Tabb toggled the bombs and the other planes dropped theirs in unison -- three dozen 500-pounders fused to explode in 45 seconds. But there was an immediate thunderous explosion, possibly caused by an air gunner hitting something volatile. The blast levitated Barwell in the top turret. Appold's "smooth ride" over the target turned out to be a big jolt that flung him over the stacks. Almost instantaneously there came a blast to the left that displaced the hurtling airships so smartly to the side that Barwell had "the unique experience for a top gunner of seeing our bombs alongside, still falling. They crashed into a large cracking plant."
In the upheaval Appold's compass fell out of its rubber shock mount and his radio was shaken to pieces. Just past the target, roof-top gunners fired into his nose, knocking out a waist gunner, blowing the aerial camera out of its anal position, riddling the left wing, and holing an empty bomb bay tank. Appold said, "I went into a right bank, trying to gain a few feet more of altitude. I put Storz, on my right wing, in an uncomfortable position. He slid down to the right and had to practically brush his wings on buildings to keep me off." Appold's five-plane improvisation had hit Concordia Vega hard. About 40 percent of its refining capacity was destroyed.
Now Appold had to avoid crashing into Potts and the last of the Circus. The two formations were closing head-on over the roof tops at a combined speed of nearly 500 miles an hour. Potts stayed low and Appold lifted a bit. Killer Kane's higher wave was almost upon them. The center of Ploesti was roofed with three layers of interweaving Liberators. In the open street below stood General Alfred Gerstenberg, in awed admiration of the galaxy of bombers maneuvering precisely at top speed without colliding. He had no suspicion that it was all a horrible foul-up.
Appold's wingman, Storz, saw a green airplane coming toward him, "a hundred feet off my wing, low, and laboring hard. I was quite certain we would have a mid-air collision. As our courses were about to intercept, he entered a three-story building." Storz had seen the B-24 crash into the Women's Prison.
Appold's commando crossed the city and plunged into the billows rolling off White Five. From his smoke-filled fuselage came a shout, "We're on firel" Appold steered due west. Fresh air, entering through battle holes, ventilated the ship. Nothing was on fire. Appold went to his usual altitude, "five feet plus," and asked Barwell to count his ships. The British gunner wheeled his turret and reported, "They're all still with us. They appear to have sustained numerous hits, but none seems disabled." Appold said, "I get a smell of hydraulic fluid." The engineer replied, "The whole hydraulic system is out."
North of the city there was another unscheduled crosshatching of bombers. As K.K. Compton's reforming Liberandos drove west across the ravines, the Sky Scorpions came down from Red Target at right angles to them. No other Liberators were supposed to be within miles of the Scorpions at this phase, yet here were desert ships crossing their course and some of them dumping bombs into outlying units of the Scorpion objective. The Scorpions looked upon the Liberandos like men seeing pink elephants. All the ships avoided collision.
Appold nestled into a semidry river course, crouching under guns and radar, and his followers streamed behind, riffling stagnant pools and whipping brush along the banks. Barwell phoned, "Directly ahead, large stone bridge. Looks like a flak tower atop it." The observation was confirmed by orange fireballs skipping toward them along the stream bed. Barwell said, "Norm, could you drop the nose a bit?" Appold thought this "an unreasonable request, but I had learned that when Barwell wanted me to lower his gunning horizon, the favor paid off." He put the nose deeper. "The top turret clattered," said the pilot, "and there, without fail, we saw the slugs disintegrate the tower, gunners and all, from a distance of at least a half mile. It was over in four or five seconds. That was the maximum time I could maintain flight with the nose pressed down, and it was all that Barwell ever needed. I felt strongly relieved. We skirted the flak tower and eased down again, to begin what was going to be a long, lonely journey to base if our gas and luck held out."
The two finest aerial marksmen in the battle of Ploesti, Gamecock Hahn and George Barwell had neither one got a shot at an enemy aircraft that day. By taking to the river bed, Appold slipped his guerrillas past the Messerschmitts and sighted no hostile planes all the way home.
As Appold fled Ploesti, the Eight Balls and Pyramiders were plunging across the city from the northwest toward their briefed targets, which were now in a convulsion of flames and explosions.
