Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  Daisy Mae submerged in the dust sea, touched earth at stalling speed, and bounced. Ellis shoved the throttles to the bulkhead, demanding all power to maintain horizontal progress. The engines cut out. But Daisy Mae's wheels were running on the earth. She coasted on swiftly and silently through the gritty fog and ploughed her nose gently into the sand. An ambulance crew took out the twice-wounded bombardier from the bloody flight deck. Gioana lifted a hand from the litter and said, "Sure glad to be back." That night flight surgeons, employing four blood transfusions, preserved his life.

  At interrogations Ellis came upon a memorable scene: the man who had been scared on his second mission was sitting with Generals Brereton and Ent, "telling them just how it happened."

  In the glum Liberando encampment, hours after the ships were all home and the dust was settled, yawning towermen saw red flares arching into the night off the end of the main runway and ordered landing lights on the strip.

  It was Liberty Lad, the last Tidal Wave bomber still in the air, with both engines dead on one wing. McFarland and Podgurski were giving the last of their tortured legs to bring their wounded to Berka Two, where the hospital was located, instead of their own Circus field. The pilots approached at 2,000 feet with half flaps, the rudders fixed grotesquely to the right, held there by their stone legs for four hours. John H. Hayes manually lowered the wheels. As McFarland made his commitment to land, his instrument panel lights blew out. John Brown held a flashlight on the air-speed indicator. It read 120 mph. If it increased, Liberty Lad would crash in. If it decreased, the plane would stall in.

  With brakes gone, Liberty Lad hit hard and bounced into an uncontrollable run. The ship coasted more than a mile before it stopped, sixteen hours after take-off, completing one of the most extraordinary flights in aviation history. McFarland's bombardier, Master Sergeant Robert W. Slade, grasped his hand and cried, "Landing this heap was really something! And, man, the way you dodged those balloon cables over the target!" McFarland said, "What balloon cables? I never saw any." The pilots' legs gave way, and they were in bed several days suffering exhaustion.

  During the night Joseph Tate's neighbors were awakened by yells from his tent. He was stumbling around in his sleep, ripping up mosquito netting and underwear, crying, "Bandages! Tourniquets! Take care of these men!"

  A fortnight after the mission, the Ninth Air Force closed the casualty books on Tidal Wave and President Roosevelt gave the figures to Congress, saying that the losses may have seemed disastrously high, "but I am certain that the German or Japanese High Commands would cheerfully sacrifice tens of thousands of men to do the same amount of damage to us, if they could."

  The price was 53 Liberators, including eight interned in Turkey. Twenty-three ships reached Allied bases on Cyprus, Sicily and Malta. Eighty-eight returned to Benghazi, including 55 with battle damage.

  The official report said that 446 airmen were killed or missing, 79 were interned in Turkey, and 54 were wounded.

  At least one writer about Tidal Wave has alleged that the official War Department casualties were minimized. The authors of this book, on the basis of research among survivors, checked against "201" files (the individual war records), found that 310 Americans were killed on Tidal Wave, about one in five of the approximately 1,620 men who attained the target area, including those lost on the Nespor-Riley take-off crash and in Wingo-Wango's fall at Corfu.

  However, many more than 54 men were wounded. The official report; coming on 17 August, accounted for only the injured who had returned to Allied or neutral bases. There were 70 more wounded in Romanian captivity, whose condition was not then known, and a half dozen in Bulgarian hands, making a total of 130.

  Although the casualties were far lower than General Ent had feared, he had lost the services of 579 effectives, plus 300 "retired" airmen, who now had to be actually retired. The day after Tidal Wave he had little more than half his men left and only 33 Liberators fit to fly, out of the 178 he had dispatched to Ploesti. Killer Kane returned from Cyprus that day and found 17 B-24's listed on the Pyramider strength, but only three were in condition for a mission.

  Tidal Wave was the end of the Ninth Air Force as a heavy bomber command, although it participated minimally in several more joint raids with the Twelfth Air Force, out of Tunisia. The Circus, Eight Ball and Scorpion survivors flew back to their nests in England, and the desert rats and their pink ships were absorbed into the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, where preparations were under way for a gigantic and prolonged bombing campaign against Gerstenberg's fortress. As Sir Charles Portal had guessed, the Protector was building up a greater furniture of arms to meet it.

