Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  In the meantime Daryl Epp's fugitives had outrun the Bulgarian guards and were at large in the border region with many armed men looking for them. Epp had one thing on his side. Three months before, British Intelligence had had such misgivings about Mikhailovitch, the supposed leader of Yugoslav resistance, that British agents were parachuted to his adversary, Tito. Shortly before Tidal Wave, the British cabinet decided to support Tito instead of Mikhailovitch. Consequently some of the U.S. flers had been orally instructed to ask for Tito should they land in Yugoslavia. *

  * The printed escape instructions advised contacting "the Communists" but did not mention Tito by name.

  Epp's men scrambled over mountains, headed west for the land of the mysterious Tito. They got up nerve to approach some mountain folk and pronounced the password, "Tito." The peasants took in the sore, half-starved airmen, fed them, and gave them a long sleep. Mountaineers passed them along a chain of patriots to a man who spoke English. He offered a toast in raki to Allied victory, and handed them a photograph. It showed their plane belly down in the Bulgarian wheat field, surrounded by German and Bulgarian officers. Tito's man, in the role of an innocent bystander, had snapped it himself. He gave the picture to Epp.

  Tito's man explained that it might be some time before he could arrange to send Epp's rangers back to their outfit -- such movements were difficult for the partisans. The Americans made themselves useful and were absorbed into the underground. The Yugoslav partisans had no way to report that Epp's men were safe, and the Bulgarian Red Cross did not bother to advise Geneva on the Sofia prisoners, so that the survivors of The Witch and Prince Charming were written off as dead by the U.S. War Department. They were in limbo for more than a year.

  The rear elements of the Tidal Wave retreat were still crossing Bulgaria when two new Messerschmitt 110G's, on a ferry flight from Wiener Neustadt to Sofia, picked up chatter on the radio about the bombing of Ploesti. One of the pilots was Cadet Sergeant Zed,* a veteran of sixty air battles, who was delivering aircraft while recuperating from wounds. He phoned his wingman, Cadet Sergeant Richter: "Would you like to go hunting bombers?" Richter said, "I'm for it. Let's go." Each of the fast new fighters was full of ammunition for its four fixed machine guns, two cannons and two swiveling machine guns in the radioman's rear compartment. Near Vratsa, Bulgaria, the hunters sighted luscious prey, a single B-24 with No. 4 engine dead and smoke issuing from No. 3. The Messerschmitts fell on the tail of the bedraggled Liberator. The American tail gunner was wide awake. He hit Zed's right wing tank. The fighter pilot said, "I began losing gas and, for fear of fire, had to stop my right engine." He pulled away on his remaining engine, leaving the kill to Richter, but the U.S. tail and top turret gunners drove off the second Messerschmitt.

  * Name disguised by request. He now lives in East Berlin.

  Zed was worried. New Me-110G's were jewels, and for a ferry pilot to lose one meant a court-martial. "The American pilot was resourceful," he said. "As Richter made his second pass, the American headed as fast as he could for a cloud. Richter did not get him. The cloud swallowed him." Zed called his comrade and the two chastened ferry pilots made for Sofia.

  Colonel Brown of the Circus led his homing "Romanian remains" into a mountain valley with antiaircraft ranged along the ridges. The deep ravines they had feared before the raid were now their best friends. The flak crews faced a problem not in the books. They had been trained to compute, track and pick away at tiny black stars inching across the zenith. Now these same targets, suddenly grown to seventy-foot green monsters, reeled past beneath them faster than they could traverse the guns. And the planes spouted something the ground gunners had never dreamed of -- flails of machine-gun fire ripping along the hillside, chipping up cement, and hurling men down in splatters of blood. Rustling the treetops, the Circus ships passed up the valley. Joe Tate, the mild, green-eyed West Pointer, who had come off the target without damage, sat in his cockpit in his British battle jacket, smoking his pipe, and looked up at the rippling surface of tracers. He took his plane up a hundred feet, like a submarine raising a periscope through bright waves, and then submerged again to his place in the Pratt & Whitney riptide.

