Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  "Hey, Wegener," said the CO. "So, I find you in town. Sleeping with a fat Romanian woman?" Wegener meekly protested his divine orders. "Watch yourself," said his nemesis, "or I'll pack you off to the eastern front. If you ever get back from there you'll appreciate the need for a woman." He released the corporal, who continued on his way.

  In the target city, a German camp show musician named Paul Baetz was in the Luftwaffe command post to arrange his next week's concerts at military installations. Baetz was a short, dark, animated pianist, who toured with Else Schneider, a twenty-year-old coloratura, and Edith Rath, twenty-three, an accordionist-comedienne. The act was popular with the soldiers, and it was just as well that nobody wondered why Baetz, a cousin by marriage to Richard Wagner, and a former conductor at the Weimar State Theater, was giving troop shows in the Balkans. The little musician was staying out of sight of the Nazis, who had marked him for a concentration camp because he continued to perform "decadent Jewish music." In his exile Baetz took pleasure in complying with soldiers' requests for "Tea for Two" and "White Christmas," written by Jews, and enemies to boot.

  The duty officer said sotto voce to the pianist, "Paul, enemy bombers are being tracked over the Mediterranean this morning. Life here may not always be this quiet. I believe you should take the girls away from here." Baetz thanked him and left. Outside it was extremely hot and humid and the streets were thronged with promenaders. The town's picnic hampers were full of plump roast geese and salamis, and countrybound private automobiles honked through the streets in the only country in the wartime world that had ineffectual gasoline rationing. The traffic policemen in their choker tunics, heavy capes and fur hats sweated copiously. Near one of them Baetz saw a gauzily dressed Gypsy beauty, cigaret dangling from her lips, giving breast to an infant. Even Gerstenberg had been unable to keep the "unessential" Romany tribe out of Festung Ploesti .

  Baetz reflected on this strange, soft, white Mediterranean city under the Carpathians, surrounded by plants that provided Hitler's clanking panzers, roaring planes and stalking submarines with the lifeblood of war. Fingers linked behind his back, the musician strolled through the market place, where stood a soaring abstract sculpture by Brancusi, a Ploesti native who had made a name in Parisian art. In leafy parks Baetz saw soldiers fondling ripening thirteen-year-old girls in the drowsy, carnal heat. "Rosen auf den Weg gestreut/ Und des Harms vergessen!" (Scatter roses in your path and forget your sorrows.)

  The air raid sirens screamed.

  The people paid no attention, thinking it was just another test by the busy Germans. It was 1330 eastern European time, 1130 Greenwich time. The Liberator horde was twenty minutes from Ploesti. The men in the bombers saw many lovely streams flowing across their course, the waters of the Alps draining southeast to the Danube. The navigators stared hard at the streams and at their maps and kept running calculations of ground speed. The three Initial Points that would set them upon the target sweep were towns with rivers like these flowing through them.

  The two lead groups were now aware that they were going across the target without the three others. Far behind them, Killer Kane was about to find that out. He came down the Balkan slope toward the Danube with the impression that the group behind was the Circus. In order to let it assume its proper place in front of him, Kane turned his ships back to the west. Then he recognized the formation as the Eight Balls and the final group as the Sky Scorpions. Kane returned to course and drove speedily to the fore. All the pilots now knew that the great mission was hopelessly split into two elements, neither knowing the other's location. Kane took up the heading to the First I.P. at higher and higher power settings.

  Near Craiova, 65 miles short of the First I.P., one of Johnson's pilots, Lieutenant Charles Whitlock, lost his No. 1 engine when a fuel line clogged. Unable to keep up, Whitlock turned south for Cyprus. Although his bombs were a dangerous burden for a plane flying on three engines, the pilot did not jettison them, not wishing to harm civilians or betray what he still thought was a surprise raid. Whitlock toted them to the Danube and dropped them in the river. Over Bulgaria he lost No. 4 engine by malfunction and he was obliged to drop his incendiaries. He made it to Cyprus.

