Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  K.K. Compton sat in the left-hand seat of the flagship beside co-pilot Ralph P. Thompson. Red Thompson was a transfer from the Pyramiders. He had served restlessly under Killer Kane until the day he saw his commanding officer fist-fighting with a lieutenant, and then he had asked for a transfer. On a stool between and behind the pilots sat Brigadier Ent, wearing a crash helmet. He and the pilots could look down at the navigator's desk, where sat Captain Harold A. Wicklund, who had flown to Ploesti before on the Halpro raid.

  Facing the Albanian cloud, the mission was up against the reality of what had been theoretical problems in the long briefings. In the fortnight past, the force leaders had intently absorbed information that would help them journey to the target, bomb it truly, and bring back as many men as possible. In the last days a serious difference over tactics, verging on acrimony, arose between Killer Kane and K.K. Compton. Compton argued that the entire mission should use normal cruise settings on its engines during the first oversea leg, to keep good formation, and then use increased power for the climb over the mountains. Then, at the Danube, they would be together for the dash to target.

  Kane had disagreed. "Why not save power so we can pour it on, getting away from the target?" was his plea. There was also another difference between African and European practices. The Eighth Air Force always carried oxygen breathing units for the high thin air from which it bombed. The Ninth often flew lower and did not always need oxygen. Today, many of Kane's planes had none aboard. They had not expected to fly higher than 12,000 feet.

  Now, confronted with the high cumulus, K.K. Compton decided definitely what to do. He waggled his wings and climbed in straight battle formation without ringing around in front of the clouds. Compton was going to snake through the cloud tops without breaking formation. Behind him, Colonel Baker, leading the Circus, shot a flare to instruct his people to climb straight. The two lead groups leveled off at 16,000 feet and the crews donned oxygen masks. They droned through pinnacles of cumulus, spaced far enough apart so that visual contact held the formation together.

  Killer Kane got the Pyramiders, Eight Balls and Scorpions turned at Corfu and faced the clouds. He signaled for Frontal Penetration and began circling at 12,000 feet. The front and rear groups were already dangerously separated. Now the gap was widening between Kane and Compton.

  Bounced in pearly mists, the airmen took lunch, Kane's crews shivering in their cotton clothing. Some of them were wearing sandals. They clawed open wax boxes of K-rations, warmed up cans of bacon and eggs on the heat vents, munched hard biscuits, and cursed the lemonade powder, one of the nutritive fiascos of the Quartermaster Corps. They drank hot coffee from big vacuum flasks. (At Luftwaffe Fighter Command, Pitcairn ordered coffee for his tense staff, watching the red marks inch toward them on the big glass map. But there was no coffee in the German stores.)

  Soon Compton's Liberandos came on a far-ranging radar up ahead. Atop the 7,250-foot pinnacle of Mount Cherin, near Sofia, there was a German Würzburg unit living in wretched boredom. Eight months before, they had packed their tons of equipment a mile up the mountain on muleback and carried it the rest of the way on their backs. All these weary months they had monitored the air without a single trace of enemy aircraft. Suddenly they were talking with soft-voiced airwomen in ops rooms from Vienna to Salonika. "Many wings! Zone Twenty-four East. Sector Eleven. Bearing thirty degrees."

  K.K. Compton drove across the Yugoslavian mountains, through wells of midday sun among the cloud tops. Kane was almost a mile below and sixty miles behind as Compton crossed the last mountain barrier, the Osogovska Range on the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. Compton passed Mount Cherin, where the radar men were phoning ahead, "Big wings! Zone Twenty-four East, Sector Twenty-two."

  The last possibility that the force could reunite by visual contact was now lost by a quirk of nature. At 16,000 feet Compton and Baker were kicked along by a brisk tail wind. But it was not blowing at 12,000 feet. K.K. Compton was gaining ground speed and pulling farther away from Kane. In Compton's rear, Circus pilots phoned tail gunners, "Any sight of the guys behind?" The answer was always, "No, sir. Nobody in sight."

