That Monday morning the Bucharest stock exchange opened for ten minutes, then shut its doors to assess the economic impact of the bombing.
Princess Caradja had been very busy since the bombers crossed her house. Hearing that American prisoners were being detained by her countrymen instead of the Germans, she advised "her boys," as she had begun to call O'Reilly's crew, to surrender to Romanians and arranged a discreet rendezvous for them. Poulsen collected their dollars and gave them to the princess to hold. She sent her field hands with a winch to the wrecked plane to lift the turret off the dead flight engineer, Frank Kees, and started the orphans' carpentry shop to constructing his coffin. Women washed the body and repaired the ripped suntans in which he would be buried next day.
The princess sped to Bucharest to pursue her main purpose, to hold the Americans in Romania and not let them be sent to Germany. She persuaded her social circle, which included several wives of cabinet ministers, to exert conjugal politics on their husbands. Colonel Sarbu, an old family friend, implored her to go to the ruins of the Women's Prison and try to identify the body of his sister, Elena. He was a member of the Iron Guard and Mademoiselle Sarbu had been sentenced to prison as a leftist Allied sympathizer. The princess identified the charred body of Elena Sarbu,* and drove to a café rendezvous to see how the campaign to hold the Americans was coming. The cabinet ladies had good news. Their husbands had bucked up Antonescu to go see Gerstenberg and claim the Americans. The Iron Guard leader had approached the Protector with deep misgivings; Hitler's captives, wherever apprehended, were always sent to German stalags. Antonescu said, "The Americans have been captured in battle here, therefore Romania should be the detaining power." Gerstenberg pondered the question. It occurred to him that this was an elegant solution. Instead of carting the rambunctious, high-calorie-consuming Americans off to tax the rations and billets of the Reich, why not leave them in Romania and win a point for his generosity? He said, "My dear General Antonescu, they were shot down here. Of course they are your prisoners! I shall hand over all those we have arrested and will give you the ones we have sent to Frankfurt for interrogation." It was Antonescu's second victory of the war, the other being his refusal to adopt Wehrmacht time.
* Today, on the rebuilt Women's Prison, according to Princess Caradja, there is a memorial tablet to Elena Sarbu, saying that she was "treacherously murdered." This perversion ignores the fact that she died in the crash of a Liberator crippled by a Romanian pilot who disobeyed orders not to fight over the city. The ten Americans in the plane were as helpless as the women in the jail. The plane was a prison too.
The princess heard the good news in a café which was otherwise buzzing with talk about the fantastic accuracy of the bombing and the patent fact that the Americans had tried to avoid hurting civilians. Except for the tragedy in the prison, few Ploesti dwellers had been harmed.
She drove back home to conclude arrangements for burying O'Reilly's top turret man. Her major-domo said, "The parish priest refuses to conduct the funeral. He says this man bombed our people." The princess phoned a bishop in Bucharest, "My fool of a priest won't bury one of the American boys." The parish priest was on hand in the morning, leading a procession of villagers and orphans behind Kees's body to the Cantacuzene private cemetery on the estate. To the sound of chants in an alien tongue, a boy from Kentucky was laid among the bones of princes who had fought the Saracen. Women covered the grave with flowers. The priest said to a grandmother, "You fools! They shoot your sons and you decorate their graves." The old woman replied, "Our sons are falling in Russia. We hope that other mothers are doing this for them."
King Michael drove to the princess' manor in his sports car to see O'Reilly's Liberator, which was among the best preserved of the crashed ships. Michael saw gasoline trickling out of the wing tanks and collected several liters for his car. He leaped in and roared away. Down the road a way, his motor failed. U. S. aviation gas was too rich for it.
Hitler telephoned congratulations to Gerstenberg, and then Goering thanked the Protector for brilliantly justifying the arms and men he had sent to the quiet theater, sometimes at the expense of the Reichsmarschal's dwindling prestige in Berlin. Gerstenberg and Woldenga inspected the damaged refineries with their petroleum production engineer and economist, Frau Gramach, a feminine doctoral engineer from Hanover. She told Gerstenberg that it would be only a matter of days before she could give him full shipment quotas of oil. Ten thousand Slav captives were at work clearing rubble and connecting by-pass pipelines in the quick recovery system the Protector had devised.
