Romanian nonbelligerence was Hitler's strongest shield for undisturbed oil production. The Germans consolidated control by forming the Kontinentale Oil Company, "nationalizing" the Allied-owned refineries and staffing them with German technicians, setting up new boards of directors consisting of pliant Romanian politicians and lawyers. This done, Gerstenberg turned to a more serious endeavor, that of squeezing men, guns and planes out of Goering to defend Ploesti. He bent his powers of persuasian and scare propaganda on Berlin rather than Bucharest, which he dominated with unobtrusive art. Gerstenberg thought little of the Antonescu mob. Romanian fratricide served only to strengthen German rule. One night the Iron Guard murdered 64 politicians of the Liberal party -- leaving fewer patriots to annoy him. A few months later, however, Antonescu's crazed domestic fascists gave Gerstenberg a start by rising against their own leader for "selling out to the German!" Antonescu, however, controlled the Romanian Army and squelched the berserkers with 6,000 deaths. It gave Gerstenberg a period of domestic tranquillity in which to carry on his preparations.
For Romania the result of Antonescu's embrace of Hitler's protection was immediate national humiliation. Other willing Nazi satellites waited until 1945 for territorial disgorgement, but Romania was partitioned immediately. Soviet Russia, accepting Antonescu's word that he was too weak to protect the country, and not herself at war with Germany, served an ultimatum for the return of Bessarabia and Bukovina and got them back next day. Whereupon Antonescu's Axis neighbors, Bulgaria and Hungary, twisted his arm and regained southern Dobruja and most of Transylvania, respectively. Queen Marie's Greater Romania vanished overnight. Soon King Carol II was in flight to Switzerland with Iron Guard assassins at his heels, and his seventeen-year-old son, Michael, was placed on a powerless throne.
In February 1941 Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Romania. Two months later Hitler blitzed Yugoslavia and Greece. Outnumbered Royal Air Force squadrons resisted with hopeless valor. In the fortnight left to her in Greece, Britain proposed to hurl her remaining two-engine bombers at Ploesti. The Greek cabinet forbade it because Greece was not at war with Romania. The last chance to hit Ploesti from Europe was lost. Germany had won the prize intact by a combined diplomatic and military offensive that forced Britain a thousand miles from Ploesti, far beyond bombing range.
Among the R.A.F. escapees from Greece was a long-haired, histrionic Anglo-Irish peer, Wing Commander Arthur Patrick Hastings Viscount Forbes, formerly air attaché in the British Embassy at Bucharest. Lord Forbes arrived in Cairo crying for vengeance upon Ploesti, but there was no way now to bomb it.
Gerstenberg made use of the lull to obtain more men and arms from Berlin. Hitler, preparing his onslaught on the U.S.S.R., was disinclined to strengthen a region where enemy incursion was impossible. But Gerstenberg's old comrade, Goering, helped him, and the Protector came into good luck a few days after Hitler's attack on Russia in June. During the first week, Red Air Force bombers came three times to Ploesti in small numbers. The last raid, a twilight affair, left some damage and a few parachuted airmen. Gerstenberg used it to get a substantial reinforcement from Berlin. There was no follow-up by the Red Air Force. Stalin, a leading proponent of massive long-range retaliatory bombing, quickly dropped the whole idea. Many of his heavy bombers were destroyed on the ground by the first Luftwaffe attacks; the Wehrmacht rolled over his forward air bases, and Stalin lent every resource of soviet aircraft production to ground-support craft for the Red Army, and fighters to defend his cities. Gerstenberg gained another epoch of calm for his preparations. He was promoted to Generalmajor (brigadier) and was moving along briskly toward the unique result of his mission, an autonomous theater command, not subject to Oberkommando politics or Hitler intuition.