  K.K. Compton passed Pitesti, the First Initial Point, which lay at the mouth of a valley with a ganglion of river, road and rails passing through it to the southeast. The leaders were now in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps. The Liberandos and the Circus dropped lower toward the piney ridges and spread into a quasi-bombing front. The engineers and radiomen cranked up the sliding bomb doors and particles of pink African sand fell on the black soil of Europe. K.K. Compton and Uzal Ent stood on the flight deck of Teggie Ann, riding on the right of the thirteen-plane first element, slightly behind Brewery Wagon, piloted by John Palm. Although no enemy had been sighted and navigation and timing had been perfect to the first I.P., Compton and Ent were worried over the absence of Killer Kane and the three trailing groups. They also had a difficult recognition problem in the series of valleys below, all of which ran southeast, all of which contained towns, and most of which had parallel streams, rails and rivers. There were four similar-looking valleys between the First and Second Initial Points.

  As they approached Targoviste, the ancient capital of Romania, located in still another valley, K.K. Compton resumed his seat beside Red Thompson and said, "Now." Thompson slid Teggie Ann out to the right and took up the briefed bomb-run heading of 127 degrees, parallel to the road, railway and river. K.K. Compton was taking the lead to be the first to bomb Ploesti. The others turned neatly behind, except for John Palm in Brewery Wagon, who shot on over Targoviste.

  Teggie Ann had made a wrong turn.

  Targoviste was only the Second I.P.

  The lead group was turning twenty miles short of the Initial Point that led to Ploesti.

  Red Thompson reflected later, "Who knows what bearing there was on it from the mysterious loss of Flavelle and Wilson, the target-finding team, and the lack of air discipline that moved Flavelle's wingman, carrying the Number Two navigator, to go down and circle his oil slick and return to base?"

  Officers behind K.K. Compton were thunderstruck by the turn. Stanley Wertz, the navigator of Utah Man, phoned his pilot, "We're turning too soon!" Stewart said, "There's nothing we can do about it." Norman Appold broke radio silence. He switched on the command channel and cried, "Not here! Not here! This isn't it!" Ramsay Potts in Duchess simultaneously went on the clear air with "Mistake! Mistake!" A dozen others joined the protest on the open radio, but they had to turn. Potts's twelve planes, for instance, were surrounded by others and could not wheel back on the right course without causing air collisions.

  Along the wrong route the Liberators passed through startling changes of weather, the unpredictable midsummer humors of the Danubian basin -- mugginess, bright sunny patches and dark rain squalls. The main impression was of a light violet haze, limiting visibility to about six miles.

  K.K. Compton drilled on, keeping the heading which they had been briefed to take after the Third I.P. This did not lead to Ploesti. It led to Bucharest. In their path lay the heaviest flak concentration in Europe, the wicked heart of Gerstenberg's surprise. His guns were packed into the fields southeast of the oil city, ahead of Compton.

  In the game of supposition between the defense and attack planners, Gerstenberg calculated that bombers from Benghazi would be at the extreme limit of their flying range to reach Ploesti at all. Therefore they would have to come and depart on a straight line between the two points. So he put the brunt of his guns on this line. Now the Liberators were marching right into the ambuscade.

  Near the Standard Block refinery (Target White Three) on the south side of Ploesti, men of antiaircraft Battery Four were lined up by a horse-drawn mess wagon, drawing goulash and potatoes in their mess tins. Gunners Erich Hanfland, a locksmith's apprentice from Olsberg, and his friend, Heinz Silberg, a woodcutter from the Westerwald, sat eating by the side of the lane.

  When Pitcairn of Pe
rthshire pressed the red button at Otopenii for the full alarm, Silberg exclaimed, "Always exercises! Alarms for a whole year and nobody comes!" Hanfland agreed. "And in the middle of our meal. They are crazy." Nevertheless, they abandoned their food and rushed to their gun, a four-barreled 20-mm., which they took pride in manning seventeen seconds after an alert. Hanfland, the gunlayer, put his left hand on the traverse wheel and his right on the elevation wheel and poised his foot lightly on the trigger button. Silberg stood by the electric view finder. They heard heavy flak bursts. But the battery sergeant gave no firing order. "I can't see any planes," said Silberg.

