PLOESTI
The whole true story of the most
daring bomber attack of World War II
"In bigness and bravery it was the
greatest of all strokes."
S.L.A. Marshall, New York Herald Tribune
by James Dugan and Carroll Stewart
A THOUSAND MILES INSIDE ENEMY TERRITORY!
Twenty years ago, 1,763 Americans headed their unescorted
Liberator bombers toward Ploesti, the German oil refinery
deep in Rumania. Their impossible task was to destroy, from
zero altitude, a fortress more heavily defended than Berlin
itself.
They were told that their mission would shorten the war by
six months. Hundreds of men volunteered to go, even though
50 per-cent casualties were predicted. But that didn't mat-
ter. Their goal was to blast the refinery to dust -- at any cost.
"PLOESTI is an epic. It is packed with fierce, tender, tragic,
breakneck action, and, too, with random and haphazard
heroism and terror and horror. All the immemorial ingredi-
ents of war: speed and brutality and devotion and death."
-- Chicago Tribune
PLOESTI
The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943
BY JAMES DUGAN AND CARROLL STEWART
PLOESTI
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with
Random House, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Random House edition published April 1962
2nd printing ........ May 1962
3rd printing ........ July 1962
Excerpt appeared in Male Magazine February 1963
Bantam edition published June 1963
The quotations beginning Chapters 6, 8 and 10 are
from W.H.D. Rouse's translation of THE ILIAD,
published by New American Library of World
Literature, Inc.
The quotation beginning Chapter 12 is from E.V. Rieu's
translation of THE ODYSSEY, published by Penguin
Books.
All rights reserved.
Š Copyright, 1962, by James Dugan and Carroll Stewart.
No part of this book may be reproduced In any form,
by mimeograph or any other means, without permission
in writing. For information address: Random House Inc.
457 Madison Avenue, New York 22, N. Y.
Published simultaneously in the United States
and Canada.
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ica. Bantam Books, Inc., 271 Madison Ave., New York 16, N. Y.
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A NOTE ON RESEARCHING THIS BOOK
During the events described herein James Dugan was with the Photo &
Newsreel Section of the Eighth Air Force, which provided three bomb groups
for Tidal Wave. Carroll Stewart was the public relations officer of one of
them, the Traveling Circus. The authors knew many men who did not return
and, shortly after the mission, interviewed scores who did. This material
was only used in a 32-page airdrop booklet in French, Le Bombardement
de Ploesti. Since then the authors have corresponded with about half
the living U.S. participants in Tidal Wave, as well as with the ground
staff and relatives of the fallen. A questionnaire was circulated among
the veterans, and the pilots and navigators were furnished additional
target area charts in which to draw their courses over Ploesti. The
two forms were also printed in German and distributed among the small
percentage of Luftwaffe fliers and flak men who survived the war. The
authors found the five surviving German pilots who fought in Tidal Wave,
the four top fighter controllers, and a number of Gerstenberg's staff
officers.
The authors personally interviewed 164 U. S. combat men of 1 August 1943
and dozens of ground (and grounded) men, widows, and relatives. Dugan
and Stewart consulted 28 unpublished personal narratives and diaries
of U. S. Tidal Wave men, plus a prison camp chronicle by the inimitable
Douglas Collins. The spate of narratives indicated that the men regarded
the low raid as the greatest event in their lives. A hundred men wrote
shorter recollections of the day. Very few of them had previously told
their stories for publication, so that the accounts were relatively fresh,
even after the passage of years. Quite a few questionnaires furnished
cross checks on what happened in a single aircraft and among squadrons and
groups. The percentage of corroboration among these individual accounts
was extremely high, notwithstanding the fact that men had been separated
for a long time. A handful had improved their memories over the years,
and some of these accounts could be checked against earlier versions by
the same men.
By compiling the first complete mission roster of Tidal Wave, the authors
believe they were able to avoid the sort of evidence on Ploesti that
Colonel Kane encountered some time after the raid. Kane was in an air
terminal and overheard a U.S.A.F. sergeant telling some new acquaintances,
"I was Killer Kane's tail gunner at Ploesti." Kane stepped over and said,
"Pardon me, but did I hear my name mentioned?" The sergeant shot out his
hand and said, "Colonel, meet the biggest liar west of the Mississippi."
Five or six of the outstanding men of the mission had deliberately or
subconsciously put the awful details out of mind, and their stories
had to be gathered from others. One of the shining heroes of Ploesti
had not spoken a word about it in seventeen years. After a preliminary
interview he became upset, refused to say anything more, and would not
even furnish a photograph of himself.
The research entailed two trips to Europe and about 50,000 miles of travel
in the United States. The U.S. Air Force cooperated wholeheartedly,
although this is not an official history. The U.S.A.F. declassified
every known document and picture on Tidal Wave. Several former officers
provided documents that were not in the official archives because of
the primitive record-keeping in the desert.
