In the Slovak Republic this week, Joseph Morton and 16 other American and British soldiers were remembered for what happened to them 80 years ago.
Morton grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, took classes at the University of Nebraska and worked as a reporter for the Associated Press in Lincoln.
He was a World War II correspondent in Central Europe when tragedy struck, a tragedy that distinguished Morton from the other American reporters who covered World War II.
In 1944, Morton flew from Italy on a highly classified mission with U.S. Air Force B-17 bombers and P-51 Mustangs. They flew 500-miles across the Adriatic Sea, into the Balkans and through enemy lines to Nazi Germany’s Eastern Front. Then 33 years old, Morton was the only reporter. He was hunting a big story.
Morton had already flown on Air Force missions to rescue downed U.S. and Allied pilots trapped behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia, according to York University history professor Tim McNeese.
“He wants to be the guy writing the story and the only guy writing the story,” McNeese said. “…So this puts him sometimes in places where the crowd, the journalism crowd, is not gathered.”
Morton’s biggest mission came on Oct. 7. He only told his Associated Press editor and pregnant wife Letty Morton, back home in Missouri, that he was covering “the story of a lifetime.”
Historian Mitch Yockelson said Morton landed on a remote airfield in Nazi-occupied Slovakia with 16 American O.S.S. and British S.O.E. intelligence officers.
"He was embedded with the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to today's modern CIA,” Yockelson said.
The OSS cover story was an Air Force rescue mission for downed Allied pilots. Secretly though, the six planes that landed in Slovakia with were loaded with guns, medical supplies and gasoline. They were for partisan troops fighting in Slovakia’s national uprising against Nazi and Slovak forces.
Retired Columbia University Journalism professor Ann Cooper said Morton’s big story was the OSS and SOE secret Balkan mission to assist the Slovak uprising.
“To be the witness, to be able to see what was happening, and then go back and tell the world that story, and that's still the very best kind of journalism,” Cooper said.
Morton was supposed to fly back to Italy with the rescued pilots.
“He said, don't worry about me. I'll fly in, get the story, I'll fly out on the next plane,” McNeese said. “Well, the first part was true. The second part wasn't.”
Instead, Morton shadowed the Allied spy team for three weeks in the Slovak rebel stronghold of Banska Bystrica. As veteran German troops surrounded the city, Morton’s chances of being caught by the Nazis with the Allied spies increased dramatically.
On Oct. 27, Nazi troops stormed into Banska Bystrica and sent outgunned rebel soldiers, refugees, Morton and the spy team fleeing into the Tatra Mountains.
“It's just harrowing,” Cooper said. “And I think they were on the run for about six weeks. It just was such a desperate, desperate situation.”
A miserable weather mix of rain, freezing wind and snow caused severe malnutrition and frostbite for the thousands who fled the Nazis.
On Christmas Day, Morton and the exhausted spy team took shelter in a remote forester's mountain hut near Polomka. The next morning, 250 German and Hlinka soldiers opened fire, stormed the hut and arrested everyone inside.
Morton was wearing his war correspondent's uniform at the time that identified him as a non-combatant journalist.
Less than a month later, on January 24, 1945, the Nazis executed Morton and the American and British intelligence officers at Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp. Morton became the only American war correspondent sentenced to death by the Nazis.
He left behind his wife Letty and baby daughter, Melinda Ann, who everyone called Mimi and who Morton never met.
“I sort of always knew what happened,” she said. “It was always a known entity that he was not going to be coming home.”
Now 80, Mimi Gosney is a retired teacher living in Kentucky. She said her mother kept her father’s memory alive through the many photographs that Letty kept of him. In 2001, Gosney retraced her father’s last steps in Slovakia while serving in the Peace Corps. It helped her understand why her father the journalist died.
“I don’t think there’s a place in Slovakia that my dad went that I didn’t go to, too,” she said. “And I think that’s why he was killed. It’s important to be the messenger. People have to understand what other people were going through.”
The Associated Press tried for months to learn from the U.S. government what happened to Morton.
The long silence was finally broken by Associated Press Correspondent Lynn Heinzerling in July 1945. He published a story after finding and interviewing witnesses that confirmed the Nazi executions of Joe Morton and the 16 other intelligence team members.