Woldenga told Gerstenberg that he thought the American bombs were too small for the job. Many had not exploded. But the fighter controller's opinion was: "The deep-level attack was a good idea. I myself have seen the effect of total surprise at zero altitude. In October 1940 I took forty Messerschmitts over London at roof-top level. We took off from the French coast, went up the Thames, and swept the city from end to end without losing a plane.* It was only a forty-minute flight. One can attain surprise on such short missions, but the American voyage was much too long. The risk of detection is too great on a six-hour flight."
* This may have been the fighter bomber sweep of 7 October which hit Lambeth Palace, or that of 10 October which destroyed the high altar of St. Paul's Cathedral.
Woldenga remarked on the high proportion of Liberators with Eighth Air Force colors and markings. Gerstenberg said, "Yes, we have punished two American air forces." Woldenga gave him one of Geerlings' perspective route charts found in one of the wrecks. ** "Extraordinary," said the general. "It shows a very special effort. Excellent planning." He added, "I am certain the Americans will come again, despite what happened to them. Their bases are moving closer. They have a foothold in Sicily; southern Italy may be next. I reminded Goering of the Me-110's he promised. We must have more aircraft, more guns, more troops. We lost about a hundred flak people yesterday."
** German Intelligence assumed that the prewar postcards and snapshots were photographs from a recent Allied reconnaissance flight. The Luftwaffe warning system was reprimanded for not detecting it. Of course there had been no photo-reconnaissance prior to Tidal Wave.
Woldenga said, "That is unfortunate, sir. I have the pleasure to report that we lost only two German pilots.* I believe three Romanians were killed."
* The authors received this same remarkable assertion in separate interviews with eleven Luftwaffe officers in the battle, including four fighter pilots of I-JG 4 at Mizil. The Air Ministry in London opened its captured Luftwaffe documents for southeastern Europe, which bore out Woldenga. They state that IV-NJG 6, the night-fighter group at Zilistea, lost two Me-110's and five were damaged, while two Mizil Me-109's were destroyed and two damaged. Presumably the Mizil fatalities were from Captain Toma's integrated Romanian wing. The Air Ministry documents do not include Royal Romanian Air Force figures, which the writers were unable to find. The Athenian Me-109's lost two planes of record in the Kephallenia ambush. Apparently the Bulgarian Air Force lost none of the fighters that attacked the B-24's during the withdrawal. The ascertainable facts shed a revealing light on wartime allowances for enemy aircraft destroyed. Tidal Wave gunners were credited with 51. A cautious estimate of German evidence would scarcely show two dozen fighters actually downed in the general melee around Ploesti, the Bulgarian border fray, and the Ionian Sea ambuscade. The Luftwaffe officially credited eighteen Liberators to Romanian-based fighters, after examining the crashes. Two B-24's were definitely shot down in Bulgaria and four in the battle of the Ionian Sea. Human losses in the intra-aerial engagements of Tidal Wave would appear to total approximately: Americans -- 150; Axis -- 15.
Ever since he had made his fortunate guess on which threaded part disarmed the American bombs, Armament Inspector Egon Schantz had been continuously rendering them harmless. In the first 24 hours his men dealt with "more than a hundred," according to Adjutant Scheiffele. Of course many of them were duds to begin with, but some of the sleeping mons
ters, with tardy detonators, were still exploding on the second day.
There was an unexploded 500-pounder hanging in the top of a fractionating column, and the defenders wanted to save this vital unit. Fireman Schütz volunteered to climb the column and disarm the bomb. Trailing a phone cable to Schantz in a bomb shelter, the fireman went up the tower. He phoned to the ground, "The first screw is bent and I can't get it off with my bare hands. I'm going to use a wrench." Schantz replied, "I don't think you should. If there is too much force, it might turn the second screw." Schütz said, "No, I think it will work." A huge explosion rocked the shelter. They didn't even find Schütz's belt buckle.