The U.S.A.F. read the manuscript for security. However, this surveillance
did not involve censorship or approval or disapproval of the treatment.
The sole remaining security consideration was to protect the real names
of certain Europeans who helped the Ploesti men and who may be living
today under governments that resent such activity.
THE PUBLISHER
CONTENTS
1 The Hidden Mission 3
2 Ploesti: The Taproot of German Might 21
3 Zero Raiders 40
4 Coming Back Is Secondary Today 59
5 The Great Mission Airborne 82
6 The Circus in Hell 110
7 Targets of Opportunity 131
8 The Tunnel of Fire 142
9 The Coup de Main 154
10 Kane at White Four 160
11 Red Target Is Destroyed 171
12 The Stormy Return 182
13 Black Sunday 213
14 The Gilded Cage 236
15 The High Road to Ploesti 250
16 "Liberation, Glory Be!" 265
To the FALLEN of PLOESTI
To you who fly on forever I send that part of me which
cannot be separated and is bound to you for all time. I send
to you those of our hopes and dreams that never quite came
true, the joyous laughter and showery tears of our boy-
hood, the marvelous mysteries of our adolescence, the
glorious strength and tragic illusions of our young manhood,
all these that were and perhaps would have been, I leave, in
your care, out there in the Blue.
--John Riley Kane, Colonel, U.S.A.F. (Ret.)
In Tsarist times a game of courage called Kukushka
was played late at night in garrisons in Caucasia and
Siberia. Two officers stood in adjoining rooms with an
open door between. One had a pistol, the other had
not. At a signal the lights were extinguished. The un-
armed player opened the contest by dashing toward
the door, yelling "Kukushka!" The rules permitted him
to go through it straight or diagonally, left or right,
crouching or leaping. His opponent's problem was to
shoot him as he came through the door.
--Othmar Gurtner, The Myth of the Eigerwald
He who owns the oil will own the world, for he will rule the sea by
means of the heavy oils, the air by means of the ultra-refined oils,
and the land by means of petrol and the illuminating oils. And, in
addition to these, he will rule his fellow men in an economic sense,
by reason of the fantastic wealth he will derive from oil.
-- Henri Bérenger, 1921
1 THE HIDDEN MISSION
During the middle years of World War II the United States Army Air Forces carried on a determined and bloody bombing offensive against one of the most vital, distant and deadly industrial targets in Hitler's Europe, the oil refineries at a city called Ploesti, in the kingdom of Romania. The campaign against Ploesti, which Winston Churchill called "the taproot of German might," opened with a quixotic attempt to avenge the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor.
In May 1942 a secret, hastily assembled band of American freebooters known as Halverson Project No. 63 took off from Florida in 23 new Consolidated Liberator (B-24) bombers with orders that rivaled science fiction. They were sent to do nothing less than bomb Tokyo.
The planned route from Florida to Tokyo was not the direct 8,200-mile line to the northwest; instead, it equaled a circumnavigation of the globe. The course, south and east, called for a series of formation flights to Brazil, across the equatorial Atlantic, and over the bulge of Africa, without ground navigational aids or bases that could service the new-model bomber. There were no air charts of the route. The navigators used National Geographic Society members' maps and scattered sections of African geological surveys.
The Liberators carried everything needed for the extravaganza except bombs and further installments of gasoline. They were overloaded with three months' food for 231 men and a double issue of anything that could be scrounged. Each navigator had two sextants, each man two mess kits, each plane a spare nosewheel. The Halverson Detachment, or "Halpro" as the outlandish expedition was dubbed, carried its own intelligence echelon, including a stockbroker named Paul Zuckerman; Wilfred J. Smith, Professor of History at Ohio State University; Floyd N. Shumaker, a Mandarin-speaking airplane salesman, whose son, Thomas, was a navigator with the mission; Dr. Lauchlin Currie, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's adviser on China; and General P.H. Wang of the Chinese Air Force. The combat men were also exotic. One of the pilots was a full-blooded Oklahoma Indian, Meech Tahsequah. There was also a war analyst from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , a former actor in Our Gang movie comedies, a Royal Dutch Airlines pilot, and Richard Sanders of Salt Lake City, Utah, who was to become, at the age of twenty-eight, the youngest U.S. general officer since the Civil War. Even a skeleton ground echelon was aboard. Each plane carried two mechanics who were expected to do the work of the usual seven-man ground crew.
The cutting-out party was named for its leader, a dark, impetuous pilot, Colonel Harry A. ("Hurry-Up") Halverson.* His expedition was the product of the shocked, frantic days after Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese almost obliterated the U.S. air forces in Hawaii and the Far East. Halpro came from vengeful councils of veteran American airmen with their chief, General Henry ("Hap") Arnold. Colonel James A. Doolittle's carrier-based raid on Japan a month earlier came from the same fiery moots.
