George Vujnovich - Telegraph Churchill, who was also mindful of keeping the Soviet Union on side, led the Allies to throw their support behind the Croat communist leader Josip Broz Tito, whose partisans, in addition to fighting the Nazis, were conducting a brutal internal civil war against anti-communist groups, including the Chetniks. The British bitterly opposed Vujnovich's rescue plan, by now code-named Halyard, because it would mean collaborating with Mihailovich. Resistance from both the SOE and the State Department ultimately forced the OSS's director William "Wild Bill" Donovan to go straight to President Roosevelt. Screw the British! Let's get our boys out! Donovan is reported to have said. Roosevelt agreed, and the British were ordered to co-operate; but Vujnovich's plans to lead the OSS team himself were scuppered by a telegram from the White House, which read: "Former naval person objects to George Vujnovich going into Mihailovich's headquarters. Therefore he will not be sent. "Former naval person" was code for Winston Churchill who had, it seemed, learned of Vujnovich's pro-Mihailovich views. To begin with, the British were placed in charge of logistics, but the first six attempts to insert a team to coordinate the rescue had to be aborted. George Musulin, the leader of a three-man OSS squad trained by Vujnovich, began to suspect sabotage from communist moles in the SOE when, during one attempt, he discovered that the drop coordinates given to the pilot lay in Partisan territory. Subsequently, Musulin demanded that planning should be transferred to the Americans. On August 2 1944 the team successfully parachuted into Serbia where, within a few days, they had helped villagers and stranded airmen to carve a makeshift runway for rescue planes. On August 9 the first in a succession of American transport planes made the hazardous journey from Italy, and from then until December 27 1944 a total of 512 airmen, most of them Americans, were flown to safety without a single casualty or the loss of a single aircraft. Even though later flights were made during daylight hours, the Germans never discovered the runway. Early in 1946 General Mihailovich was captured by Tito's Partisans and put on trial for alleged war crimes. Outraged, many rescued airmen mounted a public campaign to clear his name, writing to newspapers, lobbying Congress and protesting outside the Yugoslav consulate in New York City, but all to no avail. Mihailovich was executed by firing squad on July 17 1946, and buried in an unmarked grave. In 1948 he was posthumously awarded the Legion of Merit by President Truman, but as the American and British governments became more concerned about maintaining their relationship with Tito's Yugoslavia during the Cold War, the award sat in a State Department drawer, and both it and Operation Halyard remained classified. A breakthrough came in 1997, when the British documents on Operation Halyard were declassified and the citation for Mihailovich's Legion of Merit was released from the American National Archives. The medal itself, however, was not delivered until 2005, when Vujnovich and other veterans of Operation Halyard personally presented it to Gordana Mihailovich, the general's daughter. Operation Halyard remained relatively obscure until the publication of The Forgotten 500 by Gregory Freeman in 2007. In 2010 Vujnovich was formally recognised for his part in the operation with the award of a Bronze Star. "What aggravated me more than anything else," Vujnovich said in 2008, "is that we couldn't get the truth out. Everything was covered up from beginning to end. George Mane Vujnovich was born on May 31 1915 in Pittsburgh, the son of immigrants from Serbia. After leaving school he worked for a Heinz vinegar factory for $1 a day, a job from which he was rescued by news that he had won a scholarship to study Medicine at the University of Belgrade. It was there that he met his future wife, Mirjana Lazich. He was still in Belgrade in April 1941, when the Luftwaffe began bombing the city. He recalled seeing a streetcar obliterated by a bomb: "The streetcar and the dozens of people inside exploded in a bloody mess of body parts and metal, limbs flying through the air and landing all around," he recalled. He and Mirjana then fled to Turkey, Jerusalem, Cairo and finally Ghana, where Vujnovich took a job with Pan Am, while his wife proceeded to the United States. Subsequently commissioned into the US Army, his knowledge of Yugoslavia soon led to his recruitment by the OSS. After the war, Vujnovich and his wife settled in New York City, where he went into business as a supplier of aircraft parts. He sold the business in the 1980s but continued to work as a consultant into his nineties. George Vujnovich's wife died in 2003. He is survived by their daughter. George Vujnovich, born May 31 1915, died April 24 2012