Byzantine Blog

Beauty of the Taboric Light

“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James and John, his brother,
and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them:
and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as light.” (Matt. 17:1-2)

Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of Transfiguration, the fulfillment of all theophanies and manifestations of God, reaffirming our true heritage with the cleansing Taboric Light and revealing our ultimate destiny as Christians — the ultimate destiny of all men and all creation to be transformed and glorified by the majestic splendor of God Himself.

That Girl Looks Familiar...

The world’s second-placed female tennis player Jelena Jankovic, another non-Croat, non-Russian, non-Czech, Polish or Slovakian, is meeting world’s number one, Belgian (or is it Swiss?) Justine Henin in the finals of the Rogers Cup in Toronto.

Last Sunday, Jelena’s countryman Novak Djokovic triumphed at the same tournament for men held in Montreal, after defeating world’s number 3, 2 and 1 (a Turk, Iranian and Egyptian, respectively) in three successive matches, booking his place in tennis history as the first player who defeated top three players at the same event after Boris Becker in 1994.

Bloody Experiments

Author, political analyst and historian Srdja Trifkovic offers a comprehensive review of Pakistan — ‘A Land of the Pure’ — sixty years after the bloody partition of India, aimed at appeasing the Muslims by creation of an artificial pure-Muslim state.

A 31-gun salute boomed at daybreak in Islamabad last Tuesday to mark Pakistan’s 60th anniversary of independence from British rule—or, to be precise, its birth as a Muslim state that resulted from the bloody partition of India in 1947. That event was accompanied by the largest mass migration in history, as over ten million people crossed the new borders fleeing for their lives; up to a million never made it [...]

U.S./NATO to Give Up Their (Latest) Experiment

Serbian Minister Aleksandar Popovic told Tanjug that “a compromise solution for the status of Kosovo-Metohija would be possible if the US were to abandon the plan proposed by Ahtisaari and the idea of creating a first NATO state in the province,” adding that there is no state in the world, especially among the important countries which are NATO members, where military forces are not under strict civilian control.

“Only Ahtisaari plan envisages unlimited NATO authority without any civilian control in an allegedly independent Kosovo,” Popovic said.

...And Julia Gorin gives us another timely reminder about recent history, along with the announcement for a long-overdue new book.

The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II

By Gregory A. Freeman, NAL Hardcover, 336pp, ISBN 0451222121. Buy this book at Amazon.com

— Book review excerpts from the author’s web site —

One of the last untold stories of World War II is also one of the greatest — a story of adventure, daring, danger and heroics, followed by a web of conspiracy, lies, and coverup.

THE FORGOTTEN 500 is one of the greatest rescue and escape stories ever, but hardly anyone has heard about it. And that’s by design. The U.S., British, and Yugoslav [communist] governments hid details of this story for decades, purposefully denying credit to the heroic rescuers and the foreign ally who gave his life to help allied airmen as they were hunted down by Nazis in the hills of Yugoslavia.

THE FORGOTTEN 500 tells the story of Operation Halyard in 1944, the largest rescue ever of downed American airmen. More than 500 U.S. airmen were rescued, along with some from other countries, all right under the noses of the Germans, and mostly in broad daylight. The mission was a complete success — the kind that should have been trumpeted in news reels and on the front page. (By comparison, the famed escape of allied prisoners from a German POW camp portrayed in the movie “The Great Escape” involved 200 men, and only 76 were successful.)

It is a little known episode that started with one edge-of-your seat rescue in August 1944, followed by a series of additional rescues in the following months. American agents from the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, worked with a Serbian guerrilla, General Draza Mihailovich, to carry out the huge, ultra-secret rescue mission.

THE FORGOTTEN 500 weaves together the tales of a dozen young airmen shot down in the hills of Yugoslavia during bombing runs, and the five secret agents who conducted their amazing rescue. These are the stories of young men who were eager to join the war and fight the Germans, even finding excitement in the often deadly trips from Italy to bomb German oil fields in Romania, but who found themselves parachuting out of crippled planes and into the arms of strange, rough looking villagers in a country they knew nothing about. They soon found out that the local Serbs were willing to sacrifice their own lives to keep the downed airmen out of German hands, but they still wondered if anyone was coming for them or if they would spend the rest of the war hiding from German patrols and barely surviving on goat’s milk and bread made with hay to make it more filling.

[...] THE FORGOTTEN 500 takes the reader along on this suspenseful adventure, while also explaining how the [Serbian] guerrilla fighter who made it all possible was betrayed by his western allies. THE FORGOTTEN 500 is the story of young men struggling to make it back home to their families, and their decades-long quest to acknowledge the secret agents and the foreign soldiers who risked all for them.

Long silenced by the governments of several nations, the full story of Operation Halyard and the young men who risked everything for their fellow soldiers is revealed for the first time in this book.

THE FORGOTTEN 500 is truly the greatest World War II story never told.