Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  The Danube, which prospective American escapees had been instructed to paddle across on a log, once again brooked the British Vanishers. This time the captors put them in a cage manned by a battalion of guards who had no other inmates to look after. Collins said their strolls in the compound "followed by four hundred pairs of eyes, was rather like playing in the center court at Wimbledon."

  When the Americans dropped in, the Romanians decided to mix the bothersome Britons in with them. Here they were in the schoolyard, temporarily down on their luck, much intrigued with an ally they had never seen, and listening to his scurrilous remarks in their mother tongue.

  Buses arrived and took them all aboard. Collins and Lancaster selected a seat behind radioman Russell Huntley, whom they had heard the others calling "Limey." (The nickname was merely inspired by the fact that Huntley had served in the Canadian Army before his own country went to war.) Lancaster leaned over to Huntley and spoke the first words to come from the unprepossessing quartet: "I say, give us a light, mate." Huntley jumped. The allied parties began to talk. Collins' sharp eyes scanned the Americans for potential escapee material.

  The buses went north on the Ploesti highway, on a route that happened to provide a sight-seeing tour of the stricken refineries. As the buses neared Blue Target at Brazi, the guards primly drew the blinds, which tipped off the airmen that there was something worth looking at. They rolled up the blinds and saw Creditul Minier in total and desolate ruin. The guards ran back and forth in the aisles jerking down the blinds. At Ploesti the airmen saw the Russian corvée toiling in the wreckage of White Four and White Five, which had cost them many comrades and their own freedom. Passing Red Target at Câmpina, there was an approving hum and elbows in neighboring ribs: "Boy, that one is hammered but good!"

  The convoy climbed the winding Predeal Pass from the heat of the valley to cool breezes scented with balsams. Halfway up the Transylvanian spur of the Carpathians, the buses stopped at Sinaia and took aboard the walking wounded from the King's Hospital. The journey took up again, higher and higher, toward the domain of Count Dracula and the werewolves. Near the summit, at a resort called Timisul de Jos, where Gerstenberg had taken his ease on the morning of Tidal Wave, Lancaster spotted barbed wire across the parallel railroad and said to Collins and Huntley, "This is it."

  The buses turned across the tracks into Prisonaire de Lagurel No. 18, as it was called. Nothing like it befell other captives in World War II. The officers' new home was a three-story resort hotel. The enlisted men drew two buildings of a neighboring private school for girls. The gunners inspected the girls' dorms, scowling at the tiled wood-burning stoves, the ample washroom and kitchen, and the outside toilets which had French-style footprint offices. A sergeant moaned, "Jeez, are these people ever behind the times!" Collins said, "This is absolutely marvelous. You should see what you get in Germany." He recognized the compound at Timisul as by far the best prisoner-of-war establishment in Axis territory. It resembled the princely aviation-officer detention centers of the First World War. The Liberator gunners had no basis of comparison, and, in the fashion of traveling Americans, proceeded to knock the foreign plumbing.

  The officers' hotel was superior to air base quarters in the States. It had a spacious dining room, two baths, four lavatories and fourteen bedrooms, each with a hot-water basin, individual lockers and goose-down mattresses. On the pleasant grounds there were graveled walks, a fine view of the Alps, a small gymnasium with showers, and tennis courts. The officers had nothing to cavil about, so patently luxurious was their lot. They found some empty fish pools which a co-pilot promptly learned to fill from a mountain stream, and they began to amuse themselves by flooding and emptying the ponds.

  Both compounds had Russian prisoner cooks, kitchen hands, cleaners and orderlies. The officers had a hearty Ukrainian cook named Ivan. There was no kitchen police or any sort of work detail for the prisoners. Romania was doing well by its uninvited guests. However, the barbed wire was serious. The adjoining camps of the officers and men were separated by guarded gates and a wire-lined connecting track. The whole was surrounded by double lines of wire interconnected by barbed entanglements, and in some places there were four outer strands.

