Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  Kalberer took his small force over Mersa Matrûh. Below, there was a dun blanket of tank wakes and shell bursts from which came occasional signal flares and flames. British and Germans were dying by the hundreds beneath this pall of dust. The Liberators tightened up into two flights and went hunting over the blue sea, the Royal Navy boys in the greenhouses intent with their binoculars. Kalberer's spotter called, "Smoke smudge to the north, sir. Believe it is Admiral Vian's convoy, but we should go closer to be sure it's ours." The spotter was right, but Admiral Sir Philip L. Vian's naval escort was no longer with the convoy. He had had to turn back the night before with just enough oil left to reach his only bunkering port in Alexandria. The merchantmen were alone with the Italian fleet rushing toward them at thirty knots. As Kalberer went closer to have a look, "everything that convoy had started busting around us." The merchant gun crews were taking no chances. They had no idea that the four-engined bombers might be trying to help them. Some of the freighters were American.

  Kalberer's formation scattered from the fire. He broke radio silence to reassemble the planes out of gun range. The R.A.F. Liberator radiophoned, "Flight Leader. We've been shot up. Must turn back, sorry." As the LB-30 turned back, Kalberer's tunnel gunner handed him a six-inch piece of spent flak that had arrived through the skin of the plane and said bitterly, "I'll bet it's from a lend-lease shell." This set them all laughing and they settled back to combat intent. The saucy convoy fell behind and Kalberer began bridging the distance from it to the Italian fleet. Only unfriendly fire was expected ahead.

  He was flying at 14,000 feet. He planned to hold there until the Italian naval gunners had fused their shell bursts for that altitude. Then he would lead his B-24's into a rapid banking dive of a thousand feet to throw off the enemy aim and fuse settings, and cross the ships at beams' ends to bomb. Soon he saw a magnificent sight -- the oncoming warships steaming close together at flank speed with bones in their teeth, led by what seemed a capital ship, speeding along, flanked by two cruisers and the darting white wakes of nervous protecting vessels. About 1,500 feet above the Italian fleet the Junkers shuttled.

  As the B-24's roared on into the climax, no fire came up, yet everyone below seemed alert and busy. The German planes buzzed back and forth, but showed no climbing profile to the Liberators. Bernard Rang, Kalberer's navigator-bombardier called, "I've got the battleship. What are we waiting for?" Kalberer nearly overshot the dreamy target. He dived his four Liberators, and the second flight went for a cruiser. Even on the bomb run there was no opposition. Kalberer said, "The Ju-88's were looking for low-flying Beauforts and we were flying into a headwind that carried off our engine noise."

  Bernard Rang toggled five 500-pound bombs and his colleagues dropped fifteen more almost in unison. Most of them crashed on the main deck of the big ship,* setting fires. The second flight dropped a higher percentage on the cruiser Conte di Cavour. The Liberators were out of range before the flak started. "It was the rare perfect bombing operation," said Kalberer. "We attained complete surprise and wasted very few bombs. The two ships stopped dead in the water, and the Ju-88's climbed after us. We dived to within ten feet of the waves and made it home untouched, except for the 'friendly' damage."

  * In 1945 an Italian admiral from this ship told Kalberer it was the Littorio.

  Germans aboard the stricken vessels tried to force the Italian commanders to continue toward the convoy. While the intra-Axis issue was being debated, the British submarine sank the cruiser. The two remaining Italian capital ships limped back to Taranto and never went to war again. The Allied freighters reached Malta carrying the supplies that guaranteed the island's fortitude would win out.

  Back in Fayid, Sam Nero greeted Kalberer with laurels, the first can of Spam in Africa. "It tasted great," said the victor. His crew walked three miles across the desert to the operations shack and found nobody around except a ground officer, staring into his fourth pink gin. "Ruddy show is finished," said the reception committee. "Rommel's broken through. Army's pulling out of Egypt." In came the R.A.F. officer who had briefed them on the Italian fleet. He heard Kalberer's story with eyes shining. "Bloody well done!" he said, running to Signals to spread the news.

