* Allied Intelligence people interviewed as late as 1961 were still unaware of the radio intercept at Athens.
Conceding the greatest possible round-trip range of the B-24's the area affected spread from central Italy to Austria, Romania and Greece. This comprised six Luftwaffe defense zones, each covering about 115,000 square miles. These huge rectangles were in turn divided into a hundred sectors each. The most important one today, as it turned out, was Zone 24 East, and the bombers would first enter it at Corfu, which was Sector 00 on the southwest corner. Zone 24 East was controlled from Luftwaffe Fighter Command at Otopenii, five miles north of Bucharest. It was housed in a windowless two-story camouflaged building sunk in the ground near a small clearing in a wood. The meadow was used to land liaison planes. In the building a two-story amphitheater faced a huge glass map of the war theater, cross-hatched with defense grids. Here 120 specialists were on duty around the clock. A long bench of Luftnachrichtenhelferinnen (Luftwaffe Airwomen), wearing headphones, sat facing the map. They were hooked with radio-detectors, radar and audio-visual spotters throughout Gerstenberg's command. When they received the location of a plane, friend or foe, they directed a narrow flashlight beam to its map position, and airmen on ladders crayoned it on the glass -- white marks for Axis planes and red ones for the enemy.
A second-floor balcony looked into this elegant war room. Off the balcony were the bedrooms and offices of the commanders. Due to the absence of Colonel Bernhard Woldenga, a young Prussian fighter pilot from Gerstenberg's staff was the senior controller at Fighter Command that morning. This officer arose, bathed and shaved, and glanced from the balcony into the war room before he went to breakfast. He noticed an unusual stir in "the business end of the room," and went down to see what it was. Bombers were up from Benghazi.
Aboard the Liberators were hundreds of men with German names, enough to make up a Luftwaffe squadron. Indeed, the highest-ranking U.S. officer aboard, General Ent, bore a name from the German Palatinate. The name of this young Prussian officer who would give them battle today was Douglas Pitcairn of Perthshire.*
* His legal name includes the seat.
Pitcairn of Perthshire was descended from a Scottish Protestant clan which had emigrated to East Prussia in 1830 after religious quarrels with Catholic neighbors. One of his ancestors was the midshipman who first sighted Pitcairn Island, the haven of H.M.S. Bounty's mutineers. The German Pitcairn had grown up in Memel, joined the revived German air force in the early thirties, and was secretly trained as a fighter pilot in Gerstenberg's school at Lipetsk in the Soviet Union. He entered combat in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 with a Heinkel 51 squadron flying for Franco, and his first enemy aircraft destroyed was a U.S.-built Curtiss, piloted by a French volunteer for the Loyalists. The next year some of Pitcairn's former Lipetsk instructors turned up in Spain in four-cannon Ratas. The Russians knocked down fifteen of the twin-cannon Heinkel biplanes in the first fifty encounters. Soon after the rehearsal war in Spain, Pitcairn was flying in the Battle of Britain, fighting his own clansmen in Hurricanes and Spitfires. Pitcairn was grounded after his crash injuries and sent to help create the Fighter Command he was now to move into battle for the first time.
Pitcairn greeted the five liaison officers seated at a desk near the girls. They were linked by phone to the day fighters, the night-fighter base, the flak command, the Romanian fighter bases, and the telegraphic and radio network which terminated in a room visible behind the glass. Pitcairn checked the Würzburg Table -- the central radar monitor, linked to the radar antennae ringed around Ploesti and Bucharest. He glanced at a prominent red button which set off the civilian air raid sirens in Romania.
Examining the swarm of red marks over Benghazi, Pitcairn remarked, "It looks like another training mission. If I were running a training mission in the desert, I too would take advantage of the cool morning hours." A few minutes later the signals officer got a fresh decode from the room behind the glass. It was from Luftwaffe, Salonika, reporting that the bombers were at 2,000-3,000 feet and headed north over the Mediterranean. "It can't be a training mission," said Signals.*
* The authors have found no evidence on how the Germans determined the altitude and course of the mission this early in the Mediterranean crossing. The Liberators were far out of range of enemy radar on Crete, Sicily and Italy. It is highly doubtful that the Germans in 1943 had detection apparatus that could pick up planes maintaining radio silence. There are three circumstantial possibilities for the oversea course detection. When Rommel was chased out of Libya, he left three German weathermen hiding in a gully near the Benghazi bomber bases. They radioed the Libyan weather to Crete and could have reported sighting the take-off and northerly course. These spies, living on ambushes of lone Allied vehicles, were not discovered until April 1944. A further possibility is that, following the Athens intercept, Crete sent a high-altitude reconnaissance plane to have a look at the American formation over the water. Also, one Liberator crew reported sighting "a slim gray warship" at 30° N. and 19° 50' E., which may have been an enemy spotter.