* Born Halvor A. Halvorsen.
At Chengtu, in interior China, Halverson's Liberators were to fuel from buried caches, sling Italian bombs, and move up to operational fields around Chekiang within return range of Japan. The forward bases were primitive earthen fighter strips, hardly capable of handling spotter planes, and the Liberator was a 60,000-pound four-engined bomber with a 110-foot wingspread. Indeed, Doolittle's raid had drawn attention to the likelihood of further attacks on Japan, and the Japanese army was marching rapidly toward the Chekiang bases.
As they headed out from Florida on the chimerical adventure, Halverson's outfit did not know the Japanese strike was impossible and that, instead, they were to be sent to Romania on the longest bombing mission ever to be attempted until the long-range Superfortress came into action two years later.
Halpro island-hopped to Natal, Brazil, with one ship unable to keep up with the formation because its right wheel would not retract. It was the flagship carrying the furious Halverson and his executive officer, Colonel George F. ("Mickey") McGuire, piloted by a thirty-four-year-old ex-KLM pilot from Indiana, Alfred Kalberer, who had been flying since he was seventeen. Kalberer's flight engineer was a newly recruited garage mechanic, who could not find anyone able to fix the hanging wheel on the Caribbean stops. The flagship barely made 135 miles an hour and its stalling speed was 110.
Without waiting for their commander the other pilots took off from Natal and completed the first formation flight across the South Atlantic to Africa. They landed on the Pan-American passenger base at Accra -- there were no military airdromes available. The pilots intended to lay over a few days to service their overworked craft and wait for Halverson, but the airport manager was nervous about German air raids, so they gassed up and took off directly on the 2,400-mile flight to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. They ran into an evening cyclone which scattered the formation. Each plane continued on its own in the howling rain, unable to take starsights, and, of course, without ground radio-direction. As they groped across Africa in the stormy night, Kalberer took off from Brazil to fly his overburdened bus across the Atlantic with the wheels down.
In the morning the forward element gazed down on solid African jungle without landmarks. The navigators pored over the geological survey charts, unable to relate them to anything below. The navigator of Babe the Big Blue Ox was Lieutenant Walter L. Shea of the Bronx, New York, who had been washed out of pilot training by the discovery that he was nearly blind in the left eye from an air rifle accident as a boy. He had concealed this handicap from pilot John Wilkinson. The pilot said, "Come on, Shea boy, give us a fix." Shea handed up a chart with a position vaguely outlined. John Wilcox, the co-pilot, said, "I can't make out where we are from this." Shea said, "All right, you guys tell me where we are." Wilcox cried, "I think I got it!" Shea said, "Okay, see that you mark my chart correctly."
Further along in the voyage another Liberator was flying through cloud when the pilot, Captain Robert Paullin, noticed dark patches passing below his wings. "What's the highest mountain around here?" he phoned his navigator, Thomas A. Shumaker. "Mount Marra," came the
reply. "Three thousand seventy." Paullin said, "Three thousand seventy what?" Shumaker said, "This damn French map . . . Hey, it's three thousand meters!" That was more than ten thousand feet. Paullin pushed up full throttle and barely cleared the peak.
The fliers looked down at giraffes and elephants on the savannah. A few weeks before, many of them had been sitting in humdrum offices, with no more thought of traveling in Africa than of rocketing to the moon. In the fuselage the sergeants breached canned peaches, played poker, and wondered what the women would be like in China.
The main element landed intact at the Pan-American base at Wadi Seidna, Khartoum. An R.A.F. officer asked Shea, "How close did you come to your ETA [Estimated Time of Arrival]?" The one-eyed navigator replied nonchalantly, "Two miles off the heading and one minute early" -- improving his plotting by 75 minutes. The Briton pointed his handle-bar mustaches in sheer admiration. Indeed, it was an extraordinary flight. Halpro had come eight thousand miles on uncharted ways over sea, jungle and desert, through storms and starless night, freighted with the contents of a food warehouse, a supply depot and its ground personnel. A British lorry driver gave Shea a lift, noting that the navigator was packing a.45 automatic on each hip. "Where do you blokes think you are -- Africa?" asked the driver.
In the meantime Kalberer completed his precarious trudge across the ocean and landed at Abidjan on the Ivory Coast with zero on his gas gauges. He refueled and started across Africa, still dragging his wheels, and was forced down at an R.A.F. base at El Fasher in the Sudanese desert. He asked the station commander for 500 gallons of gas. Tears welled into the Briton's eyes. "Lieutenant," he said, "every pint of petrol we've got has to be carried here on camel back, eight hundred miles across the desert." Nevertheless he gave Kalberer the gas, and the flagship went on to Khartoum.
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