Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  "Then I remembered the automatic pilot," said Ellis. "Fortunately, I always kept it warmed up. I flipped to 'ON' and it was working. We were six hundred feet below the formation, drawing Messerschmitts like honey. I adjusted the elevator settings and the autopilot and the nose came up slowly."

  A Messerschmitt exploded and its pilot, Sergeant Graf, fell out. The battle had now rolled along for about eighty miles and the Germans were close to fuel warnings. Some broke off and departed for base. On the last pass of the engagement, Sergeant Hackl cannoned his Messerschmitt through the B-24's and destroyed a second engine on the ship piloted by Reginald L. Carpenter.

  Carpenter continued on two engines, his craft receding from the others. When she was down to 5,000 feet, west of Crete, Carpenter called his crew to ditching positions in the front of the plane. Just above the water he feathered all the propellers. His replacement navigator, John E. Powell,* was completely unfamiliar with water-landing procedure. He chose the most perilous position he could, his feet dangling in the bomb bay and hands grasping the ladder to the top turret. The turret usually came unshipped and fell in crash-landings, and water impacts were much heavier.

  * Powell's regular crew died at the target.

  Carpenter said, "We lit the sea easily, and skipped into the air, smacking in harder the second time. The tail section was torn off, just after the wing. Walter Brown, right waist gunner, and Frederick Durand, tail gunner, were pinned and never came to the surface." The pilot and six others swam out of the floating wreck and inflated their life vests. Inside, still, was navigator Powell. Providentially, the turret had not fallen upon him. Powell struggled under water and wriggled out of the swamping plane. (He doesn't remember how.) On the surface he found that his life vest was damaged and would not inflate. He swam back to the wreck and pulled out two rubber dinghies just before the ship went down. Seven of the crew got into the five-man dinghy and Powell helped the most heavily injured of them, co-pilot Edward Rumsey, into the one-man boat, and splinted his broken leg with the paddle. While the plane was falling, Powell had had the presence of mind to stick a first-aid kit in his shirt. He now produced it and gave morphine injections to Rumsey and the radioman, Joseph Manquen, who had a flak wound in his knee. "Then," said Powell, "we settled down for a night without food or water."

  At dawn the men in the dinghies heard airplane engines. The Royal Air Force Air-Sea Rescue unit at Cyprus was out sweeping for ditched air crews. A Wellington came over low and dropped fresh water, concentrated food and cigarets to the raftsmen. It circled them for five hours, protecting them from German search boats out of Crete. When the Wellington's fuel gauges approached the point of no return, a sister ship arrived and took up the picket. The following night, after they had been adrift for thirty hours, an Air-Sea Rescue launch picked up the Americans. Powell's Silver Star citation mentioned his cheerfulness as well as his resourcefulness.

  The Stahl-Burk Messerschmitt ambush in the Ionian Sea was the last fighter engagement in the Battle of Ploesti. The. Germans claimed five bombers destroyed. Actually they had shot down only McCarty, Jones and McBride, although damaging Carpenter so that he was forced to ditch later. Apparently the Me-109's claimed Ellis when he went out of control temporarily. U.S. gunners were allowed five enemy aircraft destroyed, when only two were actually downed. The death toll was two German pilots and 22 Americans.

  Ellis came out of the Battle of the Ionian Sea still flying tortured Daisy Mae. The unconscious Gioana had 35 wounds. The three lacerated sergeants bandaged themselves and helped look after him. As if refreshed by the new flak hits on the top cylinders and dangling sparkplug wires, Daisy Mae's No. 3 motor began to revive. The Canadian engineer, Blase Dillman, spliced the severed control cables, measured the gas, and reported, "I figure we have enough to last until seven o'clock." The navigator, Julius K. Klenkbell said, "We'll never make land by then." The men in the torn Liberator dwelt on their thoughts as night came.

  One of them had found an extra measure of heroism. Several weeks before, after taking off on his second mission, he had gone forward to Ellis and said, "Take me back." The pilot said, "Are you sick?" The man said, "No, just scared." Ellis said, "Hell, we're all scared. What difference does that make? If I take you back we'll never catch up with the formation." The frightened man said, "Well, I'm going to jump." Dillman grabbed the man by the collar and announced, "I'll knock your teeth in if you don't get back to your job." The flier resumed his post and reported to Ellis every half hour. Now the quaking man was flying with his comrades in complete acceptance and common praying fear.

