In addition to the massing of arms, Gerstenberg conceived a system to restore production quickly if some of the bombers got through to the refineries. He erected a trunk pipeline around Ploesti linking all the refinery units. Refinery managers protested that they were competing with each other and that a common circulation of oil would be uncapitalistic. Gerstenberg paid no attention to them. His brilliant scheme provided that if parts of several refineries were destroyed, the pipeline would marry their surviving units to begin processing oil immediately after a raid. The emergency pipeline stood exposed above the ground so that bomb damage to it could be repaired quickly. Allied Intelligence knew nothing about Gerstenberg's rapid recovery system.
In contrast to Gerstenberg's situation, his coming opponent's was most uncomfortable. On the Libyan desert, crawling with scorpions, in dust blowing shoulder-high, the Americans lay in a vast, unprepossessing encampment, scattered forty miles north and south on the beach behind the ruins of the Bronze Age city of Benghazi. Their threadbare tents were patched with scraps of aluminum from neighboring junk yards of Axis air wrecks. Around the tents bloomed "desert lilies," conical urinals made from gas tins; oil drum privies; and cordons of fluttering rags marking off old German mine fields and shell dumps, cunningly booby-trapped for souvenir hunters.
In the morning the inhabitants of this unholy bivouac shuffled out, fisting dust from their eyes, to a breakfast of pressed ham and dried cabbage boiled in alkali water. Each man was rationed to one pint of water a day. They were lean and dirty and some had beards and shoulder-length hair. They wore tatters of U.S. uniforms, save for a lucky few with British battle dress or German and Italian garments pulled out of dunes shifted in the wind. Their shoes were held together with wires. They seemed the final camp of a broken and demoralized army at the end of a hopeless retreat. Actually they were among the early elite of the mightiest air force the world has ever seen. This was Lewis Brereton's Ninth Air Force Bomber Command in January 1943. It was incapable of bombing Ploesti. However, at that moment, on the other side of Africa, at Casablanca, a secret meeting was assigning just that mission to it.
At the Casablanca Conference, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met to settle on European land strategy once the Germans were expelled from Africa. Both were under pressure from Stalin and agitation in their own ranks for a second front -- mass landings in Atlantic Europe to grapple Hitler from behind while Stalin hammered him from the east. Churchill opposed a second front in 1943, as he had in 1942, on the grounds that the Allies did not have the strength for it.
When the Casablanca elders chose Sicily as the next land objective, the Prime Minister noted that the Americans were probably thinking, "At any rate we have stopped Churchill from entangling us in the Balkans." Churchill yielded gracefully on another friction point -- American high-level daylight bombing out of England, which he had come to Casablanca to oppose. General Ira Eaker, chief of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, who was trying to prove the concept with inadequate forces in a season of foul weather, met Churchill privately and read off a list of ten arguments for high daytime strikes. The master propagandist rolled one of them aloud on his tongue -- "round-the-clock bombing" by the R.A.F. and U.S.A.A.F. -- and withdrew his opposition until Eaker had had a chance to demonstrate whether the tactic would work.
The British delegation came to Casablanca with a cautious brief for an Allied invasion of the Balkans. It became apparent in the preliminary pourparlers that the United States would be very difficult to persuade to this course. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden made the Balkan proposal while Mr. Churchill remained quiet. The Americans strongly opposed the strategy, and Britain swiftly withdrew without involving the Prime Minister. Later Churchill wrote about the incident somewhat elliptically: "The American chiefs do not like to be outdone in generosity. No people respond more spontaneously to fair play. If you treat Americans well, they always want to treat you better." Perhaps it was this trait that brought out the Ploesti folder and resulted in unanimous and enthusiastic approval of the blow at Romanian oil production. Generals George Marshall and Henry Arnold and the political side of the U.S. delegation were strongly for the assault as a strategic imperative and as a project that would please both Stalin and Churchill. Ploesti was a minor matter compared with the momentous "unconditional surrender" declaration and "Husky," the planned invasion of Sicily. Destroying Romanian refining capacity would relieve pressure on Stalin and the Allies in Sicily. It was estimated that the bombers could destroy one-third of Hitler's fuel production and shorten the war in Europe by six months.
There was a large content of hope in the plan. An uninfluential group at Casablanca regarded Ploesti as another "panacea target," the sort Sir Arthur Harris, R.A.F. bomber command chief, railed against. Analysts were always telling Bomber Harris that huge single raids on pet German industries would shorten the war by six months. The skeptics had no weight at Casablanca. The conference directed the Ninth Air Force to bomb Ploesti sometime between the end of the African campaign and the invasion of Sicily in order that bomber support would not be withheld from these operations. The plan was called Tidal Wave. It was one of the few instances in World War II in which the High Command handed down a major task to a theater commander without asking him if it was feasible. At this stage -- early in 1943 -- the only Ninth Air Force airmen who knew of the intent were Brereton and his immediate staff.