Antonescu drove a half-million unwilling, ill-trained and poorly equipped peasants into the U.S.S.R. under the name of the Third Romanian Army. Hitler sacrificed 50,000 of them to win Odessa. (During the war Germany consumed about one-third of the able-bodied farmers of Romania, a nation with an 80 percent agricultural population.) As a consequence, Gerstenberg's new troops came to a land of lonely women. From hardship, deprivation, blackout and bombing in Germany, they came to peace and plenty. Werner Nass, who arrived with the 622nd Antiaircraft Battalion from the Ruhr, said, "As an NCO I got fourteen thousand lei a month; that bought ten pounds of bacon. You could buy anything -- things no longer known in the Rubr -- eggs, sausages, ham, fruit and as much wine as you wanted. From our first home leaves we brought old clothes to sell to the Romanians. Our pockets were full of money. We were everything but soldiers. It was like Feldmarschall von Mackensen said when he went to Romania in 1916: 'I came with an army of soldiers and returned with an army of salesmen.'" The only flaw in the good life was the exacting Gerstenberg who fought obesity, alcoholism, venereal disease and laziness with incessant drills. Every day the gunners in their pale blue, short-sleeved shirts and mustard-colored shorts -- an Afrika Korps fashion -- ran through firing exercises. Russian POW's in Red Army uniforms with insignia removed served up the shells, and on some guns a "reindoctrinated" Red even pulled the firing cord.
Life became even sweeter when 1,200 Luftwaffe air-women and hundreds of German civilian girls came as secretaries and technicians. Romanian women also were kind to the rich soldiers. However, a German having relations with Romanians or Russians outside the line of duty had to report each contact to an Intelligence officer. There were a few Romanian antifascists who would risk espionage work, but most of the information leaving the country was carried by diplomats or commercial travelers going to neutral Turkey. The United States and British embassies there received generalized impressions and Bucharest café chatter but very little about Gerstenberg's strength or dispositions. He allowed no one but German troops near the flak batteries, airdromes and warning installations. He divested Ploesti of occupants not holding essential refinery or commercial jobs. On the ruling level, Gerstenberg had a singular strength; he spoke Romanian, which his Anibassador Buch-Killinger did not, so that the General controlled intimate communications between him and Antonescu.
Gerstenberg disdained both of them. He permitted them to think they were running Romania while having his own way on matters of importance. Colonel Bernhard Woldenga, Gerstenberg's fighter controller, said, "He was absolutely the key man. He knew everyone and all combinations in court circles, the Romanian staff, businessmen, estate owners and people who knew what the peasants were thinking." Only his immediate staff knew what Gerstenberg was thinking. His plans for holding Ploesti were quite un-Nazi. Berlin had no notion what to do about defeat or insurrection until they occurred. The Protector, however, was cooly anticipating an Allied bombing offensive, a Romanian rising and a Soviet roll-back of the Wehrmacht three years before they in fact occurred.
To handle bombers Gerstenberg required the world's heaviest concentration of flak guns and warning systems. He was defending a curious city; it had a soft civilian center five miles in diameter and, close around it, an almost solid belt of oil plants and transportation systems. The Protector wanted an outer ring of powerful, highly mobile guns which he could shift and concentrate quickly in the most likely tangents of aerial assault. He demanded 250 first-line interceptor planes standing by and 75,000 Luftwaffe troops, mostly technicians, to serve the planes, guns, radar and communications systems.
On the second possibility -- the national rising -- Gerstenberg's thinking was subtly realistic. Although the Iron Guard's anti-German outbreak had been smothered in bullets, he was aware of a more tactful, pro-Allied, or opportunistic, core in the Romanian general staff and among the aristocracy and big landowners. He was surrounded by Romanian toadies whose fortunes had improved under the German rule, but he did not delude himself that they were any more than an ineffectual and expendable minority when the patriotic war came.
The Protector held Saturday afternoon staff meetings in which he elucidated his analyses and plans. He reminded his officers that the Antonescu crowd would be broken q
uickly in a rising and it would be entirely left to the Germans to save themselves and the refineries. Ploesti was the key. It lay astride the main road and rail routes from Germany to the southeastern front. If the Romanians rebelled, Gerstenberg would pull his outer flak rings in tight against the oil city and use the guns as artillery against the insurrectionists. He called this concept Festung Ploesti , an unconquerable redoubt. At the same time, he insured that a corridor would remain open to the Reich by fortifying both sides of the Predeal Pass north of the city. As the peasants threw themselves at his 88's, he would continue to receive supplies from Germany and send oil to her through the armed corridor.
Gerstenberg considered Bucharest of no strategic importance and was confident that a gun battery and a few squads could quell a revolution in the capital.