  Appold said, "Compton began a snaking descent of the mountains to allow the straggling groups to close in." The Liberators zigzagged down the slope, losing time but spending gas.

  As the mission entered Bulgarian airspace, Colonel Vulkov sent up two squadrons of Avias from bases near the capital, Lieutenant Marlin Petrov leading Squadron 612 from Wraschdebna, and Lieutenant Rusi Rusev commanding Squadron 622 from Bozhurishte. Their old Czech fighters carried two to four 7.92-mm. machine guns and were stripped of oxygen and radio systems to get more speed. None of the pilots had ever been in battle or had seen an enemy bomber. The Bulgarians took up an interception course toward Berkovitsa, north of their capital, and Colonel Vulkov ordered fighters up from his main base at Karlovo, east of Sofia, where he had sixteen Avias and six Me-109's, the only fighters capable of battling on good terms with the Liberators. Vulkov was angered to learn that the Karlovo pilots were away from base on Sunday. He set off loudspeakers and phones to get them back from café and brothel.

  The Bulgarians estimated that the Americans had come to bomb Sofia. Petrov and Rusev were very hard put to maintain the air speed of the bombers and arrived at the rendezvous barely in time to sight the rear echelons of the last groups, the Scorpions and Eight Balls, driving northeast, stepped up to 15,000 feet. The Bulgars could not climb to that altitude without oxygen, and, without radios, could not confer on what to do. With awed glances at the giants pulling away from them in the zenith, Petrov and Rusev arrived independently at the same decision -- to return to base, refuel and try to catch the Americans on the way out.

  Several Liberator crews saw the fighters and concluded they were spotters. Unaware that their mission had already been tracked most of the way, these few Americans had a sinking feeling. The mission was betrayed. The suspense was over. They wanted to tell the other ships, but could not. Up ahead, Killer Kane's Pyramiders, and still farther ahead, K.K. Compton's Liberandos and Addison Baker's Circus flew on in happy ignorance of the "spotters." The Bulgarians had been sighted from Leon Johnson's plane and he was the only group commander who now knew that the raid could not be a surprise. But he was in fourth place in the bomber convoy, sentenced to keep off the radio.

  Pitcairn's operations room did not hear of the Bulgarian sighting for some time -- that spent by the mute Avias on the return flight and in translating phone calls. Before their news came, he got an alarming report from the Würzburg station on Mount Cherin: "The devils have vanished! We get no more traces of them in Zone Twenty-four East, Sector Forty-four. Last bearing, thirty degrees." The bombers were descending the eastern slopes, putting mountain tops between them and the radar on the peak. Pitcairn said, "The blackout was terrible for us. The bombers were still outside range of our radar units on the plain around Ploesti."

  By now at the Ploesti flak site, Armament Warden Nowicki had discovered what was wrong with Bertha, the big 88. "Okay, Becker," he said, "we can start putting the panel back." Sergeant Aust ran into the gun pit yelling, "We're on alert! Willi, give me that gun!" Nowicki did not take time to look up or answer. He wasted no motion. The gun crew and the Russian loaders watched the methodical artisan. The fate of the gun, perhaps their lives, was passing through his swift, calloused fingers.

  K.K. Compton's leading pilots reached the foot of the mountains and adjusted their power to level off for the low onrush across the Danubian basin to the three initial points northwest of the target city. A wonderful sight spread before their dust-reddened eyes. In a light haze the ripe gold and green Wallachian plain lay before them in the splendor of harvest. The desert rats were in rich Romania. They looked at its beauty with perhaps the same emotions as the invaders of the past who had plundered this sumptuous earth since the Bronze Age -- the Scythians, Goths, and Huns, Turks and Tartars, Russians and Germans. But this invasion was different: there was not a man in the American
armada who did not fervently hope that he would never set foot on Romania.

  As they crossed the Danube, the airman said, "Why it's not blue! It's like a muddy old river at home." For the benefit of his crew members who had not had the luck to be raised in Utah, Walter Stewart observed, "It looks just like the Colorado River at Moab."