  The British Vanishers were delighted with the food. They had nearly starved in the stalags, while "here there was always enough to eat," said Collins. "True, it was beans, bread, bits of meat, cabbage and potatoes, but there was no hunger." The Americans did not like the fare, although it was no worse than the grub at Benghazi. Their culinary comparison overlooked that and went back to steaks and ice cream in the Big PX across the Atlantic.

  Red Cross parcels arrived in the gunners' compound and the men crowded around Master Sergeant Frank Garrett, who called off the lucky recipients: "Sergeant Edward Lancaster. [Three cheers for the Limey.] Sergeant Douglas Collins. [That a boy, Doug.] Sergeant Douglas Collins. [Lucky bastard.] Sergeant Douglas Collins. [Hey, what goes on?] Sergeant Edward Lancaster. [He gets two?] Sergeant Edward Lancaster . . ." All thirty parcels from the British Red Cross were for the embarrassed British decampers. They had never received any before, due to their unavailability at mail call much of the time. Now three years' accumulation of parcels had caught up with them. Lancaster said, "Just a minute there, Yanks. This lot is for all of us." Collins recalled, "We pooled the loot. It would have been unthinkable to sit apart and nibble at our parcels. In POW camps nothing leads to strife quicker than having a favored few around."

  American officers received the equivalent pay of their rank in the Romanian Army -- in the case of a first lieutenant, 22,400 lei (about $22.50 U.S.) a month, a large salary in Romania. A hard-working peasant was lucky to earn two dollars a month in Hitler's protectorate. Two hundred lei per day was deducted from each officer's salary for rations. Although that amounted to twenty cents, it bought plenty of good food.

  When the word got out in the countryside that Timisul was full of rich Americans, farm wives arrived at the wire with a small harvest fair: juicy peaches and plums, squealing piglets, chicken and geese, apples, slabs of bacon and pungent sausages, goose liver salami, and two veritable marvels -- ripe watermelons and roasting ears of corn. The officers quickly learned the word for beer -- the famous brand name "Bragadir"; tsuica , pronounced "sweeka," for plum brandy; and "Monopol" for champagne.

  Romania held in escrow from the officers' wages all but the allowance for rations and comforts. The depositors figured their growing bank accounts and plunged heavily at craps and poker, using I.O.U.'s. Caminada and Johnson received captains' salaries, which the veterinarian said "were of little use to us. We could not always compete with the 'Damn Yanks' at poker. We poor 'Limeys' were easy prey." One officer won $3,000 from his cagemates. Some of the shouting card-slappers and pot-rakers had "appalling wounds and burns, which really should have been attended to in hospital," said Johnson. There came a shipment of medications from the British Red Cross and the "Limey Pig-Doctor" looked after the "Damn Yanks." "I worried each time I dressed the burns, because it was inevitable that I had to take off more layers of flesh," said Johnson. "The only way I managed to get any cure was to expose the wounds and put the men out to sunbathe."

  Seventy-nine other Tidal Wave men were interned in the first-class Yeni Hotel in Ankara, Turkey. General William D. Tindall, the U. S. military attaché, paid their full salaries, obtained parole for them from morning to night, and shipped the disabled men to the States. The fliers walked in Captain Mooney's funeral procession. As it passed the German Embassy, a drooping swastika banner almost brushed the Stars and Stripes on Mooney's catafalque. When the Turkish honor guard fired the last volley, storks flew out of their nests in the trees. Franz von Papen, the Nazi ambassador, protested to the Turkish Government over the insult done his banner by permitting the American flag to parade past it.

  Tindall got the men credits to buy civilian clothes. Earl Zimmerman said, "As Uncle Sam was paying the bill, we wore nothing but the best." They played chess with interned Russian a
irmen, who inquired after the health of previous American chess opponents, the Halpro men. They dined at the best restaurant in the capital, Pop Karpic's. He sent gifts of caviar to their tables, particularly when von Papen was sitting nearby. One of the bored B-24 men went on a spree and was jailed for striking a policeman. Karpic sent him caviar and champagne.