Festung Ploesti also was the answer to the Red Army if it came through the Danubian Plain. The fortress would bar the Soviets from crossing the Transylvanian Alps into Central Europe and the city defenses could be quickly and steadily enlarged through the bristling Predeal lifeline.
In the spring of 1942 the premature Halpro mission helped Gerstenberg's Festung Ploesti project. He flaunted the daring attack before the Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, which was Goering's shy title, and Goering began to eke him air troops amounting to 50,000 people by the end of the year. Gerstenberg had in addition about 70,000 Slav prisoners and civilian slaves who had been driven out of the conquered eastlands.
During the winter the British Eighth Army rolled back Rommel's threat to Egypt and Brereton's bombers came back to Egyptian bases. Halverson's successor, Mickey McGuire, received a dribble of Liberators. McGuire jeeped to each arrival as though Washington was going to snatch it back before he could put his unit symbol on the rudder. From the second replacement ship came a small pilot, Norman Appold, a chemical engineer recently graduated from the University of Michigan. He looked nothing like the prognathous aviators in the comic strips. Instead of the standard bulging jaw, Appold's could be held slightly recessive. In place of eagle brows, his formed two quizzical circumflexes, and the eyes were round instead of squinty. He wore a large grin and was full of gab and gags instead of the Olympian silences of the classic birdmen. McGuire thought for a moment that America was running out of manpower. What stood before him, saluting casually, was the first of the college boys, children of the Great Depression, who were about to take over air combat from the prewar set.
Appold's vivacity was deceptive. He was deadly serious. He resented the war for interrupting his engineering career and he was resolved to get the damn thing over with as soon as possible. To him that meant absolute application to the bomber business, preserving his life by laying it on the line at every opportunity. He held iconoclastic views on air tactics. Even in training, Appold had tossed the book out the window by practicing low-level attacks with the cumbersome Liberator.
The bombers blasted ahead of Montgomery's army, reducing Tobruk and Benghazi and gaining them as bases. When Appold arrived in Benghazi -- a "weather-beaten wasp's nest fallen to pieces," as the war correspondent Ivan Dmitri put it -- he found the Ninth Bomber Command moving into one of the few surviving structures, a hotel compound south of the city. Since 1940 it had housed, in order, war staffs of Italy, Britain, Germany, Britain, Germany, and now the U.S.A. In barren battlegrounds, opposing generals sometimes leave each other suitable headquarters in their wills. Appold leafed through the guest book, noting such previous registrants as Marshal Graziani, Vittorio Mussolini, Erwin Rommel, Sir Arthur Tedder, Sir Archibald Wavell, and a recent hasty German scrawl: "Keep this book in order. We'll be back." Appold signed in and drove off to inspect the city and its important deep-water port. The ruins of Benghazi were clinically interesting; he had helped considerably to put them in this condition by breaching the flak defenses when the Germans last held them.
The R.A.F. had opened up the final offensive on Benghazi with night pathfinders, dropping flares for following bombers. The Germans dispersed them with jungles of flak and lured them to bomb phony target flares ten miles away on a barren beach. Next time the pathfinders dropped flares in the flak sites to guide oncoming B-24 trains with Norden bombsights. The glare was too intense for the U.S. bombardiers, who once again hit the false Benghazi. During a subsequent night raid Appold decided to pull a counter-ambush on the flak men. He went over at 20,000 feet. Shells ranged toward him and the Germans lighted the mock target. But Appold dropped no flares. He crossed Benghazi, turned and deliberately flew back over it, bringing more ground guns into action. On the third pass every muzzle on the grounds was belching brightly, revealing the complete geography of the antiaircraft positions, nicely picked out in the dark. Appold flipped into a steep dive to 12,000 feet, throwing off the fuse settings of the German shells, and distributed three tons of high explosive and antipersonnel bombs on the exposed flak guns. After that the Germans could not break the bomber array. The Allies took the upper hand and systematicaily reduced the defenses.