  Ellis placed his power at lowest setting to milk more miles out of Daisy Mae. At the fuel-exhaustion deadline he was still airborne at 155 mph, 1700 rpm and 25 inches manifeld pressure. "I could not decide for sure what was best to do," the pilot remembered. "I knew that ditching at night was a very hazardous undertaking, even if we still had power. Bailing out in individual dinghies would have been O.K. for everyone but Lieutenant Gioana, who was still unconscious.

  Over the Adriatic several planes found they were too low on fuel to reach Benghazi. They turned off for Sicily or Malta. One of them, K for King, with its electrical system shot out and all instruments dead, was navigated to the Sicilian beachhead by Leroy B. Zaruba. Pilots Miller and Hodge landed her safely without an altimeter. The Fravega brothers landed on a fighter strip at Syracuse with three other planes, one of which blew a tire and ground-looped. Anthony Fravega said, "Nobody would believe us when we told them what we had done." The returning heroes had to sleep in their planes that night. *

  * Four months later the Fravega brothers were shot down over Solingen, Germany. Anthony lived. Thomas died with engineer McWhirter and tunnel gunner George Parramore, who had been with them over Ploesti. After the war Anthony became the first sergeant of an Army Engineer group building air bases, and the new youngsters in Air Force blues did not understand how a muddy "dogface" could wear the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  Lucky, Ramsay Potts's surviving wingman, proved to be aptly named. Pilot Harold Kendall was groping for Sicily with a 20-mm. hole in his bomb bay tanks which had let out most of the gas before the crew could plug it. Kendall, down to his last gallons and his crew in parachutes, waiting for the jump gong, spotted a fighter strip in southern Sicily and landed halfway up the short runway without hydraulic fluid to set his brakes. Lucky ate up the runway, ran over a hill, picked up some unoccupied British bell tents, and was halted by crashing into seven P-40 fighters. Kendall's men tumbled out and kissed the ground. The top turret man, James Goodgion, stroked the lucky live lizard that he carried on missions. He saw the P-40 ground crews approaching and got ready for a big welcome. A mechanic greeted him with "Jesus Christ! We just got finished taking fifteen crackups apart to make these good airplanes and you guys come along and smash 'em all up." Captain Kendall, a lifelong teetotaler, went to a village wine shop and drank two liters of vino rosso .

  Charles Porter Henderson of the Eight Balls stretched his flight on to Malta, landing on the Luqa fighter runway high on the rock. As his thankful men dismounted, an R.A.F. man pointed to the brink of a quarry 150 feet ahead of the plane. "Bloody good landing, sir," he said. "We've had lots of chaps go in there."

  Forlorn Utah Man, far behind the general decampment, reached the Adriatic slope. Stewart called, "Connolly, give me a fuel check." The engineer replied, "Number Three is clear out and has been since the target. One, Two and Four are dipping empty." The pilot asked, "How much time does this give us?" The sergeant answered, "I don't know, Walt. I've never been in a ship registering this low before." Stewart said, "Well, fellows, shall we set down here on the shore and give ourselves up, or do you want to try to make it? We've got five hundred miles of water ahead." Bartlett chimed in, "Before we vote, let me make a speech. Do you call this a sea? Why, we have rivers in Montana wider than this two-bit pond. Let's go! If we have to set down, I could pull this tub with one hand and swim with the other." The Paul Bunyanesque address produced a
ten-nothing vote to carry on.

  In a ship nearer home, Alva J. Geron gave control to his co-pilot and went aft to give morphine to gunner Paul T. Daugherty, who had a gaping flak wound in his chest. "Kill me, Lieutenant," said the gunner. "You know I won't live. Put me out of my misery." Geron injected more anesthetic. "Lieutenant, can you pray?" asked Daugherty. "Yes, I can," said the pilot. "Will you say a prayer for me?" Geron took him in his arms and prayed. The gunner squeezed the pilot's hand and slumped in death.

