DECREVEL. The pilot must have cut all his engines to crash her in, because I beard a scream. The navigator was kneeling on the catwalk and holding on to the open bomb door. He looked like he had caught an eighty-eight right in the chest. The flesh was stripped away and I could see the white ribs. I wanted to help him, but there wasn't time. We were all dead anyway. I had made up my mind to shoot it out with that sonofabitch on our tail. I leaned out the window and swiveled the gun parallel to the fuselage and fired inside the fin and below the horizontal stabilizer. We hit the ground and my last view of aerial combat was of our left rudder disappearing in a puff of smoke. I tumbled head over heels in flame and tearing metal and hit the forward bulkhead with a sweet black thud. Then immediate consciousness and a vision of green corn and blue sky from a bed of hot coals. No airplane to speak of, just a pile of burning junk. Stagger out of it, trying to run. Stop, look back. No Shaffer. Go back, drag him out. Dump him about fifty yards off. There's not enough airplane left to blow up, but ammunition is going off all over the plane.
KILL. Lasco was blindly thrashing around, pinned in his harness. All I could do was tell him I couldn't get out. Both my legs were broken and the right foot was out of the socket at the ankle. Lasco got loose and unfastened my legs from a tangle of wires and cables. He grabbed me under the arms and dragged me through a hole in the side. Then he wandered off.
LASCO. I went to look for aid as Joe's legs were bad and my mouth was in not too good shape. I saw some peasants, who ran away and threw stones at me.
KILL. Two peasants jumped me and tore off my watch and ring, emptied my pockets, and then belted me a beauty. I guess they figured I was about gone anyway, what with the legs, a cracked forehead and bad burns. Surprisingly, I didn't go out, although I prayed for unconsciousness.
DECREVEL. Drag Shaffer a bit further. Strip off my smoldering outer gear. Shaffer hollering like hell. His leg looks like hamburger. No morphine. I give him a cigaret, tell him I'll go for help. See an Me-109, having a look at me about fifty feet up. I give him a great big R.A.F. salute just for laughs.
Sit down, drag out my compass, maps and money, plan a course for Yugoslavia. Crazy! Shock wears off. I must get to a hospital quick. Burns hurt real bad in the hot sun. Have almost a full pack of cigarettes. Must smoke them all up before the enemy takes them away. Get cracking! Keep walking! If you lie down you'll never get up and they won't find you until they harvest this corn.
Stumble into the edge of a village. Start hollering. Nobody appears, only eyes peeking through the window blinds. Holler some more. Crazy with pain. Stagger down main street, see sign, Gendarmeri . Holler real angry. Finally soldiers appear. I hold up hands and holler, "Nix arme!" Soldiers hang back. I drag out a dollar bill and hold it for the world to see. Ah! Immediate warm welcome and smiles. Total population turns out. Many questions. "Amerika komm? When Amerika komm?" Take me into village pub. Drinks for all. Only when they had spent all my escape money do they consent to get me aid. Out into the hot village street again. Fainted. Un-American? Too many brandies? Loss of blood? They fetch a horse cart and I ride in style. Feel like I'm dying. Don't want to die in horse cart. See nice farmyard with a big shade tree and pretty girl leaning over fence. Parade halts while I rest under tree and get a glass of milk from girl. Willing to die on the spot with pretty girl holding my head. Soldiers impatient to move on. News drifts in that more Americans are in a churchyard up the line. Parade from my village meets parade from next village. All hands into churchyard for gay festival while our top turretman dies.
KILL. In the churchyard, Lasco was still in a stupor so I wrote out our names. For some reason I was thinking sharper than I ever had. I listed them all as officers and put an "O" in front of each name. This I had heard was wise, because it would give the enlisted men officer treatment in POW camp.*
* Sad Sack Ii's sergeants spent their captivity in the officers' camp.
DECREVEL. Some hours later buses cart us to Bucharest military hospital. Sweet morphine at last!
LASCO. The man in the next bed said, "My name is Al Shaffer. I am on Lieutenant Lasco's crew." I couldn't talk. I showed him my dog tags. "God, Lieutenant, I didn't recognize you," Shaffer said.