  Sergeant Aust, in the center of Battery Four, received a signal from Regiment. "They're flying very low. Change your fuse settings for point-blank fire!" Aust put the Russians to work altering the 88-mm. shell fuses.

  Less than halfway to Bucharest the forward line of the Liberandos walked into a massive ambuscade and the Battle of Ploesti began. The first salvo was dazzling -- four enormous blue-white muzzle blasts from 88-mm. guns.

  Major Appold, a mile behind K.K. Compton, was flying at 200 miles an hour, fifty feet from the ground. He and his top turret gunner, Squadron Leader Barwell, saw blue flashes and black clouds of shrapnel spreading among the leaders. Barwell observed, "Bloody eighty-eights. They're fusing point-blank to spread the stuff low." He raised his voice on the intercom: "Gunners! I'm concentrating on Jerry personnel. Recommend trying to hit men rather than guns. I say, Norm, drop the nose." Appold was folded close to his left wingman, Lieutenant Lyle T. Ryan, but managed to bank delicately to port. "The top turret began thumping away at the emplacement," said Appold. "I saw those fifty-caliber slugs churning up dust, spewing sparks off the gun barrels, and soldiers frantically running. A man went down in a puff of dust, got up and started to walk, then fell in a heap. That uncanny accuracy of Barwell's had literally saved our necks."

  The outer guns were manned by Gerstenberg's second-best. One gun site now pitted against the likes of Barwell was in the hands of a unit of old men from Vienna -- retired Austrian Army officers. They stood up against the storm and worked their weapons. From his turret the Englishman peered far beyond them toward another cluster of big ones, six 88's that were planting a black forest of shrapnel among the leading Liberators. "All right, old boy, let the left wing down a bit," Barwell directed. Five thousand feet from the big guns, a range that would have got another gunner Appold's reprimand for wasting bullets, Barwell began firing five-second bursts. "I would crank her down and he'd squeeze short ones," said Appold. "We coordinated successfully and the blue flashes came less and less."

  It was a virtuoso duet against death. Appold banked and turned the hurtling bomber, locked in low-level formation, so that Barwell could clear the emplacements passing beneath at 200 miles an hour. Appold said, "I believe George silenced three of the six guns on that spot. I am convinced that we would not have survived and a lot more planes would not have come through, save for the cool-headed gunnery of this English officer." Behind them were forty B-24's. Many took hits in the first ground fusillade, but no planes fell yet.

  The opening of battle found General Gerstenberg speeding through Ploesti toward his Bucharest post. Gerstenberg said to his driver, "Turn here. I'm going to the Ploesti command post instead." The master defense architect had decided to experience the siege in Festung Ploesti .

  "Where are the fighters?" Barwell asked Appold. "The flak was ready for us, why not the Messerschmitts?" Gamecock Hahn was exactly where he should be, had the bombers kept their projected line of invasion. But now the Messerschmitts were forty miles from the Liberators, due to the erroneous turn at the Second I.P. Battles are composed of caprice and error, and this error had some luck for the Americans. It kept the German fighters off them during the opening of the battle.

  Coming down from the heights over Bucharest, George Barwell saw low-wing fighters that were not in his mental gallery of enemy aircraft. They were Romanian IAR-80's. The Gypsies were beating Gamecock Hahn to the first encounter. Ground spotters phoned the control centers, "They're attacking Bucharest very deep!" The fighter controllers started calling Gamecock Hahn south to meet the B-24's. Amidst the nervous babble on the fighter channels he did not hear the order.

  Fighter controller Schultz had an alarming thought. "If they are making a heavy attack in Bucharest it will be a catastrophe. Feelings against the war are bad enough now. This could turn the Romanians against us." Then he thought of the possibility that the bombers would attack the German airdromes. He phoned the bases, "Send up every machine that will fly! Nothing must be left on the ground." The American gunners began seeing big Heinkel 111 bombers, Junkers 52 transports, liaison Storchs, and other chore planes such as Buckers, Stieglitzes and Weihes. There was even an ancient Gloster Gladiator that Britain had sold to Romania before the war. The B-24 men could not understand why these old and often unarmed types should be up, and some jumped to the hasty conclusion that this ragtag was all the Germans had to defend Ploesti. If so, it was going to be a big day for B-24 gunners. However, these planes were in the sky not to give battle, but to avoid it.