The Ploesti mandate passed to General Arnold's inner circle, Generals Heywood Hansell and Lawrence Kuter and Colonel Jacob Smart. The generals assigned Smart to work up the bombing plan. He was a tall, sandy-haired Southerner and a crack pilot whom Arnold often entrusted with viceregal missions to overseas commands. Colonel Smart flew to Britain and enlisted British Intelligence and R.A.F. tactical specialists, the most important of whom was Lieutenant Colonel W. Lesley Forster, an old Balkan hand who had managed the Astro Romana refinery at Ploesti for eight years. Lord Forbes, the anxious avenger, was also brought in.
Forster briefed Smart on the peculiar industrial geography of Ploesti. The refineries did not constitute a single large unit like most of the familiar German targets. There were a dozen of them ringed around the city, due to the unplanned growth of the oil industry. The first oil wells in Romania were located in the Transylvanian foothills to the north and were drained off in gravity pipelines to the convenient refining city. As more refineries were built, they came to form a ring six miles in diameter with their rails and delivery pipelines, pumping stations, marshaling yards and trucking depots.
Smart did not have enough bombers to hit all the plants. He and Forster selected the five major refineries, one on the north side of the city and the others strung for five miles along the southern outskirts. The target selection confronted Smart with the challenge of his career. To drop anything in the city itself would be a waste of bombs and cause useless civilian casualties. He had to find a way to hit only the outer ring. It was like trying to bomb an atoll without dropping anything into the lagoon. In addition, there were two other highly productive refineries that should be struck if the raid was to be a telling blow at Hitler. One was eighteen miles north of Ploesti and the other five miles south.
Furthermore, Forster pointed out that simply bombing a refinery would not suffice. A single plant, like Creditul Minier, for instance, was dispersed over an area of a mile to keep volatile processing units apart in case of fire. The entire bomber strength Smart could hope for -- perhaps 200 planes -- could place all its bombs in the grounds of such a refinery and fail to destroy it. What had to be hit were the relatively small critical installations within the complex -- the powerhouse, boiler house, stills, cracking towers and pumping stations. And Forster and Smart had reason to believe these pinpoints would be surrounded by blast walls.
The Allied chiefs had given Jacob Smart a strategic mandate with no known tactical solution.
He had also to consider that such a raid far into enemy territory would be very costly in men and planes, far more expensive th
an other missions. Such losses had to be offset by very heavy destruction to the enemy's fuel production capacity. While balancing these questions, Smart did not hesitate to ponder another, which is often the arbiter of battles -- how to obtain surprise. To reach the target city the B-24's would have to fly a round trip of at least 2,300 miles, most of it over enemy territory. It would be the longest mission of the war, save for Halpro. The odds against surprise seemed insurmountable. The enemy certainly had radar, visual spotters and scounting planes to report the inbound attacking force.
Smart's cerebrations on what was known, what was foreseeable, and what could be imagined had a special intensity. He was going to fly the mission himself. He looked for the best way to fly to Ploesti, smash most of the production capacity, and get back with the most men, including himself. Ploughing through the morass of implausibility, he found a solution, "like bright metal on a sullen ground." It gleamed so brightly that each difficulty seemed an omen of victory.
He conceived that the bombers would attack the refineries at very low altitude.
The idea seemed to have everything. It was a cunning psychological trick. Everyone, including the Germans, knew the American monomania for high-level attack by heavy bombers. An unprecedented low-level strike would permit the utmost precision bombing of the vital pinpoints in the refineries and score with the most explosives. It would spare civilians and raise American esteem among the subject peoples of fascism. It would reduce losses of men and planes by affording the flak gunners only low, fleeting targets. By hugging the ground the B-24's would cheat German pursuit planes of half their sphere of attack. Moreover, the stratum nearest the ground was the blind angle for radar detection. And Liberators that were mortally hit in battle would have a better chance to skid-land than those that were crippled high in the sky.
Before he told anyone of the wild idea, Smart turned devil's advocate and tried to upset his own reasoning. "Of all aircraft there is probably none less suited to low-level work than the B-24," he said to himself. "To the man on the ground it appears as though he could knock it down with a rock." He took off his horns and answered, "The quality of our B-24 pilots is pretty high. With special training they could fly formation on the deck and make it work. Moreover, for the first time in heavy bombing experience the machine gunners in the Liberators will be able to fight the flak men, not just the fighter craft. Previously, flak crews have been subjected only to an occasional nearby bomb burst or strafing by fighters. How would they behave in the face of hundreds of fifty-calibers firing from the low-flying Liberators?" Each question produced a satisfactory answer. The revolutionary low road was the right road to Ploesti. The most radical tactic was the most practical. The coup de main would be delivered at zero altitude.
