Meeting U. S. combat men for the first time, the British gave them a cordial welcome, which Halverson quickly translated into a whopping requisition on military stores. Each man drew a pair of suede desert boots, drill shorts, bush jacket, cork topee, green cashmere knee stockings and an ivory cigaret holder. Duked out in these costumes, the airmen swarmed into a Khartoum night club that boasted three Viennese did not faze the red-blooded American boy. The hostesses would accept only officers as dance partners, so the sergeants formed their own conga line, snaking around to the band leader's calls of "One, two, three -- kick!" and breaking formation only to pull up their socks.
It was a little comic gleam in a tragic period for the Allies. The Liberators were deep inland at Khartoum because German planes were raiding Egyptian air bases almost as they pleased. Everywhere the Axis was winning the war. Bataan was falling and Corregidor would soon go. General Joseph Stilwell was retreating from Burma. In Russia the Germans had taken Kerch, were besieging Sevastopol, and the road seemed open to a great prize -- the Russian oil fields at Baku. General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps was threatening Egypt. U-boats were killing ships off the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. There was only one Allied gain. The battered U.S. Navy had turned back the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea.
Halpro's Chinese expedition was held at Khartoum, awaiting orders. Halverson ran practice missions to keep the crews on the ball. That took more life out of the planes. The best maintenance man in the air force, Captain Ulysses S. ("Sam") Nero, fought the scouring desert dust, without replacement parts and with too few mechanics. In 1921, as a sergeant, Sam Nero had flown with Colonel William Mitchell to sink the 27,000-ton war-prize battleship Ostfriesland in the historic assertion of the airplane's supremacy over warships. Now Nero declared one plane after another unserviceable until Halpro was down to half its original strength.
In June Halpro's destiny changed overnight. The Japanese captured Chekiang, from which Halpro was supposed to bomb Japan. On 5 June the U.S. Congress declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Oddly enough, Hitler's puppet dictator of Romania, Ion Antonescu, had declared war on the United States nine months before, but not until now had he been honored with a counter-declaration. Washington's belated response was to legalize an invasion of Romania by Halverson. Hap Arnold ordered Hurry-Up to strike Europe's greatest oil refinery, the Astro Romana plant, located at Ploesti, with an annual productive capacity of two million metric tons.
The airmen asked each other, "Where is this Ploesti? How come?" Their top commanders knew the name well; capturing or destroying Ploesti had long been a classic problem in the world's war colleges. The name was being used frequently in the secure rooms in Washington, London, Berlin, Moscow and Cairo. Ploesti's refineries produced one-third of Adolf Hitler's high-octane aviation gasoline, panzer fuel, benzine and lubricants. From Ploesti came half of the oil that kept Rommel's armor running on the sand seas of Mediterranean Africa. At that bitter moment, destroying Astro Romana seemed the only move that could stop Rommel in deltaic Egypt and the smashing German drive to take Baku. If Hitler seized the Baku oil, it would quench the thirst of the Nazi machine for a long time to come, and it was far beyond bombing range of any Allied base in prospect or any bomber in production. In the airman's thinking, Ploesti was the key to many doors.
President Roosevelt's bright friend Harry Hopkins had been urging a blow at Ploesti. Royal Air Force Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder offered petrol and bombs from his meager African stores to hit Ploesti. The U.S. military attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner F. Fellers, declared that the Ploesti refineries were "by far the most decisive objective," in fact, "the strategic target of the war," and they were "within striking distance of American heavies." In ordering it to be bombed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff overruled the misgivings of some airmen who said that Ploesti was too far for planes to carry an effective bomb load. They would have to trade bombs for extra gas to bring them back. A Liberator could not carry much more than a ton of bombs that distance and Halpro was down to thirteen planes.
But the time was now or never, in view of Rommel's rapid progress toward the Nile. Sam Nero painted fake insignia on the B-24's and moved them to the take-off base, the R.A.F. training school at Fayid on the Great Bitter Lake. It had been raided four times by the Luftwaffe in the past fortnight. Halverson was jeopardizing his force merely to reach the forward base. Halpro landed at Fayid the day the gallant Free French garrison was forced out at Bir Hacheim and the Afrika Korps was laagering up for the victory march to Egypt. There was a rumor in Cairo that Hitler had reserved two floors in Shepheard's Hotel to accept the surrender of Africa.
