Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  John J. Hayes, flight engineer of Liberty Lad, saw "great sheets of gasoline ablaze, flowing down the roads and over the fields." The layer of summer haze over Ploesti gave way to towering darkness, rooted in flame. As yet no Circus bombs had exploded. Their detonation times were graduated from one hour in the lead wave to forty-five seconds in the rear, and Tailend Charlie was still coming. The last plane in Brown's force was Valiant Virgin, piloted by Russell D. DeMont and Robert C. Murray. Laying down a bristling fifty-caliber barrage into the flak men, they got on top of the cracking plant and put their bombs into it. DeMont immediately returned to the lowest possible altitude, crossed the city and came upon Colonel Brown and one other plane in the hills north of Ploesti. DeMont tried to shape up on his leader, but one of his engines would not give full power. "Rather than waste gas to keep up," said DeMont, "I decided I would throttle back and make a lone withdrawal." *

  * DeMont's fuel conservation policy proved sound. He flew all the way to Benghazi alone and landed with an hour's gas in his tanks.

  As the two main Circus columns, Baker's and Brown's, crossed their target, out to their right were the twelve planes of B Force, led by the economics professor, Ramsay Potts in Duchess. His was the smallest force of Tidal Wave and carried the highest percentage of men overdue for retirement from battle. Potts had deduced the low-level target three months before and the long anticipation had taken twenty pounds off his normally trim body. With white face, red eyes and yellow hair, his clothing hanging loosely from his worry-worn frame, B Force Leader was a ghost pilot hanging on by raw will power, as his ships ran the gauntlet of hot steel and tracers seeking their petrol reservoirs. He watched the last oval rudders of A Force plunge into the smoke, and looked for his target. Potts had been briefed to bomb the intertwined Standard Petrol Block and Unirea Sperantza refineries, small precise objectives worthy of his expert crews. They had studied the models until they could see the target in their sleep, but not from this unfamiliar angle. Ironically, their proper targets lay in the corner of Ploesti they were approaching, but Potts steered toward a nearer refinery. It was Astro Romana, the largest oil producer in Europe, the first priority objective of the mission -- Killer Kane's target.

  Potts's planes were sighted by gunlayer Erich Hanfland's battery. The young German saw, right among the Liberators, "a storage tank leap five hundred feet in the air, billowing smoke and flame." He thought, "How can anybody fly through that?" Battery Sergeant Bichler bellowed through his megaphone, "Fire! Fire freely in all directions!" Hanfland saw a dozen "furniture vans" coming, hailing bullets into the battery. Obergefreiter (Corporal) Deltester of Hamburg, who had just been married on home leave, was at his field phone when a fifty-caliber shell struck his neck and passed out under his arm on the other side, killing him instantly.

  Potts and his wingmen, Jersey Bounce and Lucky, passed over as Hanfland lined up on the furniture vans and tramped the trigger of the four-barreled 20-mm. gun, loaded with armor-piercing and incendiary shells. The first fifty rounds nearly sheared the tail off a Liberator in Potts's second rank. It crashed 200 feet past the battery in a cornfield and began to burn. It was Pudgy, piloted by Milton W. Teltser and Wilmer H.C. Bassett. They brought the crumpled, burning ship into a crash-landing, from which they and three others -- observer Willard R. Beaumont and waist gunners Robert Locky and Francis Doll -- got away before it exploded. A mob of peasants closed in, thinking the men were Russians. A man in a horse cart rode into the crowd and drove the farmers away with a whip.

  The seared and blistered survivors walked to a shuttered village. A middle-aged inhabitant ventured out and said, "'Are you chaps Americans by any chance?" Bassett said, "That is correct." The man cried, "How nice to see you! I was with the Royal Flying Corps in England in the last war." The village poured out in gay Sunday dress, led by the burgomaster wearing a red embroidered shirt. Through the crowd came a beautiful young woman, who looked at the burned men and made way for them to a spotless infirmary. She was the village doctor. The villagers watched her strip their smoldering rags and dress the burns. She laid the shocked men on straw in the village pub, and the burgomaster admitted orderly queues of people to look at the Americans.