Bombs Away: 1211 hours
Then let each man turn straight to the front,
come death, come life --
that's how war and battle kiss and prattle.
-- The Iliad , Book XVII
8 THE TUNNEL OF FIRE
It was now high noon. The battle of Ploesti was fifteen minutes old. The Circus and Liberandos had left three refineries in flames, and the two biggest forces of the mission, Leon Johnson's Eight Balls and Killer Kane's Pyramiders, were still coming. They had reached and turned the correct Third Initial Point on the northwest and were coming down astraddle the Floresti-Ploesti railway. As they passed over the force-landed Circus ship Honky-Tonk Gal, Robert Lehnhausen saw emerging from its right waist window "a fellow without a stitch of clothing."
The two groups coming in abreast, exactly as the plan required, were divided into three target forces. On the left was Kane, bound for White Four, then Leon Johnson with 16 planes, driving for White Five, and on his right James Posey, his deputy leader, guiding 21 ships toward Blue Target.
In the lead ship of the Eight Balls, Suzy-Q, piloted by Major William Brandon, the co-pilot was Colonel Leon Johnson, the group commanding officer. Johnson was a mild, snub-nosed Kansan with a blond R.A.F.-type mustache. Following graduation from Moline High School, he had gone to work in his father's bank. After seeing a friend in a U.S. Military Academy uniform, he went to West Point and was commissioned as an infantry shavetail. In 1929 he transferred to the Air Force because "things looked more interesting from the air." While the infant Eighth Air Force in Britain was shaking out commanders, Johnson was promoted group leader of the Eight Balls. He told his men, "I never expected this appointment. Frankly, I'd be suspicious of men who do not miss their former CO, and I expect I'll be resented. But I have a feeling we'll get along all right." They did. The Eight Balls followed their quiet leader in bombing a 5,000-mile arc around Hitler's Reich, from Kiel to Bordeaux to Naples and now to Ploesti.
As he sat in front of them on the target run, Johnson squinted hard through the lilac haze for his target, White Five, the Colombia Aquila refinery complex, whose six aiming points were only 310 feet wide, strung along a bomb alley 1,000 feet deep. Johnson could see nothing but a dark shroud hanging 2,000 feet high over his target heading. He was puzzled about it, but, pending a closer look, assumed that it was smog. Soon the dark curtain sharpened into focus and Johnson saw that it was not an atmospheric effect; it was a forest of surging black smoke with mangrove roots of flame. Someone had already struck his target.
Bombs exploded in White Five. Storage tanks jumped into the air. Pilot Brandon looked at Colonel Johnson with a critical, unspoken question: "Shall we turn back?" Johnson said in a calm, steady voice, "William, you are on target." The force drove on. The bombardiers in five waves of Liberators lined up on their pinpoint objectives hidden in the geysers of smoke and flame.
As Johnson and Kane faced the chosen ordeal, a series of magic boxes opened up on the railway that they were following to their targets. On a freight train speeding south the sides of box cars fell, and a line of artillery fired right and left into the flanking B-24's overtaking the train at virtually the same altitude.
The flak train was one of Gerstenberg's most effective surprises. It resembled a Q-ship of the First World War. Commanded by a captain, the Q-train was a string of prosaic-looking four-wheeled freight wagons, which contained bunk cars, a kitchen and recreation room, ammunition magazines and dozens of antiaircraft guns concealed in collapsible car bodies. This self-
contained mobile destroyer could not have been placed in a better position. An hour or so before, when the predicted B-24 course spotlighted Floresti, the defenders had rolled the Q-train onto the line, and now it roared along between the two parallel bomber columns, firing into Johnson on the right and Killer Kane on the left. And the Liberators could not elude flak while holding on the bomb run. The air gunners enfiladed the train and blew up the locomotive, but not before it had hit some ships so hard they would not get far beyond the target.
Leon Johnson faced right into the seething wall of smoke. Seconds before he plunged into the holocaust there was a blast in the refinery of such magnitude that the updraft sucked the smoke high off bomb alley. The Dubbs stills and cracking towers were framed against a patch of blue sky beyond. Suzy-Q rode through a tunnel of clear, hot, turbulent air, arched over by crackling yellow and black clouds, and bombed her objective.
