Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  Elmer H. Reinhart took the last plane away from Blue Target. With part of a wing shot off, he came out into "a crazy crisscrossing of ships," unable to catch up with any of the improvised formations. The Messerschmitts leaped on him. They shot away most of the tail turret, but George Van Son crawled out of it alive. The attackers incapacitated waist gunners Alfred A. Mash and Robert Wolf. The radioman, Russell Huntley, gave them first aid. The fighters left the bomber they had mangled but could not down. Engineer Frank D. Garrett reported: "Gas is pouring out of a hole near Number Three. The tunnel is a wreck. The tail turret is hanging by a thread. The left vertical and horizontal stabilizers are almost shot off. The left aileron is practically gone. There's a big hole behind Number One and oil is streaming out."

  "I realized that we could never get back to base," said Reinhart, "so I tried to gain altitude." The crew put on their parachutes. The plane heaved and quivered from nose to tail. Reinhart managed to climb to 3,500 feet. Disintegration was at hand. Eighty miles from Ploesti, he turned on the automatic pilot and rang the bail-out gong. He stayed in his seat until the others had jumped, then went into the bomb bay and hurled himself out.

  Reinhart floated down through an empty, sunny sky. The roars, the shouts, the explosions were over. The silence was emphasized by the drone of his plane, flying on, dipping its crippled wing. He saw no other chutes. He landed in a field of six-foot corn and hid his parachute. The ground trembled and a black column of smoke climbed over the corn tassels. His ship was in. He heard shouts in an unfamiliar tongue and ran several miles, thinking "how closely the corn, wheat and alfalfa resembled that of the United States." He ate some concentrated food and assembled a compass from two disguised suspender buttons.

  In the disorder beyond the target, collisions were possible all over the sky, yet only one occurred among the 200-odd bombers and fighters milling around south of Ploesti. Carol Anastasescu, the debonair Romanian lieutenant, accidentally crashed into a B-24 and parachuted safely. The bomber evidently fell with a total loss of life, for none of the Americans who survived mentioned colliding with a fighter.

  Rowland Houston, from the first wave over Blue Target, joined the end of an assembling formation. Willie Steinmann, who had shot down John Palm at the opening of the battle, was flying one of the Messerschmitts that pursued him. "The American machine guns were spatting all around," said Steinmann. The German ace picked out Houston's ship which was "about a hundred fifty feet from the ground. I attacked from the rear," said Steinmann. "I cut back on the throttle, slowed her with flaps, and gave the Liberator a good raking from wing tip to wing tip. I could see tracers walking across the width of the plane and flames coming out everywhere. The top gunner [Walter B. Schoer] and the tail gunner [M.L. Spears], particularly the man in the tail, were shooting me up. I closed to within seventy feet.

  "My engine caught fire and there was a tremendous quivering. My speed carried me under the left side of the bomber, which was going out of control. The Liberator and the ground were coming together fast and I was in between, with no control. I had an instant to consider what would happen. The best chance seemed being thrown free in the crash. I loosened my harness and opened the latch on my canopy. I don't remember crashing. The first thing I knew I was seated on the ground with my pants torn and cuts on my legs. Near me the two planes burned. I got up from the ground and walked away."

  No one escaped from Houston's ship.

  Posey's perfect strike destroyed Creditul Minier. The refinery was out of business for the rest of the war. It cost only two of his twenty-one planes.

  Bombs Away: 1211 hours

  The Trojans worried Odysseus all around like a pack of grimy jackals

  round a wounded stag. You have seen such a thing in the mountains.

  A huntsman has hit the stag with an arrow: the stag gets away, and keeps

  good pace as long as the blood is warm and his knees are nimble:

  but when the arrow is too much for him, the carrion jackals tear

  and crunch him.

  -- The Iliad , Book XI

  10 KANE AT WHITE FOUR

  The Pyramiders, the largest attacking force in Tidal Wave, reached the final Initial Point, turned it correctly, and began the run toward the biggest target -- White Four, or Astro Romana, the most productive refinery in Europe. At the controls of the flagship Hail Columbia sat the beefy force leader, wearing a World War I doughboy helmet and an automatic, "to shoot my way out if I go down." John Riley Kane was the son of a Baptist parson at Eagle Springs, Texas. He had been reared on a farm, over which passed primitive planes flying air mail between Austin and Dallas. He had vacillated between careers in aviation and medicine. The smell of dissection rooms had finally decided him, and he entered Army aviation in 1931 at Brooks Field. Kane had a dissonant personality. His tough-hombre manner covered a sensitive, almost poetic core. He had a manner like General George Patton's. It has a place in war, which is not entirely waged by nice guys.