  Alongside Potts flew Jersey Bounce, carrying the first man killed in action. Shortly after Sergeant Havens had died, the ship's nose was removed by shrapnel, wounding bombardier Norman C. Adams and navigator David Lipton. The bleeding Lipton continued to assail the flak pits with his machine gun. With air whistling through the open nose and tail, Jersey Bounce raced through hose streams of steel.

  From the ground, Hanfland, who had knocked out the engine, saw the plane lurch. "It was flying too deep for anybody to jump," said the German. Hanfland exploded a shell in Jersey Bounce's control pedestal. Long and Lockhart flew on between two flak towers, which removed the rest of the greenhouse and shattered half of the instrument panel. Number One engine was struck and caught fire. With two engines gone and Jersey Bounce fading into a stall, the pilots saw a refinery cooling tower looming ahead. They used the last energy of the engines to pull over the tower. Long called on Adams to bomb. There was no answer on the intercom -- it had been shot away.

  But Jersey Bounce did not die. Over the cooling tower the pilots got her leveled out and walked her on treetops and telegraph poles into a fairly open field, where she went into a long slide, still without taking fire. The plane dismantled a fence, ground across a railway in a shower of sparks, and sledded to a stop. Only then did her bomb bay tanks burst and flames spring from the gas sluicing through the interior. Lockhart squirmed out through a rent in the side and ran with his head and hands aflame. Long was caught in his collapsed seat, with the catch on his safety belt pinned beneath him. He wrenched himself free.

  Adams, the wounded bombardier, plunged back into the fire and hauled Sergeant Maurice Peterson out of the waist. The two officers ripped the clothing off the badly burned gunner, and Adams went back to the wreck again to help others. The fire could no longer be approached. Four of his comrades died in the pyre of the dead tail gunner. Long watched his ship burn. Germans marched them to a schoolhouse aid station in Ploesti, where they found their mortally hurt waist gunner, Marion J. Szaras, lying naked with heavy burns and his back and legs riddled with sharpnel. There were thirty other B-24 men there, most of them burned and others with fractures and internal injuries incurred in low parachute jumps.

  Beyond the target, Honky-Tonk Gal, flown by Hubert K. Womble, was mortally hit by aroused flak gunners north of Ploesti, who killed an officer in the greenhouse. Womble lowered his landing gear as soon as he felt the strike. A wheat field providentially spread before him and he made a tricycle landing. A wing clipped the earth, and, as the plane ground-looped, a control cable parted and whipped off Womble's foot. His men were lifting him out as Russell Longnecker and Deacon Jones roared over in Thundermug, recognized Honky-Tonk Gal, and thanked God for the eight men waving wildly on the ground. The young pilots of Thundermug located their indomitable companions, Hugh Roper and Vic Olliffe, who brought their three ships together "real tight as before" to begin the thousand-mile voyage home. Longnecker said, "We had come through, but there was no sight of the three others in our wing. As I moved back into my old position on Hugh Roper, I could see the display of big boles on his right wing and side that he got on the target run."

  The last Circus plane to cross the target was Ready & Willing, piloted by Packy Roche, a smart, lucky veteran of the high war in the west. He stayed low at Ploesti. "If we'd have climbed more than fifty feet from the ground, we'd have been shot to pieces," said his gunner William Doerner. As it was, Roche came off with five wounded. Colonel Beightol, the observer in Ready & Willing, watched sister ships go down and had an "intense feeling that, even though we had reached and bombed the target, the limited success scarcely compensated for the pasting we took." The Circus was paying Gerstenberg's list price. Roche's flight engineer, Fred Anderson, a "retired" volunteer, had his front teeth knocked out by shrap
nel. He continued his duties, transferring fuel and looking after the ship.

  As the Circus blundered across the city, Baetz, the German camp show musician, heard "loud, roaring wings" and stuck his head out of a doorway. He saw a monstrous green airplane coming toward him, its wing tips stretching nearly the width of the boulevard. He saw a gunner in a glass dome on the roof, one standing in an open window on the side, and another in a bay window in the rear, exchanging streams of bullets with a small pursuing plane, which he recognized as a Romanian IAR-81. The fighter went into a half roll and sped under the bomber, upside down, crashing bullets into its belly.