  One of Geron's engines had been shot out. Now another failed. The crew threw guns, ammunition, everything loose out the waist bays. The pilot called a conference on the intercom and asked if all agreed on a water-landing. One of the gunners said, "No, sir. Not with Daugherty here. We oughtn't to let him sink in the sea." To bear the pall, the crew stayed with the airplane.*

  * They landed in Libya with five minutes of gas left. The gunner was buried in the desert and the pilot and several of the crew went missing in action over Germany three weeks later.

  On the dusty Libyan bases it had been a long, silent, corrosive day. Despite General Ent's "Mission Successful" signal, the camps were full of sick longing to know what had happened and who would return. The R.A.F. was relaying distress calls from an appalling number of Liberators. Outside the command radio shack Gerald Geerlings, the mission draftsman, played a distracted game of horseshoes with Jacob Smart, Ted Timberlake and Leander Schmid, the leaders who had been pulled out of the planes before take-off. Inside sat General Brereton, silently fretting, growing more and more annoyed at the cheerful telephone conversations of the duty officer who affected R.A.F. slang. Late in the afternoon Brereton heard one "Bang-on, ruddy good show" too many. He went over to the junior and snarled, "You're a moron!" The surprised officer was trying to shape an apology when the phone rang again. He said, "Sir, General Ent's plane has just landed at Berka Two." Brereton ran to his car to meet the first plane home.

  Norman Appold landed soon afterward at Berka Two without flaps or brakes. In the interrogation shack he and George Barwell found Brereton, Ent and K.K. Compton huddled in a low, gloomy discussion. Barwell said, "Norm, I am really quite sorry for General Ent. He's one of the best of your chaps I've met, a nice man, a very unusual man." Appold said, "Let's find A-Two and tell the sad story." Ent's decision to break off the target run in the face of Gerstenberg's flak had preserved all but two of the 26 Liberando ships that had reached the target area.

  Barwell found that a clerk had put his name on the mission sortie list for the first time in his many unauthorized flights with the Americans. Cross and bone-weary, the master air gunner went to his tent and flopped on a cot. One of the Yacht Club boys thrust his head through the flaps and said, "You had a hard day, pal? Want a drink?" Barwell said, "Ghastly. Thanks." He got up and joined the artists. Next day he was summoned to Cairo by a very senior Royal Air Force officer, who reprimanded him for flying without permission and packed him off for England. Barwell was the only man on Tidal Wave who never received a decoration for it.

  Russell Longnecker's spectral day in Thundermug, his first as the commander of an airship, had been splotched with somber shades of the deaths of many comrades and rainbows of luck for him. Now, nearing Africa, the picture would be ending, black or bright. Sergeant Pinson said, "The sight gauges are empty." Longnecker sang out with a confidence that had no substance, "We ought to be hitting land any minute now." In the miasma ahead there was a yellow flash, followed by a heavy crump. Longnecker's heart leaped. "We're home!" he cried. "The British ack-ack boys are saying hello." He queued up on another Liberator to land and recognized Ramsay Potts's ship, Duchess. He told himself, "At least somebody else got back almost as late as me." As the Circus base spread in front of his glide, he did not see a single B-24 on the ground. Longnecker was in the Intelligence shed before he realized what had happened at Ploesti. Eleven more crews reported in after him. Addison Baker had left that morning with 39 bombers.

  Timberlake and Geerlings jeeped out to meet Ramsay Potts's ship. The ashen-faced B Force Leader came out from under the bomb bay with blazing eyes, shaking with fury. "A torrent of words tumbled out of him about what had gone wrong with the mission," said Geerlings.

  A ship reached Benina Main in the twilight, firing red flares. The controllers stacked the others in the air to let it in first. Chaplain Patterson went in the ambulance to meet it. Through the waist window the gunners passed out a litter upon which lay a wounded comrade, numbed with morphine, but wearing a crooked smile. He said to Patterson, "I made it back from Ploesti, Chappie. See you later." The Chaplain looked at him again and drew a blanket over a dead face. The top turret gunner watched, shakily lighting a cigaret with a kitchen match. He held the stem in front of his eyes, watching it burn in yellow sap-flame, curl over black, and die. "Is life like that, Chappie?" he asked. Patterson said, "Yes, Sergeant, life is like that." Top turret trampled the ember in the dust and walked to interrogation.

