Geerlings said, "Our plane was loaded with thermite bombs. If we were hit, the entire contents would go up in a single splendid flash, leaving no trace of the secrets. Only Hugh Roper and I knew about the incendiaries, to save the crew unnecessary worry."
As Roper steered through broken cumulus off Saint-Nazaire, France, his bombardier called, "Junkers 88's below!" Roper said, "I sure hope they have some other business." The bombardier rejoined, "Looks like they do. They're chasing a big fat Sunderland in and out of the clouds." Geerlings said, "It wasn't exactly Christian, but it was some minutes before we hoped the British flying boat got away." Roper's explosion-prone Liberator drummed on, its people thinking of the long travel ahead through German fighters. But the Mediterranean skies were empty. The Luftwaffe was occupied over Sicily, where the Allied invasion had begun that morning.
At Benghazi the briefing paraphernalia was carried to a green hut in the H.Q. compound, and Geerlings and a corporal took turns sleeping against the door with loaded.45's. Only command and group leaders were admitted to the shack. Alfred Kalberer, leader of the original Halpro mission to Ploesti, by this time the grounded operations officer of the Liberandos, said, "This thing can't work. I'll have nothing to do with it. I figure we'll lose thirty-two planes." He was relieved and sent home.
As more officers were admitted to its secrets, the stuffy, smoke-reeking green hut became a theater of ill-concealed emotions. The initiate felt awe and pride in taking part in one of the great efforts of the war, and then he felt fear. This one was going to be rugged.
The group leaders groused to General Ent about the low-level plan. Leon Johnson of the Eight Balls said, "I asked the planners about barrage balloons, and they replied, 'We think your wings'll break the cables.' Think! I'd rather know we'll be able to break them." Uzal Ent embodied the complaints in a note to Brereton: "We estimate that seventy-five aircraft will be lost at low level. Fifty percent destruction is the best we can hope for. You have guessed our recommendation -- to attack at high level until the target is destroyed or effectively neutralized."
Brereton was unable to take the advice. He had already submitted the low-level plan to Eisenhower and had received the theater chief's approval. The remaining problems of Tidal Wave were left to those who would fly it.
Eisenhower kept demanding planes. Italy was cracking ahead of plan. The high command ordered a dashing propaganda raid. Ent was called on for 150 Liberators to strike precise military objectives in Rome on 19 July. Intelligence officers agreed to exempt three categories of airmen from the Rome-bound fleet: unwilling Roman Catholics (none objected); Catholic-haters who might not care too much if they hit religious buildings (three were grounded by Protestant chaplains); and men who knew the Ploesti secret. Watching them fly away, Timberlake groaned, "Damn it. I let Ramsay Potts go." John Jerstad said, "Squadron leaders like Ramsay haven't been briefed yet on Tidal Wave." Timberlake said, "You know Potts. He's probably figured out where we're going." Timberlake and Jerstad sweated out Potts's return in Duchess. She came in from Rome undamaged. Timberlake asked Potts; "Where do you think we're going?" The pilot had deduced that with squadron leader Joseph Tate in England two months before. Potts went to the map and silently laid his finger on Ploesti.
The day after Rome, Uzal Ent took Ninth Bomber Command off operations, quarantined the sprawl of airfields, and began intensive low-level rehearsals. South on the desert plateau British Army engineers laid out a plat of the complex refineries, the front of each vital pinpoint target marked with a furrow of lime mixed with engineers' urine. No water was available. The Americans had to find these bomb-lines in a hurry near the ground. Their flaunted high-altitude Norden computing bombsight could not be used on Tidal Wave. The bombardiers were being equipped with "ten-cent" converted gunsights to toggle and plough their explosives home.
Colonel Timberlake and target architect Geerlings examined the dummy layout from an altitude of six miles to determine whether it could be seen by German scout planes from Crete that often passed over that high. The target was invisible. But it was also invisible to the first test flights at zero altitude. The pilots said, "You come over the white lines so fast, you can't see them. We have to get something upright. After all, the refineries are tall." The engineers planted poles topped with fluttering rags on the corners of the aiming points. Timberlake flew over them at German reconnaissance altitude and could not see them. Then pilots aimed for the poles at ground level and also failed to see them. Arabs had stolen the rag pennants overnight. When the engineers topped the poles with shredded petrol tins, the Senussi left them alone and the ground-hugging test pilots found their aiming points.