  Rang was interviewed by an American reporter. To convey the impression of hitting a battleship, the bombardier said, "It was like shooting fish in a barrel!" The British coninuniqué on the Mediterranean battle properly acknowledged the contribution of "four-engined American Liberators." This cracked Washington's silence on Halpro. The Air Force announced that the Halverson Detachment was responsible and had earlier attacked "the Balkans." It was Washington's combined birth and death notice for Halpro.

  Harry Halverson, whose remarkable feats were thus meagerly acknowledged, was down to a fraction of his task force; moreover, he was overloaded with personal problems. He fell into a heated argument on bombing tactics with a very senior and stuffy R.A.F. officer and was sent home and retired.

  Mickey McGuire and Al Kalberer took over what was left and ran 63 short-range raids against Rommel. They were reinforced by a dozen battle-weary flying Fortresses from the other side of the world, the remnant of the U. S. Far East Air Force, under a chipper little general named Lewis H. Brereton. Brereton was a 1911 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who had switched to a second lieutenancy in the Army Coast Artillery, then to the flying Corps. He was smarting with defeats; the Japanese had chased his planes out of Indonesia and then out of Burma, and now it looked as though those left were joining another losing cause against Erwin Rommel. Brereton was immediately obliged to remove his B-17's and the Halpro Liberators from Egypt to Lydda, Palestine, to save them from destruction on the ground.

  Thirty-seven Ploesti men were still interned in Turkey in a modern hotel on Attaturk Boulevard, the main street of Ankara. They were paroled from morning to midnight, dined in the best restaurants, drew full pay from the U.S. military attaché, and enjoyed romantic flutters. A gunner lost his head over an exquisite German refugee girl and mooned to his pilot, "I'd marry her grandmother just to get in the family." The fliers became acquainted with thirty interned Soviet pilots who taught them to play chess. Navigator Harold ("Red") Wicklund was a superb swimmer and worked out daily in a pool, beating Turkish natatorial champions with such sprints as fifty meters in 25 seconds.

  On the Fourth of July the internees dined with American Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt at the embassy. Over cigars they heard a news broadcast: "Today United States Air Force crews penetrated Europe for the first time. In a joint raid with the R.A.F. to Holland . . ." * The Ploesti men looked at each other in amazement and the ambassador sent an aide to find out what the broadcast was all about. A dozen R.A.F. Bostons, six carrying uniformed U.S.A.A.F. crews, had flown a propaganda sortie from England on the American national holiday. The Halpro men, who had bombed Europe three weeks before, were hurt and puzzled. Five weeks later they were upset by a broadcast announcing that "for the first time U.S. Air Force heavy bombers have attacked targets in Europe." This was a mission of twelve British-based Flying Fortresses to Rouen, France. The Halpro men had beaten them by two months, and had gone far deeper into Europe with one more plane.

  * An error taken up in later official histories. See the Army Air Forces, Target: Germany (Simon and Schuster, 1943), p. 28, on the 4 July 1942 raid: "for the first time in World War II American airmen . . . fly American built bombers against the Germans."

  The Turkish internees did not slump into the comfortable life. They wanted back in the fight. Charles Davis met a Turk who offered to further this ambition. On certain nights, after the day's parole was over, Davis let pairs of airmen out of his hotel window on a knotted rope, into a courtyard, from which the Turkish friend put them on the Taurus Express for Allied Syria. In order not to embarrass Turkish border controls, the escapees detrained short of the boundary and were escorted across it on foot by another anonymous friend. Three who escaped in this fashion -- Red Wicklund, Lieutenant William Zimmerman and Sergeant John E. O'Co
nner -- were destined to fly to Ploesti again on a terrible raid.