  Reginald Phillips, leader of the second wave over Blue Target, sat in the shack, dog-tired and thick of tongue. An Intelligence officer asked, "What was your overall impression of the mission?" Phillips' jaw worked. He said, "We -- were -- dragged through the mouth of -- hell."

  Waist gunner Ernest V. Martin, a young Sky Scorpion man lent to Kane's force, was brought home mortally wounded. Fellow crewmen said he had stood his guns throughout the day. He died 48 hours later.

  Earl Hurd landed Tarfu and helped lift out a wounded gunner, Thomas D. Gilbert, back from his first war mission. Gilbert asked his pilot, "Are they all like this?" Hurd, a 22-mission man, joked, "No, some of them get pretty rough." He saw the spirit ebb from the youngster, as he thought of 24 more missions worse than Ploesti. The pilot said, "Look, I'm just kidding. This was my roughest one. The good Lord had his hand on our shoulders today."

  Sergeant William Nelson got out of Valiant Virgin and lay down on the sand. A mechanic asked, "What was it like?" After some thought Nelson said, "Well, we started out today comparatively inexperienced. Right now I'd say we are one of the most experienced and oldest crews in the Air Force."

  Ben Kuroki, the Japanese-American top turret gunner, shouldered his parachute and got down from Tupelo Lass. He and pilot K.O. Dessert walked to interrogations in the fading daylight, passing shadowy, dejected groups of ground crewmen waiting at empty stands. Ben wept. "The fools! Don't they know they'll never come back!"

  As the distracted airman sat for questioning, night settled on the desert. The interrogators did not get much from men in shock and deep fatigue and released them to stumble off to sleep. As the bomber camps sank into torpor, out in the Mediterranean night three Homeric Liberator crews were still in the air with dead radios, yearning for home.

  One of them was Utah Man with 13 hours and 45 minutes on the flight log. The Mormon pilot took up a glide path on the Circus base and quipped on the interphone, "We're going over our tent. Watch the vultures run out. The boys are probably dividing up our junk." (The next day, sheepish people returned their belongings.) Stewart rolled to a stop in the sands and dropped out of the plane into a welter of greeters -- his ground crew, truck drivers, cooks, Red Cross girls, Chaplain James Burns, Brutus Hamilton and Ted Timberlake, laughing and weeping and embracing the crew of Utah Man. They told him of the cloud collision in which he had lost his friend Hugh Roper of Exterminator. Stewart and his fellow officers went to their tent, knelt together, and "thanked God for hearing our prayer of just twenty-four hours before." The crew chief of Utah Man, Master Sergeant Scott, entered and said, "Walt, I know you're beat and don't want to talk to anybody, but I got to tell you something. I just went over our plane with seventeen crew chiefs from ships that didn't get back. Did you smell gas over the target?" Stewart said, "I sure did. But it stopped about twenty-five minutes later and the gauge showed empty." Scott said, "It follows. You have a flak hole the size of a baseball under the wing tank and you got one as big as a basketball where it went out the top. The bottom one got sealed off and
the only gas you lost went out the top a while. I don't know how much you have left, but the way she sits on the oleo struts, I'd say you are now out of gas."

  When Stewart brought his miracle to earth, Lewis Ellis was still out in the night with Daisy Mae, trying to work another. Dillman reported, "All fuel gauges showing zero, sir." Coldiron, slumping tired and wounded in the turret slings, announced, "Red flares ahead. It's got to be land." Dillman spun the handcranks, letting the wheels down, to save the last hydraulic fluid for the flaps. "We need only a few more minutes," Ellis told the crew. Daisy Mae was chewing the air, near to stalling.

  Ellis set power as low as he dared to suck the last pints of gasoline, Fager pumped the flaps half down as Daisy Mae settled into the dust blanket over her home port. The pilot revved up to 2,100 rpm, ears cocked for failing engines, and turned the elevator knob on the automatic pilot. He was committed to land without a nosewheel, at night, inside a bed of dust -- the same turbidity that had taken the Nespor-Riley ship on the Tidal Wave take-off fifteen hours before. "We can never circle again if we miss this one," said Ellis. Fager switched on the landing beams and pistoled red flares out his window.