Princess Caradja visited Timisul and was accosted by Sergeant Robert Locky, who, she said, was "a boy who could get anything out of me." Locky asked her for electrical wire, sockets and bulbs for a big camp show. "Copper wire is just about the last thing you can find in Romania," she told him, "but I'll try." Locky said, "If you have any old ladies' dresses lying around, we could use them to dress up in -- I mean for the show." She left in a pensive mood, suspecting he wanted the electrical gear to light a tunnel, and the dresses for getaway disguises. During her visits to the camp she had scrupulously avoided involvement in military matters. Antonescu's fascist crowd had indulged her as an anti-Soviet brainwasher, but if she were inculpated in an escape plot, the Iron Guard would surely try to hang her. Nonetheless, she scrounged the lighting equipment and rummaged in her attic for female costumes. She heaved open a mildewed trunk and gazed inside with a wicked grin. It contained camphored layers of ball gowns worn by her mother, Princess Irene Cantacuzene, at galas in Vienna and Budapest in the halcyon days of the Second Hapsburg Empire. Here were enough watered silks and lace, swags and bangles, bugle beads and boas for the camp show! Runaway G.I.'s scuttling cross-country in this fin-de-siécle attire would attract crowds in no time. She took the stuff to the camp. When Locky saw the lighting gear, he smiled covetously. "And now, dear boy," she said, "here are some perfectly marvelous costumes for your show." Locky's smile faded, and she knew they were tunneling.
It was no mean tunnel that Edward Lancaster had designed. It was an eighty-foot subway, to pass beyond the wire and under the adjacent highway. "It will certainly allow everyone involved to get quite clear of the camp," pronounced Collins. With the princess' lighting system and "air conditioning" -- forced ventilation devised by Larry Yates and James Barker -- eager shifts of sandhogs drove the tunnel forward. Collins, aching from his beatings, set pit props. "For me, time was of the essence," he said. "I was due to be sent to Slobozia any day. I wanted to look out of that magnificent tunnel, and felt absolutely confident that when I did I was going to make Turkey."
After weeks of digging around the clock, the miners struck water. They stopped up the irruption and started a detour six feet back. More maddening water came from the sky, heavy rains that caved in the tunnel, closing off thirty feet of it. The Romanians did not seem to notice the depression in the prison yard and the POW's started a new parallel shaft a few feet from the starting point. Lancaster. contracted blood poisoning from handling pit props and was taken to a Bucharest hospital, borne away from the major escape enterprise of his distinguished career.
Collins took over as construction superintendent. One day, while on watch at a barracks window, he noticed the Romanian guards rolling their eyes and pantomiming to each other. The moles in the tunnel were making too much noise and the guards were on to it. "The tunnel was hopeless now," said Collins, "but we couldn't resist milking it for laughs." The prisoners lined the windows and Collins sent men into the shaft to make noise. When the guards began their miming, the barracks exploded with laughter and catcalls. The game was broken up by the entrance of what looked like a Romaman cavalry regiment. Major Matiescu formed the POW's for a roll call and held them there while the cavalrymen shook down the camp and found the tunnel. Matiescu lined up the prime suspects, Douglas Collins at the head of the queue. "What do you know about the tunnel?" the Major asked. Collins said, "What tunnel, sir?" The Romanian said, "You know very well there is a tunnel under your barracks." Collins said, "Imagine that, sir! Did you keep prisoners here in the First World War?" Matiescu leaped up, kicked Collins, and stormed away. The commandant announced the punishment for the Timisul subway: the camp was to be liquidated and its inmates mixed in with the high-level captives in Bucharest, imperiled by their own bombs.
This gave Collins the idea for a fake escape. He and Limey Huntley took packs of food, climbed into the eaves of the barrack, and were boarded up. They planned to stay up there until the camp was evacuated and then move on. Garrett short-circuited the lights. The guards heard the dread hubbub of the traditional Timisul jail break. Matiescu threw his full force out to kill Collins on sight. Off-duty guards in their underwear came out firing at anything. Officers ran up bill and down dale, cursing, slapping and kicking their men. In the meantime a survey of the camp turned up no tunnel or breach in the wire. Matiescu pitted his fevered brain against the British Vanisher, searched the barrack three times, and finally spotted Huntley's coat showing through a crack in the boards.
Collins said, "Huntley, poor brave fighter, was first out. They smashed the hard-boiled eggs, our iron ration, on his head and rubbed them in his hair. They dragged him outside and beat him up. My turn came next. I got it badly and was knocked out. They shipped me to Slobozia that night."