One by one the five B-24 groups roared into the mock Ploesti, dropping wooden practice bombs and having a wonderful time. Afterward, the men held mock interrogations. "Sergeant, how many camels did you get today?" "Well, sir, one certain and one probable." "Like hell you did. That certain camel was mine." Two Liberators came back from the lowest buzzes on record with paint scraped from their bellies.
The commander of the ambitious junior Sky Scorpion group, Colonel Jack Wood, who remarkably resembled the playwright Eugene O'Neill, thought beyond target marksmanship to navigational problems of the long flight to Ploesti, in which bombing cohesion could be denied by errors in navigation and formation-keeping. He instructed his deputy, Major John A. Brooks III, to take the Scorpions six hundred miles into Africa, deliberately try to trick the navigators into error and see if they could come back and hit the dummy target. Brooks made some calculations and announced, "Colonel, we'll be on target at 1603 hours."
After the planes flew off, Wood loaded his ground officers and dozens of smoke pots in a truck and drove to the dummy to surprise Brooks with smoke screens, which were expected to be a serious obstacle at Ploesti. Gasping in the baking sun, the officers planted the pots around the effigy of Red Target. One of them called, "Colonel, it's 1600, close to ETA." Wood said, "Don't worry, they'll never make it on time." Exactly on the predicted minute, Brooks brought the ear-shattering bomber front over the target at a height of twenty feet. Below, the fliers saw a Mack Sennett episode -- their superiors dodging the skipping bombs, piling into a jeep that would not start, and taking to their heels again. At dinner, Brooks said as evenly as possible, "Well, Colonel, you knew our ETA."
Despite the fun of buzzing, the prolonged practice missions and the unfolding of still more special briefing material increased speculation and foreboding about the real thing. The airmen thought that a target all this important was bound to present machine-gun fire. Geerlings said, "Probably the most discussed question among all ranks was what losses would be due to small-arms fire." The architect joined volunteers who lay in desert foxholes with broomstick machine guns which they tried to train on dust-swirling bombers coming from unknown directions at unannounced times. "It's something beyond belief," said Geerlings, "when from nowhere there is a sound of power and fury, coming and going before one's reflexes can do anything but duck. I swallowed a lot of sand and never got a satisfactory shot." Meanwhile, other men with real machine guns were crouching in pits around Ploesti tracking Woldenga's surprise practice bombings of the refineries.
During the desert rehearsals a ground crew chief grew suspicious of an officer in a clean uniform who was snooping around the base. The G.I. challenged the stranger, who identified himself as a member of the Psychological Warfare Division. The mechanic said, "Jeez, we can sure use you to examine some of the screwballs driving these airplanes."
in the last week of July all the flying officers had passed through the green hut, and then the secret was exposed to the sergeants. Not since Bernard Montgomery revealed his plan for El Alamein to all ranks before the battle had such a total briefing occurred. Walter Stewart, who was holding nightly Bible readings with his Mormon comrades, said: "As the days went by and the enlisted crews learned where we were going, men of various religions decided to meet with us -- not a tough decision when the alternative was cleaning your
guns again at night. The meetings became an anxiously looked-for pleasure. We knew the low-level mission was to be no breeze. To add to our little fears, one day some men came to the base and installed tanks in the outer section of each wing and even took out the right front bomb-bay shackles and installed a tank there. Now it was the long low-level mission. They also fitted armor plate on the flight deck for extra protection. Our little meetings became more precious to us."
The airmen, who had had virtually no reading matter, were suddenly inundated with British paperback books bearing such odd titles as Cage Birds and The Tunnelers of Holzminden. All were about British escapes from German prison camps in World War I.