  Below them stood a Romanian spotter, phoning, "Many big bombers!" Otopenii asked, "What heading?" "Toward Bucharest!" cried the spotter.

  Pitcairn paced the war room, deep in thought, wondering whether his sector was definitely committed. The bombers still might turn back on Sofia. There was no trace of the bombers on Pitcairn's nearby radar. He signaled "Stand by" to his fighter bases. He sent an officer outside the windowless room for a visual report on weather. "Hot and humid," the scout reported. "There are rain squalls in the mountains to the north. Overhead are high strato-clouds, with wind blowing holes through them." Pitcairn went to the Würzburg Table. "If they are coming here, sir," said a radarman, "they surely ought to be on our monitor by now." Compton was now well within the radius of the radar unit near the Danube, but there were no blips on the Würzburg. The B-24's were flying too low to register on radar. Pitcairn ordered the pilots on "sit-in," puzzled and alarmed over the "vanish" of the oncoming bombers.

  Pitcairn told the Romanian liaison officer, "Your people may defend Bucharest as they have expressed the wish to do." Protecting the capital was distinctly secondary to saving the refineries and Pitcairn wanted the fewest possible Romanian stunt artists fooling around in the Ploesti sector. The Romanian groups climbed from Pepira and Taxeroul and went roving over Bucharest. Pilot Treude, who was beginning six weeks' confinement to quarters for buzzing the king's boat, bolted his room and was in the air with the Second Romanian Flotilla.

  At Mizil, Gamecock Hahn, the day-fighter leader, tucked his long legs into the cockpit. His adjutant in Headquarters Schwarm (flight of four fighters), Leutnant Jack Rauch, got into his Messerschmitt, hoping this alert was not like the one two weeks before. Rauch had come back that day after buzzing Romanian antiaircraft guns south of Bucharest to find his whole squadron sitting in. "The civilian alarm went off," said his crew chief. "Just stay where you are. I'll fuel you up." No take-off order had come. That evening at dinner Gamecock said, "Jack, you scared those Romanians so bad they turned in an alert." The other pilots hazed Ranch, and Gamecock gave him an official reprimand.

  In the third plane of H.Q. Schwarm, Lieutenant Werner Gerhartz, the unlucky warrior, closed his cockpit canopy, then opened it again and handed out his Berlin mongrel bitch, Peggi, which he often took on flights. If this was real, it was no place for a dog. (There was a dog in one of the Liberators.)

  Two ground crewmen holding motor cranks stood on the right wing of each Messerschmitt. The full alert came from Fighter Command Control Center. The mechanics stuck the cranks in the motor cowling and heaved. Three-bladed props kicked and spun. The mechanics dropped off behind and scurried away in prop-wakes. Uncle Willie Steinmann watched Hahn's planes bobbing along the grass in tandem. "They always reminded me of insects," he said.

  Hans Schopper took off Black Wing. Manfred Spenner, a Battle of Britain veteran with a hundred hours of front-line combat, went up leading Yellow Wing. Captain Toma got his Romanian Messerschmitts off in creditable fashion. Fifty-two fighters were airborne within five minutes. It would have been done faster if Captain Steinmann of White Wing had not had to taxi around chasing sheep off the runway. The Mizil medical officer, Hans Arthur Wagner, watched them climbing into the clouds and went into his surgery and began laying out instrument.

  Sergeant Aust on the emplacement of Bertha yelled, "Second alert!" Nowicki closed and bolted the panel. "Sergeant, give me some test signals from the fire control box," he asked. The armament warden watched the lights flickering on and off and said, "She's working all right."

  "Full alarm!" shouted the battery sergeant. Nowicki rolled up his tools and clipped them to his motorcycle. Russians bearers ran past him, cradling shells. "Hold your fire!" said Aust. "Our fighters are going up." The armament warden, having no further orders, stayed with Bertha of Battery Four to see what would happen. He watched the fighters ascending the sky and stretched his cramped fingers.

