An American of Greek extraction, John T. Blackis, took Scheherazade toward a boiler house. His bombardier, Milton Nelson, phoned, "The bomb bay doors are jammed. The Tokyo tanks are stuck against them and they won't roll up." Blackis told engineer Joseph Landry, "Clear the bomb doors." Landry got down from his turret just as the flak opened up. Radioman David L. Rosenthal impulsively climbed into the turret, although he had no experience with machine guns, and started hammering the flak towers. Navigator Arthur H. Johnson reported to the pilot, "We can't get the doors open." Blackis said, "Okay, drop them right through the damn doors." Landry manually disengaged the bombs from the slings and they plunked through the bottom. Johnson said, "Coming off target we picked up comstalks on the hanging parts of the doors." Landry found himself an unemployed top turret gunner. The radio operator was firmly in charge, by now dueling with fighters. Rosenthal was credited with destroying a Messerschmitt in his first gunnery lesson. Scheherazade flew the whole way home alone.
As Captain James rode away from a flaming cracking plant, radioman Zimmerman saw only one other B-24 going with them. "His bomb doors hung open and Number Three was stopped. It was Captain Bob Mooney. We flew right wing on him for many miles at low level. We gained a little altitude and Mooney's ship sent me an Aldis lamp signal: 'Pilot dead. Wounded aboard. Trying for Turkey.' I blinked him, 'We're short on gas. Will join you for Turkey.'"
In the other ship the pilot's head had been shot off by a 20-mm. shell. A long, gawky co-pilot, Henry Gerrits, was flying it while helping the bombardier, Rockly Triantafellu, pull the body from the left-hand seat. Gerrits was flying on three engines, and with five sergeants prostrated by wounds. Gas streamed from a hole in a Tokyo tank. Triantafellu covered the pilot's body and stuffed his leather flying jacket into the rift in the tank.
Crossing Red Target were a pair of fledgling second lieutenants, Pilot William M. Selvidge and co-pilot Bedford Bruce Bilby, on their fifth sortie. Selvidge remembers the mission as a "rather long day, most of which I spent looking at the flight leader on whom I was flying formation." Bilby did most of the close flying, since the element leader was on his side. "I think I was less concerned with getting shot," said Bilby, "than I was with keeping closed up. I was bucking to get my own crew, and I was scared to death I would be chewed out if I didn't keep it tucked in. I never did see our target, the left rear of a distillery, or where our bombs hit. My eyes were glued to the element leader during the bomb run." Scrupulous formation-keeping had its reward; they were not hit, and Bilby got his own crew five missions later.
Lieutenant Kenneth Fowble led the second wave into Red Target. Sitting beside him was the command pilot, Major Ardery, who had bumped Fowble's regular co-pilot, Robert Bird, out of his seat. However, Bird had insisted on going with Fowble to Ploesti and was riding in the rear, coiled in the ball turret.
The two planes bracketing Fowble were captained by devoted friends, Robert L. Wright and Lloyd D. ("Pete") Hughes, the last pilots to join the Scorpions before leaving the States. Before missions they would flip a coin to see which whould fly the favored left-wing position on Fowble. The winner that morning was Hughes, a slight, dark-complexioned youngster with a gay smile.
As antiaircraft fire laced into them on the target run, Hughes was hit in the bomb bay tanks. In Old Buster Butt, navigator James H. McClain saw "a stream of gas about the thickness of a man's arm coming from Hughes's bomb bay tank. The lead aircraft of the flight ahead bombed a boiler. It exploded in front of us. Hughes stayed in formation." Ardery noted "raw gasoline trailing from Hughes's plane in such volume that his waist gunner was hidden from view. My stomach turned over. Poor Pete! Fine, conscientious boy, with a young wife waiting for him at home. He was holding formation to bomb, flying into a solid room of fire, with gasoline gushing from his ship. Why do men do such things?"
The waiting flames touched off the geyser of gasoline and Hughes's ship became a blowtorch. Fire streamed from the trailing edge of the left wing and from the top turret and waist windows, Hughes's comrade, Wright, said, "Pete got his bombs off just fine."