On the fighter base near Constanta, Colonel Woldenga received the news from Salonika. He felt no concern over being absent from his post; it was by no means clear that the target was Ploesti, and three capable men were on duty as fighter controllers near the target. In addition to Pitcairn at Otopenii, there were two controllers in Gerstenberg's headquarters at Pepira: Major Werner Zahn, for night-fighter operations and Major Hermann Schultz for day fighters. The news about the U.S. force was still confined to command level. There would be no need to alert squadrons and batteries until, and if, the bombers could be detected on a course for Ploesti. Their objective could still be the Messerschmitt plant at Wiener Neustadt in Austria, or Sofia, or even Athens. When the planes came over land, there were plenty of visual spotters, and Würzburg units to report them again.
In the war room at Otopenii, Pitcairn raised his voice. "All right, everyone, let's have a big breakfast. We may be here quite a while." The staff went out in relays to eat. Before joining them he sent the first-stage alert out to the next lower echelons of command. This merely required them to turn everyone out on duty.
At the main day-fighter base at Mizil the German and Romanian pilots were confined to the field. They hung around the operations room, or lounged outside staring at sheep grazing on the grassy field, against the blue Carpathians. The station kept the sheep as lawn mowers for its airstrip. Some pilots gathered around fence posts upon which were mounted models of Liberators and Flying Fortresses. It was hard to avoid seeing an American bomber model at Mizil; inside they hung from the ceilings and stood on tables.
One of the most diligent students of U.S. craft was the commander of First Fighter Wing, or White Wing, Hauptmann Wilhelm Steinmann of Nuremberg. He was called "Uncle Willie" because of his advanced age -- he was thirty. He understood bombers. During the Blitz he had hauled tons of high explosives to Hull, Manchester, Sheffield, London and Glasgow. One night over London, Uncle Willie was trapped in an apex of searchlights and the tracers closed in. He could not shake the cone and he knew he was moments from destruction. He turned on his running and landing lights, fired "friendly" recognition flares, and went into a steep dive. "I wanted the searchlight and flak battery people to think, 'No German could be that crazy.'" The British fire stopped and he passed safely beyond the searchlights.
Defeated in the Blitz of England, and facing frantic demands for more fighter pilots to defend the Reich, the Luftwaffe put bomber pilots like Steinmann into fighters. His combat philosophy was simple and adequate so far: "You've got to have belief. You've got to have confidence. It's either you or me." Uncle Willie even managed to radiate this confidence to his wife, Else, in Nuremberg, who never worried about him.
A pilot who thought about combat and death with the same self-confidence as Steinmann was the ex-Mormon missionary, Walter Stewart, flying Utah Man next to Baker, the Circus leader. As the B-24's paraded over the blue sea, Stewart, a 25-mission
veteran, was thinking about the Luftwaffe. He had faith in his gunners, each at his post by his "wonderful fifties." Stewart said, "I was especially attached to those guns because my great-uncle, John M. Browning, used to sit on the porch and tell us kids how he invented the machine gun. Uncle John never got anything out of his invention, but we certainly did." Stewart was scanning the horizon for fighters when his heart missed a beat. A blast of machine-gun fire came right over his head. "Then I heard the fiendish laugh of the big logger," Stewart said. Richard Bartlett, the top turret man, a lumberjack from Montana, was test-firing his guns without warning the edgy crew. Around the sky the other gunners cleared their weapons with short bursts.