The last wave over White Five consisted of four planes led by Rowland M. Gentry in Porky II. His orders were to bomb from 400 feet at the top of the stepped-up formation that had been adopted for the five Eight Ball waves. The last wave was well exposed to the German gunners. Gentry led a V-flight with a plane piloted by Charles Hughes and Sylvester S. Hunn on his left, and, on his right, George Winger, flying a B-24 that was unaccountably painted bright orange. It stood out among the others like a tangerine in a basket of limes and pears and attracted every German gunlayer who caught sight of it. Completing this vulnerable quartet was Robert Felber, flying a spare ship, F for Freddie, which had been added to the force the night before. Felber was alone, on the rear high left of the element, with the smallest chance of getting through.
Hunn saw waves three and four going in ahead of him. Two ships disintegrated at the same time. "Another was literally pulled to the ground by some force," said the co-pilot. "It didn't stall or drop off. It was pulled." As Hunn's bombardier was set to release his bombs, Winger's orange ship was knocked aside by an explosion and crossed directly beneath him. The bomb-aimer held off until it had cleared him. In the target smoke, explosions killed two gunners and set half Porky II's engines on fire. E.C. Light in the top turret and the right waist gunner, Charles T. Bridges, remained in action. On the other side of the target three German fighters came up at them from the deck. Bridges, the veteran of 53 missions with the Royal Air Force, got in his last rounds of battle. The fighters left Porky II burning in a cornfield with the nose buried in the ground and the tail standing. Bridges staggered out of the wreck as it exploded.
The remaining three ships of the last wave came through still in the air. The orange ship was even brighter now. Its Tokyo tanks were aflame. Hunn said, "Winger climbed steeply to about five hundred feet. It must have taken him and the co-pilot enormous effort to get her high enough for people to bail out." Two men came out the waist ports and their parachutes opened as the orange ship crashed and exploded. Winger and his men had completed 27 missions and were legally "retired." The two chutists who had received the gift of life from their pilots were gunners Michael J. Cicon and Bernard Traudt. Traudt was a seventeen-year-old with a perpetual grin. He landed unhurt, concealed his parachute, crawled under some bushes and went to sleep. He had gotten no sleep the night before.
The Hughes-Hunn ship and the spare, F for Freddie, left Ploesti and their two crashed sister ships behind. They ran alongside some barracks from which soldiers ran out firing machine guns, rifles and pistols. The air gunners mowed them down in bloody windrows. F for Freddie was almost untouched, but Hunn looked back in his fuselage and was surprised how bright it was. Ground fire had turned it into a sieve.
The withdrawal plan of Tidal Wave called for all the B-24's in the simultaneous bombing front on the White Targets to continue beyond Ploesti for five miles and then wheel sharply right and take up orderly course formation to the southwest and Corfu. Leon Johnson had not the slightest opportunity to execute this order. His surviving machines were all over the air, dodging fighters and flak, or crippled and dying. By now there were about 125 enemy fighters in the immediate area of the turning point for withdrawal. Among them was young Gerhartz, who sighted a covey of Liberators "very fast, very down." As he lined up behind them, he noted that his fuel exhaustion light was on and looked at his chronometer. He had been aloft for an hour on an hour's fuel allowance. He turned and skimmed back across the fields to Mizil, not daring to climb, expecting to stall and belly-land any minute. Nearing his home sheep pasture, he lowered his wheels. As they touched earth the motor coughed out. Gerhartz rolled on momentum almost to his revetment. His dog ran to the plane.
Hans Schopper picked up a bomber flying 150 feet from the ground and assailed her from the rear hig
h right, simultaneously pressing his cannon button on the control stick and squeezing the machine trigger. "I got him good in the right wing," said the veteran. "I gave the whole plane a good raking, and swept over top of him. His machine guns were after me, coming close, but not hitting. I full-powered a steep banking climb to the right and looked over my shoulder to see if another attack was necessary. Both of his wing tanks were blazing. He tried to gain altitude. He flew on about five hundred meters, crashed, and burned in a field. Nobody had time to jump. Apparently he had dropped his bombs. There was no explosion."
