The general concluded with special injunctions for the bombardiers. He wanted precision, precision, precision, on the targets. "When you get on the bomb run, bombardiers," he cried, "I want you to go in like -- " Before he could point his simile, a dust devil blew him off the platform into the crowd. The general picked himself up and shouted, "I want you to go in like that!"
Sir Arthur Tedder addressed them. "I am proud to be here with you just before this job," said the R.A.F. desert chief. "I want to wish you the best of luck with it. It's a hard, dangerous mission. It will take all your famous American courage and resourcefulness."
A gunner visited an operations clerk who had chased him over a lot of airdromes to get him to recognition and gunnery classes. He gave the clerk his watch, ring and billfold with Ł200 in it. "I've had it," said the airman. "There's my mother's address. Go see her after the war." In the evening the chaplains received hundreds of men. They brought their worldly goods -- family photos, high school rings, camel whips, medals, and money for the chaplains to hold "just in case." One chaplain kept $3,300 for his men. John Jerstad, who was to fly co-pilot with Addison Baker in Hell's Wench, the lead ship of the Circus, gave Chaplain Burns money to pay up a lapsed Sunday school pledge in a Wisconsin church. Jerstad was among the hundreds who gave the chaplains last letters to mail if they should not return. Jerstad told his parents, "I'm to be one of the boys to try out the planning, so if you don't hear from me for a couple of days, don't be too concerned, because it will take time to work out some details and I probably won't be near a post office."
A young Mississippian named Jesse D. ("Red") Franks wrote the pastor of the First Baptist Church at Columbus: "Dearest Dad: I want to write you a little note before our big raid tomorrow. It will be the biggest and toughest we've had yet. Our target is the refineries that supply Germany with three-fourths of her oil. We will get the target at any cost. We are going in at fifty feet so there will be no second trip to complete the job. We will destroy the refineries in one blow. Dad, if anything happens, don't feel bitter at all. Please stay the same. Take care of yourself, little Sis, and don't let this get you down, because I would never want it that way. Hope you don't get this letter, but one never knows what tomorrow may bring. My favorite chapter is the 91st Psalm. Your devoted son."
In Ploesti it was market day; the rich 1943 harvest was evident in heaps of corn, beans, tomatoes, apples, chickens, cheeses and salamis in the white-tiled market place. The stalls were tended by women in embroidered skirts and old men in white tunics and hard black hats; the young farmers were dying for the Germans in Russia. Plump corn-fed pigs could be bought without ration cards in the only wartime country in Europe where such a fantasy was real.
Around the oil city the defenses were ready. At Mizil, twenty miles east of Ploesti, lay the main German air base, where four wings of Messerschmitt 109's, totaling 52 aircraft, formed Jaegergruppe 4. Hauptmann (Captain) Manfred Spenner, leader of Yellow Wing, was one of the few pilots who left the station that Saturday. For him Romania was a blessed respite from endless battle. The winter before he had been four weeks in the chopper at Stalingrad, and he had served in the battle of Tunisia after that. Spenner had an appointment in Bucharest with a dentist who was swapping fillings for flying lessons.
A few miles east of Mizil, at Zilistea, seventeen black, clipped-wing, two-engine Messerschmitt 110 night fighters were ready under Major Lutje. In addition to the pilot, the Me-110 carried a radioman with swivel guns, which often made this machine a testier bomber opponent than the single-seat Me-109 with its fixed forward guns. Months before, Goering had promised to replace all of Gerstenberg's solo Messerschmitts with the twin-engine machines, but the half-strength of Nachtjaegergruppe 6 at Zilistea represented all that had arrived so far.
