Ben Kuroki had volunteered for the service on the night of Pearl Harbor and was turned away because of his ancestry. He besieged the Army and was accepted for a nonsensitive" clerk's job in the infant Circus bomb group, whose members shunned him. His name was not on the shipping list when the group was sent to England. He pleaded with Ted Timberlake, who was at first confused, then touched and honored by the tears of Private Kuroki. Timberlake put his name on the list and Ben went to Britain on the Queen Elizabeth, scrubbing kitchen pots and sleeping on coiled decklines. In England, Ben slipped into air-gunnery classes and graduated with top qualifications, but no air crew would have him. Exactly one year after Pearl Harbor, Jake Epting needed a last-minute replacement gunner, and rather than ground his plane, took Kuroki on a mission. The Nisei warrior soon demolished the "yellow man" prejudice by his deeds in combat. A few months before Ploesti he was shot down in Algeria and escaped through Spain and Portugal to rejoin the Circus in England.
As Kuroki's plane ran up the twenty-mile, five-minute corridor to Ploesti, the sides of haystacks flew open, revealing spitting guns, and freight cars on railway sidings collapsed to pour out 37-mm. fire. Ahead, high barrage balloons were being reeled down and others were rising from the ground. Pits opened in the fields and sprouted machine guns. Kuroki's twin fifties joined other Circus guns in a direct fire fight with the larger German pieces, which, muzzle down, shells short-fused, interlaced the air with 20-mm., 37-mm., 88- and even 105-mm. shells. Flying gunners shot it out with ground gunners. As the flak men tried to hit the low planes from towers they killed flak gunners on other towers. The noise was beyond decibel measure as the choir of 136 fourteen-cylinder engines, with a total of more than a half-million horsepower, roared among muzzle blasts, shrapnel crumps and the ship-shaking clatter of 230 machine guns in the Liberators. Wheat shocks blew away in the bomber wakes like tumbleweeds.
In Utah Man, gunner John Connolly raked a man sending up a blocking balloon and saw him and the bag vanish in a puff of smoke. Connolly blew up a locomotive and did not recall it for three days afterward. He saw a flak gunner cradling a shell, looking up with open mouth, and a grinning soldier waving his cap on a bayonet.
Flight Officer Longnecker noted "an eighty-eight behind a row of trees at a crossroad. I could see the muzzle flash and the projectile as it came toward us. I forced Thundermug under this barrage. The shell removed the left aileron, left rudder and half of the elevator on Captain Roper's ship at my right. I went back into position with him. His plane looked like a junk yard, but he was not wavering a bit. I could see Roper in his cockpit, looking straight ahead, keeping his position. Resistance grew stronger. Our gunners were pounding away steadily. We were going in from the wrong direction at two hundred forty-five mph, sixty-five miles more than our usual speed, pulling emergency power for so long it was a question how much longer the engines could stand the abuse. All I wanted was to get beyond that inferno of tracers, exploding storage tanks and burning aircraft."
In the last ship of the Circus, a command observer, Lieutenant Colonel William A. Beightol, looked back for the Liberandos, the mission leaders last seen hanging on the rim of Bucharest. He saw their dim frontal silhouettes turning to follow the Circus into Ploesti. A minute or so later Beightol saw them turning east, breaking off the attack. He concluded that the Liberandos "had abandoned in the face of restrictive opposition."
Closing on the target city, several Circus planes were trailing smoke from smashed engines, and men were bleeding and dying on the air decks among hot bullet casings, and taking new wounds through the thin-skinned planes, their cries drowned by the deafening air-ground battle. Glittering shards of aluminum and plexiglass floated past in the slip streams. Fires bloomed from the Tokyo tanks they had brought to take them home. Longnecker said, "I saw Enoch Porter take a direct hit in the bomb bay and become a fountain of flame. Two red streams poured out the sides around the tail turret and joined in a river of fire flowing behind for two hundred feet. Porter climbed in a desperate bid for altitude, to let people parachute. The ship stalled, hanging like a cloud of fire, and out of the nosewheel door tumbled the bodies of Jack Warner and Red Franks."