B-24 pilot Sylvester Hunn said, "We looked for a plane to tack on to. We picked one and he was shot down. We picked another and he was knocked down. A fighter got on our tail. Tracers were zooming above and around the cockpit. Hughes and I were giving it all the left rudder we could in evasive action. Our tail gunner reported the attacker suddenly hit the ground like a ton of brick. The gunner didn't claim him." Hunn, a hundred feet from the ground, saw a Liberator bisecting his course fifty feet below with a fighter in hot pursuit. "The B-24 dropped lower and the fighter went into the ground up to his neck." Hughes sailed into the sanctuary of a cloud and surveyed their situation: not enough gas to reach Libya, a large hole in the left stabilizer, a control cable hanging by a thread, and waist gunners Stanley G. Nalipa and Robert L. Albine wounded. They headed for Turkey.
Leon Johnson lost nine of his sixteen Liberators in the battle. He left behind a full measure of destruction. The combined weight of his and Addison Baker's earlier bombs on White Five totaled "the most destruction" of any Tidal Wave objective, according to later surveys. Although not totally erased, Colombia Aquila refinery was out of production for eleven months.
Bombs Away: 1210 hours
I Carried a Gun for Al Capone , and
Vous avez mis le doigt dessus, mon Commandant.
9 THE COUP DE MAIN
The Eight Balls were assigned two separate objectives that day. As Leon Johnson struck White Five, B Force, a larger column of his 44th Bomb Group, was to bit Blue Target -- the isolated Creditul Minier refinery at Brazi, five miles south of Ploesti on the highway to Bucharest. This formation of 21 ships was led by a West Pointer, Colonel James I. Posey of Henderson, Kentucky. His target was the most modern high-octane aviation fuel producer in Europe.
Posey's experienced detachment was called upon to place its bombs with utmost refinement on eleven aiming points. The target plot of a single plane, for instance, reduced its task to hitting "the near wall of Building G." No more meticulous bombing task had been given since Stalingrad, where Russian youngsters in tiny, slow biplanes were sent into the city to throw bombs into certain rooms of buildings that contained Germans, without hitting Russian soldiers in adjacent rooms.
Posey's bombing course lay three miles west of Ploesti, so that he did not have to fly into the furnaces Johnson and Kane were going through on his left. Strangely enough, twenty minutes earlier many Circus ships had flown past Posey's refinery without dropping a single bomb on it. Thus the attack on Blue Target was what the planners had envisioned for all the strikes: every aircraft that had been dispatched running on a virgin target, with flak and the element of surprise the only unknowns. The flak was the same resolute stuff that had savaged the Circus, and surprise had been lost. Nonetheless, what James Posey and his men did to Blue Target was a justification of Jacob Smart's heretical low-level plan.
Posey's lead ship, V for Victory, was piloted by a 29-mission man, John H. Diehl. The first wave of five planes was formed like a spread "M." Following them were three more M-shaped waves of Liberators. Drumming closer to the target, Posey saw ribbons of artificial smoke dribbling across the refinery, but this was trivial compared to the inferno he could glimpse over at White Five. Alongside the speeding column a 37-mm. gun knocked off part of Posey's tail and killed a waist gunner, Truitt Williams.
In the greenhouse the target-finding bombardier, Howard R. Klekar, peered into the converted gunsight he had been given to aim the bombs and wondered if he would ever be a married man. He was engaged to a member of the Women's Royal Air Force in Britain and he and his fiancée were in the four-month cooling-off period imposed by the U.S. command to stem a wave of impulsive Anglo-American unions. Next to the preoccupied Klekar, the navigator, Robert J. Stine, was fighting the battle of his life -- his twin fifties against two batteries of Bofors crouched low on a tower dead ahead and hurling destruction into B Force. The flak men had dealt with the Traveling Circus and their blood was up. Stine and the top turret man of V for Victory "swept those eight guns clear," according to Posey. "If the Bofors had continued, a lot more men following us would not have come through."
The ship on Posey's right, piloted by Eunice M. Shannon and Robert Lehnhausen, joined the barrage the lead planes were laying down ahead. "A heavy burst pitched some flak gunners from a platform," said Lehnhausen. He triggered two fixed guns in the nose. One shell came out and the guns jammed. "It was the only round I had the opportunity to fire at the enemy during the war," he said.