  With a clatter of mimeograph machines, the Ninth Air Force, General Brereton and his staff, were transmogrifled into a British-based fighter-bomber and infantry support command for the coming invasion of France.

  Meanwhile, 108 Tidal Wave men were alive in Romania, entering one of the most extraordinary experiences that befell captured soldiers in World War II.

  13 BLACK SUNDAY

  When the Liberators left Ploesti they had altered a landscape and begun the transformation of a people. Around the Wallachian plain they left pillars of smoke, the epitaphs of aircraft and men, of refineries and tank farms. In the ripe fields they left smudges of burned haycocks and wheat stooks and long skid smears of planes, like those of insects squashed on a windshield. The hot ground guns were still, but the battle tympanum was pounding to a crescendo of delayed explosions in the refineries.

  In der Mordkessel (the cauldron of death), from Campina to the Danube, the dead and wounded lay. The fields and woods abounded with hunting parties of soldiery, litter bearers and sightseers. On the roads to Ploesti marched battalions of slave laborers, the Russian corvée , to begin salvage and reconstruction. A hundred Americans were dying and another hundred, staggering with pain, with red-blind eyes from the shock of crashes and parachute falls -- many to be deaf for days from the overwhelming sound of battle -- were dispersing from the wrecks in the hope of getting away.

  The first one to touch Romanian soil, Jack Warner, out of Enoch Porter's Euroclydon, awakened in a shallow creek with a shattered collarbone, and ladled water over his burns with his good hand. German soldiers hauled him out, stripped him "naked as a jay bird," and marched him away. Farm women and children pointed to Warner and shrieked, "Amerikani!" The Germans took him to a room full of injured comrades, lying on parachute packs and moaning for water. Warner heard a voice say in broken English, "Put those in the dead corner." He fainted into sleep and awakened in a hospital ward of wounded Germans. One, with a fifty-caliber shell through his neck, gave Warner a cigaret. Two Germans died and their beds were taken by more wounded, one of whom yelled at the American, "Get up, you gangster! I'll wipe the floor with you." The German tried to get out of bed and fell back dead.

  The young flak gunner, Erich Hanfland, got down from the hot seat of his 20-mm. battery. He had passed 1,450 rounds through the gun and burned out two barrels while shooting down two bombers. Battery Sergeant Bichler threatened to punish him for ruining the gun. Hanfland took off across the fields to see the wrecks of the B-24's he had destroyed. He came upon a tall, thin American in a leather flying jacket, who was badly burned. The American said to him in "perfect" German, "What is the damage to the refineries? You know, I worked here in Ploesti before the war." Hanfland took his escape kit and began examining the curiosities inside. The American said, "Give me back the gold piece. I can use it." Hanfland returned it. Sergeant Bichler arrived and pummeled the American. Hanfland cried to his sergeant, "You hate yourself! You hate life!" Bichler turned from the airman and said to the young gunner, "That finishes you, Hanfland." * The thin American who spoke perfect German and claimed to have worked at Ploesti was taken off to the hospital. **

  * Hanfland was sent to Germany and punished with parachute training. That autumn he was dropped behind Allied lines in Italy and was captured unhurt by Americans. Battery Sergeant Bichler and most of Hanfland's Plo
esti comrades were killed in Romania the following year.

  ** The authors have not been able to identify this intriguing thin man. Charles Cavit remembers an American sergeant in the Bucharest jail who asked the guards to let the pilot go to the toilet. "The sergeant spoke real good German," said Cavit. "They told us later that he died from a piece of flak, but some of the boys saw him in Germany." The latter were eight POW's sent to Frankfurt for interrogation. One of them remembered a ninth man who spoke both American and German idiomatically. They had never seen him before. The ninth man had special privileges, including parole from the interrogation center, and did not return with them to Romania. Was he a German spy? If so, he was a very thorough worker to have himself "badly burned" or struck with flak before taking up his masquerade. Ninth Air Force Intelligence officers doubt very much that anyone who had lived in Ploesti flew the great mission; Tidal Wave planners had scoured Britain and the United States for people with prewar experience there, and it is unlikely that they would have overlooked one on the air bases. Was the thin man a defector? Did he invent a story for Hanfland about working in Ploesti, thinking it would get him preferred treatment, or even a trip to Germany?