Beyond the target the burning ship slowed to about 110 mph, seemingly under control. The witnesses had the impression that the pilots were steering for a belly-landing in a dry river bed. McClain said, "Pete was doing a good job. The flaming plane came to a bridge and actually lifted over it. He came down beyond the bridge to land. His right wing caught the riverbank and the plane cartwheeled to its flaming end."
The other B-24's settled beyond the trees too quickly to see what was happening in the blazing creek bed. Hughes's last exertions had cheated death of two of his crew. Out of the fire came gunners Thomas A. Hoff and Edmond H. Smith and bombardier John A. McLoughlin. The officer died of burns but the sergeants lived.
Hughes was later awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor. The citation said, "Rather than jeopardize the formation and success of the attack, he unhesitatingly entered the blazing area, dropped his bombs with great precision, and only then did he undertake a forced landing."
The final bombs of Tidal Wave were deposited in the powerhouse and boiler of Red Target by Vagabond King, piloted by John B. McCormick. Sergeant Martin Van Buren * was kneeling on his chute to activate the K-2 target camera, when a shell burst under him. The chute stopped most of the fragments. As crewmen gave him first aid, Van Buren crowed, "Now I'll have one more medal than you guys."
* Not related to his namesake, the bachelor fifteenth President of the United States.
Vagabond King bombed amidst exploding kettles and the crumble and crash of a high smokestack. Pilot McCormick thought that "from an esthetic point of view, the best thing was the incendiaries flickering up and down in the smoke like fireflies." Tail gunner Paul M. Miller, the last man in the Tidal Wave force, looked back at Vagabond King's 45-second bombs exploding, and phoned the pilot, "They didn't give us too much time for the getaway." McCormick had this topic much on his mind. "I didn't know whether we were going to get back," said he. "My crew was prepared for a crash-landing before we left Africa. We had everything with us that we would need for a month -- clothes, hiking boots and rations. Our plane was in bad shape. We got into formation on the treetops with another wounded ship and three good ones that stayed outside to protect us, and got a heading for Cyprus."
Coming off the target, Philip Ardery entered "a bedlam of bombers flying in all directions, some on fire, many with smoking engines, some with gaping holes or huge chunks of wing or rudder gone; many so riddled their insides must have been stark pictures of the dead and dying or grievously wounded men who would bleed to death before they could be brought to land; pilots facing horrible decisions -- whether to crash-land and sacrifice the unhurt to save a dying friend or to fly on and let him give his life for the freedom of the rest."
The Sky Scorpion strike on Red Target was one of the two classically executed performances of the day. The Steaua Romana refinery was totally destroyed and did not reenter production for six years. Colonel Wood's group lost six of twenty-nine planes.
Few people in the target area realized what was happening that Sunday. Many who saw the Liberators thundering close above thought it was a supernatural visitation. Romania was steeped in illiteracy and fascist-controlled ignorance. War was an unseen, bloody maw in the east into which its men vanished, but this apocalyptic event in the air did not seem related to war. Even the German technicians found the raid hard to believe. Werner Nass's impression of the charred and shrunken corpses of a B-24 crew as "men from Mars" typified the reaction. Werner Horn, seeing the colossal machines sweeping over, had the initial notion that "the Americans were out joy riding," as though they had come a thousand miles to amuse themselves by buzzing the country. Most Romanians, obsessed with the death mill in Russia, assumed the planes came from there. One who thought so was Princess Caterina Caradja, doyenne of the ancient house of Cantacuzene. She lived on a thousand-acre estate at Nedelea, ten miles northwest of Ploesti.
That Sunday she was lunching in her man
or house under a cartouche of the double-crowned eagle of Byzantium, the armorial bearings of her family. Since early Christian martial history in Wallachia, generations of Cantacuzene princes had ridden against the Saracens to win or die -- the latter fate often produced by the axe of the Sultan's headsman. However, the family fortunes had improved in recent times, and the arms could have been brought up to date by perching the double eagle on an oil derrick. The first engineered petroleum well in the world had gushed forth on this domain of her grandfather, Prince George Cantacuzene.