  Baetz had the impression that the B-24 was out of control, "although it continued to fly at a flat angle." The IAR-81 twisted out from under the bomber and climbed. "I felt the street shake," said Baetz. "The bomber crashed into a three-story brick building." He ran toward it. The Liberator was buried inside the Ploesti Women's Prison. "Flaming petrol flowed through the cell blocks and down the stairs," said the musician. In the cells were about a hundred prisoners -- shoplifters, political opponents of Antonescu, and farm girls serving short terms for watering milk. The women screamed. In the street a man yelled, "Where's the turnkey? He has the cell keys on his ring. Get the turnkey! Let's get them out." Another bystander said, "I saw the turnkey climbing the outside staircase to unlock the women, and the plane hit him."

  Quick to the disaster came a unit from Gerstenberg's sole remaining regiment of fire police. Most of them came from Magdeburg in Saxony. They approached the burning prison with great valor, pried open window bars on the ground floor, and brought out forty women before the flames shut them out. The prison burned all the next night and cries were heard from it until early morning.

  As the young pilots of Thundermug left Ploesti, Longnecker said, "We were doing two hundred forty miles an hour and planes were passing us like it was the Cleveland Air Races. It looked like we had a chance to get home, but we'd never make it on such power settings. I reduced power to save gas and conserve the engines."

  Tarfu came out flying, with pilot Hurd surveying his defunct oxygen and electrical systems, a shell hole in a bomb bay tank, and severed control cables. Not the smallest loss was the shattered portable toilet. He and most of his men had dysentery.

  The Mormon missionary, Stewart, swung across the chimney pots of Ploesti, still sniffing gasoline fumes, although the crew had stoppered the holes in the bomb bay tanks. His co-pilot pointed to No. 3 engine on Utah Man. A thick stream of gas was pouring out of the wing tank. Stewart kicked the rudder to swing the gusher away from the waist window, and told his crew to assume crash-landing positions. "Don't set 'er down now, Walt," said a small voice from the rear. "We've still got two live thousand-pounders aboard." The bombs were armed to explode in an hour. Apparently when Cummings was about to release them, a flak hit had impaired his controls and they did not fall.

  Utah Man, near to mechanical failure, full of explosive fumes and streaming gas, faced sudden death from a flak or fighter strike. If that didn't finish the expedition, in about fifty minutes the big bombs would. Stewart steered toward some oil derricks, calling on Cummings to drop the live bombs to "do some good." The bombardier tripped them again, but they did not fall. "Now we've got to get them out of here, Ralph," said the pilot, "or we'll never get this thing down. Let's try this railroad bridge up ahead." Cummings tinkered with the gyro-gunsight and reported, "Bombs away!" Stewart looked at his ad lib target and cringed in horror. It was not a military objective but an ordinary country bridge with cows trudging over it, driven by a small girl, who was waving ecstatically at the oncoming Goliath.

  The pilot did not feel the unburdening of bombs. The tail gunner phoned, "Hey, there's a little girl back there waving at us!" The thousand-pounders were still hanging in the slings, ruminating the acid in their nose membranes that would soon blow them to smithereens. Cummings and the engineer went into the bay to work the big ones out through the open bomb doors.

  Colonel Brown, now in command of the Circus after Addison Baker's death, picked up more of his ships on the outskirts of Ploesti and led them on a southwest withdrawal heading. Brown saw that one of his wing tips was crumpled. "It doesn't look like it hit a balloon cable," he said. Top turret gunner Lloyd Treadway said, "Colonel, you hit a church steeple, remember?" Brown wondered where the Circus was. That morning 39 planes had taken off, and 34 reached the target area. Now he had fifteen in a scratch formation. Only five were relatively undamaged. Others carried dead and wounded. A feathered prop was their cockade and the marching tune was air whistling through broken glass. The Circus formed a flying hedgehog to save itself. In the shifting fortunes of battle it seemed that Brown was getting lucky. There were no fighters in sight. It looked as though the riddled Circus might slip through between the Romanians at Bucharest and Gamecock Hahn on the north.