  The military attaché evacuated them piecemeal. Sergeant Zimmerman departed via Syria and arrived in Prestwick, Scotland, in General Sir Bernard Montgomery's private plane. Charles Hughes, Sylvester Hunn and two brother officers were taking an aperitif on the waterfront at Izmir when a smiling Greek named Thorgarous Christopholis invited them to inspect his little fishing caïque. As the airmen recoiled from the cramped, reeking and verminous forecastle, Captain Christopholis said, "This is where you will stay." His lone seaman was casting off lines. During four miserable days the Americans remained belowdecks as German patrol planes buzzed the boat, sighting nothing but a sailor toiling and a skipper squatting on the afterdeck, arm over the tiller, mouth sucking on a hubble-bubble pipe. Christopholis landed the airmen in Cyprus, and the R.A.F. returned them to their squadrons.

  Three weeks after Tidal Wave, Washington target analysts held a convention to "reach agreement" on the damage inflicted on Ploesti. They concluded that "the most important effect was to eliminate the cushion between production and capacity." It was tantamount to admitting that the unprecedented effort and sacrifice had not taken any oil from Hitler.

  However, the European war was no longer static. The Allies were going over to the land offensive on two fronts in Italy and the U.S.S.R., forcing Hitler to find more fuel than before. Just when he needed the Ploesti cushion, it had disappeared. The German drive to seize the Soviet oil centers had been defeated, and the Reich was now obliged to divert labor and capital to synthetic oil production. The Ploesti raid hastened German retreat in Italy, where the Allies were marching on Foggia and Bari to build bases much closer to Ploesti than Benghazi. Although Tidal Wave had fallen short of expectation, it made a pivotal contribution to the crisis of the Third Reich.

  The most telling effect of the mission was to inaugurate the downfall of the German Air Force. The Reich was expanding fighter production at an astonishing rate to meet the ever-growing, round-the-clock bomber offensive. More than enough eager youths came forward to fly the new German fighters, but there was not enough extra oil to give them proper training. The Luftwaffe began to eat itself. A pilot parachuting from a disabled plane was immediately given a new one, but a pilot lost in battle could not be as readily replaced. There was no such thing as retirement of an able-bodied flier in Goering's command. The fighter pilots in Romania faced nothing but overwork, fatigue and death.

  Tidal Wave was a pronounced moral victory for the Allies, a desideratum of the great plan, which was realized to a greater degree than had been hoped for. Romanian eyewitnesses spoke admiringly of the accuracy of the strikes, "like a postman dropping a letter in the box." Europe is a community, even when divided by war, and this sort of talk spread from country to country. In Britain the U.S. Office of War Information produced a Tidal Wave booklet in French, which showed the extraordinary photographs of Liberators flying in the target flames and smoke. It was airdropped in France and Belgium and passed from hand to hand around Europe, which despised the inaccurate Allied high-level bombings that killed many innocent and friendly people. To Europeans Tidal Wave was evidence that U.S. bomber men were brave enough to fight on the ground amidst their own explosions, and that they could deliver bombs accurately on military objectives with a minimum toll of civilians.

  The mission was the last act of chivalry in aerial bombing. There was probably no other urban air raid of the war in which more airmen died than civilians. Excluding German military casualties, 116 Romanian military and civilians were killed, against 310 U.S. airmen. One hundred fifty Romanians were wounded, against a comparable number of Liberator men.

  In the target kingdom respect for Allied power, not Soviet might alone, leaped in a day. In power psychology -- the only terms by which abused Romania could judge friend or foe -- the United States suddenly became as highly regarded as Germany and the Soviet. The First of August aroused stirrings of national spirit, and Romania began a slow upturn from resignation to active resistance toward the Nazis.