  Many miles behind, in ramshackle Utah Man, Stewart heard his gunners cheering. "Hugh Roper, my old and dear friend, passed under us in Exterminator, doing about a hundred seventy," said Stewart. "We tried to catch up and fly with him, but it was no use. Then we saw Thundermug and Let 'Er Rip closing up to Exterminator. The three of them left us and flew a beautiful tight formation into the clouds over the mountains. We were immensely happy for Roper. Six of the men in his plane were on their twenty-fifth mission: Hugh, John White, Walter Zablocki, Earl LeMoine, William Defreese and Hank Lloyd. Also headed home for a rest was Captain Jack Jones, who was flying as an observer with Roper. As soon as they got over a few miles of enemy territory and the sea, they'd all have a ticket to the land of the free."

  From Let 'Er Rip, waist gunner Clifford E. Koen, Jr., looked over at Roper's plane. "Wires were hanging from the vertical stabilizers," he said. "They must have been guy wires from refinery stacks. The gunners in the other ship kept pointing to different spots on our plane that we couldn't see from the inside. We never learned the extent of this damage."

  The three ships caught up with Brown's main Circus formation and sat on top of the flying slum. Clouds soon forced the planes to space out, but Hugh Roper and Vic Olliffe remained close together. They had flown the whole mission tight as a team of aerobats. Russell Longnecker was not as confident as they. As they entered a cloud top he would hold on Roper until the lead ship became invisible, then make a fifteen-degree turn away from him, hold it for a half minute, and resume the original heading. When they got out of the cloud Longnecker would slide Thundermug back on Roper's wing. "We passed through a lot of clouds," said Longnecker, "then I came out of one and glanced to the right for Roper and Olliffe. They were not there. I never saw them again."

  Below them, men in the main formation saw two B-24's falling out of the cloud. A tail turret fell separately. After surviving Ploesti, the good comrades, Roper and Olliffe, were lost in a banal cloud collision. But the great adventure was not over for three sergeants in Let 'Er Rip. Harold Murray had seen the badly damaged Exterminator floating in on top of them, and the collision cut off her tail. "We broke away and went into a steep dive," said Murray. "In the fuselage we hardly knew what was happening. It was full of red dust 'and floating ammo boxes. We could scarcely move because of the force of the dive."

  Exterminator crashed, killing everyone on board. Let 'Er Rip grazed a mountaintop and went into a flatter glide. Koen snapped on his chest chute and went out the window amidst falling debris. Gunners Edgar J. Pearson, Eugene Engdahl and Murray followed him. Pearson's parachute collapsed and he died in the fall. The other three parachutists landed alive, not far from the burning wreckage of their plane. Bulgarian border police trussed their arms behind their backs and took them to a field into which peasants were bringing bodies and paraphernalia from the crash. The sergeants were unable to identify the bodies. They were marched 25 miles to the nearest road.

  After the cloud collision the orphaned Thundermug continued on alone. Her pilots, Longnecker and Jones, glimpsed ships far ahead. Longnecker said, "Deacon, if we pour it on to catch up with them, we might not have the gas to get home." Jones said, "I'm for saving gas, even if we have to fly it alone, Russ. We haven't been hit. There's plenty of ammo." Longnecker called on navigator Stanley Valcik to give a heading and prediction on a landfall at Benghazi. The navigator handed him a chart and said, "Just follow this course exactly and it'll take us to Benghazi." With that Valcik sat down on the flight deck, yawned, and opened a magazine. In this relaxed atmosphere the gunners came forward to tell the pilots how it had gone with them. Pinson, the top turret man, said, "There I was with the guns turned to the rear, expecting to get shot any minute. There was a crash behind my head. I wheeled around. The plexiglass was cracked and covered with blood. I thought
, 'Boy, I've had it!' I felt the back of my head. It was still there. Then I saw feathers in the blood. A bird had crashed into the turret."

  Longnecker now had time to return to his main worry -- whether he could hold his new first pilot's job. Yesterday the CO had told him, "Any pilot who fails to keep tight formation on this mission will be a co-pilot the day after tomorrow." "Now," reflected Longnecker, "I have my big opportunity to prove I can handle a plane of my own, and here I am all alone and probably going to get in much later than the others. That is, if I make it at all."

  Pilot Kenton D. McFarland, a 31-mission veteran of the Circus, was trying to bring Liberty Lad home with a No. 3 engine "sick" from a flak hit. He called his flight engineer, John J. Hayes: "The wing tanks ought to be plenty low. Let's begin transferring gas from the bomb bay tanks." Hayes reported, "I can't pump into Number One or Number Two. The fuel lines are cut or clogged."