Johnson's flankers, Bewitching Witch and Scrappy II, hit their aiming points in the aerial cave and came out flying. The second wave, led by Captain Cameron in Buzzin' Bear, drove under the suspended fire cloud and ploughed their yellow bombs into the target. Buzzin' Bear came off at a height of 75 feet, with a rudder nearly shot off its hinges. Cameron's co-pilot, William C. Dabney, said, "Bill, we're too low. Pick 'er up a little." Cameron refused, and he won his point when two B-24's and a pursuing Messerschmitt crossed beneath them. The Eight Balls that had survived so far now entered the range of the guns southwest of Ploesti that had mauled the Circus. Waiting also were the roving Messerschmitts, IAR-80's, Me-110's and Ju-88's, all seeking cripples.
On Cameron's right wing, Charlie Porter Henderson was shot up by a Ju-88, wounding navigator Robert S. Schminke and bombardier John R. Huddle. Radioman John Dayberry saved Huddle's life with a quick and efficient tourniquet while the ship was under attack by another twin-engined fighter. It drove in obliquely from the rear, cutting rudder cables and ripping up the tail. Gunner James R. Porter fell wounded. The top turret man, Harold Cooper, and tail gunner C.H. Confer hit the Ju-88, and Confer saw it strike the ground on fire. Another German crossed over them, dropping disklike objects which burst into flame but did not fall on the Liberator. Sergeant Dayberry tended the wounded and took Schminke's place as navigator to give Henderson a bearing for Malta.
The black crematory door lowered on the third Eight Ball wave, led by Worden L. Weaver piloting Lil Abner. He came out with three engines mangled and his controls shot away. Forty miles from the target Weaver could no longer hold in the air. He bellylanded near Visnia-Dombovitsa, and a wing tipped the ground during the skid. Lil Abner came to a halt with the nose rolled under the body, the bomb bay telescoped into the flight deck, and the engineer, William J. Schettler, crushed dead under the fallen top turret. The wreck burst into flame midships. Six men got out of the rear, but the pilots and the navigator were imprisoned in the cockpit. Weaver seized a crack in the windshield, forced open a hole, and wriggled out. As navigator Walter M. Sorenson followed, his parachute harness fouled in the opening, and he was stuck halfway out with co-pilot Robert R. Snyder trapped behind him. The flames spread forward.
One of the fuselage escapees, bombardier Lloyd W. Reese Jr., went through the fire and popping ammunition and cut away Sorenson's parachute harness. Reese and radioman Jesse W. Hinley hauled both trapped men clear. The survivors split up and ran in opposite directions. A German fighter circled Weaver's party, "evidently reporting our position," the pilot thought. Weaver tried his Romanian glossary on a farm boy, who led them to a village. Women dipped feathers in a homemade balm and gently brushed their seared flesh.
K for King, commanded by Robert E. Miller, led the fourth wave into the dark and fiery target. "There was a hell of a lot of chatter on the intercom about flak batteries," said Miller, "but through it all I heard the voice of our bombardier, Robert Edwards, steady and cool even though we were enveloped with smoke and fire. One of our gunners, Daniel Rowland, got a direct hit in the thigh, which almost tore his leg off. He put on the tourniquet himself." The co-pilot, Dexter L. Hodge, said, "The way our gunners worked over the flak guys, I was convinced they were the best men ever to squeeze a trigger." K for King emerged with a two-foot gap in the fuselage, the top ripped open, a missing vertical stabilizer, oil gushing from the cracked hub of No. 4 engine, a shattered supercharger and the induction systems gone. In that state Miller and Hodge faced the 1,100-mile voyage back to Africa. Missing were the two wingmen who had entered White Five with them. Thomas E. Scrivner's ship came out in flames, with the pilots fighting for a crash-landing. They sledded into a wheat field, but before the slide was spent, the ship exploded in a hundred-foot sphere of flame. None of the men Scrivner tried to save came out of it.
