Looking down at Ploesti from the Initial Point, the planners found the refineries neatly spaced across a five-mile-wide bombline. Men rushing across a strange country could not be expected to learn place names, much less the names of factories, so the refineries were assigned numbers from left to right.
The lead group, Colonel K.K. Compton's Liberandos, accordingly drew Target White One on the far left, the Romana Americana plant. The second group, Addison Baker's Traveling Circus, would simultaneously strike White Two, the Concordia Vega refinery. Section B of the Circus, led by Ramsay Potts, would hit White Three, the parallel Standard Petrol Block and Unirea Sperantza units. Killer Kane's heavy Pyramider force, coming in on the center, would take out the number-one priority target of the raid, Astro Romana, or Target White Four, the two-million-ton producer that had eluded Halpro. On Kane's right, flying almost on top of the railway, would come Leon Johnson's Eight Balls, aiming for White Five, the Colombia Aquila refinery.
Johnson's deputy, James Posey, would veer off a few points further right to carry his force to Blue Target, the important Creditul Minier plant, five miles south of the White targets at a town called Brazi. The last and seventh strike force in the bomber stream, Jack Wood's Sky Scorpions, would climb the foothills and hit another isolated objective, the Steaua Romana refinery at Câmpina, 18 miles north of Ploesti. It was named Red Target.
The approach was shrewdly selected, considering the extra flying range the B-24's would be given that day, the surprise angle, the lucky railroad, and the fact that the last sixty miles to the Initial Point would be flown over wooded foothills and ravines that Allied Intelligence was almost sure had no antiaircraft defenses. Intelligence firmly estimated that the flak and detection systems were arraigned in Ploesti's eastern approaches, toward the Soviet, and denied the possibility of effective defenses in the northern, western and southern salients of Ploesti. What enemy commander could be expecting an incursion over the vast distance from Africa, and especially one that went on an extra hundred miles or so to attack through the back door? Unfortunately for this supposition, Gerstenberg was definitely expecting an attack from Africa and was right now building up his guns on the north, west and south.
Having picked Floresti as the turning point for the bomb run, the planners redoubled assurances that the navigators could find the little town. They projected a line west of Floresti and slightly south and found that two much larger towns lay along this approach, Targoviste and Pitesti. So Pitesti became the First Initial Point to find and Targoviste the Second Initial Point. Crossing them correctly would bring one unerringly to the Third I.P. In addition, there was a prominent landmark at Targoviste that could be seen for many miles, a large ancient monastery on a hill. Everything that could be done for the navigators was done. The three principal plotters of the I.P.'s, Ted Timberlake, Leander Schmid and John Jerstad, were going to fly the mission.
In England, Timberlake started low-level rehearsals among the two Eighth Air Force Liberator groups selected to go to Africa for Tidal Wave -- his former command, the Traveling Circus, and the Eight Balls, led by Colonel Leon Johnson. Johnson introduced his flying officers to a specialist who would teach them how to use a low-level bombsight. Pilot Robert Lehnhausen said, "This was right after a very mean and costly mission we'd made against the submarine pens at Kiel where we lost seven out of eighteen ships. And a few days before, a squadron of speedy B-26 medium bombers had tried a low-level raid on Holland and none came back. There was much murmuring and grumbling. Colonel Johnson told us in a calm, positive voice that if it was the desire of the Air Force to fly low-level missions we would fly those missions and he would lead us. There was complete silence in the room. If he was leading, we were going to follow."
The English-based groups, together with the newly arrived Sky Scorpions (389th Bomb Group), began beating up and down the foggy East Anglian countryside in treetop practice flights. None of the crewmen knew why, but they reveled in the sudden legalization of buzzing, heretofore a highly illicit pleasure. English farmers were not as happy about it. They complained of horses in shock, cows gone dry, and bees on strike against May flowers. To satisfy speculations about the low-level target, Timberlake's Intelligence chief, Michael G. Phipps, a former ten-goal polo player, planted a rumor that it was the German battleship Tirpitz, hiding in a Norwegian fjord beyond the range of R.A.F. bombers. Phipps borrowed Norwegian Navy officers to walk around the B-24 bases and go in and out of operations rooms. The Norwegians had no idea why, but they enjoyed their post exchange privileges.