Washington asked Moscow to permit Halpro to land behind the Russian lines, to shorten the flight over Ploesti. The Kremlin was silent. The American privateers faced the longest bombing flight in history. None of them had ever been in combat, dropped a live bomb, or seen an enemy pursuit plane. They were going to fly over unknown blacked-out lands at night, without proper charts, flouting the U.S. daylight bombing doctrine for which they had been trained and the Liberator designed.
The airplane had never been tested in combat by Americans. The first production run of the B-24 had gone to Britain, where it had been dubbed the Liberator. It was a fat, slab-sided machine with a radically thin, high-set wing that looked incapable of bearing the ship's weight. It had twin oval rudders and a low-slung tricycle undercarriage. Yet the "pregnant cow," as airmen called her, could fly faster and farther at 20,000-25,000 feet than the vaunted B-17 Flying Fortress, and with a greater bomb load.
Before take-off Kalberer ran into an Australian mechanic who was familiar with the LB-30, the Royal Air Force designation for the Liberator. "Would you have a look at my right wheel?" asked the pilot. "It won't retract." The Aussie got under the machine and said, "No wonder, sir. The strut you have on 'er was not made for the Liberator. I'll have a look in stores." He came back and installed a proper Liberator strut.
An R.A.F. officer briefed Halverson's men for the mission. He warned them about a fake Ploesti the Germans had erected ten miles east of the target, and announced the course: they were to cross the Mediterranean to a lighthouse on the Turkish coast. "However, gentlemen, you are not -- and I repeat not -- to enter neutral Turkish territory," he said. The fliers glanced at each other; the direct line to the target was over Turkey. The briefing officer continued, "You will swing out to the west and skirt Turkey in this fashion, then turn back northeast across northern Greece [which was German-held] to the Romanian port of Constanta on the Black Sea. Follow the pipeline west to the Danube. You will follow the river inland until you come to a fork and a diamond-shaped island. From that point take your northern heading direct to the Astro Romana refinery." The fliers groaned. An American Intelligence officer concluded the briefing. "This will be a momentous mission," he said, "and can have a tremendous effect. You will bomb from thirty thousand feet and land at Ramadi in Iraq."
Captain John Payne, one of the pilots, said, "To us the briefing was straight out of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . Many of our ships could never make thirty thousand feet with an extra bomb bay tank and six five-hundred-pound bombs. And range! We calculated the round trip was twenty-six hundred miles. Even if we stripped the bombs and put two gas tanks in the bomb bay, we'd never make it back on the briefed route."
The mission navigator, Lieutenant Bernard Rang, a civil air transport alumnus, called a navigators' meeting in his room without telling Halverson. Rang pinned up a National Geographic Society map of the Middle East and pointed out, "It can't be done. If we have to veer all around Turkey, nobody will make Iraq. But, for God's sake, don't anybody land in Turkey, or you'll be interned for the rest of the war. If your pilot insists on it because you're about out of gas, try your damndest to talk him into Aleppo, Syria. Or try to hit the Euphrates River and follow it to Ramadi." Although the Kremlin was still silent on the request to land in the U.S.S.R., Rang said, "Maybe you can land in Tiflis. They got red-headed women there."
The rump briefing was interrupted by the dramatic entrance of Hurry-Up Halverson. The navigators leaped to attention. The colonel drew his finger down a well-worn crease in the map -- the line of 30 degrees east longitude running from Egypt through Turkey to the Black Sea. He said, "Can we help it if the National Geographic put this line through Turkey? Furthermore, I suggest that we bomb at fourteen thousand feet." Without another word he stalked out. The navigators roared with relief.
The first U.S. mission to Ploesti -- indeed the first U.S. Air Force mission to any target in Europe -- took off at 2230 hours, 11 June 1942. Each plane was on its own. The pilots could not keep formation at night, although prowling fighters could spot the undampered engine exhausts at a short distance. Babe the Big Blue Ox was the last ship airborne at 2300 hours.