Killer Kane announced to the Pyramiders, "All available crews will go on the mission regardless of completion of all their combat tours." Scores of his men had logged thirty missions and were due to be repatriated. Worried about the morale of the group, Jacob Smart went to an armament shop where Kane was fixing extra machine guns into the nose perspexes of his lead ships. Kane let the Washington man wait a while before inquiring coldly, "What can I do for you, Colonel?" Smart said, "Do you think your men will follow you on the big one?" Kane exploded. "Look," he said, "if you have any doubt about it, you have the authority to remove me here and now!" Smart left. General Ent came to the shop and said to Kane, "If nobody comes back, the results will be worth the cost." Both he and Kane were scheduled to go to Ploesti.
Geerlings said, "Jake Smart was the unfailing sparkplug who kept the operation from bogging down." A week before the mission a wave of amoebic dysentery hit the bases and Smart was among those ordered to bed. Geerlings dropped in to see Smart, "not daring to tell him how badly he was needed at headquarters. There was a growing pessimism at all levels." Fliers near Smart in the infirmary tent "rather hoped they would not be restored to active duty for the raid," Geerlings noted. After several days Smart staggered to his feet and drove around among the groups, rebuilding confidence.
Trucks carted the relief models of the target around the bases for the air crews to study. The smallest-scale relief -- the general target area -- portrayed the Alpine valleys above Ploesti with a vertical exaggeration of five times. The fliers lingered gloomily over the model, wondering what would happen to a tight, low formation tossing in the tricky drafts of these deep defiles. "No amount of explanation that the actual ravines were relatively shallow would satisfy them," said Geerlings. The men examined the miniature of the entire refinery complex and models of each refinery, which were in true scale, and glanced back at the steep canyons. All would have to fly contours over them, and the Sky Scorpions were to go farthest into them and attack down one of the draws to hit Red Target at Câmpina. However, few combat men anticipated what could endanger them atop the targets. Intelligence said nothing about fire hazards to the Liberators from bombs and bullets ripping into storage tanks of volatile fuels. One pilot predicted, "It'll be like looking for a gas leak with a lighted match."
Four days before Tidal Wave the U.S.A.A.F. captured a Romanian pilot, Lieutenant Nicolai Feodor, who said Ploesti "was the most heavily defended target in Europe." There was no way to check this alarming assertion. The mimeograph machines were rolling out Intelligence estimates that "The heavy guns would be unable to direct accurate fire at low-flying formations because of their inability to follow fast-moving targets. The results would be nil. The target has been unmolested for years and is not expected to be alert."
Squadron operations officers searched files and faces to find men to fill out the combat crews. Walter T. Holmes, who had completed his own ordained missions, was the operations man in an Eight Ball squadron. Hating to do it, he called in pilot Robert Lehnhausen, who was not yet recovered from his crash in the sea. Lehnhausen said, "I have no desire to fly a mission, but will if I am ordered to go." Holmes, a shy man, mumbled something which the pilot construed as a direct order: "Okay, Bob," said Holmes, "check yourself into the green hut." Holmes had already been in the hut and felt sorry for the men he had to send there. He did not know that on the eve of the raid he would look over his crew lists, find nobody to pilot a first wave ship on Blue Target, and would write in his own name.
Lehnhausen joined the crowd in the green hut and looked at the exhibits. "Ploesti?" he asked himself. "Where have I heard of that before?" The occasion came back to him in a seizure of trepidation: in the hospital at Malta three weeks before, an American colonel coming to his bed and saying, "Did you people come out here to bomb Ploesti?" Lehnhausen wondered how many other outsiders knew the objective. "Does the enemy know it too?" The pilot left the hut, keeping "the feeling of horror" to himself, not wishing to alarm the others.
On this day in the enemy camp General Gerstenberg also received bad news. A terrible thing had happened in Germany. He went to the railway station to bid goodbye to one of his two precious 500-man regiments of fire police. They had been ordered to Hamburg to fight the fire typhoon which took 60,000 lives in three nights. The cataclysm began with one secret weapon and ended with another. On 25 July the R.A.F. reached Hamburg, almost unopposed, by dropping a blizzard of metalized paper strips to craze the German radar. The bombers dropped the new RDX-2 blast bomb, whose monstrous explosion raised a tornadic updraft that sucked in ground air in a fiery tempest that seethed through whole blocks of buildings. It carried flaming trees torn out of the ground by the roots. The survivors said it was "beyond all human imagination." Gerstenberg's people wondered whether the new weapon was coming to Ploesti. Quite the contrary was true: the Americans had only general-purpose bombs, and recent tests on a U.S. proving ground had determined the dismaying fact that 50 percent of the 1,000-pound bombs failed to detonate and a quarter of the 500-pounders did not go off.