The planners dreaded one aspect of the low-level scheme -- mid-air collisions caused by propeller turbulence or slight errors in judgment. During the rehearsals two Liberators collided, killing eighteen men. The survivors, pilot Harold L. James and Sergeant Earl Zimmerman, returned to duty. They were to go to Ploesti.
Timberlake befriended an unemployed Intelligence officer whom he found wandering around Eighth Air Force H.Q., vainly trying to sell an idea. He was a slender, ingenious Connecticut architect named Gerald K. Geerlings, a World War I infantryman, and his idea was: "Flat aerial maps do not coordinate with ground features until the navigator is directly over them. Why not use oblique drawings to show how places look as you approach them?" Timberlake admitted Geerlings to the Tidal Wave secret and gave him instructions to prepare perspective views of Ploesti and the overland route to the target.
The Allies had no such aerial pictures of the Balkans or the refinery city and were prohibited from photo-reconnaissance lest the defenses be alerted. The only way to fulfill the orders was for Geerlings to comb a large random picture bank without alerting the custodians to his regional interest. He went to the Bodleian Library at Cambridge, where there was a large picture deposit of foreign scenery, gathered by appeals to the public for snapshots and postal cards from prewar travels. Geerlings asked for files on ten widely separated parts of the world and photographed the mountain to get the mouse he was after -- a slender folder on the Balkans.
Geerlings designed a novel route chart -- an accordion folder with eleven oblique views of landmarks en route to the target. There were no place names on the folder. They could not be disclosed even to his printer, the secure R.A.F. Intelligence center at Medmenham. At that establishment model makers worked on another hush-hush project, scale models of a nameless valley and an unknown industrial city. The miniature of Ploesti was so accurate that Group Captain Lewis recognized his former villa. They finished the models in record time, and an odd pair came with strange devices, including a child's tricycle, and locked themselves in the model room. They were the Ploesti avenger, Lord Forbes, and a Texas-drawling New York newspaperman named John Reagan ("Tex") McCrary, chief of the Photo & Newsreel Section of the Eighth U.S.A.A.F. They produced a professional 45-minute sound film to brief the Ploesti ffiers; this was the first use of movies to prepare men for a single battle. They also turned out 8-mm. silent films showing how each refinery would look from the air on a low-level approach and crossing. The camera dolly for these trucking shots was the child's tricycle. Thus, more than a month before the mission, the entire briefing panoply was designed for a low attack, even though General Brereton in Cairo was still supposed to have the final option between the low road and the high road.
Brereton was not closely involved with the operational preparations; they were left to his bomber chief, Brigadier Uzal G. Ent, who had to find the men and airplanes to do the job. Ent was a small, amiable Pennsylvania Dutchman with a searching mind and remarkably varied attainments. A graduate of Susquehanna University and the U.S. Military Academy, he was a qualified specialist in chemical warfare, engineering, meteorology, and aerial navigation and piloting. As a navigator in the National Balloon Race in 1938, Ent won the Distinguished Flying Cross for landing the bag after his pilot had been killed by lightning. He had served in diplomatic posts and was an ordained Lutheran minister. He was married to an ex-Ziegfeld Follies girl.
Ent was not enthusiastic about a low-leve
l attack; he believed the losses would be unbearable. He intended to fly to Ploesti himself. Then a surprising and encouraging omen came, when an adventitious low-level bombing experiment succeeded beyond all expectation. It began in the restless, inventive mind of Norman Appold, who had become impatient with the often ineffective high-level attempts on Rommel's Italian supply ports. Appold asked his Liberando group commander, K.K. Compton, to let him try the low road to a particularly resistant target at Messina, Sicily. The flak there was almost interdictory. The veteran Halpro lead navigator, Bernard Rang, had recently gone over Messina in a plane rocking with flak hits, and had parachuted to his death among the bursts.