Warner's shoulder blade had been shattered by flak. At his request Red Franks pushed him through the nosewheel hatch and followed him. Franks's chute did not open. Warner's silk spread just in time to save his life. He hit the ground hard and slid unconscious into a shallow stream. Enoch Porter climbed Euroclydon a little higher, and two gunners, Jack Reed and James Vest, bailed out safely. The first plane to go down in battle burned at the edge of a village, the pages of As You Like It opening and shriveling in fiery fingers.
A provident pilot named Earl C. Hurd roared toward the city in Tarfu. He had taught all his men how to land the plane in the event the pilots were knocked out. He struck a balloon cable, which stripped off a de-icer boot, but Tarfu stayed in the air. The co-pilot, Joseph Clements, opened his window and started firing a submachine gun at the German gunners. Hurd clapped his shoulder and yelled, "For God's sake, Joe, be ready to take over when they get me!"
Up front in Hell's Wench, Addison Baker and John Jerstad held an adamant course with Stewart's Utah Man. The Mormon was hit in the left aileron, but did not waver. It seemed impossible that any plane could force the city guns now belching into the Circus. "I didn't see how anyone could get through that mess alive," said Hurd.
Hell's Wench struck a balloon cable. The plane went on and the severed balloon wandered up into the air. The flagship received a direct bit in the nose from an 88. That was the station of bombardier Pezzella, of the "Ball one!" quip. Joseph Tate, leading the second wave behind Baker, saw him hit three more times -- in the wing, wing root and then a devastating burst in the cockpit. The wing tanks and Tokyo tanks took flame. The stricken command ship was still two or three minutes from the bomb-release line.
Baker and Jerstad jettisoned their bombs to keep Hell's Wench in the air and lead the force over the target. "You can tell from the way they drop whether it is the bombardier or the pilot who dumped them," said Tate. Colonel Brown in Queenie, leading the parallel column, saw "open wheat fields in front into which Baker could have mushed with ease." Instead, the flaming Liberator flew on, aiming for an opening between two tall refinery stacks. Tate saw a man coming out of the nosewheel hatch of Hell's Wench. "He came tumbling back," said Tate, "his chute opening. He drifted over top of us so close we could see his burned legs."
Immediately before the target, the flagship received another direct hit. "Baker had been burning for about three minutes," said Carl Barthel, Queenie's navigator. "The right wing began to drop. I don't see how anyone could have been alive in that cockpit, but someone kept her leading the force on between the refinery stacks. Baker was a powerful man, but one man could not have held the ship on the climb she took beyond the stacks." Hell's Wench staggered up to about three hundred feet and three or four men came out. She fell off on the right wing and came drifting back toward Colonel Brown. The falling flagship cleared him by six feet, and, as she "flashed by, flames hid everything in the cockpit," said Brown. Hell's Wench crashed on her wing tip in a field. Brown said, "Baker went down after he flew his ship to pieces to get us over the target." None of Baker's crew survived, not even the men who jumped.
The death of A Force Leader dropped into the subconscious beneath the scream of battle. Utah Man, sole survivor of the lead wave, pulled up to sixty feet to get on top of a refinery unit. Pilot Stewart heard "Bombs away!" and a terrific flak burst came in the left side of his ship. Stewart's bombardier, Ralph Cummings, a former Texas League baseball player, placed the first bombs of Tidal Wave between the plant and its two-foot-thick blast wall. He hit the Colombia Aquila refinery, Target White Five, which was assigned to the Eight Balls, still coming somewhere in the sky. Paul Johnston, the tail gunner of Utah Man, reported on the interphone, "Saw two bombs go into the target. Didn't see any more fall out. The incendiaries hit on top."
Stewart saw a 200-foot
radio tower directly ahead of Utah Man. Its pinnacle was whipping back and forth in gusts of antiaircraft fire. "To go over it would have meant running into that flak," said the pilot. "I said to Larry [co-pilot Loren Koon, an American veteran of the R.A.F.], 'Watch out when the tower goes by.' We rolled the left wing into the street below and stood the right wing to miss the tower. Flak chewed off the high wing tip before we leveled off." Utah Man roared across the housetops of Ploesti, spraying gasoline from shrapnel holes.