One-Eyed Shea felt hopeful of his navigation; the sky was transparent, a diamond mine of stars. Shea hit the Turkish lighthouse "right on the money" and the pilots pulled the giant bomber into the substratosphere over sleeping Turkey. Another machine, Little Eva, co-piloted by Wilber C. West of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, climbed into the freezing heights. Her navigator, Charles T. Davis, the Pittsburgh newspaperman, said, "The penetrating, almost unbearable forty-below zero cold sapped our strength. It froze the oxygen mask on one of the gunners and West stumbled back through the windy, frigid bomb bays in time to bring him a spare and save his life. It thickened the machine oil on our bombsight until it would hardly operate." The bombardiers were using a sight manufactured by a cash register company, of which they said, "Maybe it's good for ringing up sales, because you sure can't bomb with it."
A few hours after take-off the Kremlin granted permission for them to land in Russia, but the airmen were keeping complete radio silence and could not be advised of it.
Kalberer, conning the lead ship, reached Constanta in the first glimmer of dawn and sighted no other Liberator in the sky. But to the east there was something that looked like the aurora borealis. It was caused by the glowing trajectories of 36-inch German mortar shells falling into Sevastopol in the ghastly battle of the Crimea. Kalberer turned west and looked down at the Danube. The river outlines were completely unlike the largest-scale map he had seen in Egypt. Then he realized that the Danube was in heavy flood, the shorelines blotted out by muddy water. There would be no neat fork and island to use as an Initial Point from which to turn for Ploesti.
Behind him, over the Black Sea, One-Eyed Shea squinted for his second landfall, a Romanian lighthouse near Constanta. After a period of suspense he said, "I got her, fellows. But she seems to move." Wilkinson asked for the bearing and took a look. He said, "Shea, you've got a damned good fix on the planet Venus." The navigator said imperturbably, "Check. Give 'er a ninety-degree turn, Lieutenant." Babe was over Constanta harbor. Wilkinson said, "Kindly give me the bearing for Astro Romana." Shea scribbled something and took his fur-lined jacket off the bombsight; he had shivered the whole way across Turkey to keep it from freezing up. In the Halpro force navigators also served as bombardiers to save weight.
The crew, now over German territory, was solemn and silent, thinking of fighters. Shea heard a shout on the intercom and thought. "Oh, boy, here they come!" He looked out and saw Lieutenant Mark Mooty's Liberator, the first plane they had seen since take-off. Shea waved to his colleague, Lieutenant Theodore E. Bennett, in Mooty's greenhouse. Bennett shrugged eloquently. He was lost too.
Below, they saw explosions flashing on the dusky earth. They didn't know whether thcy were bombs bursting or muzzle flashes of flak guns, having seen neither phenomenon before. The scattered mission, unable to pick up landmarks, now came into thick cloud. Little Eva, with her frozen fuel transfer system, lost three engines. The crew struggled to regain them as the plane turned back. Little Eva dumped her bombs on shipping at Constanta.
"Well, navigator?" said the pilot of Babe the Big Blue Ox. Shea figured he had to be over the Astro Romana refinery and toggled the first live bombs he had ever dropped. Babe leaped with relief and Wilkinson wheeled her about and streaked for the Black Sea. He landed at Aleppo, Syria, and was surrounded by tommy gunners. A French officer said to his men, "Put down the guns. They're the same types as those who have just landed." Another Halpro plane was at Aleppo.
Lieutenant Mooty landed safely on an Iraqi waste near the Euphrates. The Liberator was encircled by a band of desert brigands. The American gunners prepared to defend themselves in the fashion of a wagon train beleaguered by the Sioux, and were saved in the nick of time by the cavalry, in the form of a French armored car.
Short of gas, Little Eva landed on the civil airport at Ankara, Turkey. The airport manager rushed over and gave Charles Davis a box of candy. A Turkish officer looked at the plane and said, "Little Eva? If this is little Eva, what must big Eva be like?" As the crew breakfasted in the airport café on syrupy coffee and goat cheese, two more B-24's landed, followed by a Messerschmitt 109, which had chased them all the way from Romania. All three were out of gas.