  Elmer Reinhart, the last man to jump from his failing Liberator, was alone in a cornfield eighty miles southwest of Ploesti. He fitted his compass buttons together and set off along a creek, on the theory that it emptied into the Danube. His escape instructions favored two routes out of Romania. If the downed man was loose considerably west of the target, he was to search for Yugoslav partisan areas. If he was too deep inside Romania, as was the case with Reinhart, the breezy advice was to "hop a log or a raft across the Danube" and "jump" a Turkish ship at Constanta.

  Reinhart trekked along the creek all afternoon, avoiding people. Toward evening he saw an elderly shepherd on a hilltop and decided to take a chance on him. The old man gazed at Reinhart with frightened eyes. The pilot pantomimed that he was unarmed and handed over his pocket knife. This won a timid smile. Reinhart gave him a dollar bill. The shepherd studied George Washington's portrait and cried, "President Roosevelt!" He led Reinhart to his cottage, left him there, and returned with policemen. The populace followed Reinhart to a dirt-floored village jail and gave him cheese, bread and melons.

  The reception turned ugly. A Romanian officer arrived, chained Reinhart's hands and feet, and threw him into a horse cart. The pilot was delivered to a town police station, where a man questioned him in English. On a desk Reinhart saw a hunting knife and pistol belonging to his co-pilot Charles L. Starr. The interrogator could not tell him where Starr was. Reinhart was taken in a 1929 Ford to Slatina, where he met five of his parachuted sergeants. They had puffed eyes and bruises from beatings by peasants. "They probably took us for Russians," said Sergeant Alfred Mash. "Where is Lieutenant Starr?" Reinhart asked. Russell Huntley said, "We never did hook up with any of the officers. The story is that the peasants killed Lieutenant Starr. His chute didn't open and they put him out of his misery."

  Near burning and exploding White Five, the Catholic missioner, Corporal Ewald Wegener, and a Dr. Kauter worked all Sunday afternoon on a gravely burned Romanian soldier, who had been brought in naked wrapped in newspapers. They sent him to the hospital, where, thanks to their early work, his life was saved. As they removed their wrist watches to scrub up, the medical men noticed the hour. It was five hours since the bombing.

  "Wegener, there must be many other wounded," said the doctor. They went seeking them through the smoke and came to a schoolhouse in the city, where airmen were being carried. In the main hall, upon a straw-littered floor, lay thirty Americans, burned and broken, naked and dying. Wegener saw a man with "C" for Catholic on his identification tags and said in clumsy English, "I am a priest." The airman looked up through his pain at the sooty enemy, groaned and waved him away. The next man with a "C" touched the corporal's hand and received the last rites in Latin before he died. Wegener administered them to several others.

  As Dr. Kauter began organizing the impromptu dressing station, there was a clatter of boots and snarls; in came Wegener's CO, the Mad Prussian, yelling, "Sie sollten umgebracht werden, diese Mörder!" (These murderers should be killed.) Corporal Wegener said, "They are only soldiers, mein Kommandant. They were only doing their duty." The CO shouted, "You will go to the Russian front!" and clomped out of the schoolhouse.

  Other wounded men were brought to Bucharest in carts and trucks, with people peering in, the women bursting into tears, seeing in their mind's eye their young men going to mound graves in Russia. Disaster-followers thronged the amphitheater of the Queen's Hospital, watching masked surgeons and their white-robed courtiers perform emergency operations on the blackened airmen. When the doctors lost Maurice Peterson of Jersey Bounce, women in a the gallery keened the doina , the ancient Gypsy lament.