More than half of Gerstenberg's total fighter strength in the target area was Romanian. One of the Me-109 wings at Mizil was commanded by Romanian Captain Toma, whom the Germans accounted "a first-class flier." He was a close student of U.S. bombers. In front of his operations building on a flagpole as high as the flanking swastika and Romanian flags, Toma had perched a huge wooden model of a Flying Fortress mounted on a universal joint so that its angle could be adjusted to various perspectives. Captain Toma studied it so closely from the air that one day, during a mock attack, his propeller chopped off a piece of the wooden enemy. However, one of the German pilots said, "Most of the Romanian pilots were wealthy boys from the play-sports set. They took poor care of aircraft. Considering the few they were flying, they wrecked many Messerschmitts, although every time they got a new one a bearded Orthodox priest came out and blessed it."
On the eastern outskirts of Bucharest, at Pepira, there was an all-Romanian base with domestically built fighters -- IAR-80's and IAR-81's, heavy, low-winged machines, each armed with four light and two heavy machine guns. On this Saturday before battle only 20 of the 34 IAR's at Pepira were serviceable, due to the Romanians' frolicsome attitude toward flying. The Germans called them "Gypsies" behind their backs, and had a low opinion of the IAR, although admitting that most of the Gypsies were daring fliers.
On this particular Saturday in high summer, some of the Gypsies were out joy riding, as though the war were just a super aeroclub outing. Lieutenant Brancu Treude flew low over the bathers at Lake Znagov, a popular resort north of Bucharest. He spied a tall yacht. Buzzing sailboats was exquisite fun. You dived from the rear, pulled over close, and sent the terrified yachtsman sailing backward in your prop-wash. Dreamily, Treude dived on the boat. He clipped off the topmast, shredded the mainsail, and staggered away fouled with staylines, barely airborne. The skipper of the yacht, King Michael of Romania, took Treude's number, and the joy rider came to the officers' mess that evening to find himself confined to quarters for six weeks.
After dinner, Lieutenant Carol Anastasescu, a frustrated variety artist, improvised a comedy sketch on Treude's bad luck. The young boyars shrieked with laughter. Two older ones, the commandant, Captain Alexandru Serbanescu, and Lieutenant Florian Budu, who sat together, merely smiled. They had seen the laughter stopped in many such merry lads as these. They were veterans of the eastern front. By the Romanian system of crediting enemy aircraft destroyed, Budu had forty Russian kills.
Not far from Pepira, at Taxeroul, there was another Romanian group, with 11 Junkers 88's and 23 Junkers 87 dive bombers ready for action. One hundred fifty miles east, on the Black Sea, at a resort called Mamaia, near Constanta, there was a mixed Romano-German base under Major Gigi Iliescu. He had a mélange of about twenty IAR's, Messerschmitts and oddments, which could intervene in action around Ploesti. The modest strength of Mamaia was reinforced on weekends by many "liaison," "technical" and "inspection" visits of fighters from the inland bases. Mamaia was the one untouched seaside resort in warring Europe. There were no tetrahedrons, mines, blockhouses, wire or armed patrols on the beach, and above its golden sands stepped arcaded terraces to the Rex Hotel, which had been built to rival the Elysian establishments at Cannes and Nice. And the girls were there.
Such was Gerstenberg's inner fighter ring. The outer ring included bases on Crete and Greece, with the pursuit quality centered at Kalamaki airdrome at Mégara, where twenty Me-109's stood ready. There were also fighter groups in southern Italy which could interfere briefly with a Benghazi-Ploesti bomber stream, although these fighters were now heavily engaged in the Battle of Sicily. The largest force in the outer ring lay athwart the bomber route. It was the Sixth Royal Bulgarian Fighter Regiment, under Polkovnik (Colonel) Vasil Vulkov. His polk (regiment), which had never been in battle, had 124 fighters on three bases at Sofia and Karlovo. The majority of Vulkov's machines were Avia 534's, manufactured in Czechoslovakia in 1936 and captured there when Hitler raped the republic in 1939. One of the Bulgarian groups at Karlovo was being trained to fly the Me-l09, but only a handful of its pilots were as yet competent to fight in the German machine.
Considering that Germany desperately needed interceptors in Atlantic Europe to
meet the multiplying Anglo-American round-the-clock bomber offensive from Britain, the fact that Gerstenberg had so many fighters standing by in a quiet theater was a noteworthy achievement. Its extent was not fully appreciated by Allied Intelligence.