Stewart decided to return Bartlett's scare. "I moved over to another B-24, showing how close the old baby could fly formation. As he brought the prop tips right over the other ship, the logger said, "Skipper, do you have the D.F.C.?" Stewart replied, "I think so." "Do you know what it stands for?" Bartlett asked. "I guess so," Stewart answered. The turret man said, "It's not what you think. It means Don't Fly Close."
The boy pilots Longnecker and Jones had gotten Thundermug off the ground in their first try at taking off a loaded airplane. The newly appointed first pilot, Longnecker, now demonstrated an administrative trait of command -- that of confidently placing responsibility on a junior. He said to Jones, "Deacon, you fly 'er a while and I'll go back and check on the enlisted men." He came upon Sergeants J.C. Pinson, Bernard C. Strnad, Edward A. Sand, Howard J. Teague, Leonard J. Dougal and Aloysius G. Cunningham sitting around on ammunition boxes, stark naked.
Cunningham, who wore the only adornment -- a headset and a throat mike -- reported to the master of Thundermug, "It was so damn hot before take-off, we just sort of . . ." Longnecker strode forward, the first hair pigments fading at his temples -- the mark of a seasoned first pilot.
An hour out, some of the dust-scoured cylinders began to fail. Captain William Banks of Kane's Pyramiders noted, "Every once in a while I would look off and see one or two Liberators feather a prop, wheel out of formation, and start for home." Their crews gave thumbs-up signals as they turned back for Africa, jettisoning bombs and gasoline into the sea to lighten ship for emergency landings. Watching them pull out, a gunner said, "Those guys look too happy about it." Seven of the ten abortives came from the Pyramiders. There were 167 planes left.
The bombers passed into a light haze. The formation began to swell as the pilots instinctively spaced farther away from each other. In the soft, luminous air it was hard to distinguish the make-up of the group in front or behind. The leaders had been instructed to maintain 500-yard visual contact between groups at all times. Although the range of visibility was still much greater than that, the outlines of other ships became blurred.
The situation brought out one of the inherent problems of inter-group formation flying -- the varying styles of the leaders. Three of them, Compton, Baker and Johnson, had been schooled in the Eighth Air Force's tight combat box formation on raids out of Britain. Wood's people had had these close formation practices drummed into them in recent training in the States. But the tactic was not strictly followed in Africa. Kane's crews had not met the prolonged, repeated and resolute Luftwaffe attacks, fought over hundreds of miles of German territory, experienced by the green ships from England. Moreover, Kane's aircraft were the worse for wear; a group leader expecting battle will set his speed to that of his slowest member to bunch his defensive strength. Two and a half hours out, the distance between the second group, the Circus, and Killer Kane's third group had widened to the extent that they could barely see each other. From the vanguard K.K. Compton could not see Kane at all. Johnson and Wood could do nothing but hang on Kane's tail as they obediently kept to their fourth and fifth places in the bomber stream.
Young Longnecker in Thundermug had a difficult time holding formation with his flight leader, Hugh Roper, in Exterminator. "I had no previous experience in the left seat," he remarked. "I admired Vic Olliffe, who was flying Let 'Er Rip left wing on Roper. Olliffe was a very muscular man and could fly the B-24 like it was a Piper Cub. He was holding in so close to Roper, the two planes seemed welded together."
Three hours out, the landfall was imminent -- Cape Asprókavos, the southern tip of the Nazi-held island of Corfu. The anxious sea journey was over; soon they would turn on a northeasterly heading into the unknown continent, over forests and mountains to the deepest target in Europe. Norman Appold, sitting at the bottom of the ladder in his B Section of the Liberandos, looked in front at A Section and the mission-leading aircraft, Flavelle's Wingo-Wango, in which the mission navigator, Wilson, had brought them unerringly to Corfu. Then Appold stared incredulously at the lead plane. "Wingo-Wango began to stagger, dipping down and nosing up in ever-increasing movement, until its nose rose higher and higher into the air," said Appold. "The section scattered away from the wild gyrations. When virtually standing on its tail, Wingo-Wango slid over on her back, and slowly gaining speed, planed straight down and dove violently into the sea. I watched this episode with considerable disbelief. Flavelle was gone in thirty seconds." No one knew why Flavelle went down. Sergeant George K. ("Bud") Holroyd watched the crash. The bombardier of Wingo-Wango, Lieutenant Jack Lanning, was his closest friend.