  McFarland was confronted with the imminent failure of two engines, both on the same side, On the other wing, No. 3 was in bad shape. He wondered whether to turn back while he still had power, and bail out to become a POW, or take a chance and continue out over the Mediterranean, where bailing out was usually fatal. He decided he did not want to be a prisoner of war. He would try to make it to base.

  McFarland's reasoning was bolstered by the presence beside him of the pilot with the most combat experience of any man in the air at the battle of Ploesti, Flight Officer Henry A. Podgurski, an American transferee from the Royal Canadian Air Forces. Podgurski had flown 127 raids with the R.C.A.F. He did not like the Liberator because the book said you should not try to fly it upside down.

  The No. 1 engine in Liberty Lad sputtered out. Podgurski feathered it and he and McFarland pressed more heavily on the left rudder pedals to hold on course. The distorted rudder position dragged Liberty Lad out of the formation into a slow and steady descent. The pilots dared not waggle their wings to signal distress lest they lose airworthiness. They watched the formation disappear ahead.

  Fifteen minutes later No. 2 engine went dry and out. McFarland and Podgurski stiffened their legs on the left rudders to keep the ship in the air and pushed the throttle on the two remaining left-wing engines. They were alone at sea, 500 miles from base. Liberty Lad kept on sinking. All the pull was on the left side, and to counteract that, the twin tail rudders were swung left twenty degrees, as far as they would go, and held there only by the pilots' constant pedal pressure. If McFarland and Podgurski eased off their strained legs for an instant, Liberty Lad would twist sharply right on the live side. If she should fall off on the dead side just a fraction too much, airworthiness would vanish and the plane would fall into the Mediterranean.

  McFarland ordered his men to clean out ship. They threw out oxygen bottles, fire extinguishers, the aerial camera and ammunition boxes. Although they were still well within range of fighters, out went ten machine guns and all the remaining ammo. With fire axes they chopped off and jettisoned everything in the fuselage which was not directly involved with keeping them flying, and then they threw out the axes. Liberty Lad continued to sink. From 15,000 feet the ship went down to 5,500. There, with her lightened burden, she found some stability in the thicker air.

  Straining against the rudder pedal, McFarland broke the pilot's seat. Hayes and Sergeant John Brown, who was flying as an observer, got behind and braced their backs against his, so he could maintain leverage on the rudder. The two sergeants bolstered the pilot throughout the rest of the journey, one of them at a time crawling around front and massaging the pilots' legs.

  The radioman, Oda A. Smathers, his head swathed in bloody bandages, managed to repair the shot-up radio and exchanged fixes with the Ninth Air Force station 75X in Libya. The rest of the crew sat in ditching position, with their backs to the main bulkhead. Liberty Lad heaved on across the sea in the fading light.

  As the scattered Ploesti fleet droned over the Balkans, it was tracked by the Wurzburg on Mount Cherin and the vigilant spotter was waiting on Corfu. He reported, "They are turning south from Sector Zero Zero, Zone Twenty-four East, into Sector Zero Nine, Zone Twenty-three East." The new zone was controlled from Athens, where, since morning, Leutnant Werner Stahl had been patiently plotting the progress of the B-24's. He had noted that U.S. bombers usually returned on the same route they took to the target. Now the Liberators were confirming that, and Stahl was ready. Sitting on the flight line at Kalamaki near Mégara, Greece, he had ten new Messerschmitts with auxiliary belly tanks, under the command of Leutnant Burk. Stahl had calculated that extra petrol and precise timing would give Burk a half hour of combat on the nearest point of intersection with the bomber course. He plotted the point in the Ionian Sea, west of the Island of Kephallenia, one of the kingdoms of Odysseus, the old sea rover. Up went the Messerschmitts, driving west in the midafternoon sun. They crossed the interception point and turned to get the blinding sun at their backs. Twelve Liberators walked across the German leader's gunsights exactly on time.

  The first American to spot the Messerschmitts was the sharp-eyed Owen Coldiron, standing by his useless guns in the jammed top turret of Daisy Mae. He phoned pilot Ellis, "Fighters at three o'clock, straight into the sun."

