Reily is a retired naval officer and retired college professor/administrator who lives in Bankers Hill.
When my mother-in-law passed away in 2012, my husband was serving as a docent on the USS Midway Museum. He convinced his father, a World War II veteran and prisoner of war camp survivor, to move to San Diego. My father-in-law had no reason to stay in Philadelphia. Most of his close friends had passed away. So he sold his home and joined us.
The Midway had a World War II desk where veterans could share their experiences with visitors. My husband thought it would be good for his dad to recount his experiences. So, for four years, he did just that. He especially liked chatting with children and having his picture taken with pretty young women who thought he was cute. Unfortunately, his feet never totally recovered from being frozen in the war. They would become numb without warning, making it difficult for him to keep his balance.
One day he took a bad fall, hit his head and never recovered. He passed away in 2016 at the VA hospital in La Jolla. It was not long after he passed that my husband received correspondence from his father’s bomber squadron that some World War II historians had located what they thought was the crash site and remains of the bomber he went down in. They were trying to connect with any of the crew who might still be alive. He explained that his dad had recently passed, but my husband had learned a lot about the crash over the years and wanted to connect with the historians investigating the crash site. My husband’s father, Lt. James Reily Sr., was the 19-year-old bombardier of a B-24 Liberator nicknamed “Mairzy Doats” stationed in Southern Italy near the end of the war.
The raid on May 10, 1944, began well before dawn. It was a crisp spring morning, redolent with the aroma of blossoms of all kinds in stark contrast with the acrid smell of a smoldering refuse pile near the airbase mingled with fuel fumes as a dozen bombers started their engines. The young bombardier huddled with the pilot and co-pilot as they reviewed the mission in the pre-dawn light. The target was an aerodrome in Vienna. Meanwhile, 500 miles away, in the same pre-dawn, an 18-year-old Croatian Army private — Josip Markovic — shivered under a threadbare blanket in the barracks of an Army camp outside of Brinje, Croatia.
He was the eldest son in a family of 12 children, without a father. His mother did not want him to join the army. She depended upon him. Markovic countered that he could help his family more by joining the army. Markovic was not an idealist, but he was a proud Croatian. Like most Croatians, he was tired of seeing his country overrun by rising powers coveting the beauty and bounty of this strip of fertile land stretching from the mountains to the sea. So against his mother’s wishes he joined the Croatian army — a scruffy collection of boys and men — led by a cadre of German officers. It was that or join the communists — Tito’s “Partisans”— in the mountains.
As Markovic rolled over to try to get comfortable in his lumpy cot, he heard a distant whirring and sputtering sound. The sound was out of place in this bucolic outpost. He ran to the barracks window and saw an Allied bomber approaching. He scrambled to put on his uniform and headed for the door. When he emerged from the barracks, he heard a sharp shriek and saw the bomber was damaged and descending rapidly. A German Messerschmitt fighter aircraft flew above the Allied bomber, strafing it as it plunged. Black dots like small spiders popped from the plane’s underbelly and white puffs emerged as the dots drifted into a clearing far below.
Markovic started to make sense of what was happening. The fliers in the sputtering aircraft had bailed out. It was then that he heard a rumble like thunder. Orange flames shot out of the aircraft and black smoke billowed skyward as it plowed into the foothills on the eastern side of the valley. The Messerschmitt circled above the crash and flew off. Markovic knew the countryside like the back of his hand, and this was his opportunity to finally see some action. He hopped on his motorcycle and careened down the hill into the valley. He knew exactly where the wind would take those parachutes. Reily had successfully dropped the bomber’s 5,000 pounds of ordinance on its target, but the plane was hit by heavy flak and was pursued by a German Messerschmitt as the pilot in command attempted to rise above the flak and return to base.
It became apparent that the bomber would not be able to make it back. They would need to bail out. None of them had bailed out of a plane before — there was no time to practice that before shipping out. If luck was on their side, they could evade capture in the foothills and make it into the rugged mountainous area where the friendly Croatian insurgents were entrenched. By the time Markovic reached the clearing in the foothills, the first of the aircrew was down. It was then that he realized that in his haste he had forgotten his rifle. For a moment, he felt supremely stupid but decided that he would need to do his best until the others from his unit arrived. Markovic approached the first airman to land. Markovic tried to look as tough as he could.
The airman saw him, threw his arms into the air, and said “Amerikaner … don’t shoot!” In a stroke of luck for Markovic, all the Americans survived the crash and were captured. They were herded into the back of a truck and transported to an interrogation site. The interrogations did not take long. The prisoners did not know much more than the interrogator already knew. They were loaded back into trucks and transported on to POW camps. The war in the Pacific was still raging when Reily returned home in 1945. When sufficiently recovered, he requested to be trained as a fighter pilot and deployed to the Pacific. After completing training, he was sent to Guam to fly P47 Thunderbolts in the fight against Japan.
Markovic stayed in the army until the end of the war in Europe. Shortly after the German surrender, Tito was elevated to power and Croatia was absorbed into a collection of Eastern European countries that would come to be called Yugoslavia. The Croatian soldiers who had fought on the German side were pursued and jailed and most of them were executed. Markovic and his family spent the next nine years in European refugee camps before they were able to successfully emigrate to Cleveland.
In the summer of 2019, on one of his extended stays in Croatia, Markovic received a call from a member of the group researching WWII crash sites in Croatia. The historian explained that they had uncovered what they thought was the location of the remains of an Allied bomber outside of Brinje. Markovic was told that the son of one of the fliers was visiting Croatia and was interested in meeting him.
Markovic was thrilled that finally, after all these years, perhaps he would learn what happened to the Americans he had captured in 1944. He met the senior Reily’s son in Brinje in October 2019 and caravaned to a rural overlook where they could see where the bomber crashed. Reily was respectful and friendly. He chatted with Markovic as a local TV crew filmed their conversation. My husband confirmed that — to his knowledge — all the crew members of the Mairzy Doats had passed away. Markovic invited Reily to visit again in Croatia or Cleveland. He would like him to meet his family and talk more about the war. But COVID-19 intervened.
Markovic passed away in 2021, in his beloved Croatia, from COVID-19 complications. He was a proud, courageous Croatian American until the end. As is so often the case in wars, in retrospect Markovic and Reily were more alike than they were different. Both men were survivors. Both had positive attitudes despite their hardships. Both were tough and ambitious. Both were a lot of fun. Both were devoted to their families. Both were married for 62 years. Both of their wives passed away in 2012. Both had sons who went to college in Ohio. Both had grandsons named Michael who were physicians. Both loved drinking beer. Both suffered in silence from post-traumatic stress. Both self-medicated on occasion with alcohol. In advanced age, both reveled in telling war stories and having their pictures taken with pretty young women.
Reily and Markovic were not extraordinary. They shared commonalities shared by many who fought in WWII. What Reily and Markovic uniquely shared was one day in the spring of 1944 that they could vividly recall to the end of their lives. No doubt if they had the opportunity to meet in their senior years, they would have transcended the label “enemy” and embraced the label “friend.”