  General Gerstenberg sent officers around the collecting points for American wounded to see that they had proper medical care. Leutnant Scheiffele found several B-24 crews laid out in a flak battery barracks and phoned, "Herr General, none of them are conscious. They all have heavy burns and dreadful wounds. They are beyond help, but the doctors are administering morphine to ease their last hours." In a field dressing station, Scheiffele found German medics picking flak splinters from the heads of a dozen Americans. He reported, "It is hard to believe, Herr General. They came here without helmets! Most are in severe shock. They cannot believe what they have experienced. I find it hard to believe myself. Our soldiers, to the last man, are astonished that anyone would dare such a low-level attack. They do not understand how anyone could underestimate our defenses so badly."

  Only a dozen Americans were in condition to be interrogated. An English-speaking Intelligence officer sat alone in a room and the fliers were admitted one by one. The officer had orders to be courteous and not try to force answers. He offered the men cigarets, but they declined and smoked their own. The airmen gave only the minimum personal identification required by the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. However, many of them could not help unburdening themselves to the sympathetic German on the great disillusion of Ploesti: "They told us before the mission that the flak would never get us if we flew low!"

  Those Americans able to walk were collected in the Bucharest city jail. There Elmer Reinhart and his five parachutists met pilot Jerome Savaria, who lay in shock from a heavy scalp wound. He had fallen among country folk who had not observed Allied Intelligence advices that "the peasants are honest, friendly, kindly and hospitable to strangers." They had mobbed Savaria, one swinging an axe. He ducked the fatal stroke but took a glancing blow on his head. The peasants put a rope around his neck and marched him to a tree. A German patrol arrived and stopped the lynching.

  John Palm lay in a barrage balloon shack near Bratulesti, holding on to his nearly severed leg. He pantomimed to his captors how to construct a litter. They made one of saplings and carried him on it to a truck. After a jolting, excruciating ride to a Bucharest gynecological hospital, Palm was sent in a pushcart on another hard ride to Spital Shuler, a first-class private clinic run by Dr. Georg Petrescu. Palm said, "I could tell right away that Dr. Petrescu was a wheel and an Allied sympathizer." The surgeon removed his dangling leg, sutured the stump, and put Palm to bed.

  That night the Texan was awakened by a crowd of thug-like types in long leather overcoats, cradling machine guns in their arms. In front of them stood a small fox-faced man wearing a black homburg, a pin-striped Savile Row suit and suede shoes. In English he said, "So you are an American?" Palm admitted it. The little man scowled and walked out with the gunmen. Dr. Petrescu said, "Do you know who that was? General Antonescu." The dictator of Romania had come to see one of the creatures for himself, after a day of absurd frustration. At his villa on Lake Znagov, he had heard the aerial noise and assumed that it was merely Woldenga running another surprise mock attack on Ploesti.

  In the morning Palm received friendly visitors, with an unarmed escort -- a slender, pleasant lady, her arm held
by a hulking teen-aged boy. She said, "I am Helen and this is the king." Palm said, "It's sure nice to make your acquaintance," looking at the first king he'd ever laid eyes on. Palm remembered a newspaper item about Michael running away with a tank on army maneuvers, and engaged him in a discussion about planes, guns, cars, tanks and motocycles, for such was their mutual passion. The queen mother found a chance to whisper to Palm, out of earshot of her retinue, "You know, we are not free to speak. Do the Americans understand that our sympathies are with you?" Palm gave the queen a big secret wink and a Lucky Strike. He was now American ambassador to Romania.

  The queen bade Dr. Petrescu move Palm into a private room, where she could come incognito without spying courtiers. She was the wife that Carol II had put away in favor of his famous baggage, Magda Lupescu. On the days that Helen did not come to the hospital Palm received anonymous perfumed notes on crested writing paper. The Texan began to form the impression that if one had to lose a leg and languish in foreign durance, this was not a bad way to take it.

  During the long hot afternoon and night after the raid Bernard Traudt, the seventeen-year-old gunner who had bailed out of the flaming orange ship, slept blissfully under a bush, undetected by search parties. He awoke refreshed at dawn Monday and saw a farmer walking toward a privy. Traudt selected from his escape kit a mimeographed form letter in Romanian asking help for an American aviator. With an extra-sunny smile the lad stepped out and presented it. The peasant studied it from all angles, including upside down. He was illiterate. From behind, another rustic came up stealthily and clouted Traudt on the head with a pitchfork handle. The boy awakened in an oxcart on the way to captivity.