From Bucharest, General Gerstenberg watched the enemy bomber bases marching west in Africa. At Benghazi the Liberators were nearly 200 miles closer to Ploesti than they had been in Egypt. The Protector also noted Italian reports of higher, faster B-24's, whose markings revealed a new bomb group operating from Benghazi. This was the 98th, the Pyramiders, led by a sulphurous Texan, John Riley Kane, whose name began appearing in Luftwaffe intelligence summaries as "Killer" Kane. He had come to fight, loud on the intercom and hard on the power settings. "Every bomb on the Axis!" Kane preached to his troops. Once he took the Pyramiders over an Afrika Korps objective with his tail and top turret guns jammed. He missed the bomb heading during spirited Messerschmitt attacks, and went back over the target, calling on the open radio for his planes to follow. The German pilots got on his frequency and drowned Kane's commands with taunts. Kane yelled, "Get the goddamn hell off the air, you bastards!" The Messerschmitt boys shut up, Kane bombed, and dodged through them to get home safely.
Then Gerstenberg noted still another new group of Liberators entering Mediterranean combat. Unlike Mickey McGuire's and Killer Kane's tawny desert-camouflaged ships, these planes wore green and loam colors, and they flew tight formation with well-disciplined gunners. This was the 93rd Bomb Group out of England on temporary loan to the desert forces. It was called Ted's Traveling Circus, after its commander, Colonel Edward J. Timberlake, a West Pointer with a nose bent playing football on the Plain. Timberlake was a ruggedly built, easygoing blond, a style setter and an elegant manager of men. He spoke his own argot; if he called a man "a good Joe," that man was in. "A joker" was out.
At this augmentation of enemy air power, Gerstenberg sent to Goering for more men, guns and planes to defend Ploesti. He got a first-class reinforcement, including an outstanding airman, Colonel Bernhard Woldenga of Hamburg, who became Romanian fighter controller. Trim, blue-eyed Woldenga was a former master mariner of the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line. In the 1920's Hamburg-Amerika planned its own airline and trained a half dozen of its ship captains, including Woldenga, as air pilots. He joined the Luftwaffe in the mid-thirties, and after Hitler marched in 1939, flew both bombers and fighters in Poland, Britain, Greece and Russia. Gerstenberg especially welcomed Colonel Woldenga, who came straight from eight months in North Africa managing fighters against the B-24's of McGuire, Kane and Timberlake.
The quality of the enlisted technicians in Gerstenberg's new draft was evidenced by Willi Nowicki, Waffenwart , or armament warden, in the 614th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion, which was pulled out of Germany Christmas week and drawn nonstop to Ploesti in a double-locomotive train. In civilian life Nowicki was a Brandenburg locksmith. He won a master mechanic's certificate at the age of twenty-two, had worked before the war constructing British air bases in the Suez, and, after the war began, was a subcontractor in the German aircraft industry. Willi could knock down and reassemble flak guns in astonishing time. His battery sat on the southwest quadrant of Ploesti, through which Gerstenberg
estimated the American bombers would come, when they came. Battery Seven staked out and dug in with six officers, 180 men and a hundred Russian prisoners to do the heavy work. The battery implanted six 88-mm. rifles, the versatile high-velocity artillery piece which served as an antiaircraft, antitank, naval and general purpose gun. Waffenwart Nowicki's 88's were named Adolf, Bertha, Caesar, Dora, Emile and Friederich. Bertha had four white rings painted on her muzzle, one for each bomber she had shot down in Germany. On the periphery of the battery there were four 37-mm. and four 20-mm. guns.
Before long there were forty such batteries embracing the Anglo-American salients of Festung Ploesti. Outside of them were lighter batteries manned by Austrians and Romanians, and hundreds of machine-gun pits and towers. More guns were mounted on factories, bridge approaches, water towers, church steeples, and concealed in haystacks and groves. To exercise the gunners, Colonel Woldenga sent old Heinkel 111 and Junkers 52 bombers on unannounced mock attacks. In case the Americans should actually be able to bomb through this awesome protection, Gerstenberg secured from Germany a crack 500-man unit of fire police, despite their urgent need at home in the mounting Anglo-American bombing offensive. Corporal Werner Buchheim of Ulm, one of the fire fighters, operated a mobile radio car with the call letters ICEBEAR, to link up the active air defenses and the passive fire fighters and reconstruction engineers. Gerstenberg was building the first air fortress in the world -- around an exposed industrial installation that could not go underground or be dispersed. Ploesti was a colossal land battleship, armored and gunned to withstand the heaviest aerial attack.
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