather was clear and sunny when Eugenie Rutkowski and a dozen other U.S. Army nurses serving in WWII, flew from to Bara Italy, on a mission to evacuate wounded soldiers near the front lines in Italy.
As a member of the newly formed 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron, Eugenie was one of the few American women to ever have flown in an airplane.
The weather changed during the 90-minute flight and a violent storm blew the plane off-course, forcing the pilot to crash-land in Nazi-occupied Albania.
The downed passengers had two pieces of luck right away. None of the nurses were hurt in the crash and only one of the 16 men on the flight (medics and plane crew) was injured. And as they crawled from the wreckage they were met by Albanian partisans friendly to the Allies, one of whom spoke English.
Stranded in Nazi-occupied territory, the woman, medics and flight crew played hide-and-seek for their lives.
The partisans led them to a nearby village, where they discovered Albania was wracked by poverty and rife with the chaos and danger of civil war.
"Luckily, both sides seemed friendly to us and they all seemed to hate the Germans,” Eugenia said.
Hunted by Nazi forces, strafed by German planes, short on food and warm clothing, they set out in a blizzard to cross Albania's highest mountain. It would be an 800 mile trek to Adriatic coast where they hoped to be picked up by a US ship.
"Some of the girls were sleepy and insisted on lying down in the snow, The rest of us slapped their faces and dragged them along. I wiggled my face muscles up and down to keep from freezing, Oh, It was cold!”
Occasionally, they were able to borrow mules to ride, but they had to walk for most of the journey, Below, army nurses show how the bottoms of their shoes wore out.
Often gunfire sounded in the night and before dawn villagers would urge them on their way, because food was so scarce they couldn’t afford to feed them more than one day.
One day they hitched a ride in trucks, but Nazi troops patrolled the road, and every time traffic approached the women jumped from the trucks to hide in the hills.
“I saw the truck I’d been riding in demolished by German machine guns. One of the pieces landed in my lap," Eugenia said.
But she and the others hiding in the thick underbrush and escaped safely.
The nurses and medics finally reached the Adriatic coast to meet a U.S. ship 60 days after their plane crashed. More than half the group had dysentery, and two were sick with jaundice and one with pneumonia.
Below they're shown on the ship that rescued them.
After arriving safely back in US territory, Lieutenant Eugenie Rutkowski (right) and Lt. Lilian Tacina study a map of their journey through snowy mountains fleeing for their lives.
The Secret Rescue tells harrowing story of the army nurses' and medics' escape from Albania.
The author Cate Lineberry said, "If the villagers had been caught helping the Americans, the village likely would have been burned and many of its residents killed.
Because of their sacrifices and risks, the Albanian partisans and the Albanian people are heroes of this story to me."
One of the reasons I love autumn!
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My best,
Mary
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