Princess Caterina was a handsome, robust, blue-eyed woman of fifty with a managerial ability equal to that of any man in the kingdom. She had been educated in England. Her chosen occupation was the care of 3,000 war waifs and orphans in institutions and foster homes in the region. At this Sunday lunch the princess had as her guest a thirteen-year-old polylingual Polish countess whom she had rescued in 1939 from the Nazi smash-up in Poland. They were chatting in English when the talk was drowned by roaring engines. They ran out on the terrace and were nearly bowled over by air blasts from Colonel Posey's force, bound for Blue Target. "They looked like they were falling out of my attic," said Caterina. She assumed they were Russian planes. That summer Romanian insiders were in dread of a Soviet offensive striking through Romania to climb the Transylvanian passes before the snows.
After Posey's ships disappeared, another roar came from the north -- the Sky Scorpions were coming off Red Target. They passed over, some planes trailing smoke and flame. The princess saw one sinking toward her with an engine smoking. It streamed silvery cascades across the fields, like a crop duster. Caterina, who had lived aviation with two generations of flying Cantacuzenes, said to the child, "The pilot is dropping petrol so the fire will not be so bad when he lands. Now, my dear, you must go inside and not come out until I return." She drove her 1939 Plymouth, which had white-wall tires, through roundabout lanes toward the falling B-24.
Pilot Robert O'Reilly was coming down in the luckiest spot in Romania; the princess' farm hands and orphan boys were trained in fighting oil-well fires. The plane crashed a mile from the house and bounced. The burning motor came out of its seat and flew away. The B-24 stopped with its fore section crushed and the tail in the air. Eight airmen emerged and ran.
The princess found a squad of orphans with foam bottles quenching the fire in the engine casing. A farmer touched his forelock and said, "Your Honor, the Russians have come." The crumpled flank of the plane bore a large white star. He said, "There are two dead Russians in the front." As she went to look she noticed in large lettering under the pilot's window: Shoot, Fritz, You're Faded. A wide-eyed orphan clutched her, crying, "One of the dead Russians is moving." The man farther back in the fuselage was crushed to death under the fallen top turret. He was the flight engineer, Frank Kees. As Shoot, Fritz was falling he had gone into the bomb bay to parachute, found the plane too low, and could not get out from under the turret before the crash.
The man entangled in the nose was soaked with gasoline trickling down from the wing tanks. Caterina saw his eyes open and said, "Boy, are you an American?" Navigator Richard Britt of Houston, Texas, replied, "yes, ma'am." She addressed the crowd: "Lunt aviator Americani!" Farmers ran for tools to extricate Britt. A woman handed the princess a bottle of plum brandy. She passed it and a glass of water through the shattered greenhouse to Britt. The farm hands plied axes and crowbars to free him. The foreman said, "We'll have to cut off his shoe." Caterina said, "Be careful! Don't ruin it. We'll never be able to find American shoes for him." She kept the shorn G.I. boot to be repaired in the orphans' shoe shop.
They lifted Britt out and he fainted on the ground. Two German soldiers took his feet and began dragging him away. The princess grabbed his shoulders and dug in, yelling in German, "Oh, no, you don't take him. He's our prisoner." The large, unconscious American was the medium of a tug of war between supposed Axis allies. The princess won. She put Britt in the Plymouth, concealed him with a crowd of orphans, and drove him to a clinic in the village of Fiipestii de Targ to treat him for skin burns received in the gasoline bath.
The episode was witnessed from a tall stand of corn by two sergeants from O'Reilly's crew, Troy McCray and a wounded shipmate, Clell Riffle, whom McCrary had dragged there and covered with pumpkin leaves. The stunned men looked out through an American harvest scene at an English-speaking woman driving away in a Detroit automobile. McCrary said, "Looks like we're home." The illusion was dispelled by German soldiers, coming toward them, firing into the corn. McCrary tried to carry Riffle away, but escape was impossible. They gave themselves up.
The retainers took O'Reilly and three crewmates to the manor house. (The remaining three crewmen were at large three days, eating turnips, before they were bagged.) The princess came back from the clinic and found O'Reilly's party was gone. Her major-domo said, "People took them to Nedelea." She said, "Idiots!" and drove into the village, where an elder lamely told her, "For safety's sake we hid the Americans in a cellar." She called down into the dark, "Boys, there are only friends here. Now come up and let us help you." O'Reilly emerged with his co-pilot, Ernest Poulsen, bombardier Albert A. Romano and gunner Louis Medeiros.
