Bronze Star

In my last post, I noted that there are two conflicting stories about why Opapa’s 1945 mission to Austria went awry: Opapa’s narrative was that the plane’s crew made an error and dropped him in Yugoslavia, while other accounts (likely based on the report by the plane crew) insisted that Paul Kröck, Opapa’s comrade, mistook Yugoslavia for his hometown of Freiland, Austria.

Well, here’s another document that offers some insight: Opapa’s Bronze Star citation, which he received in August 1945, a few months after returning to the Allied base in northern Italy:

According to the citation, Opapa received a Bronze Star for “heroic achievement in connection with military operations against the enemy in Jugoslavia from 7 February to 8 May 1945.”

Here’s the especially relevant section:

“Unfazed by the fact that through an error of navigation made by the plane crew he had landed at a post twent-five miles distanct from his original pinpoint, in an area with an altogether different type of terrain and population, Second Lieutenant Gerbner displayed outstanding initiative and leadership in making contact with the Jugoslav Partisans and, after a period of three months, in making his way back to his organization.” [emphasis added]

Opapa was probably the source of information for this citation, so what this tells us is that Opapa’s narrative about the plane crew’s error, which I heard as a kid and which he reiterated in the draft for his autobiography, has been his narrative since 1945. It makes me even more suspicious of the other story that blames Kröck for the mishap.

I’ll be spending the next few posts trying to learn more about what Opapa’s experiences were like in Yugoslavia — I never realized he spent four entire months with the Yugoslav Partisans! I always assumed it was more like a few days.

But today, I will leave you with a picture Mom found yesterday, which I *think* might be the Bronze Star ceremony from August 11, 1945.

You can see Opapa in the middle, looking very tan. The sign in the background reads “Parking for Staff Cars Only” (in English), suggesting that it’s the American headquarters, possibly in Trieste, Italy. And, as Mom pointed out, there are a lot of bullet holes in the building’s facade.