Fiery waves radiated from the crash and a tower of dirty smoke rolled a thousand feet high. Flavelle's wingman, Guy Iovine, turned down, hoping to drop rafts to survivors, despite the fact that breaking formation, even for compassionate reasons, was forbidden. Iovine found no trace of men or plane. It was impossible for him to climb his overloaded craft back into the formation. He turned back for Africa. With him went the deputy route navigator. A Section reformed, with Lieutenant John Palm in Brewery Wagon slipping into the empty lead positions. His navigator, a young lieutenant named William Wright, was now suddenly the route navigator of the Ploesti mission of 165 planes. The first two groups turned inland, with Kane's three trailing groups lost from sight. Kane and Compton dared not speak to each other on the radio to reunite the mission. The radio-silence edict was now working against them.
Another pilot now learned for certain that he would not return to Africa. Lindley P. Hussey, piloting an old B-24 called Lil Joe, discovered that he had lost 800 galions of gas through a faulty hose connection to the bomb bay tanks. "Unless we turned back and aborted then and there, we would never make Benghazi," said Hussey. "They told us before take-off that if none of us returned the mission would be well worth it if we hit the target. On this basis I decided to go on to Ploesti."
A spotter on Corfu had some real news for Pitcairn: "They are turning northeast in Sector Zero Zero! Air Zone Twenty-four East. New heading thirty degrees." Pitcairn projected a line from Corfu on this bearing. The line ran slightly north of Sofia and north of Bucharest. "It no longer looks like Wiener Neustadt," said Pitcairn. "They are too far east already." He ordered the second-stage alert, which went down to squadron and flak battalion level.
Gamecock Hahn told his pilots, "We'd better have lunch early." They ate soup, eggs and fried potatoes. As they finished, the third-stage alert came and all Luftwaffe personnel in Zone 24 East went to duty stations. Major Ernst Kuchenbacker in Gerstenberg's Bucharest H.Q. thought it time to advise the commanding general. He rang up Gerstenberg at the mountain resort. "It is unclear what is developing," he told the general, "but we think the objective must be Ploesti." Gerstenberg said, "I am returning immediately." It was a three-hour drive.
The Liberator pilots and navigators unfolded their special Geerlings oblique drawings of the unfamiliar territory ahead. Up the folder, through the views, ran the red line of the flight heading. The red line ran over the northern tip of Greece and into Albania, passing along the mountainous Greek border. The first geographical obstacle was the Pindus Range, which swings southeast from Albania to form the spine of the Greek archipelago. Its 9,000-foot summits demanded an 11,000-foot climb to clear them prudently. "It seemed just minutes later," said Appold, "before towering cumulus cloud
s began to show above the mountains." The clouds stood to 17,000 feet. The mission leader, K. K. Compton, faced a swift decision.
Formation flying of clumsy bombers through cloud was a dangerous matter. In zero visibility, air turbulence or slight divergences from course could bring planes into rending collisions, the doomed craft plunging in pieces, perhaps taking lower planes with them. When passing through cloud the Air Force practiced a maneuver called Frontal Penetration. Before the cloud the mission leader began circling, and when all his ships were turning on the carrousel, his three-plane wing peeled off, spread apart, and drove into it. The others turned off three by three, and followed him through in tandem. On the other side of the cloud they repeated the circle, took up battle order, and continued on course. Frontal Penetration took time and fuel during the circling and sorting out.
The mission leader did not like the idea of losing this time and gas. Keith K. Compton was a short, dimple-chinned pilot proven in battle. He had been deputy commander of the Traveling Circus in Britain, where he caught the eye of the generals. He was sent to Africa in 1942 to command the Liberandos, the 376th Group, the residue of Hurry-Up Halverson's minutemen plus new people from the States. Compton sent some of Halpro's guerrillas home, spread others in key jobs, and absorbed new crews in a competent group of his own design. He made life miserable for pilots who kept sloppy formation in the air, but indulged the men living miserably in the desert. Once Washington had sent him an officer to "whip the men into shape by push-ups and close-order drill." Compton exiled him to Cairo, where the physical culturist wore out his war service appealing from café terraces for people to keep fit.
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