Smart placed his low-level proposal in the Ploesti folder that lay before the Allied chiefs at the Trident Conference in Washington in May. The meeting was obsessed with the invasion of Sicily, scheduled to begin in two months' time, and the conferees could pay little attention to Ploesti or whether it was to be tackled high or low. Sir Charles Portal, Britain's chief of the air staff, voiced misgivings about a Ploesti assault by either technique. He noted that the entire Liberator force in Britain, the redoubtable Traveling Circus and the Eight Balls (44th Heavy Bombardment Group), were to be removed to Africa, along with the newly arrived Sky Scorpions, to make up the mission force with two Ninth Air Force groups. All would be taken off operations for low-level training at a time when they would be sorely needed in the Sicilian invasion and the round-the-clock offensive on Germany. Sir Charles also wondered aloud whether, if the mission failed to destroy enemy oil production in one blow, the Germans would not build up heavier defenses at Ploesti to cope with the succeeding attacks which would have to be made.
The U.S. chief of staff, General Marshall, replied that even "a fairly successful" attack on the refineries would stagger the enemy. He held that Tidal Wave was the most important action that could be taken to aid the Soviet and the coming invasion of the Continent. The overtasked Trident Conference countersealed the Tidal Wave order to the Ninth Air Force.
The conferees, minus President Roosevelt, repaired to Africa to make their writ known to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the theater commander. He agreed to the mission and its time of execution, but did not give an opinion on whether it should be executed high or low. Jacob Smart was accorded a private audience with Mr. Churchill to describe the low-level scheme. The imaginative Churchill, a lifelong lover of surprise raids, responded enthusiastically. He offered four crack Royal Air Force Lancaster crews to lead the Americans to the target.
Smart replied that the Lancaster bomber and the Liberator had differing characteristics of range, load, altitude and speed, and that it would be impossible for the two types to maintain close formation on the long journey to Romania. Mr. Churchill yielded. Smart did not have to bring up the additional consideration that American airmen would resent the implication that they could not find the target themselves.
The whole art of war consists of getting at what is on the other
side of the hill.
-- The Duke of Wellington
3 ZERO RAIDERS
While the inner circle of the U. S. Army Air Forces was buzzing with Smart's daring low-level proposition, the R.A.F. furnished ostensible proof that low strikes by heavy bombers were too costly. Twelve Lancasters assailed U-boat engine works at Augsburg, Germany, and five returned. Wing Commander Guy Gibson took nineteen hand-picked Lancaster crews to destroy the Mohne and Eder hydroelectric dams and flood the industrial Ruhr. Three planes aborted after take-off. Sixteen bombed from an altitude of sixty feet, and eight returned. The gallant Gibson was awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain's Medal of Honor. Bomber Harris remarked, "Any operation that deserves the V.C. is in the nature of things unfit to be repeated at frequent intervals." It was a matter of plain arithmetic. If you lost half your sixteen planes on a mission, four raids afterward you would have one plane. The U.S. Air Force in Europe demanded 25 missions of a combat flier by day, and Bomber Harris insisted on 35 by night.
Jacob Smart flew to Britain to confer with the airman he wanted to assume operational planning for Tidal Wave, Colonel Edward J. Timberlake, dean of the Liberator combat school, who had just brought his Traveling Circus back to England from the winter campaign in Africa. Timberlake had promoted squadron leaders to commanding rank, including Group Colonel K.K. Compton, who was to lead the force on Tidal Wave. As Jacob Smart braced him, Timberlake was relinquishing command of the Circus to Addison Baker, one of his squadron leaders, and moving up to command of the 201st (Provisional) Combat Wing, a cadre charged with converting the onflow of new B-24's and crews to a battle might. Timberlake accepted Smart's challenge to take over the thousand and one details of Tidal Wave, and began picking out the experts he needed.
As his operations officer, Timberlake selected one of his Circus squadron leaders, a slight, sharp-witted youth from Racine, Wisconsin, named John Jerstad, who suffered the nickname "Jerk." Major Jerstad had flown so many more missions than his quota that he had stopped counting them. He had come far since his first raid, after which he reported to interrogations, "I never saw so much flak!" Jerstad kept a notebook of lessons learned in combat; he had brought his men through many a dire sky engagement, including a 105-minute running battle with the "Yellownoses," Goering's smartest fighter group. Jerstad wrote his parents, "I'm the youngest kid on the staff and it's quite an honor to work with Colonels and Generals."
The navigation officer of Timberlake's planning wing was a New York State school teacher, Captain Leander F. Schmid, retired from combat but prepared to fly to Ploesti as the target finder. Two outstanding Britons joined the wing, Group Captain D.G. Lewis, R.A.F., an expert on enemy fighters, and another ex-refinery manager from Ploesti, Wing Commander D.C. Smythe, an advocate of low-level bombing.
As the tactical motif for the assault formed among the planners, they became attracted to the idea of attacking Ploesti from the northwe
st, the direction of the Reich itself. Coming down from the Carpathian foothills and sweeping the targets simultaneously seemed to promise maximum surprise. Moreover, from this direction there was a shining arrow pointing straight at the target city -- the railway from Floresti to Ploesti. The attack group could guide on the railway and run infallibly upon the targets from Floresti, thirteen miles -- or three minutes -- away from the bombline. Thus Floresti, an obscure hamlet carried on only the largest-scale survey maps, was selected as the final Initial Point, the turning place for the bomb drive.
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