  On the dash for Ploesti, Killer Kane took Hail Columbia down, and his first wave of nine planes spread into the bomb front to pick up the target lanes in White Four. He had briefed his men: "It would take an entire army a year to fight its way up here and smash this target. We are going to do it in a couple of minutes with less than two thousand men!" The Pyramider front was committed on a twelve-mile sprint at 225 miles an hour, with four waves following Kane. There were gaps in the ranks. Eight pink ships had already fallen out with mechanical failures.

  Kane said, "Toward Ploesti the sky was the ominous black of a threatening thunderstorm. It would be our luck to arrive during a heavy rain, so that we could not see ahead of us. A flight of B-24's [Liberandos] passed under me. I thought I was low, but those planes were really low." Kane looked at his oblique target drawing to pick out the two tall stacks of White Four. Then "everything but the kitchen sink began to rise from the ground at us," be said. "I dived behind a row of trees and told the men in the nose to stand clear. We had to shoot our way in. I lifted over the trees and opened up with the fixed front guns. My tracer streams glanced off the ground a mile ahead. I saw natural-looking haystacks unfold like daisies, with guns spouting fire at us. On our right a flak train moved full speed down the track with guns belching black puffs at us. They were shooting eighty-eights like shotguns, with shells set to go off immediately after they left the gun barrels. A sprinkle of rain spread a film of water over the windshield." The nose guns jammed. Kane yelled at his navigator, Norman Whalen, "Clear the guns!" Whalen, who was knee-deep in shell casings, replied, "You shot up all the ammo." Kane had passed 2,400 rounds through the guns in a hundred seconds.

  Now Kane came close enough to the shadow over Ploesti to see that it was not rain but smoke. His target was burning from Ramsay Potts's attack twenty minutes earlier. Group commanders had been instructed before take-off that if they could not reach their objectives they should radio the word "crabapple" to Benghazi, announcing that they were turning away. Killer Kane would not send the signal. He sped on toward the volcano. In Tagalong, a plane on his left flank, a shell from the flak train killed radioman Paul Eshelman. The Q-train scored a direct hit on Kane's wingman, Hadley's Harem, blowing off most of the greenhouse, killing bombardier Leon Storms, and wounding navigator Harold Tabacoff. Pilot Gilbert B. Hadley was unable to deliver his bombs because of the death of his bombardier and the destruction of the bombsight. Hadley ordered his engineer, a Rygate, Vermont, cattle buyer named Russell Page, to release the bombs manually. The combination of air currents through the open nose and a new strike from the flak train on No. 2 engine almost spun Hadley's Harem into the ground, but Hadley and co-pilot James R. Lindsey held the ship up.

  Manfred Spenner, leading ten Me-109's of Yellow Wing over the northern outskirts of Ploesti, happened upon Killer Kane's target run. It was one of the few occasions in the battle on which the Germans were able to locate bombers before they reached the target. "The bombers were about seven hundred feet high," said Spenner. "I start
ed to attack the lead Liberator, closing at less than a right angle with a dive. I would not say it was the lead of all the desert-colored planes, but it was at the head of a wave. The bomber I intended to attack suddenly exploded and disintegrated in front of me, hit by flak, not by me.*

  * The sole Pyramider flight leader shot down was Wallace C. Taylor, fronting the fifth wave.

  The first wave of the Pyramiders dived into the smoke, Kane so low that Hail Columbia was wrapped in flame that singed the hair off his left arm. His co-pilot, John Young, called, "Number Four is hit." Kane feathered the engine and stepped up power on the other three. The bombardiers delivered their bombs into crackling flame. The cyclonic updrafts from White Four wafted thirty-ton bombers like cinders of paper. Samuel R. Neeley's B-24 hit a balloon cable, which did not break. The bomber climbed the cable until it struck a contact bomb which removed a wing. The plane fell and the balloon soared.