K for King, with an engine afire, hedgehopped through twenty separate fighter attacks. Flight engineer William J. Murphy, Jr., cut off the gas on the flaming engine, pilot Miller feathered the prop, co-pilot Hodge recovered the ship, and tail gunner C. J. Ducote dueled warily with a Romanian plane that clung to him like a glider on a short tow. The Gypsy would not break off until he had learned how to deal with a bomber that refused to come off the ground and fight. The Romanian crept closer. When he came within a hundred yards, Ducote buried fifty rounds in him. The Romanian resorted to the textbook for high fighting. He peeled off, presented his armored belly to the rear gunner, and dived. "The next instant the woods for three blocks around were on fire," said Ducote.
The left wingman in the fourth wave was Sad Sack II, piloted by Henry A. Lasco and Joseph A. Kill, both of Chicago, flying their seventh mission. Riding the left waist gun with them was Charles Decrevel of San Francisco, who had served in the Royal Air Force. Their story brings us close to what the red harvest of Ploesti was like for the men who went down.
DECREVEL. Other planes were riding on black flak like trucks on a highway. We caught a hail of small-arms fire and something went through my thigh. I was strafing gun crews on a roof top and noted out of the corner of my eye that my interphone box was vanishing from the wall. I donned my parachute pack and stuck my head out the window. I noted a tree at eye level. Therefore I heroically decided to stay with the ship.
LASCO. Our target was on fire, with very black smoke and fire high in the sky. Colonel Johnson headed into this conflagration and we followed.
KILL. I wasn't paying any attention to where we're going except to watch a couple of rivets on the lead airplane. I glanced up ahead and thought, "How in Christ's name can we get through that?" I can't push her down, so I holler to Lasco to get on the controls with me.
The bombardier [Dale R. Scriven] is calling for corrections on the target -- the boiler works and tool shed. The back end calls that the tail gunner [Thomas M. Wood] is dead. Scriv hollers, "Bombs away!" and the navigator [Harry W. Stenborn] is badly shot through the chest. Lasco shouts, "Number Two is out. She won't feather." And we hit the inferno, nothing but smoke and flame.
LASCO. Coming out of the smoke we entered a group of six ships. Eighty-eights were firing at us at short range. The top turretman [Leonard L. Raspotnik] and radioman [Joseph Spivey] were hit. Joe Kill and I decided to head for Turkey.
DECREVEL. A few minutes after we left the target, I began to wish I had jumped. I had grave doubts that anyone was alive on the flight deck. Wherever I looked I could see holes as big as my fist and our left wing was almost scraping the ground.
KILL. Sad Sack II was vibrating badly and was extremely rough to handle. "There's a good cornfield over there," Lasco hollered.
DECREVEL. Seven to nine Me-109's were queuing up to take shots at us. They made level dead-astern attacks. The first one broke away and I caught him with a long burst in the belly at no more than thirty yards. He appeared to come apart like a dropped jigsaw puzzle. The next one was hit by Al Shaffer, my buddy at the other waist gun, who was standing on one leg, the other being almost shot off. The next Messerschmitt broke off on my side in a chandelle, and I knocked some pieces off his tail. My aim was off. The interior of our plane was
full of little white puffs like firecrackers going off. Ammununition was exploding in the boxes and I felt fingers plucking at my clothing. I received shrapnel in the back, head and knee and was floored by a thirteen-millimeter in the butt. The parachute pack saved me in that area.
The fighter attacks seemed to subside somewhat. I don't know whether we had thinned them out or some had gone off looking for easier kills. There was one left hanging back about sixty yards or so with his flaps down and all his guns blinking. He really had to slow down for us. There wasn't much left in our plane but daylight. It felt like we were hanging in a total stall with one wing touching and all as good as dead.
LASCO. We were very low to the ground, probably fifty feet, when an Me-109 circled around us and came in shallow at ten o'clock on my side. I saw his wing light up and felt a tremendous sock on the jaw. I was shot through both cheeks and upper palate. I had no strength. I couldn't see anything.
KILL. Lasco called for flaps. No flaps. I reached down and started pumping them by hand. We were headed for a cornfield. I glanced up at Lasco. He was lying over the control column, all bloodied. I was coming to horizon level. We were left wing low, headed straight in. I kicked hard right rudder and picked up the wing.
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