  The Luftwaffe ace was still patrolling the northern air gates of Ploesti at 6,000 feet, perplexed by the failure of the Americans to arrive punctually on their predicted time and course. His radio appeals to the controllers were lost in the yelling on the air waves.

  Shouldered in with the Gamecock's H.Q. Schwarm was Black Wing, led by industrial engineer Hans Schopper in a Messerschmitt called Hecht, meaning a little fish that prowls and preys. Schopper had flown in the Polish campaign in '39, and later, on patrol out of Trondheim, Norway, had shot down into the freezing Atlantic a Blenheim, a Hurricane and a Sunderland. He had destroyed a Fokker in Holland in 1940 and six Soviet machines at Stalingrad in '42. Schopper was as puzzled as his commander. The mishmash of voices on his open receiver indicated that an air battle was taking place, but where was it?

  The Gamecock picked a clue off the radio, an authoritative German voice calling to him, "Fly to six thousand five hundred meters." Hahn replied, "There are no furniture vans around here." Came a reply, "Then go under the clouds." Hahn spiral-banked his 52 Messerschmitts through the bottom cloud layers. Schopper hit his radio button. "Gamecock! Oh, Gamecock, I see them! Green bombers, very deep." Under the clouds the Mizil Messerschmitts saw the target drama spread before them. The south side of Ploesti was burning. The American bombs were beginning to detonate, flinging up dust through the black target smoke. The green bombers had outwitted them and were scuttling away. The Gamecock elbowed his radio-button. "Dive! Dive!" he shouted, and plunged full throttle. The brooding youngster, Werner Gerhartz, held on to his leader's wing, facing his first battle proof. He resolved that this time the Americans were not going to evade him with any North Sea tricks. The power dive of the Mizil force reached 550 miles an hour. Schopper had to throttle back quickly "to keep from pulling my wings off."

  Each experienced pilot chose one of the Circus ships to attack and did not take his eyes from it during the swoop. Halfway down, the Gamecock, with reflexes trained by many battles, reached blindly to his panel and flipped on the switch that electrically armed his guns -- 20-mm. cannons in each wing and one under the nose, and a fifteen-caliber machine gun firing through the air screw. He shot a glance at the red light that showed the guns were open. The light was not on. He called to the novice Gerhartz, "Ben, my guns aren't working. You take over," and slid out of the formation to climb and direct the battle by radiophone. (After it was over, none of his pilots remembered hearing a single command from him.)

  Gerhartz struck at the high rear of George Brown's pinch-hit formation. The tail and top turret gunners sent up sheets of fire from their superior position in the harvest fields and broke Gerhartz' battle array on the first pass. A fighter pilot, who tried to level off and pursue, was churned up in the American prop-wake and crash-landed. Another, whose machine was full of burning B-24 bullets, ploughed the earth in flames and came staggering out of the wreckage.

  The fighter formation had been dispersed by a new kind of earth-bound aerial warfare. The Mizil men went hunting in pairs and trios for lone ships, crippled ships and those that were flying too high. Gerhartz and his wingman, Hans Eder, caught on to a V-pattern of
three Liberators departing at an altitude of 300 feet. They ignored one that was dragging and smoking, saving it for later. The Germans drove from behind on their selected victims. Gerhartz said, "I got high on the tail of mine and poured it into him. I don't know whether they were firing at me. It happened too fast. Eder and I came around again, perhaps two minutes later. The Liberators were scattering. One of the engines on mine was smokbig, possibly the result of my first pass. As I dived I saw Eder completing his second attack. I closed in and ripped up my bomber's backbone.

  "By now the two Liberators were very down, running hard for their lives, deep to the ground. As I came in I could see Eder making the third pass at his. But there was no longer an airplane in front of me. The B-24 was behind me, crushed flat. Eder's bomber was burning on the ground two miles away."

  The Circus went to earth and passed out of the fighter zone. The Messerschmitts turned back to Ploesti. The controllers were yelling that new waves of bombers were coming toward the refineries.