  Pilot Eugene L. Ziesel often took his crew to Ankara airport to see that the new owners of his Liberator were treating her well. Turkish airmen gathered around Ziesel for lectures on the prodigious contrivance. Ziesel said, "I'm worried about the engines. They'll deteriorate unless they get regular warm-ups. And it helps to keep a little gas in the tanks or they got raunchy." The Turks rationed out gas for Ziesel's frequent warm-ups. The day after Christmas Ziesel's flight engineer said, "I think we got enough." Ziesel took off and landed on Cyprus with one engine. The Turkish Government protested the theft, and the United States solemnly returned the airplane sans crew. Ziesel and two fellow escapees were killed over Naples a week later.

  The Turks asked some of the internees to teach Turkish pilots to handle the Liberator. It was inevitable that, during one of the early lessons, a monster flying machine buzzed Ankara from end to end, panicking people in the streets.

  During the winter Charles Davis continued to mete out prisoners on the knotted rope until the Turkish Government tired of the charade and offered Britain, Germany, the U.S.S.R. and the United States a clearance sale of second-hand fliers. By April they were all back with their commands, except the Russians, whose government would not treat for them. They continued to play chess in their hotel on Attaturk Boulevard.

  The Halpro men came back to Egypt and found the power of the Liberators growing. Big plans for the adolescent force were shaping in Washington, where the Joint Statistical Survey, a group of elderly sages who reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was talking of Ploesti as "the most decisive objective of the war." The Statistical Survey had studied enemy economics and all known industrial targets whose destruction would hurt Hitler most. Ploesti was number one.

  Denying oil to Hitler satisfied the Second Law of Strategy: to deprive the foe of, or seize from him, the means of making war. It also conformed to Frederick the Great's maxim, the Strategy of Accessories: When a belligerent is unable to engage the main armies of his adversary, he sends expeditions to destroy his communications and storehouses. It was secondary, alternative thinking, but that was all that seemed possible to the beleaguered free world at this period of the war. Another mission to the deepest target, even more daring than Halpro, was in the making.

  It is an approved maxim of war never to do what the enemy wishes

  you to do.

  -- Napoleon

  2 PLOESTI: THE TAPROOT OF GERMAN MIGHT

  Ploesti was an oil boom city at the foot of the Transylvanian Alps, 35 miles north of Bucharest. Frequent showers account for its name, which means "rainy town." Its 100,000 inhabitants lived far better than the average lot of Romanians -- in acacia-shaded white villas with Roman atriums, along colonnaded streeets redolent with lilacs and roses. The Arcadian city was incongruously fenced by the source of its prosperity -- the smoking stacks, cracking towers, pumping stations, tank farms and noisy rail yards of eleven huge modern refineries, Romania's main economic asset, providing 40 percent of her exports.

  Ploesti (plô-yësht') was the first place in the world to refine commercially the black blood of contemporary industrialism. That was in 1857, two years before the petroleum strike at Titusville, Pennsylvania. Within a half century the automobile arrived with its croaking petrophilia, and British, French, Italian and Dutch capital and technology came to Ploesti. By 1914 Ploesti was coveted as an essential of machine warfare. In 1916 the Germans invaded Romania, and British engineers dynamited the refineries. It was a trifling setback to the city; the postwar motor car, Diesel ship and airplane drank vastly greater draughts of oil, and Western companies were ready to build bigger production capacity.

  The country was ruled by one who knew how to cope with oilmen, Queen Marie, née the Princess of Edinburgh, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, out of the Russian ruling house of Romanoff on her father's side. She was a tall, provocative, blue-eyed blonde with long mascaraed eyelashes, who swayed about in a wardrobe of violette-cardinale . In 1920 she was forty-five years old, but she had a sexual magnetism that lasted until she was an old woman. Marie was all dealer and tough as a Tartar. While English and American vulgar journals doted on her regal progresses abroad and her romantic indiscretions, Queen Marie was striking hard bargains for Ploesti.

  At the Versailles peace conference and during the amputation of Romanoff territory in the Russian civil war she got Bessarabia and part of Bukovina from Russia, Transylvania from Hungary, and Dobruja from Bulgaria, doubling the size of her country. She called this polyglot jailbouse of nationalities Greater Romania.