  Neeley's companion ship, Tagalong, piloted by Ralph V. Hinch, plunged on with its dead radio operator. As Stanley J. Samoski dropped his bombs, German shells hit Tagalong. Waist gunner Delmar Schweigert said, "They knocked out one motor, then got us in the tail, and another motor was gone. We crashed in a cornfield." He and gunners Robert E. Coleman, Harry G. Baughn, Robert Mead and Donald G. Wright left by the rear bottom escape door. Schweigert found the co-pilot, Charles Barbour, on the ground with his clothes completely burned off, and dragged him away before Tagalong exploded. German soldiers marched the sergeants away. "I never saw Lieutenant Barbour again," said Schweigert. The co-pilot died, along with Lieutenant Hinch, bombardier Samoski, and navigator James G. Taylor.

  Major Herbert Shingler led the second Pyramider wave over White Four, with Robert Nicholson piloting the B-24 on his left. Nicholson's bomb-aimer, Boyden Supiano, was hit in both legs as he dropped his bombs, and his companion, navigator Oscie K. Parker, was wounded in the arm. Shattered pipes showered hydraulic fluid into the forward compartment, and a fire started. Supiano and Parker thrashed around in the slippery fluid and their own blood to get the fire extinguisher working. They doused the fire but could not stop the flow of CO2 and nearly smothered in rising billows of foam.

  Dwight Patch, on his third combat mission, flew Black Magic in the second wave, with co-pilot John C. Park. They neared the burning refinery in propeller-wash so turbulent that "it was all we could do to keep from flying into the ground," said Patch. "We had full control cranked in, everything shoved to the firewall." Black Magic had been ordered to bomb from an altitude of 200 feet, but Patch saw planes at that height being blasted to bits. He chose to go in at flame level instead. Black Magic bombed and came out of the conflagration. Patch saw John B. Thomas' plane directly ahead. The positions of the two ships exemplified the buffeting that the formations took over the refineries. Thomas had gone into the target two waves behind Patch and came off of it ahead of him.

  Thomas received a direct hit in the cockpit and his craft began a faltering climb, drifting back into Patch's flight path. It slid by so close that Patch glimpsed "in the black, smoke-filled turret, ammunition exploding like popcorn." Thomas' ship crashed left wing first and disintegrated. Its co-pilot, David M. Lewis, was one of Patch's closest friends. One man got out of the crash alive -- the navigator, Robert D. Nash.

  The flak men hit Black Magic heavily. Patch still had good control, so he went as low as he dared. "I almost knocked a machine gunner off a hay wagon," he said. From his fuselage three wounded gunners, John A. Ditullio, Joseph J. McCune and Ellis J. Bonorden cried for help. Navigator Philip G. Papish, who had been a veterinary surgeon in peacetime, expertly treated them and administered morphine. Bombardier William Reynolds took up a post between the waist guns, ready to defend Black Magic from fighter attack on either side.

  During the bomb run the Q-train knocked out an engine on Boilermaker II, piloted by Theodore E. Helm and Charles E. Smith. Another motor caught fire. On reduced power, with his heavy load, Helm realized he could never clear the high stack of the cracking plant. He ordered the crew to throw out a full bomb bay tank. Four hundred more gallons of gasoline entered the conflagration. Helm's quick decision paid off in every way. He managed to bomb and the lightened ship heaved over the chimney. Radioman Harry C. Opp phoned the pilot. "Number Two and Number Three are shot out. I believe another is running wild. The left wing tank is on fire." There was no reply. The interphone was destroyed. Opp went forward and yelled the news to the pilot. Without brakes, ailerons or nosewheel, Helm and Smith put Boilermaker II down on two wheels in a cornfield. The wing tank flames crackled toward the fuselage, but there was no longer a full Tokyo tank there to turn the plane into a ball of fire. Every man in Helm's ship got out alive, with only one wounded. The thing was done so neatly that engineer Arthur W. White described his Ploesti experience in full as "nothing remarkable."

