NEW YORK — Harold Hayes, the last surviving member of a band of airborne US medics and nurses who crashed-landed in Nazi-occupied Albania in 1943 and survived German attacks, blizzards, and horrific privations on a 600-mile trek to their rescue on the Adriatic Coast, died Sunday in Medford, Ore. He was 94.

The survival of the 30 noncombatants was a long-held secret of World War II: the story of 13 female nurses, 13 male medics and the four-man crew of a medical evacuation plane who were stranded behind enemy lines for nine weeks, hiding in primitive villages and caves in wintry mountains, afflicted with lice and dysentery, often near starvation and hunted by German patrols.

Their odyssey was classified during the war and for years afterward to protect partisan fighters, Allied agents, and villagers who gave them food, shelter, and guidance. Some were shot by the Germans for their acts of kindness, and after the war, as rumors became death sentences, those even suspected of helping the Americans were executed by Albania’s communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, whose rule ended with his death in 1985.

“For many years, I didn’t say anything about what happened in Albania,’’ Mr. Hayes said in a 2015 telephone interview from his assisted-living home in Medford. “Hoxha was ruthless. If he discovered the names of anyone who had helped us, he had them and their families executed.’’

Mr. Hayes, a medic, had no special role in the group’s survival, but by outliving all his wartime comrades, he became a last conduit for their story, which was related in a 1999 memoir by one of the nurses, and more recently in several books, notably “The Secret Rescue’’ (2013), by Cate Lineberry, whose account relied heavily on Mr. Hayes’s recollections.

The perilous adventure began two months after Italy surrendered and Allied forces invaded Italy to begin pushing the Germans back across Europe. On Nov. 8, 1943, the nurses, medics, and fliers of the Army Air Force’s 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron took off from Sicily, bound for Bari, on Italy’s east coast, where hundreds of wounded troops awaited.

The twin-engine cargo plane carried a pilot, copilot, radio operator, and crew chief. The nurses, all second lieutenants, were 22 to 32 years old. Mr. Hayes, then 21, from Indianola, Iowa, and the other medics were equivalent to staff sergeants and ranged in age from 21 to 36.

An hour into the flight, the plane became lost in a huge storm over the Adriatic Sea. Its compass and communications failed. Blown 100 miles off course, it crossed into Albania and was intercepted by German fighters and attacked by anti-aircraft guns. It plunged to a belly landing in a marsh 25 miles inland. Willis Shumway, 23, the crew chief, was the only casualty, with a knee injury that left him unable to walk.

The disoriented Americans had no idea where they were. Fearing a fuel explosion, they scrambled out of the plane and encountered their first bit of luck. Striding out of a woods was a band of rugged-looking men with rifles and daggers. One spoke a little English. He was Hasan Gina, an anti-German partisan leader. He told them they were in Albania.

Later, they would learn that they were 150 miles east of Bari, on the wrong side of the Adriatic, surrounded by German forces that had occupied Albania for months, and were caught in a civil war between rival partisan groups. The Americans knew almost nothing of Albania, a small, mostly Muslim country that had changed little in centuries. The mountainous terrain was dotted with impoverished villages. There were no railroads and few roads. Mules and horses were the main transportation. Winters were brutal, food was scarce.

With only a general plan to reach the west coast and somehow cross the Adriatic to Italy, the Americans began walking in the wrong direction. Over the ensuing weeks, guided by the partisans, they trekked through mountains and valleys, sometimes cutting back or traveling in circles to avoid German patrols, living in the open or sheltering in villages and sharing cornbread with peasants.

The Americans were listed as missing in action, and War Department telegrams, beginning “regret to inform you,’’ were sent to their families.

The survivors, meantime, carried Shumway on a stretcher made of seats from the plane; they later found pack animals for him. After five days, they rested at a partisan-controlled town called Berat, where they were cheered, mistaken for the vanguard of an Allied invasion to liberate Albania.

Their respite lasted only a few days. They awoke to gunfire and the explosion of artillery shells as German forces entered the town. German planes strafed a truck carrying some of the escaping Americans. Three nurses were separated from the main group and left behind in Berat; they took refuge in a farmhouse and remained in hiding for four months.

The main group of Americans climbed on foot to a mountain village and were caught in a crossfire between partisan groups. “It was the first time the Americans had heard of the rival group, and they were beginning to realize they were in as much danger from the country’s internal battle as they were from the Germans,’’ Lineberry wrote in “The Secret Rescue.’’

As autumn waned, blizzards enveloped the Americans. Their clothing was too thin. Their shoes were worn out. “Though all their feet soon felt like blocks of ice and their bodies shivered, they knew they had to keep going,’’ Lineberry wrote.

On Nov. 27, British intelligence in Albania learned from partisans that the nurses, medics, and crew were alive, trying to reach the coast. Lieutenant Gavan Duffy, a secret agent who with a small team had reached Albania months earlier by parachute and on foot, found the Americans and began leading them westward.

On Jan. 9, after a 63-day ordeal, 27 Americans — 10 nurses and 17 medics and fliers — boarded a British launch and crossed to Italy. The three nurses in German-occupied Berat were led to safety by an American team in March 1944.

Mr. Hayes returned to civilian life, attended Iowa State College and became an aeronautical engineer, designing military planes and conducting studies for the Air Force and NASA until he retired in 1984.