When he braced K.K. Compton, Appold had no inkling of the big low-level mission being planned. Compton was secretly pleased to have a man volunteer for a vitally needed experiment without knowing why it was important, and he endorsed Appold's plan to Uzal Ent, who immediately approved.
Appold's Sicilian objective was a row of ferroconcrete train ferry sheds protecting Rommel's supply trains from bombing after they were ferried across the Messina Strait from Italy. Repeated high-level strikes had not penetrated the roofs. Secretly, after dark on 29 March, Appold led three Liberando ships to the Luqa fighter strip on Malta, the most forward base for the novel target route he planned. As the planes were refueled, he briefed the crews: "We are going around the top of Sicily, keeping under radar all the way. The Initial Point, where we turn into our bomb run, may be hard to find. It's just an unmarked spot of water between the Lipari Islands and Messina. So let's all stick together. The alternate target is Crotone." This was another familiar and defiant high-level target, an important chemical and ammunition works on the boot sole of Italy which had resisted nine high-formation bombings.
At midnight, Appold's research flight took off from Malta on a night without moon or stars and settled into a wave-top swing around the west and north coasts of Sicily, to attack Messina not only at an unexpected altitude but from the opposite direction of previous missions. Appold's navigator, Donald O'Dell, called off estimated height above the waves. Bombardier John B. Hogan crouched on the central spar of the open bomb bay, looking down at the sea, reporting white chop, which indicated an altitude of twenty feet -- as low as Appold cared to go. Hogan was soaked with spray during the all-night sweep over the Tyrrhenian Sea. A gunner said, "It was just like water skiing."
The voyage was too much for the other two B-24's, which became separated from Appold and returned to Africa. At dawn, O'Dell found the Initial Point and Appold turned south into his bomb run. The pilot saw thick morning mist in the Strait and announced, "Well, we'll never be able to see the sheds this morning. What say we go to Crotone?" Appold always polled his crew on major decisions and they always agreed with his suggestions. By now the little pilot had an awesome reputation for attempting the weird and improbable and getting away with it. Appold banked into a climbing turn for the Italian mainland.
Ahead, the Calabrian Mountains were covered with low rain-drenched clouds. O'Dell had no accurate elevation charts. Nonetheless, Appold undertook to fly the contours of these unknown mountains to keep under radar and thus give fighters and flak the least opportunity to pot him. Over hogbacks and peaks at 200 miles an hour, shaving ridges and planing low in ravines, the solitary Liberator flew. The tail gunner saw pigs running, chickens being plucked in the prop-wake, and sleepy farmers coming out of stone huts to look and wave. The B-24 leaped the last foggy mouiitain and slid into the plain leading to Crotone.
"There's a fighter base between us and the target," O'Dell warned. Appold stormed across it at wind-sock level, noting unattended Messerschmitts and Macchis lying about. O'Dell used the enemy base as a final course correction, ten miles from Crotone. He and Appold called out terrain features for Hogan, hunched over his bombsight: "Three chimneys coming up. . . . Freight train moving across in front of target." Hogan interposed, "Hey, boss, let me try one on the train." Appold said, "Okay." Hogan dropped a yellow 500-pound bomb. Although it would not explode for 45 seconds, the effect of the dead weight was startling. The bomb cracked the train in two, tossed up cars, burrowed on, curling up rails, and disappeared in a lumberyard. The tail gunner cried, "Timber going up like toothpicks and she didn't go off yet!"
"I want a better line-up, Norm," said the bombardier. "Drop her lower." Appold jacked the boisterous bomber a few feet deeper. Hogan crashed the five remaining bombs into the factory. Not one of the fierce flak guns at Crotone was awake. With the loss of bomb weight Appold went full throttle, leaped the first smokestacks, and banked away from a higher 150-foot chimney. The bombs burst in a tremendous exhalation. The plant went up, crumbling and swelling with dust, cordite fumes and vaporized chemicals. Flames spurted out of the hanging debris.
Appold said, "Gunners! You want to paste it?" "Yeah, man!" they chorused. Appold crossed back over an undamaged section and the sergeants shot it up. Before the antiaircraft guns could go into action the Liberator was speeding to Benghazi, unscratched.