Another B-24 "christened" a nearly completed Turkish fighter base at Istanbul. Aboard were the first U.S. Air Force men to be wounded over Europe, pilot Virgil Anderson and gunner Enoch G. Kusilavage. They had been hit, not too seriously, in a brush with a German fighter. The remaining ships reached Iraq.
Halverson's Balkan incursion dealt little or no damage to the refineries. Nonetheless, it was an outstanding feat of World War II airmanship, especially in view of the extraordinary staging flights to Egypt. Twelve of thirteen planes reached the Ploesti area. None were lost to the Germans and not a man was killed. Halverson's mission had fared better than Doolittle's Tokyo raid, the other product of Washington's revenge impulse. Doolittle lost his sixteen aircraft; five men were killed and four taken captive. Doolittle's "thirty seconds over Tokyo" received great publicity for the benefit of home-front morale. Halverson got none.
The day after Halpro went to Ploesti not a word about it appeared in the press. Washington did not issue a communiqué. The big air news from Cairo that day was the stopover there of some Doolittle repatriates on their way home from parachuting into China. The second day, newspapers carried a squib from Ankara saying that unidentified bombers had landed in Turkey. Washington's silence dealt German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels all the wild cards. He put out a communiqué saying that the bombers had force-landed while dropping propaganda leaflets on Turkey. Vichy Radio said they were American lend-lease planes trying to reach Sevastopol. Goebbels thought of a better one and broadcast that the bombers were Chinese. On the third day the New York Times rounded up Turkish dispatches under a six-column front-page headline:
U.S. BOMBERS STRIKE BLACK SEA AREA: BASE IS MYSTERY.
Washington remained mute. No books, songs or war bond tours by Ploesti heroes were laid on.
Few Romanians were aware that anything had happened; the best-informed people in Bucharest adopted Vichy's line that U.S. planes had passed over on a lend-lease flight to Russia. However, there was one man in Romania who marked the event. Luftwaffe Colonel Alfred Gerstenberg, military attaché to the German Embassy at Bucharest, called a meeting of his Nazi "military assistance" staff and announced, "About fifteen American heavy bombers of the newest long-range type penetrated Sectors Sixty-five, Seventy-five, Eighty-five of Defense Zone Twenty-four East [Ploesti-Constanta]. This is the beginning."
As the Halpro crews filtered back from Syria and Iraq, the defense of the Mediterranean world was at its critical stage. Every man, ship, tank and plane was committed to battle. German and British land forces were fighting it out at Mersa Matrûh. The British garrison at Tobruk was in extremis. An immense air-sea battle was forming around two British convoys from Gibraltar and Alexandria which were taking relief to Malta. The Royal Air Force and Navy in the Mediterranean were totally engaged with the Luftwaffe. Even the temporizing Benito Mussolini, prodded by the Germans, sent out the Regia Aeronautica and the Italian fleet, which was the strongest in the sea.
Hurry-Up Halverson had not yet returned to bas
e from Iraq. The R.A.F. told Alfred Kalberer that the Italian fleet was out, and he asked Sam Nero for bombers. It was precisely the situation for which the Consolidated Liberator had been designed. In the spell cast by Mitchell and Nero's battleship-sinking in the twenties, U.S. air strategy had dwelt on bombers to defend the country from battleships. No one was more interested in the practical test than Sam Nero, who furnished Kalberer with seven B-24's plus a volunteer R.A.F. LB-30 Liberator.
Kalberer borrowed a young British Navy officer for each plane to distinguish naval friend from foe. The bomber men were warned not to attack submarines; a Royal Navy pigboat was stalking the Italian fleet. And the fliers were to be careful about those whom Kalberer called "the bravest men in the battle" -- R.A.F. pilots in old Beauforts, who were flying out of a patch of ground in encircled Tobruk with torpedoes slung beneath their craft. These lads were jabbing at the Italian battleships through swarms of Junkers 88's that provided fleet air cover.
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