Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  Collins and Lancaster lay low in the hills for two days and then walked twenty miles north to Brasov. There, using the German they had learned in the stalags, the British Vanishers bought tickets and boarded the Trans-European Express for Bucharest. They passed the POW camp on the way. The guards were beating up the recaptured men. They dragged Rurak around by his beard. Baughn had been picked up when he had had to beg for food.

  From Bucharest the British sergeants took a train for Constanta. They did not intend to try boarding a Turkish ship at that port, as the U.S. escape plans advised. Instead, they got off at the first stop beyond the Danube and hiked to the Romano-Bulgarian border, intending to cross Bulgaria to Turkey. They felt immensely confident after negotiating the big river that had twice foiled them. They found the border thick with guards on both sides. They reconnoitered for a weak spot and started running. Romanian guards opened fire and captured them again. They were taken to Constanta for interrogation. Lancaster had now come from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, a unique escape journey among Allied prisoners of war.

  The eight escapers were sent to a punishment camp at Slobozia, which means "freedom" in Romanian. It held two thousand hard-case Soviet officers and paratroopers. The compound was dotted with "sweat boxes" in which Russians were kept for days, unable to sit or stand. The Timisul party was put into a dark, unheated room, and each man was fed a piece of bread and two watered soups a day. They talked in low voices with Russians in the next room. Collins said, "They asked when the western Allies were going to get off their backsides and start a second front. We pointed out our enormous successes in North Africa and Italy. The Russians smuggled food to us -- pieces of sausage and salami."

  After a month the escapees were sent back to Timisul. They arrived on a snowy night with bright moonlight gleaming on a picture postcard setting. As the guards came to admit them Collins roared, "Rotten Romanian bastards!" and the mountain echoed it hollowly back. They began laughing hysterically. The camp awoke, yelling and laughing. The party marched smartly into the compound singing "Tipperary." The first American Red Cross parcels had just arrived. Collins said, "We stuffed on Spam nnd other riches, were violently ill and very happy."

  The British Vanishers were unhappy about the snow, however. It made escape impossible. "But we needed a period of quiet to lull the guards," said Collins. "We laid plans for another break in the spring."

  The last of the wounded were brought to camp from the Sinaia hospital. Among them were the ranking U.S. officer and NCO, who became prisoner-commandants of the respective compounds -- Captain Wallace C. Taylor, only survivor of the plane he had piloted in the last wave at White Four, and Master Sergeant Edmond Terry, who had crashed in with Lindley Hussey. The new leaders came under the expert appraisal of Douglas Collins, who pronounced them "first-class chaps." A Romanian guard officer complained to Terry, "Is it correct in your army for soldiers to curse an officer the way your men are abusing me?" Terry replied, "Sir, how can you expect enlisted men to respect an officer who begs cigarets from them?" The Romanian said, "Yes. You are right, Sergeant."

  Now, with the wounded in camp, all 108 of the living deposited in Romania on Tidal Wave were together, except for John Palm. The crippled pilot of Brewery Wagon remained at large in Bucharest, punching his peg leg into the carpets of the best salons as Queen Helen showed off her personal hostage. Palm was not a defector or a collaborator. No one had suggested imprisonment for the queen's friend and the Texan saw no reason why he should request it.

  In the mountain camp above, brother officers yearned for the fleshpots, and several found that if they were nice boys they could obtain week-end paroles in Bucharest with casual escort. If they made their guards drunk early, they could enjoy the overnight freedom of the capital. One of them, "Officer Z," as he will be called here (his real name is not among the Tidal Wave fliers mentioned in the chronicle) felt called upon to spread cheer in a society growing more depressed by Russian advances and the threat of new American bombings from Italy. Officer Z accepted an invitation to address the Rotary Club of Bucharest. He said, "I have traveled the whole world in an airplane and I have fought on all the fronts. I have made over one hundred missions in Japanese territory and was shot down three times in the Philippines, where our army lost twenty thousand men. Each time I have been unharmed. I have made many missions over the Atlantic, in Africa and Germany, and last of all Romania.

  "I have heard only good things about Romania, about the heroic battle the Romanian Army has been fighting in Russia and how they repelled the Russians. I commanded a group of heavy bombers on the low-level raid on Ploesti. With the wish not to bomb civilians, I took over the controls myself. Never before have I seen such well-organized antiaircraft fire. There were also Romanian fighters in this sector. Your fliers must be proud of their work. They are well trained.

  "I was taken prisoner. Life is good. The attitude of the people is very humane. We have everything we need. We are treated as if we were in our own country. If my wife and children were near me, I could never say that I was a prisoner of war."

  The speech was published in a Bucharest newspaper. In the camp, Sergeant Louis Medeiros, a printer from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who had learned Romanian in six weeks, translated it for the gunners. An auditor said, "After that load of stuff, all they can do is send for his family." Another mused, "I don't get it. Aren't the Romanians our enemies?"