In Romania arrivals are festive occasions. This extraordinary visit of friends of the princess brought the villagers out with pitchers of fresh milk, peaches, cheese and apples, and two things rarely seen on wartime tables -- white bread and sugar. The ravenous airmen tore into their finest meal since the States. O'Reilly said to Caterina, "We have just been shooting this place up and yet they give us this wonderful food." She snorted, "My boy, we Romanians never hit a man when he is down, and besides, we like Americans very much. Your chaps used to work here in the refineries." She had already decided to keep these young men out of German hands.
1300 hours
ODYSSEUS: It is time that I told you of the disastrous voyage Zeus
gave me when I started back from Troy.
-- The Odyssey , Book IX
12 THE STORMY RETURN
The battle of the target ended when the Liberators passed beyond the outer flak ring and the fighters turned away with fuel warnings. The Tidal Wave plan called for orderly withdrawal in massed formation on a course paralleling the inbound journey. But now a general formation was out of the question, after the divisive fates of the mission in which the groups had been parted from each other in the Balkan clouds, further split by the unplanned target turns, and subdivided in the witches' Sabbath around the burning refineries. Instead of hitting the objectives simultaneously, as had been demonstrated in the desert rehearsal the day before, the attack had taken 27 minutes from Walter Stewart's first bomb on White Five to John McCormick's last on Red Target
The retreating Liberators were flung out for a hundred miles over the Danubian plain. More than half of them were seriously damaged. The situation had aspects of a rout, one that was very likely to be followed by deadly pursuit along the thousand weary miles to Benghazi. Half the planes had expended their ammunition, had too little left to fight long, or carried dead and incapacitated gunners, wrecked turrets and weapons. The crews were surveying airworthiness, counting their remaining gas and bullets, and estimating the chances of wounded comrades to remain alive six or seven hours more. Their pilots were weighing these factors to decide what course to take.
The shortest way out of Gerstenberg's web was to Chorlu on the European tail of Turkey. The next escape possibility was the Turkish mainland in Asia Minor. This southerly direction offered the possibility that a ship could stay in the air across Turkey and reach British bases in Cyprus, thereby avoiding internment in the neutral country. On the briefed southwestern route home, the first possible haven was in partisan-held regions of Yugoslavia. Beyond Corfu there were five hundred miles of sea. From that island, if a plane did not have enough gas to reach Libya, it had two slightly shorter refuges, Malta and the southern tier of Sicily recently conquered by the Allies.
The majority of pilots followed the planned ro
ute. The two least-damaged groups, the Liberandos and Sky Scorpions, resumed formation for Corfu, but they were seventy miles apart. Most of the Pyramiders gathered behind Julian Bleyer on this course; so did many of the 26 survivors of the 37 Eight Ball ships. George Brown rallied those Circus ships he could find. Appold's raiders, parted from all the rest by their withdrawal in the stream bed, flew home alone, as did five or six more bands made up of ships from various groups.
In the summer sky there were nearly a dozen Liberators that could find no one else to tack on to. Minutes after maneuvering to avoid collision with many others over the target, these waifs were in empty air and never found a friend during the thousand-mile adventure ahead.
Dramas of courage were taking place among the crews trying to save the ships. A gunner severely wounded in the leg, arm and back had continued to fire at fighters as his shipmates bound up the wounds. Another plane took fire in the nose, and the pilot rang the bail-out gong. From the nose the bombardier and navigator asked the men not to jump, while they fought the fire. They could not get at it with an extinguisher, so they ripped out fuselage padding to smother it. One took off his parachute to get closer to the fire. They put it out and the ship got home. In a Liberator whose Tokyo tank had been holed over the target, crewmen caught the fauceting gasoline in their steel helmets. By another perforated bomb bay tank a radioman lay on the catwalk and held his fingers in the hole until the engineer could transfer the contents to a wing tank.*
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