Interrogation officers regarded Appold's report as a "snow job." K.K. Compton sent a photo-reconnaissance plane to Crotone. Its pictures fully bore out Appold's report. Intelligence estimated, "It will not be necessary to return to Crotone for some time." One plane at minimum altitude had accomplished what nine forces at high level had failed to do.
On the following day K.K. Compton was approached by another masterful Liberando pilot, a tall, ruddy-complexioned, dark-haired youth named Brian Woolley Flavelle, from Caldwell, New Jersey. Flavelle didn't open his mouth much, except when men gathered to harmonize -- then his fine baritone sounded deep into the desert night. He had interrupted forestry studies at the University of Oregon to join the Air Force because he hated fascism. Flavelle proposed to lead three ships on a twilight raid on Messina to avoid the morning mists that had foiled Appold. Compton and Ent approved.
Flavelle took his wave-skimming B-24's into the ferroconcrete train sheds and "rammed the bombs right down their throats." The planes leaped overtop into a formation of forty unarmed Junkers 52 transports flying toward them at tree level. Jerome DuFour, Flavelle's wingman, said, "We decided to fly straight ahead and the hell with them. With all our guns opened up, we ploughed right into them. They all scattered, except one who came at us head-on. We broke him up in the air, and he crashed." Now General Ent had another successful low-level strike to consider.
In this brightening atmosphere the Circus, Eight Balls and Sky Scorpions arrived from England, completing the five heavy bomb groups assigned to Tidal Wave. Never before had there been gathered a more experienced group of American airmen. The force commanders were, with one exception, hardened survivors of the air war. The commander of the mission-leading Liberandos, K.K. Compton, was a product of the early campaign in the west under Timberlake, who placed him with Rickenbacker and Lindberg as "a great instinctive pilot." The second bomb force was to be led by Addison Baker, Timberlake's heir at the helm of the Traveling Circus. Baker's two deputies were Colonel George Brown, who had led many high battle boxes over western Europe, and an equally experienced ex-economics professor named Ramsay Potts, set to lead a small echelon of his own. Next to Potts in the battle front would be the largest force, the Pyramiders, the old established desert firm, led by the salty Killer Kane. Beside Kane on the simultaneous sweep there would be an efficient group of green ships, the Eight Balls, led by a man of destiny, Leon Johnson, also an alumnus of the East Anglian Liberator school. His deputy and leader of another separate striking force was a cool, tight formation keeper, James Posey. The remaining force, the inexperienced Sky Scorpions, were led by Jack Wood, who maintained high technique and discipline among his crews.
When Colonel Wood arrived in Benghazi, he came up against the reality of the desert war. He and his officers had to pitch their own tents. Major Philip Ardery looked enviously at the dwellings of the pioneers. A tent near him had a marble floor two feet deep and high sandbag revetments above the ground, which made it cooler and kept out Ger
man strafing.
Jacob Smart flew to Benghazi carrying the invisible seals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He discovered that the low-level concept was by no means sold to those who so far knew about it -- the top brass and group leaders. Smart jeeped around the forty miles of dust, visiting the colonels and arguing for his conception. He let them know that he himself was going to fly the mission. He had secretly picked the co-pilot's seat with an old reliable squadron leader of the Circus, Major Kenneth 0. ("Kayo") Dessert, who was to lead the second wave over Target White Two.
One of the Circus pilots who had come to the desert was Walter Stewart, a big, ebullient blond from Utah. If you did not know this fact you could read it in very large type on the side of his machine: Utah Man. Before the war Stewart had been a Mormon missionary in England. When he returned there in uniform he resumed his rapport with English crowds by speaking at war bond rallies. One day, after selling a fortune in British bonds at King's Lynn, Norfolk, he was introduced to two members of the audience who had asked to meet him. Stewart shook hands with Queen Mary and her fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth. He put the girl at ease with a chat on literature. "I've just finished The Robe ," he said. "I'll bet you'd like it." The future queen averred she would. "I'll lend you my copy," said Stewart. "Where are you putting up?" Elizabeth said, "Sandringham."
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