  The battery jerked its eyes from the sky at an earthly phenomenon. Running from the H.Q. hutment toward them was a wild figure in underwear. It wore a steel helmet and carpet slippers. It was bawling orders. It was Oberleutnant Hecht, the battery commander. The event had finally penetrated his big hangover.

  At Gerstenberg's H.Q., Major Kuchenbacker released the German night-fighter wing at Zilistea and the controllers ordered it into the air with its seventeen new twin-engined Messerschmitt 110's under Major Lutje.

  Upstairs in the northern approaches to Ploesti, Gamecock Hahn swept his tightly packed fighters on an east-west axis 6,750 feet up, under the strato-cumulus. He was patrolling directly on the predicted bomber course, right over the final I.P. When the enemy appeared, the pilots had to remember two iron rules laid down by Gerstenberg: "Day fighters must share the same airspace as the bombers, regardless of our own flak. However, neither day nor night fighters must ever fly over the inner ring of Ploesti flak or the city itself."

  K.K. Compton took the bombers low for the 150-mile run across flat ground to the First Initial Point. Roaring across the plain, the men saw the new land like tourists passing in the Orient Express. Sergeant Bartlett said, "Everything was clean and pretty. Just like in the movies." Fred Anderson declared it "the prettiest country I've seen since the States." In several planes there was a simultaneous shout: "This is where I bail out!" It was the rueful joke they made over Germany when the Messerschmitts came barrel-rolling at them with wing cannons winking yellow. There was a different reason this time. The Liberators were passing over naked girls bathing in a stream.

  Harold Steiner, the radio operator of Utah Man, saw a woman driving a wagonload of hay along a road. "As the planes approached she got off the load and crawled under the wagon," Steiner said. "The horses ran off, leaving her face down in the dust." So close were they to the peasants below that they saw smiles on upturned faces and the brightly decorated skirts of the women. "They were very nonchalant," said gunner Robert Bochek. "They stopped working and reined up their horses hitched to carts with big painted wheels. They waved handkerchiefs at us. We thought this was going to be heaven."

  The beautiful valley, the neat tree-lined roads and rivers, the friendly gestures of the Romanians, the absence still of any note of opposition, brought a holiday mood to many of the leading B-24's. The dire predictions seemed to be turning out wrong. Tidal Wave was working great. A red-haired radio operator of a Circus ship, William D. Staats, Jr., decided the occasion was appropriate for his Franklin D. Roosevelt parody. "I hate war. Eleanor hates war. Buzzy hates war, Fuzzy hates war," he chanted on the intercom. Some crews sang "Don't Sit under the Apple Tree" and "Amapola." In the middle of the thundering formation a bombardier led his crew in the doxology.

  The Protector of Ploesti was speeding south from the mountain resort in a staff car, toward his headquarters. Gerstenberg's masterful plan for holding Hitler's black gold had one glaring omission. There were no civilian air raid shelters in Ploesti or Bucharest. The misled citizenry had not demanded them and the military were preoccupied preparing for battle. Civilians were too worried about the shocking loss of men on the Russian front to bother with an abstraction like an air raid. There had been no bombs on Ploesti since the scattered Red Air Force explosions in the autumn of 1941. No citizen had heard of the U.S. Halpro mission. Ploesti was bored with practice alerts, as well. During the first ones people ran for the fields and woods. Later they yawned when the test sirens blew. Ploesti's civil defense consisted of Pitcairn's red button and the sound legs and lungs of its inhabitants.

  A gentle German medical orderly, Corporal Ewald Wegener of the Transport-Sicherungs Regiment, which trucked Ploesti oil to the Russian front, spent that Sunday morning in a curious way.
He sang high mass in a Roman Catholic church in Ploesti. A member of the Salvatorian missionary order, he had been grabbed by the Army while studying medicine in Vienna. After mass Wegener walked back toward his barracks sick bay, where he looked after fifty venereal, malarial and enteritic truckmen in the shadow of the Colombia Aquila refinery. On the way, the priest-medic passed citizens bound out of town with picnic baskets, and met this commanding officer, a foul-mouthed Nazi known as "The Mad Prussian."