Saturday night Hauptmann Spenner returned from the dentist's and favored his stinging gums with a glass of brandy in the officers' casino. His fellow pilots, in contrast to the brooding air in the American camp, were at cards, drink and song. Spenner noticed two who stayed apart from the others. The first was the matchless leader of Fighter Group Four, Hauptmann Hans Hahn, who was spelling out one fine a l'eau to last the evening. He was a straw-haired ace, six feet five inches tall, who had been fighting in the skies of tortured Europe since 1939. His hands and face were covered with scar tissue from a flaming crash at Stalingrad the winter before. He led his airmen with the same virtues as a Timberlake or Leon Johnson -- by personal example of calm boldness in battle and respect for their fears and egos on the ground. Hahn's men called him Gockel, or Gamecock.
The Gamecock slanted his long skeleton against a bar stool and discreetly watched the other pilot in the casino who was not mixing in, a twenty-year-old named Werner Gerhartz, who sat under a model Liberator drinking his way into another sulk. Gerhartz' father was a professor at Bonn University and his mother was a physician with the German Red Cross. The youth had been schooled in England. Although the Luftwaffe spent the lives of his class by the score every day on its wide air front, Gerhartz reproached himself for having flown fighters for a year without a proper crack at the enemy. A month before, he had complained to the Gamecock, "Seven months here without action! I want to have battle too, and not always drink." Hahn, using the English nickname that the youth preferred, said, "Ben, suppose I send you on temporary duty to Jever-Wilhelmshaven? It's the hottest corner on earth. Day and night our fellows go up to meet bombers from England."
Gerhartz went to Wilhelmshaven and returned even lower in spirit, to report to the Gamecock, "Seventeen days without an enemy alert! Finally we went over the North Sea to meet Flying Fortresses. I made two passes and did not hit a thing. I was determined to make a successful attack before my petrol warning. I dived again. The Americans turned tail and went back to England. Just my rotten luck." Hahn recognized the turnback as an Eighth Air Force feint to draw fighters from a raid elsewhere. He said, "Well, Ben, at least you stopped them from bombing."
This Saturday night the Gamecock watched the youngster downing plum brandy and wondered if he would survive his first battle. An orderly called Hahn to the phone. He came back and announced, "You fellows go to bed now. It is possible that tomorrow we'll have a fight." The phone call was a checkup on combat preparedness. Nobody knew what was coming, or where or when, but something was. For eleven days the Ninth Air Force had not been seen over southern Europe.
In Bucharest, General Gerstenberg was concluding his regular Saturday staff meeting, going over familiar precautions and reminders. Although he would not admit satisfaction to his staff, or to Goering, he must have felt that his three-year labor to defend Ploesti was going well. He had decided to take one of his rare holidays the next day at the mountain resort of Timisul. People were leaving the sullen heat of Bucharest for the sea and the mountains. General Antonescu and several cabinet members were headed for Lake Znagov.
A thousand miles away, in the desert heat, the American airmen were watching a movie for the third or fourth time. Of all the special briefing materials they were impressed most by Soapsuds*, the talking picture made especially for them. It opened with a shot of a nude woman. Tex McCrary's confident newsreel announcer's voice said that Ploesti was a virgin target. He assured them that "The defenses are nothing like as strong here as they are on the western front. The fighter defenses at Ploesti are not strong, and the majority of the fighters will be flown by Romanian pilots who are thoroughly bored by the war. The heavy ack-ack should not trouble you at low altitude. All the antiaircraft guns are manned by Romanians, so there is a pretty good chance there might be incidents like there were in Italy at the beginning of the war, when civilians could not get into shelters because they were filled with antiaircraft gunners. The defenses of Ploesti may look formidable on paper, but remember: they are manned by Romanians." The narrator depended on Allied Intelligence estimates of a month before.
* A discarded code name for the Ploesti mission.