Gerstenberg ordered that the American dead be buried with full military honors. There were several mass funerals of Americans and Germans together, with trumpets, parade standards and honor guards firing the final volleys.
The Protector analyzed the event for which he had prepared for three years. He was clearly the victor of the day, but he did not warm himself with that or the encomiums from Berlin. The American wrecks around the target and a projection of that figure for damage, death and wounds, in the bombers that got away, convinced him that the Ninth Air Force would be unable to send a follow-up mission. Perhaps it had effectively lost its bomber command. Yet the enemy's great daring, the evidence of long and shrewd planning, and the combining of two air forces for the raid, told Gerstenberg that the Americans valued Ploesti as highly as he did. Never one to underestimate the enemy, the Protector imagined himself in Brereton's brown study: What could he do, without planes, to try to finish the destruction of the refineries? While the fires were still burning and the bombs exploding -- sabotage! Gerstenberg thought that if hundreds of Americans had come suicidally as bomber crews, others could parachute in to finish the job. He ordered his entire command on alert against parachutists.
Axis Sally, in her English-language broadcasts from Berlin, said, "Good show, Brereton, but you lost too many." Oddly enough, Goebbels made little of the fact that the Americans had missed the Standard Oil refinery, while destroying British and French-built plants. Café wits in Bucharest did not overlook it. They were saying, "Now we may expect British bombers to hit the American plant." The Germans sent inspired rumors by neutral businessmen headed for Turkey, greatly exaggerating the damage to the refineries -- a ploy wistfully designed to make the Americans think they need not come back. However, Brereton soon knew exactly what had happened to the White Targets. Two days after Tidal Wave, a Mosquito photo-reconnaissance plane from Sixty Squadron, South African Air Force, appeared 28,000 feet over Ploesti in perfect weather. In it were Lieutenants A.M. Miller, pilot, and W.R. Allison, navigator, busy photographing the refineries. The plywood Mosquito was the only aircraft in the world, other than the Liberator, that could duplicate the round trip from Benghazi. Amidst intense flak the bold South Africans made stereo-pairs of the White Targets and returned safely. They did not have the fuel to cover Red and Blue Targets, and the damage dealt them was not known until two weeks later when another Mosquito picked them off with a camera.
In a Bucharest hospital lay Charles I. Bridges, the only crewman alive from Porky II in the last Eight Ball wave. The battered gunner was smarting over an incident after the crash. As he had staggered away, half blind and drenched with blood, a German sergeant seized his escape kit and knocked him down. Bridges counterattacked and was knocked down again. Now at his bedside there appeared a jovial Roman Catholic priest, who said, "There you are, my son! I'm glad to see you're alive. You know, after I pulled you out of the plane, you sent me to get help for the others, and when I returned you were gone and they were dead."
Bridges said, "You pulled me out of the plane, Padre? Why, I crawled out by myself. I don't remember seeing you at all. Some Jerries worked me over, and a big Romanian soldier charged me, trying to throw the bolt on his rifle. I yelled, 'Kamerad!' and he took me to a hut. Next day I woke up here."
"Nevertheless, we are old friends, Sergeant," said the holy man. "After I pulled you from the plane, you spoke to me in Latin." Bridges said, "I haven't spoken Latin since high school. I doubt if I know ten words." The priest said, "You asked me to send word to your mother in Andersonville, Indiana, that you were all right." This was Bridges' home town. The cleric said, "I sent her a cable through the Vatican."
Mrs. Bridges had received the cable via the Roman Catholic diocese in Fort Wayne. Two days later she received a War Department telegram announcing that her son was missing in action. The poor mother was prostrated by these conflicting messages, but the diocese could furnish no further information; it had simply forwarded the cable sent through hierarchal channels. Nor could the War Department add anything. It was going to be months before some of the folks at home knew whether their men were alive or dead in Romania.