  However, another flier in the second wave went through a spate of remarkable events that day. He was a good-looking, perceptive native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, named Lewis N. Ellis, the pilot of Daisy Mae, an old war horse with 56 missions by previous crews. As he neared the ignited refinery looking for his aiming point, the left end of the boiler house, Ellis heard his bombardier, Guido Gioana, say, in a matter-of-fact fashion, "We're headed straight for our building. Be sure you pull up in time." Ellis and co-pilot Callistus E. Fager drew back their control columns, held the climb for a few seconds, and pushed forward, barely clearing the chimneys. As Daisy Mae entered the smoke, Gioana bombed, and Ellis felt things clutching at his wings. He was probably snapping guy wires on refinery stacks. In a patch of better visibility he saw a ship on his left smashing into a storage tank. It had waited too long to pull up. Burning pieces of the plane flew around, and among them Ellis saw men sailing through the air.

  Ellis burst from the black clouds into the light. "It's a miracle!" he thought. Tail gunner Nick Hunt had a more mundane reaction. "Look at that oil burning!" he phoned. "And to think this time last year I was working a gas station!" The crew reported the damage to Daisy Mae: No. 3 engine smoking, nosewheel destroyed, hydraulic fluid pouring into the bomb bay, top and tail turrets wrecked, and flak holes spread over her. Yet no one had been seriously injured and the plane was still flying.

  Ellis looked around for his sister ships. "The Cornhusker is gone," he said. "Lil Joe isn't here, or Sem per Felix. I don't see Old Baldy or Air Lobe. Where's Vulgar Virgin?" He could guess their dispositions from planes falling before his eyes. One climbed, stalled, and spun in. Another erased itself in a long flaming skid. A twin-engine fighter dropped in flames.

  Major Julian Bleyer took the third wave into the smoke, carrying the only trained motion picture cameraman to fly Tidal Wave, Sergeant Jerry J. Joswick. Other members of his combat camera unit had been ordered from the ships before take-off. Many planes carried automatic cameras, which were started, if at all, by busy untrained gunners, so that professional annotation of places and events in the pictures was not brought back except by Joswick. As Bleyer's ship vaulted through the target smoke, his right waist gunner, Frank B. Kozak, dimly saw Clarence W. Gooden's plane lurch toward him. "I could see Gooden working the controls," said Kozak, "and power his plane into a refinery building to shorten the war. The building, the plane and the crew exploded together."

  A moment later Kozak saw Lawrence E. Murphy's Liberator crash into a cracking plant; All three right-hand ships in Bleyer's blinded wave were wiped out. The last was the extreme wing ship, piloted by Lawrence Hadcock, which plunged into a refinery building, raising fresh flame and showers of rubble. A top turret gunner of third wave, James E. Callier, left the target unable to see out of his dome for smoke. "It took some time before it cleared," he said. Air pouring through the shell holes cleared the fuselage. The gunners stared at each other. Their faces were blackened like minstrel men and the tawny planes were painted with oil smoke.

  The fourth wave, led by Delbert H. Hahn, flew into the black boil over White Four and again the three right-flank aircraft were destroyed -- the
machines piloted by John J. Dore, Jr., John B. Thomas and Lindley P. Hussey.

  Hussey's men of Lil Joe had gone to the target aware that they would not get back to Africa because of the gas leak during the sea leg of the journey. They had tried to get rid of the fume-filled tank, but it was too big for the smaller bomb doors of the old model B-24 they were flying. A German shell hit the perverse tank and Lil Joe burst into flame. Hussey climbed steeply to let men parachute. Lil Joe got up to 75 feet and stalled. Eight men bailed out at that altitude. Three landed alive with many fractures: Sergeants Ray Heisner, Joseph Brown and James Turner. Pilot Hussey and his radioman, Edmond Terry, a former golf professional from California, remained in the falling plane. After two days of unconsciousness Hussey awakened in a hospital. He had a fractured skull, seven broken ribs, a broken shoulder, flak wounds in his legs, and one side of his face was caved in. Sergeant Terry was almost as badly battered, but also alive. Hussey was told that Romanians had marched him and Terry three miles to an aid station in this condition, but he remembered nothing of the walk.

  The plane next to the three right-flank victims was an old pink one named Wahoo, manned by novices from the Sky Scorpion group who had arrived at Benghazi by Air Transport Command and begged for a plane. On the target run, radio operator Anthony I. Fravega of Memphis, Tennessee, stood in the open bay to see that the bombs fell. He climbed up behind the pilots for a moment to see what was ahead. He said to himself, "We can never get through this." He wordlessly touched the pilot's shoulder and got back down. The pilot was his brother, Thomas P. Fravega. Since enlistment they had insisted on going to war together.