The first wave was now on target. Diehl climbed V for Victory to 250 feet to clear refinery stacks, and Klekar released his bombs into the aiming point. On the other side, Diehl dived back to the earth. His wingman, Flak Alley, piloted by David W. Alexander, dived with him, damaged by small-arms fire. "We left at a very low level," said Alexander. "People ask me what I mean by low level. I point out that on the antennas on the bottom of my airplane I brought back sunflowers and something that looked suspiciously like grass." Parallel to Posey, Captain W. T. Holmes, the grounded operations officer who had assigned himself to the mission, crossed Creditul Minier, carrying tail gunner Patrick McAtee in his Sunday uniform. The sergeant got no opportunity to impress the Germans with his costume. He went back to Benghazi without losing the crease in his trousers.
The second wave, led by Reginald Phillips and Walter Bunker, bombed its aiming points in Blue Target. Holding the center of their rank was an exceptional pilot, George R. Jansen, who had been accurately hitting low-level targets long before Jacob Smart proposed the tactic. Jansen was a former crop-dusting pilot from the Sacramento Valley in California. Jansen's pinpoint was the southwest corner of the boiler house. His bombardier was Technical Sergeant George Guilford, one of the eight noncommissioned bomb-aimers on Tidal Wave. Guilford, jarred by flak, toggled too soon. He groaned. The tail gunner phoned, "Direct hit! The bombs skipped into the boiler house." Guilford's three 1,000-pounders knocked it completely out of the war.
Another second wave ship, D for Dog, piloted by William D. Hughes, lined up on the U.S.-built Dubbs still, and bombardier George E. Hulpiau placed his three 1,000-pounders directly on the aiming point. "We were too low to miss," he said. "We were five feet above the target." He glanced toward Ploesti. "A flight of desert rats went straight into a cloud of fire and came out all in flames."
The third wave on Blue Target was led by W.H. Strong. He bowled a thousand-pounder with a half-hour delayed fuse through the top of the powerhouse, and also hit a large oil storage tank. The fourth wave leader, James C. McAtee (no relation to Sergeant Patrick McAtee), had this same powerhouse as his objective. The oil storage tank Strong had hit was about to explode a few feet under McAtee's plane. Instead, McAtee noted, "the top of the tank just peeled off like a sardine can." His tail gunner, John R. Edwards saw the lidless cauldron boil over in flame after they were safely over it.
As Posey's ships left Blue Target, some airmen were screwed up to hallucinations. The radioman of Princess, Norman Kiefer, heard urgent shouts in the interphone. "Go back, Mac! Mister Five-by-Five just crash-landed back there! Go back and pick them up!" yelled the top turret man. The tail gunner joined in: "We can land and pick them up! The field is level. Go back, Mac!" McAtee hesitated and replied, "Shut up. We're not going back." (When Princess landed at Benghazi, her men found the entire crew of Mister Five-by-Five in the briefing room. McAtee shook hands with the pilots, Frank O. Slough and Raymond J. LaCombe, and confronted his two g
unners with them. The sergeants vehemently denied calling on him to turn back. McAtee said, "How do you like that! You know, I almost turned around and went back.")
Posey's force did its work without losing a single plane on the target. But on the other side it entered the general misery of fighters and flak besetting Leon Johnson and Killer Kane's stricken and disoriented planes. It was a grand mêlée of airplanes trying to survive or shoot each other down or make formations or steer for favorable crash-landings. Hans Schopper, leading Black Wing of the Mizil Messerschmitts, picked out a sand-colored bomber flying southwest -- "deep, very deep, not more than sixty feet from the ground" -- and closed in on her. Suddenly he saw a black night fighter from Zilistea passing him, slamming bullets into the B-24's tail. He said, "The Me-110 passed under the bomber and turned up in front of him. He turned too soon. The Liberator filled him with lead and set him afire. I said, 'Okay, bomber boy, now I catch you.' I maneuvered into position behind the Liberator and improved my position before attacking. We were coming toward Rosiorii-de-Vede, about seventy-five miles from Ploesti. When he was nicely aligned, I pressed and squeezed. Nothing happened. My ammunition was gone! At that instant my red warning light came on. I was out of fuel -- I must land quickly. When I got back to Mizil there wasn't enough petrol left to taxi."
Ploesti Page 18