Flight Officer Longnecker, coming in to bomb, saw up ahead "a B-24 sliding down a street, with both wings sheered off. A plane hit a barrage balloon and both disintegrated in a ball of fire. We saw bombs dropped by other planes skipping along the ground, hitting buildings, and passing on through, leaving gaping holes in the brickwork. They seemed like rats, gnawing through building after building to find a better place to rest. Suddenly a huge oil storage tank exploded directly in front of my wingman, Vic Olliffe, raising a solid column of fire and debris two hundred feet, waiting for Let 'Er Rip. He couldn't possibly avoid it. The next instant I glanced out and saw Olliffe crossing under Roper and myself, barely clearing us, and then going over a pair of stacks like a hurdler before putting his bombs in a cracking tower. How he missed the explosion, our ships and the stacks is a mystery and always will be.
"The tracers were so solid in front of us that it looked like a fishing net woven of fiery cords. I thought the flight was over for us. From the expression on Deacon Jones's face, I am sure the same thing was crossing his mind; not fear, but rather a sense of vast disappointment, like having to give up a good book before reading the last chapter. As we were about to touch this web of death and destruction, it parted and fell away. Willie Schrampf dropped his bombs and Deacon said his first words: 'Let's get the hell out of here!'"
Beneath them, near the refinery, Corporal Wegener scuttled into his infirmary as gigantic planes spread their wings over it, strafing the wooden barracks. The priest-medic and his patients huddled against the baseboards. In a moment the sick bay was riddled and smoke puffed through the bullet holes. Wegener stuck his head above a window sill; outside the world was aboil with black clouds and flickering yellow flame. "It's black as night!" he exclaimed. He turned to his men. Not one of them had been hit in the storm of fifty-caliber shells. They went outside. An officer yelled, "Don't go near the refinery! The tanks are exploding. Everything is on fire!" Wegener shepherded his patients inside. They were convinced that the bombers were Canadian.
Overhead, the second wave of the Circus streamed across White Five, led by Ball of Fire Jr., which was stolen property. In England the pilot, Joseph Tate, who had lost his first Ball of Fire to battle damage, happened upon an unattended Liberator on a ferry base and flew off with it. As Tate bombed Ploesti he closed his mind over his comrades' deaths and a deep inner wound. A few days before, he had received a disturbing letter from his wife.
Tate came off the refinery unbelievably untouched and saw a roof-top battery addressing him directly. All at once the men and guns vanished in an explosion. Tate's tail gunner saw something he "didn't like to talk about" -- a blazing B-24 climbing and two parachutes opening before the plane crashed and spread an acre of fire. The parachutes drifted into the flames. In order to deny gasoline to fascism the mission force carried a half-million gallons of it to Ploesti.
In the middle of the formation a veteran co-pilot went berserk with fright. The pilot held him and the control column until the navigator dragged the man out and sat on him.
The succeeding elements of A Force kept coming up the corridor of fire, fighting for every foot of it. It was a massive tank ambuscade upon unarmored planes racing at more than 200 mph. Tupelo Lass bombed, flew out intact, and K.O. Dessert banked southwest into a broad Ploesti boulevard, noting "ribbons of tracer bullets coming like an illusion of railway tracks." He lowered Tupelo Lass to bus-top level and drove down the street, "going through a million red lights" -- the muzzle blasts of roof-top flak guns. In the top turret Ben Kuroki did not reply. They had orders not to shoot up the city.
In the meantime, to the east, George Brown's column, partially screened from flak guns by rows of lime trees along the Ploesti-Bucharest highway, approached Bertha, the big flak gun that Willi Nowicki had just put back in service. The roar of invisible bombers became louder, but the battery was still on hold-fire orders. Suddenly, said Nowicki, "Four Liberators swept across us at treetop level, shooting wildly." Sergeant Aust, the fire controller, could not restrain himself any longer. Breaking orders, he yelled, "Fire!"
Bertha scored a bull's-eye on the next plane to arrive. It crashed beyond the battery. All the other 88's went into action. "The concert started," said Nowicki. "It was bedlam. Our men were cheering and screaming." The Russians (the K-3's, the firing-cord pullers) worked smartly. The guns raised and lowered and turned, spouting death. The sound of bells was added to the clangor of battle. The flak guns could turn two and a half times on their bases before the electrical cables would go no farther. Then a warning bell rang and the gunners would be out of action until they traversed back to starting position.
"There was some fire power in those Liberators!" said Nowicki. "They wanted to paralyze our flak. They outsmarted us. We couldn't see our fighters anywhere." Brown's ships were felling men in the battery site, but Bertha and her five companions were killing his men too. The B-24 piloted by William E. Meehan fell in a sliding, burning heap, leaving a trail of burning wheat. Out of Meehan's plane ran gunner Larry Yates through a universe of fire. He was the sole survivor.