Tidal Wave labored under another severe handicap. Normally the Liberator's Pratt & Whitney engines had a life of 300 hours. However, in the desert grit they were good for only 60 hours. Sam Nero had hundreds of "Pratt & Wog" engines on his hands -- tired mechanisms that had been repaired all too often in the desert. The minimum 2,300-mile trip to Ploesti required new-engine performance. Nero called for 300 engines from the States, an order beyond the lift capacity of Air Transport Command. Washington borrowed the fast liner Mauretania from Britain and she brought the engines to Benghazi two days before the mission. The mechanics began a sleepless 48-hour job to install them in time.
Killer Kane's khamseen-weary ships were already in shocking condition when his engineering inspector came down with dysentery. He borrowed an inspector from the Eight Balls -- Master Sergeant Francis I. Fox, Regular Army -- who pronounced 32 of Kane's Liberators unfit to fly. Fox cracked the whip on the numb ground crews, teaching, hectoring, cozening, and gave Kane 40 Pyramider planes for take-off.
On Friday, 30 July, General Brereton flew from his Cairo headquarters to Benghazi, bringing along Lord Forbes and Frank Gervasi, a war correspondent of Collier's magazine. En route, the general sat cross-legged on the flight deck, playing gin rummy with his aide, Colonel Louis Hobbs. "As far as I could tell from Brereton's poker face," said Gervasi, "he was somewhere between worry and outright anxiety." Brereton pushed the cards away and said to Gervasi, "Well, Frank, this is it. This is where the Ninth Air Force makes history or wishes it had never been born. Hap Arnold has handed us a tough one." The correspondent did not know what this was all about until he was signed into the compound, forbidden to leave, and admitted to the green hut.
To cover one of the war's greatest stories there was only one other correspondent present -- Ivan Dmitri, who was stopping over at Benghazi by chance while on a globe-girdling assignment for the Saturday Evening Post . Four other civilian visitors happened to be on the base -- the Yacht Club Boys, a variety troupe on a camp show tour. Caught in the Tidal Wave quarantine but not admitted to the secret, the Yacht Club Boys feared that they were being held as cultural hostages by the entertainment-starved desert rats.
On Saturday morning, the day before the mission, the five bomb groups went on a full-dress rehearsal on th
e desert mock-up, using live hundred-pound bombs. It was a spectacular success, the widest, tightest and lowest heavy-bomber front ever flown. Five miles wide, wing tip to wing tip, the Liberators crossed the facsimile target and obliterated it in two minutes. The wildly elated men finished with an unauthorized buzz of the bases, clipping the tops from palms and tearing up tents by the stakes with their prop-wash. The days of gloom and doubt were done. Tomorrow there would go against fascism the poised strength of the finest aerial task force the world had ever seen.
In the afternoon the airmen convened on bomb-fin containers to hear Brereton's final campaign address. Their small, bespectacled general, in full medals, beat his riding crop against his pants to punctuate his stirring remarks. As Walter Stewart remembers it, Brereton said: "Gentlemen, I am the only person I know of who has held a commission in both the Army and the Navy. I have seen the fleet steam up the Hudson and I have seen the corps of cadets pass in full-dress parade. These sights are soul-stirring. But today, as I saw your hundred seventy-five four-engined bombers come roaring across the African desert at fifty feet altitude, bringing dust from the ground with your mighty roar, I enjoyed the great thrill of my entire life. Tomorrow, when you advance across that captured country, you will tear the hearts out of them. You are going in low level to hit the oil refineries, not the houses, and leave your powerful impression on a great nation. The roar of your engines in the heart of the enemy's conquest will sound in the ears of the Romanians -- and, yes, the whole world! -- long after the blasts of your bombs and fires have died away."
Ploesti Page 8