  Most of them laughed it off. Officer Z was the biggest bag of wind in the camp. The Rotary Club speaker returned to the officers' mess and described his triumph to a stony-faced audience. Norman Adams followed it with a fable: "A little sparrow sat on a telephone line, cold and hungry. A horse passed below and the little sparrow flew down and consumed a great amount of fresh warm droppings. He flew back up and opened his mouth wide in song. A hawk swooped down and devoured the sparrow. The moral of the story is: If you are full of the stuff, keep your mouth shut." Officer Z got up and went to his room. After that he was served his meals there by the Russian orderlies.

  All these months ten Tidal Wave men were in Bulgarian custody -- the survivors of The Witch, Prince Charming and Let 'Er Rip -- under Lieutenant Darlington. At first they were treated humanely. Then, in November 1943, U.S. bombers from the new bases in Italy, warming up for the all-out offensive on Ploesti, raided Sofia twice. The Bulgarians reacted primitively by abusing their captives. They force-marched Darlington's men to a mountain camp along with parachuted ffiers from the Sofia raids. The stockade had no running water and no medical attention for the newly wounded. It was lice-ridden, and the rotten food gave the men dysentery. Clifford Keon said, "It was rough as hell." More downed fliers arrived, including a Yugoslav crew and a Greek who had been dropped with money for the Bulgarian underground. The camp overflowed and the Bulgarians built a larger and worse one at Choumen and herded the prisoners there in an all-day mountain march.

  In contrast to the Bulgarian misery, the men in Romanian detention enjoyed a "Christmas that must have been one of the most extraordinary ever spent by prisoners of war," said Collins. "We were being paid salaries, more money was coming from the Red Cross, and the Pope sent seventy-two thousand lei. We bought beer, wine and champagne. We were permitted to do anything we liked except dig holes," he added. They listened on the radio to a speech by President Roosevelt and to Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas." The wealthy captives exchanged gifts. John Lockhart gave two bottles of beer to each Russian cook and orderly. The enlisted men entertained the officers at a steak dinner, followed by a concert from an imported Russian POW orchestra and comedy skits by the internees. The British Vanishers were the stars of the show. With nearly four years' experience in prison theatricals, they easily outshone the American amateurs.

  The winter social season reached its acme on New Year's Eve, with the officers returning the hospitality of the enlisted men. The Romanian commandant made a fine speech, and one of his lieutenants got drunk with the captives and came out on the losing end of a beer-
slinging match. The officers served the men champagne and hot dogs.

  The first mail from home arrived after six long months of imprisonment -- a bounty of letters that the Timisul inmates rationed to themselves over the days to stretch the pleasure as long as possible. Lawrence Lancashire received the news that he was a father -- the baby was already seven months old. It had been born ten days before he took off on Tidal Wave.

  Romanian ladies lent them skis and skates. The winter of waiting went as well as could be hoped, except for an incident involving a sentry box on a slope outside the sergeants' compound. In cold weather the guard liked to stay in the box as long as possible. One day be heard a mass howl from the cage and stuck his head out. Seventy snowballs whizzed by, several scoring direct hits. As punishment for the prank the prisoners ate rejected potatoes for a week.

  Folded in the deep February snows, the sleepers were awakened one night at the thud of distant guns, fumbled into boots and overcoats, and went out to look. To the south, over Ploesti, there were firefly winks in the sky and delayed reports of flak bursting high in the air. "The boys are back!" "They're hitting Ploesti again!" went the cries. But they heard no bombs, just the remote tattoo of shrapnel. They stood in the snow for an hour while the puzzling aerial show went on.

  It was Norman Appold over Ploesti again, not to bomb, but to take radar photos from 24,000 feet in a lone special Liberator, the APS-15, out of Italy. He was making radar plots of the refineries to use later for high-altitude bombing through clouds. While Appold flew back and forth, methodically bounding the city, Colonel Woldenga sent three M-110's into their own flak to destroy the impudent B-24. Appold spent an hour over the deadly target, eluding the night fighters, and completed his maps before he put his nose down and dived out of the mess.

  One day Captain Taylor ordered all the POW's to smarten up and make a formation in the officers' compound, where the sergeants were admitted on special occasions. Six limousines entered the gate, and two small figures, surrounded by a swarm of pluguglies in long leather coats, approached the men. Dictator Antonescu and his wife were calling. The general walked down the ranks asking if anyone had any complaints. Douglas Collins gave him an exaggerated salute and said, "Why aren't the other ranks permitted contact with the officers? We're all in the same camp." Antonescu said, "I will look into the matter." Soon afterward the barriers between the two compounds were removed.

  Collins had made the dictator an unwitting accomplice of the new escape operation he was planning. In the officers' camp there was a lot of Romanian money, and Caminada and Johnson were secreting an ample stock of compasses and maps. The four British Vanishers were now reunited and could start a full-scale escape academy of officers and men.

  Skyward in air a sudden muffled

  sound, the dalliance of the eagles,

  The rushing amorous contact high in

  space together,

  The clinching interlocking claws, a

  living, fierce, gyrating wheel . . .

