(Oliver is the middle person in the top row)
On May 6, 1944, B-24 pilot Thomas K. Oliver flew out of the USAAF base at Foggia in Italy toward a key Third Reich target, the Campina Marshaling Yards, near the Ploesti oil fields. He had no idea that it would be “96 days before we saw home base again.” Oliver said that “Our group led the 15th Air Force over the target and caught the full benefit of flak and German fighters before the gunners or the fighter pilots got tired. The fighters came right through their own flak to make a nose attack on us.”
In his memoir of the event, “Unintended Visit to Yugoslavia,” Oliver shared the blow-by-blow details of this harrowing bomb raid and his long and valiant effort to keep his shot-up plane in the air before crashing in Nazi-held territory: “Two P-38’s came and flew alongside us until we were beyond danger from German fighters. I would like to have hugged those pilots, whose names I probably will never know.”
He was the last to bail out: “As I tumbled through the air I remember saying to myself that even if the parachute did not open, I was no worse off than when I was in the plane. It did open. My attention was drawn to a noise like the loudest siren I ever heard. The free propeller was winding up as the plane dove toward the ground. The plane hit ground and there was a huge fireball.”
Alone and with a leg injury, Oliver landed almost “on top of a group of Yugoslavian peasants who were having a picnic lunch. The table was set near a farmhouse. On the table was a sheep’s head, eyeballs and all.” Luckily, he was turned over to pro-Allied guerrilla forces: “Probably within ten minutes or less a couple of men approached wearing military caps, with rifles slung over their shoulders, and leading a horse. They mentioned Draja Mihailovic and indicated that I was to mount the horse. It had not taken the Serbian guerrilla organization long to find me.”
His memoir contains lots of vignettes about peasant life in Serbia and the political groups that he experienced. His eventual repatriation with Allied forces involved lots of coded messages going back and forth between radio operators of various countries, using his initials TKO (for Thomas K. Oliver) and identifier Rat 4”.
A British RAF radio operator, Norman Edwards, received many such coded radio messages sent by the Yugoslavian call sign TKO (becoming a radio station/location named after Oliver) to ensure secrecy from the Nazis. The importance of radio communications was underscored by Edwards’ own self-identity. He was “one of the operators for 52Q (231 wing HF/DF Tortorella Freq 4110 R.A.F. Station near Foggia, Italy, High Frequency Direction Finding – Frequency 4110 Kcycles)”—and has since written his own memoir Runaway Pigs and Other Such Tales, still available on Amazon Kindle.
Edwards kept handwritten notes from his radio operator’s logbook that he eventually typed out and sent to Oliver in 2015, when Oliver got his name online after presenting to the Black Hills Veterans Writing Group. The first page of the verbatim log follows. Oliver himself went on to teach in the Electrical Engineering Department at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, after receiving his doctorate from MIT. Since he was Missing in Action over enemy territory in 1944, his mother and father (an Army general) received an unsettling telegram to that effect.
from LTC George Larson, USAF ret:
I interviewed Tom and his story is in my book South Dakota War Stories. It is funny, I did what the original Black Hills Veterans Writing Group was set up to do: I have written hundreds of magazine articles, 14 books and contributed to even more. Last Saturday I was speaking on the above book and sold all copies…more on order. The current events are not very good and since I can not sell my books—a waste of time when on Saturday I can make a good income. My latest book on Minot Air Force Base is to be released on April 29th by Arcadia Publishing. I am in final editing on my book Grand Forks Air Force by Arcadia–and Montana during World War II by Merriam Publishing.
from John Peppmeier:
He and those like him were heroes though few of them would have agreed with that…. Where did we get such men…?
from Chuck Childs:
I was a good friend and comrade of Tom. Time passes and many of WWII Veterans are passing on. At 99 I can see the sunset and I will soon be flying off on my last flight into that sunset to join that great armada in the sky.
Email from Lynne Taylor who lives in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, England, with her WWII radio operator father Norman Edwards:
Thank you so much for writing of the death of Tom – TKO as we know him. I feel very sad that such a great man has left this earth leaving a heritage that few will ever equal. I had the privilege of speaking to him on the phone soon after finding him online in 2015. I passed on my father’s best wishes and shared his side of the story as a RAF radio operator. It was a very special moment for me. He was a very special person.
My father Norman Edwards is still with us and will be 100 in November this year. He is still in good health and I will see him tomorrow to share the sad news.
I should like to pass on my condolences to his family, are you able to share details of his funeral arrangements?
Thank you again and my very best wishes to you all from England.