  Although Tidal Wave was not a strategic success, it bore out Jacob Smart's contention that a zero strike would be more efficient than the orthodox high-altitude approach. Damage surveys after the war found that the low-level mission produced a greater rate of destruction per ton of bombs against tons of oil than any of the mighty high-altitude raids that were to follow it.

  These assaults were now being planned. The Ploesti file was left open in Washington, although it was being closed in the desert. In his Tidal Wave summation to the Chiefs of Staff, General Brereton ticked off the mission leader for the wrong turn into the bomb run and the Circus commander for striking out on his own from the erroneous course. However, he did not reprimand these officers. "Combined operations of this nature," Brereton said, "require extreme precision and are most difficult to control . . . when navigation must be conducted over great distances. Hindsight suggests that a decision to break radio silence and reassemble the entire formation at the Danube might have resulted in greater success and fewer losses." Brereton apparently did not think of the consequences had all the groups followed the mission leader on the wrong turn toward Bucharest.

  Subsequent official U. S. Air Force historians have attributed the disappointing results of Tidal Wave to the error at Targoviste, which they thought had alerted the defenses and spoiled the surprise. Neither Brereton nor the historians knew that the enemy had detected the take-off and tracked the bombers most of the way to the target.

  Soon after the battle Leon Johnson and Killer Kane were gazetted for the Medal of Honor for bombing their briefed targets, although they were already burning and exploding. General Brereton hung the starry blue ribbon around Kane's neck on the cricket pitch of the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo before a fashionable audience, and pinned Silver Stars and Distinguished Service Crosses on fourteen other Ploesti warriors. Leon Johnson received the highest U.S. award for valor one gray mizzling day on an airdrome in England in front of rank after rank of great-coated Liberator men.

  It took months before the remaining three Medals of Honor for Tidal Wave were announced, the laurels of one of the most intense battles in history. Lloyd Hughes's posthumous medal for driving into flaming Red Target with his ship streaming gasoline was won for him by the O.W.I. man, but there was an inner-circle dispute over recognizing a similar deed by Addison Baker and John Jerstad, who had flown their flaming lead ship to the Circus target. A conservative faction in the award councils held that men who had broken formation discipline could not be honored. Officers who had served on Tidal Wave disputed this view with great vehemence and won for Baker and Jerstad the first paramount award given to both pilots of an aircraft for a mutual act of valor.

  All over the United States, relatives and friends of the men who did not return from Ploesti had had no word of them other than the War Department telegram announcing that they were missing. One little town, Belvidere, Illinois (population 8,000), had given four inseparable high school companions to Tidal Wave, and two of them, Lieutenant Jack Lanning and Sergeant Arthur White, were missing. The Belvidere Republican tried to strike a note of hope for Lanning by publishing a letter he had posted to his bride the day before take-off. Under a headline, JACK LANNING AND PALS HAD A NEW PLANE ON PLOESTI RAID, the story said, "It is called Wingo-Wango, which is supposed to be some kind of a bird."

  Brian Flavelle's Wingo-Wango was 3,000 feet down in the Ionian Sea. Belvidere did not learn that until several weeks later when a letter arrived from another of its Ploesti men, Sergeant George K. Holroyd, telling of seeing his friend's ship go down. The letter barely arrived before a telegram announcing that Holroyd had been killed in an air crash in England. The town held a memorial servi
ce, at which Lanning's and Holroyd's Distinguished Flying Crosses and Purple Hearts were given to next of kin. Two unexpected waves of emotion came over the gathering. The chairman was handed an announcement that the fourth local lad, Lieutenant Lon Bryan, had been killed over Germany. And then he read a letter from Sergeant White, alive in Romania!

  It was one of the first letters to reach home from the fantastic prison camp of the Ploesti men.

  And make each prisoner pent

  Unwillingly represent

  A source of innocent merriment,

  Of innocent merriment.