  -- Walt Whitman, "The Dalliance of the Eagles," 1881

  15 THE HIGH ROAD TO PLOESTI

  During the long peace after Tidal Wave, General Gerstenberg obtained more guns, more radar, and thousands of smoke generators to conceal the refineries. He barely held his fighter strength, but his antiaircraft became the heaviest concentration in the world. The build-up in Romania was matched by the swelling power of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force. The Fifteenth U.S.A.A.F. in Italy was stacking up hundreds of gleaming Liberators and Fortresses with new smartly trained crews. Officer discipline was improved; gone was the individualist of the Libyan period. The new leaders were formation keepers, and they carried bigger bombs that exploded more often than those carried on Tidal Wave.

  Norman Appold, who had rehearsed them to cope with fighter attacks, attended a briefing, on 4 April 1944 in which the new men faced the opening stroke of the final offensive on Romanian oil. He offered to check out the gunners as they left for the real thing. "Today we have complete radio silence," said Appold. "You will not hear me announcing attacks. I'm going in without warning. So, all you flexible gunners and turret gunners -- on your toes!"

  As 230 four-engined bombers assembled in the sky, little Bon-Bon darted through, stitching them up tight. The silvery school set out across the Adriatic for the second round with Alfred Gerstenberg. Appold waggled his wings for bon voyage, and dropped back to Bari. The bomber force carried a blizzard of metalized paper strips to confuse the German radar.

  The force bombed Bucharest. In one of the target areas, the railway marshaling yards, there happened to be several trainloads of Romanian refugees from the east. Many were killed and wounded. At Timisul, peasants shook their fists at the Tidal Wave men behind the wire. The ugly atmosphere was offset, however, by the arrival of a new camp commandant, a plump, affable colonel named Saulescu, who was openly an Allied sympathizer. At each new setback for Hitler he brought a case of champagne to the American officers and joined them in toasting Allied victory. Their eyes popped when the colonel brought his daughter, Carma, to the compound. She was a beautiful twenty-two-year-old who spoke excellent English. A sergeant cut out the officers and won the maiden's favor.

  Carma and her mother made pastries and sweets and gave them to the POW's. To the canteen directors, Minnie the Moocher and Red the Thief, interfering with Romanian business enterprise was worse than fraternizing with the enemy. They began pulling strings to remove Colonel Saulescu and his shocking womenfolk.

  The second high-level raid struck Brasov. The POW'S could see smoke rising from a target set aflame by two hundred bombers. As yet Ploesti had not been hit. However, when the sirens sounded there, the citizens of the shelterless city no longer yawned. Thousands of shrewd ones ran east to the Romana Americana refinery area, in the conceit that the American bombers would deliberately spare the U.S.-built plant.

  The spring thaw was working in the earth and escape weather was returning. Caminada, Johnson, Gukovsky and three Americans, including Lawrence Lancashire, holed the floor of the officers' hotel and started a short shaft under the wire. A Romanian sergeant unexpectedly walked in and caught Lancashire in the hole. The men were sent to Slobozia. There the prisoner in the next room was a Russian girl paratrooper named Antonina, who had just spent ten days stooped in the punishment box, where one could not sit or stand. Through the barbed wire on an adjoining veranda she relayed their messages to Russian officers in the cubicle on the other side of hers. The Russian men sent the Americans bits of food and tobacco by Antonina's hands. Two more Russian girl soldiers moved in with her and the Timisul men heard some sort of machine running in their cell. One morning the girls came out on the veranda transformed. Gone were their uniforms and boots. They had scrounged a sewing machine and cloth and made themselves pretty frocks.

  Early in May 1944 the long-awaited high-level offensive on Ploesti began, with 485 Liberators and Flying Fortresses smashing at the refineries and railway yards. It was well-executed bombing. Few civilians were harmed. Romanians took the Tidal Wave men back into favor. Nineteen U.S. bombers were shot down, but none of the parachutists were brought to Timisul. They were incarcerated in Bucharest.

  A few days afterward the Fifteenth Air Force went in force to Wiener Neustadt to bomb the Daimler-Messerschmitt factories. The lead Flying Fortress of the 97th Bomb Group took a direct flak hit over the target and exploded in the air. No parachutes were seen to open. The pilot was Colonel Jacob E. Smart, the principal planner of Tidal Wave. His loss was immediately classified top secret. In high Allied military circles it laid an icy finger on many hearts. Smart was privy to world-wide Allied strategy and capabilities, and he knew the biggest secret of the war -- that a nuclear chain reaction had been achieved and the Allies were building an atomic bomb.

  If Smart had somehow survived the mid-air explosion -- well, no sensible person undervalued the talking inducements of Gestapo torture. Washington made no public or private announcement that he was missing. A month later, in
an exchange of crippled prisoners of war, an American airman came home from Austria with grave news. He had seen Colonel Smart alive in a German hospital.

  In mid-May the Italian-based bombers hit Bucharest three times in one day. Soon they came to Ploesti again. The lead bombardier was Boyden Supiano, who had been wounded over the target on Tidal Wave. After the raid Colonel Saulescu shook hands with the Timisul men and gave them permission to walk outside the compound for an hour a day. It proved to be his last fraternization. He was replaced by a tough major named Matiescu, who put a stop to Saulescu's coddling policies.