The movie audience did not know of a thunderbolt hurled into their camp that afternoon which was already altering the fate of the mission. From Washington, General Arnold had sent a signal forbidding General Brereton to fly to Ploesti. The order also grounded Jacob Smart, who knew too many high Allied secrets to be risked to Nazi captivity. Brereton, moreover, had passed his own version of the order to both Smart and Timberlake: "You are not to fly and I cannot see you." Geerlings was with the two colonels when the order reached them. "Timberlake's face became grim," he said, "and he cursed softly but vehemently. He handed the message to Smart. Jake's hands trembled as he read it. There were tears in Timberlake's eyes. 'God, my men will think I'm chicken,' he said."
The mission had lost its three top men a few hours before take-off. An urgent reshuffling of air assignments began. Brereton's place in the command ship was taken by General Ent, who had been scheduled to fly with Killer Kane. Kane had to find a co-pilot. Captain Ralph ("Red") Thompson, skipper of the command ship, was bereft of his three familiar officers and found himself with K.K. Compton, General Ent, a new bombardier and the group navigator, Harold Wicklund. "The only people I knew were my gunners," Thompson lamented. Jacob Smart's place with Major K.O. Dessert was taken by a retired pilot named Jacob Epting.
Timberlake decided to do some ordering. He had always practiced crew integrity -- keeping the interreliant men of each plane together. Now, since K.K. Compton was going to use Wicklund, Timberlake pulled his planning navigator, Leander F. Schmid, off the raid. Schmid had finished his missions and had many dependents. Timberlake tried to induce his young comrade, John Jerstad, not to go. The little major comforted him. "Don't worry, sir. Bake and I will make it all right." All night the operations officers played musical chairs as a result of the groundings, the normal strain of manning a maximum effort, and the dysentery epidemic in the camps.
Squadron Leader Barwell talked with General Ent that night and got the impression that "He was flying as a sort of protest. He had opposed the low-level plan from the beginning." Ent sent out the official mission directive, Field Order 58, which contained the final Intelligence appraisal of enemy defenses according to "information from sources believed to be reliable." Intelligence said there were less than a hundred antiaircraft guns in the refinery area, probably half of them manned by Germans. At that moment at Gerstenberg's Pepira H.Q. an adjutant was closing out the strength report for July. Around Ploesti, as of that day, the Germans had 237 flak guns, 80 percent of them with German crews, plus hundreds of machine guns.
The Intelligence annex continued: "It is estimated that the defense has been calculated against attacks developing from the EAST and NORTHEAST. The briefed course to the target has been devised to avoid all antiaircraft defenses en route. Enemy radio-detection-finding stations are believed to be located in the valley lying east of the Danube covering the EASTERN approaches to the oilfields."
Now the only thing that could cancel the mission was an adverse weather prediction for the target area. Some weeks before, Allied cryptographers had cracked the German weather code, which was changed monthly. The first of August had been selected as mission day because the last German prediction of which the cryptographers could be sure would be that of 31 July. Then they would be faced with the next month's German code which they could not guarantee to solve as quickly. They got a clear intercept on the next day's forecast, which predicted overcast in the Balkan mountains with general fair conditions in the Danubian basin and some thundershowers. The weather was not perfect, but it was not prohibitive. The mission was on.
The next day was the th
irty-sixth anniversary of the United States Army Air Forces, founded by three members of the Army Signal Corps and now mustering two million men. The occasion was not announced to the fliers. They had been provided enough inspiration already.
After midnight Colonel Kane walked about his camp at Lete. "There was a quietness, quite unlike the usual buzz," said his diary entry. "Some crews were quietly giving away their belongings. I sat on my favorite perch on an old engine and stared for a long time at the stars. In my short lifetime, the stars have stayed in their places as they have for countless lifetimes before mine. They would remain unaffected whether I and the men with me lived or died. Whether we died in the near future or years later from senility mattered not in the great scheme of things. Yet the manner of our dying could have far-reaching effects. I have a young son I may never see again, yet I shall be content if I feel that his freedom is assured and he is never forced to be humbled in spirit and body before another man who proclaims himself master."
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