  "We tightened up the formation and waited," said Ellis. "Since my top and tail guns were out, I dropped down a bit to uncover the guns of the ship on my left."

  Leutnant Burk did not attack immediately. He still had a minute of gas in his auxiliary tanks and wanted to burn it and drop the tanks to streamline himself before giving battle. He took up a parallel course to the bombers, out of machine-gun range, and examined his riddled prey. Coldiron saw the Messerschmitt leader hold up his hand and the fighters shed their belly tanks. Five fighters turned in abreast in a shallow V and drove up the flanks of the Liberators. Ellis said, "It was no surprise action. It was a cool, well-planned attack. We knew the Germans would not frighten as the Macchis [Bulgarian Avias] had. We had to shoot them down, be shot down ourselves, or wait for them to run out of gas."

  The American gunners waited professionally until the fighters were within a thousand yards before opening the action. The fighters replied with cannon and machine guns. An Me-109 passed through the bombers, shedding parts, and exploded on the other side, leaving a yellow parachute tacked on the sky. Leutnant Altnorthoff rained heavy blows on the Eight Ball Liberator piloted by Fred H. Jones and Elbert Dukate, Jr. It fell behind, sinking toward the sea, not far from where Flavelle had gone down nine hours before. That was the last of the Jones-Dukate crew as far as the others could see.*

  * Two months later the tail gunner from Jones's ship, Michael Sigle, reported for duty in Benghazi. He said that his entire crew of nine had survived the ditching and were picked up from life rafts by an Italian launch. Sigle had escaped from Italy with the help of anti-Fascists. Ten months later, as General Mark Clark stood at the gates of Rome, a picturesque Italian partisan leader sneaked through the enemy lines with detailed information on the city's defenses. His name was "Duke" and he spoke American with a New Orleans accent. Co-pilot Elbert Dukate, Jr., had escaped from POW camp, joined Italian guerrillas, and helped organize the underground railway that delivered hundreds of downed Allied airmen from behind enemy lines.

  The Messerschmitts gathered again and Burk waved six machines in for another flank attack. A Viennese cadet sergeant named Phillip picked a bomber with two engines smoking and knocked Ned McCarty's mangled Liberator out of the convoy. It shed five parachutes before it hit the sea. The jumpers didn't have a chance. They were going into the water far offshore and the running battle had now moved south of the operational grounds of Italian boats. It happened that the Royal Navy was bombarding Crotone that day and the next zone on the south was unhealthy for Italians. The fighters lost no craft on the second pass.

  The sounds of the Ionian Sea engagement were heard by ships far out of sight. The radio was thick with calls: "Fighters everywhere! . . . All the ships are gone but us -- don't see how we can last through these attacks. .
. . Bailing out -- ship on fire." Philip Ardery, leading seven B-24's home, said, "These words we heard would wrench the heart of a man of stone."

  As the third assault shaped up, the bombardier of Daisy Mae, Guido Gioana, yielded his forward gun to the more experienced radioman, Carl A. Alfredson. The German leader changed his tactics. The Messerschmitts dissolved and came in singly from various directions. Leutnant Flor destroyed a Circus Liberator, Here's to Ya, piloted by Ralph McBride. No parachutes came out of it. After this assault, Gioana and flight engineer James W. Ayers lay wounded in Daisy Mae, and the tail gunner, Nick Hunt, was picking himself up and looking at a cracked armor glass and jammed turret tracks. Hunt took over a waist gun. Daisy Mae now had only her waist weapons in action. The other gunners passed their unused ammunition belts to these positions.

  The Messerschmitt leader figured that individual attack was paying off. More work could be squeezed out of the petrol that way. The fighters did not reassemble, but drove in from many angles. Two fell upon Daisy Mae, holing the left rudder and tearing strips off the elevator surfaces. Two 20-mm. shells exploded in the flight deck, wounding Gioana again. The shells cut inner control cables and Daisy Mae's nose went down, turning into a shallow bank to the left. Co-pilot Fager said, "Let's move back up to the formation. We're wide open to them." Ellis said, "Can't do it, Cal. The controls are gone." He demonstrated it by pulling the unresisting control column back into his lap. He reached for the elevator trim. It was completely loose, revolving freely, out of contact with the tab.