  The bombers drove on blindly toward Bucharest. Some of the IAR-80's had now gotten high behind them and were diving on the Liberator tails. Worthy A. Long, piloting Jersey Bounce, got a call from his rear gunner, Leycester D. Havens. There was a thump.

  A few seconds later Long heard Havens' weak and surprised voice. He was the first American to die by the enemy's hand in the great ground-air battle.

  Bombs Away: 1150 hours

  ODYSSEUS: Curse you, Atriedês! I wish you had some other army to

  command, some contemptible army instead of us! Zeus it seems has

  given us from youth to old age a nice ball of wool to wind --

  nothing but wars upon wars until we shall perish, every one.

  -- The Iliad , Book XIV

  6 THE CIRCUS IN HELL

  Addison Baker had led the Traveling Circus into the wrong turn at Targoviste, following the mission leader up front. As he hurtled on in the haze toward Bucharest many of his pilots passionately called the error on the radio, but Baker continued to maintain formation. Halfway down the errant road Circus crews saw a dark blur in the mist on their left -- the smoke of Ploesti refineries. Russell Longnecker was anxiously watching Baker's plane, when suddenly "Colonel Baker made a decision." The young flight officer said, "There was no doubt about his decision. He maneuvered our group more eloquently than if he had radio contact with each of us. He turned left ninety degrees. We all turned, with him. Ploesti was off there to the left and we were going straight into it and we were going fast."

  Baker and co-pilot Jerstad, the mission planner, drove Hell's Wench hard and low for the target city at the head of the left file of the Circus. Lieutenant Colonel George S. Brown, in Queenie, threw the right file into the improvised turn and took up a parallel course to Baker. On the other side of Brown, Ramsay Potts, leading B Force of the Circus, swung his ships into the new heading. Addison Baker's swift decision split the Circus completely away from K.K. Compton's Liberandos, which continued toward Bucharest. Now the grand plan for a simultaneous frontal assault on the White Targets by four groups was down to two groups, parting at right angles to each other, and the whereabouts of the rest of the force was unknown to them.

  Ground spotters phoned the German fighter controllers, "They're attacking Bucharest and Ploesti very deep! It's a simultaneous attack on Bucharest and Ploesti!" Controller Zahn said, "Damned cleverly done. They send planes to tie up fighters at Bucharest while the main force hits Ploesti."

  The Circus ran for Ploesti across dizzy strips of alfalfa, tall green corn, and bundles of harvested wheat lying in shining stubble. Baker's 22 Liberators went lower, drawing together, until they were knit tightly fifty feet from the ground. Through fragile windows the officers faced the ground barrage and tried to find an objective. The haze dissolved and threw up a welter of stacks, storage tanks and barrage balloons, or "blocking balloons,"
as the Luftwaffe called them. The balloon cables were festooned with contact explosives. The weeks of target briefings and rehearsals were no use to the Circus crews now. They were going in on an entirely unfamiliar heading. Their target, White Two, was on the other side of the city. The setting factors were complete.

  The Circus came to bomb. Baker was leading as he said he would. In Tupelo Lass, K.O. Dessert's co-pilot called off the flak batteries for his gunners. "Eight o'clock! Twelve o'clock! Three o'clock," cried Jacob Epting. "Shoot all over!" Among the shell bursts he saw "pink stuff, white stuff, red stuff, black stuff." Below, he saw "two men fall over their gun. Two others pushed them aside and took over. The planes ahead were chewing the air, but to hell with prop-wash. We went as low as we could. It was safer than standing in the range of all those guns. We went into the target at twenty feet." Over Epting's head in Tupelo Lass stood one of the finest gunners in the Eighth Air Force, Ben Kuroki, turning his whining turret here and there to strafe flak towers. Kuroki had won a personal campaign against the U.S. Air Force for the privilege of performing this service. He was a Japanese-American truck farmer from Hershey, Nebraska.