  Marie died in 1938, leaving orders that black was not to be used in mourning her. Bucharest was draped in a non-oily shade of mauve. As the cortege passed, Adolf Hitler was peering over the mountains at Ploesti, which Marie had left to her errant, cork-popping son, Carol II. The refineries produced ten million tons of oil annually, including 90-octane aviation fuel, the highest quality in Europe. Hitler's problem was novel for him. The refineries could not be taken by the usual Nazi smash-and-grab method. They were vulnerable to aerial attack and to sabotage by resident British, French and American engineers. He needed undisturbed production.

  Instead of dive bombers, Hitler used a fifth column, the Legion of the Archangel Michael for the Christian and Racial Renovation of Romania -- or the Iron Guard -- a fascist outfit covered with the blood of civilized politicians and teachers. Romania's 5 percent Jewish population, which after centuries had won civil equality, was subjected to window-smashings, pillage and assault. The German ambassador to Romania, Baron Manfred von Buch-Killinger, purchased the Iron Guard and its leader, General Ion Antonescu, a small, pinch-nosed Transylvanian graduate of French military schools who first came to notice in 1919 as the captain of a band that looted shops, homes and hospitals in Bucharest.

  Britain and France met Hitler's gambit with a staggering sum paid into King Carol's privy purse for a mutual-assistance treaty guaranteeing military aid for Romania and containing a secret clause providing that, if Hitler tried to seize the refineries, Allied technicians might destroy them.

  In June 1940 Hitler drew a lucky down card in the Ploesti game. During the fall of Paris a German column stopped one of the last trains leaving for Bordeaux and captured archives of the Deuxième Bureau, the French counterintelligence agency. They contained the technicians' plans for sabotaging the Romanian refineries. The next night Antonescu's gunmen moved down the leafy streets of Ploesti taking Allied oilmen from their villas to Iron Guard torture rooms. An American named Freeman was among the 35 men kidnapped. Shortly afterward Antonescu became prime minister of Romania. He appealed to Hitler for military aid. Der Führer's conditions were the expulsion of "foreign" oil interests and German occupation of strategic military positions in Romania. Antonescu accepted.

  The German military assistance group arrived in Bucharest to take over control. Its chief was a short, little-known forty-eight-year-old colonel with red hair and an equable and scholarly air. Alfred Gerstenberg was born on the Polish border and was imbued from childhood with German xenophobia. Originally a cavalryman, Gerstenberg became an aviator and flew with Hermann Goering in the First World War. When Germany was forever denied an air force in the Treaty of Versailles, the Soviets afforded her clandestine air training at Lipetsk, 230 miles southeast of Moscow. Gerstenberg was among a secret group of German officer-instructors who formally resigned their Reichswehr commissions in 1926 and went to the U.S.S.R. as members of the Red Army. Gerstenberg reported to Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov and remained in the Soviet until Hitler took power and Stalin broke off the arrangement. Back in Germany, Gerstenberg resumed his military commission but remained aloof from the Hitlerites. He was not a member of the National Socialist Party and refused to wear the swastika on his uniform.

  In Romania, Gerstenberg was nominally air attaché to the embassy in Bucharest, a modest pose which disguised his actual role as the executor of German military designs in the Balkans. He was dip
lomatic, far-sighted, realistic, and, as much as he stood apart from the actual party machinery, was willing to accept responsibility for Südostraum , the Nazi concept of a Balkan empire. Gerstenberg was a bachelor, a connoisseur of books and paintings, and a host whose dinner invitations were soon coveted by Bucharest society. General Otto Dessloch, who served with him, said, "He was a dedicated man. To better fulfill his duties he learned to speak Polish, Russian and Romanian. He worked sixteen hours a day with one goal in mind -- to make Ploesti too costly for the enemy to attack." Thus, a full year before the United States entered the war an exceptionally able and resolute Protector was placed in charge of the Romanian refineries. Indeed, in the person of the genial and adroit air attaché there had come the actual war-time ruler of Romania.