A week after the raid the wounded B-24 men were removed from Bucharest for convalescence at the King's Hospital at Sinaia in the Transylvanian Alps above Ploesti. Its quarters, food and medical care were excellent. One day the Americans were taken to a huge white building near the hospital and helped and carried up an imposing staircase into a great hall. A well-dressed woman and a strapping teen-aged boy entered and a major-domo yelled, "His Majesty, Mihai the First!" The G.I.'s were in the royal summer palace at Peles. An airman remarked, "The kid looks like good college football material." The king addressed them, "We say to you American airmen that you will be well treated in our country. Our people are favorably impressed by the fact that you did not bomb civilians. We are personally writing letters to your families, saying that you are safe." A voice from the back of the ball hollered, "How about cabling!"
The Archbishop of Bucharest visited the hospital and distributed gifts of tsuica, or plum brandy. The livelier wounded began dicing on the beds and romancing the nurses and female sightseers. The next time His Beatitude came to the hospital he passed out New Testaments. Romanian society girls, whose previous diversions had been tea-dancing with German officers at the hotels in Mamaia, now flocked to Sinaia, bringing comforts for the Americans, including books from the shuttered British Council Library in Bucharest. The titles included The Sheik , The Happy Prisoner. However, patients Charles Bridges and Donald Wright were not happy prisoners. One night they slipped out of the hospital and struck out for the woods. Their hospital robes attracted attention and the pair were apprehended and sent back. The hospital staff was hurt. The chief physician lectured them: "You are guests of this country and should behave yourselves accordingly."
A friendly English-speaking Romanian lieutenant visited the forty airmen in the Bucharest city jail and told them, "There are seventy of your men in hospital. They are receiving the best medical attention. We have counted thirty-two wrecked bombers. Here in Bucharest we have buried two hundred fourteen of your men. Only sixty-five bodies could be identified."
The jailed men were removed to a schoolyard and left there without explanation. A police van came and put in with them four men in ragged civilian clothes. The Americans suspected they were spies and made disparaging remarks about them. The newcomers said nothing. They had never seen an American soldier before. They gaped at the wide selection of uniforms permitted to the fliers -- fleece-lined leather jackets, singlets, overalls, cotton shirts and woolen shirts of different colors, British battle jackets, desert shorts, and, it seemed, ten styles of long pants. They were shod in laced boots, ornamented Brazilian cowboy boots, British hard-bashers, basketball shoes and Arab sandals. On their heads they wore steel helmets, plastic helmet liners, peaked caps, cork topees, unshorn sheepskins, brimmed dress caps with the top ring removed, forage caps -- both olive drab and suntan -- and a jaunty Afrika Korps bonnet. One of the strangers muttered under his voice to another, "I never thought I'd live to see the day." The other said, "S-s-s-sh, don't talk. Let's listen to them slanging us."
The strangers were Britons, captured three summers before during the German transgression in western Europe. The ragged band consisted of a courtly London Times correspondent
named Jerome Caminada, trapped in the fall of France; an eagle-beaked Yorkshireman named Robert Johnson, bagged in Denmark while practicing as a swine veterinarian; a rugged soldier from Nottinghamshire, Platoon Sergeant Edward Lancaster of the Sherwood Foresters, taken at Narvik, Norway; and a tall, vivacious youth with snapping brown eyes, Platoon Sergeant Douglas Collins of the Gloucestershire Regiment, overrun at Dunkirk while holding the perimeter as the last boats left for England. They were the British Vanishers, the inner circle of the elite prison-camp escapers on the eastern front, with a collective total of 21 departures from enemy cages, including stalags, maximum security fortresses and secret police cells.
Collins and Lancaster had seen more of Hitler's Europe than one of his inspectors general. The lion-hearted sergeants had left a trail of empty cells, knotted ropes, teetering gangplanks and boot leather from the Arctic Ocean to Poland, to Chetnik regions of Yugoslavia -- almost to the Black Sea. They had spent several sybaritic months at large in Budapest, maintained in luxury by Allied sympathizers, but had not forgotten their burning goal -- to get back into the fight. They came to Romania, where they had been taken while trying to cross the broad Danube. While being questioned in the cellar of a Bucharest secret police headquarters, they escaped through a sewer and emerged from a manhole on Calea Victoriei, the main street of the capital. Amidst sirens and street-corner loud-speaker announcements of the escape, they legged it forty miles to the river again.
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