Charles Merrill flew over in Thar She Blows with an armored deck under his feet and got through the battery safely. The booming flak guns were soon overworked. Nowicki put on his helmet and changed an overheated 20-mm. barrel in twenty seconds. The 88 named Friederich had a malfunction in the automatic fuse setter and exploded, killing four antiaircraft men. Adolf fired a shell that was fused too short. The explosion killed several other Germans.
Gunners of a Romanian battery saw a hard-hit bomber sinking on a direct line toward them. It salvoed its bombs in neat rows in a field and staggered on. The B-24 crashed in the battery and exploded, killing ten Americans and eight Romanians.
The most telling fire from the ground was coming from agile 37-mm. and 20-mm. guns. The Americans often mistook the 37's for 88's: they both threw bursting shells. Many of the big 88's were silent for long stretches of the battle. They were not maneuverable enough to hit low-flying bombers flashing by in the tree-tops on the sides. But when they got at the nose of an oncoming formation, the 88's were decisive. One such gun, manned by a corporal, was lying crouched in silence with its breech open when a B-24 flight came straight for it, fantastically low. There was no time to compute a shot. The corporal put his eye to the breech. One of the Liberators was neatly framed in the muzzle. Loading with fantastic speed, he shot it down.
Colonel Brown reached Colombia Aquila and bombed it. Now came a peril few of the Americans had anticipated. Buttoned around the refineries were the tank farms. These oil stockpiles were strategic trivia. The mission was not concerned with destroying a few days' product awaiting shipment, but neither the air gunners nor the ground gunners could avoid lacing into the storage tanks. And the airmen, as ordered, were throwing out armloads of incendiary bombs on them.
The tanks began exploding in flame. A plane skimmed one just as it went off. The bomber was tossed up like a flaming brand. Brown's following echelons flew out of the flak beds into red-hot tank tops spinning like coins, and girders blowing in the air like straws.
In the midst of his battle with the bomber column, Sergeant Aust received a phone call from the flak battalion commander: "Wer hat den Feuerbefehl freigegeben?" (Who gave the firing order?) Aust confessed. "I'm going to court-martial you," said the commander. The fire controller went back to work. The flak men were screaming maniacally at a sight in Colonel Brown's third bomb wave. Coming toward them was a B-24 completely enveloped in flame.
It was Jos�
� Carioca, carrying ten young men on their first bombing mission. The pilot was Nicholas Stampolis of Kalamazoo, Michigan. His co-pilot was nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Ivan Canfield from San Antonio, Texas, whom even the sergeants called "Junior." The German gunners simply watched it fly over without trying to hit it. The plane continued on evenly in hopeless flame and disappeared in the target smoke. On the other side it came out still flying steadily. José Carioca went toward a refinery building from which a flak unit was firing into the onrushing bomber stream. The plane drove through the wall of the building as though it were made of confectioners' sugar. Gasoline squirted and ran in licking flamelets across the refinery grounds. From the other side of the building came José Carioca, in level flight, without wings. The fuselage penetrated another refinery building, where it remained, lifting a cloud of brick dust and new fires. Stampolis and Canfield had taken flame in the bomb bay tanks five miles from the target, but they reached it.
In the B-24 piloted by Roy C. Harms, the left waist gunner, Jack J. Reed, was firing at the muzzle blinks of 20-mm. guns hidden in haystacks. The flak men put a four-foot hole in Harms's left vertical stabilizer. Top turret man Arnold Holden was hit. Shells shattered the nose and tail. A fire broke out in the fuselage, sealing off the tail gunner, Michael Doka. Reed's companion at the waist guns, John Shufritz, was heavily wounded but continued to man his gun. Reed yelled to him, "Bail out if we get any altitude," and went into the bomb bay. The bombs were still in the racks and Harms was still trying to bring them to Ploesti. The plane was approaching a stall. Harms tried to climb. He reached 300 feet and Reed jumped. The plane fell with the other nine men. Reed landed with heavy injuries in the refinery grounds. "I don't know how I made it," he said. "I wish I had rode her to the ground and died with the fine men who didn't have the guts to jump."
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