The final raid on Ploesti was flown by 78 Wellingtons, Liberators and Halifaxes of the Royal Air Force on the night of 17-18 August 1944. Once again a dying bomber streaked across Princess Caradja's estate. In the glow of the burning targets she saw two parachutes coming down. One of the airmen was on fire. She ran toward him and found a middle-aged man, terribly burned. She drove him to a physician. On the way the airman held his peeling arms away from his body and blinded eyes and conversed calmly. He had three children and was trying to win the war. The doctor worked fifteen hours but could not save him. The princess buried him in the family cemetery next to the low-level gunner from Kentucky. *
* There the warriors of the first and last strikes on Ploesti lay until an Allied disinterment party sent them home. Coming upon the open graves, the Red Army laid two of its fallen in them, punched wooden stars into the mounds where crosses had once stood, and hurried on toward Berlin.
The aerial campaign at Ploesti and associated oil targets in Romania came to a close as the Red Army stormed west in an irruption of men and armor that flooded half the country in ten days.
At the end Gerstenberg's bill was 286 U.S. heavy bombers and 2,829 men killed or captured. The Royal Air Force lost 38 heavy bombers on 924 sorties at night. Thirty-six R.A.F. men were prisoners of war.
Bucharest trembled with fear and hope as the Red Army clanked toward the city in the summer heat.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
-- Thomas Hardy, "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' "
16 "LIBERATION, GLORY BE!" *
* Gertrude Stein.
In Bucharest, hidden arms passed out of Romanian Army hoards to patriots as the Army dissolved in apathy. Antonescu was out of touch with the front. He did not know that the Red Army had placed the same value on Bucharest as the Protector had -- not worth fighting for. Soviet tanks and motorized columns were bypassing the fieshpots of Bucharest on the south, keeping up momentum for a northern hook to cut off the German retreat through the mountain passes above Ploesti.
Russian detachments came sniffing into Bucharest and contacted liberal politicians who had escaped Iron Guard assassination. The Allied sympathizer, Queen Helen, encouraged her son to treat with the liberals. The king secretly appointed a new cabinet under General Senatescu and summoned Antonescu to the city palace on Place Roi Carol. The dictator left his befuddled G.H.Q. to attend what he expected would be a council of war. But the young king was alone, talked only of his stamp collection, and invited Antonescu into the large vault where he kept his specimens. Michael stepped out, shut the ponderous door, and locked his deposed Prime Minister in the vault.
Michael sent for Gerstenberg. The Protector knew what was up as soon as he saw that Antonescu was not present and that the king was surrounded by Romanian generals who he knew had been storing arms. The two parties reached a modus vivendi : in return for respecting Bucharest as an open city, the Romanians would permit Gerstenberg to remove his people, unmolested, through certain mountain passes, including the Predeal route past the Timisul POW camp. Michael accepted a Russian armistice offer and called on his subjects to receive th
e Red Army without hostility.
To Douglas Collins, just settling into his third term in the punishment camp at Slobozia, came "the moment I had waited on for four years!" The Romanian sergeant major who had brought him from Timisul opened the cell with a big smile, embraced Collins, and cried, "Comrade!" Collins said, "Comrade, indeed! Yesterday you were booting me in the guts." But he accepted the Romanian's offer to drive him back to Timisul.
The roads were choked with German convoys retreating to the north. The sight gave Collins "a childish feeling of elation I have not been able to match since." Sensible civilians kept to their shuttered houses in those chaotic days, but not Princess Caterina. She roared around the roads, hauling orphans out of harm's way, taking care to avoid Russians. On one of her journeys her car trunk was full of bundles of clothing she was distributing to the orphans. The clothing had been looted in the Ukraine and bore tags in Russian. Unexpectedly a Red Army officer popped out and halted her. He spoke the same fashionable English-inflected Romanian that she used. She thought he was probably a Romanian captive of the Russians who had defected to them. The officer instructed her chauffeur to drive to his command post and got into the car. At the command post a colonel came out beaming at the wonderful Plymouth. With him was a booted Red Army woman, fingering a lacy peignoir she wore over a grimy campaign uniform.
The colonel gestured for Caterina's party to come out. She yelled to the Romanian-speaking officer, "Tell him this car is used on vital social services!" The colonel reflected on the term, "social services," undecided what to do. He grinned and said, "We'll simply trade cars." He indicated a rusty 1926 Chrysler sitting in the courtyard. Caterina's chauffeur wailed, " That for my Plymouth!" The princess snapped "Get in," and her party piled into the wreck. She coolly opened the trunk of her car and threw the looted Russian clothing in to the orphans. She went to the glove compartment and palmed her papers. She was fishing in the trunk for an inner tube when the colonel noticed it and cuffed her across the face. With a wheedling smile, she said, "No harm in trying." The colonel clumped her on the back in a pally fashion, one looter to another.
The Chrysler had no starter. Caterina pantomimed, "Push" to the Russian onlookers. Still the motor would not fire. The colonel lent mechanical assistance with his prize trade-in and the Chrysler took off.
Down the road she came upon the rear of a plodding Russian supply column. "Bad news," she thought. "It means their armor is up ahead, nearing the orphanages and the American camp." The Red Army rear consisted of horse-drawn victorias and farm wagons laden with happy souls drinking brandy. Some wore opera hats. "Make this car sound like hell," she ordered her chauffeur. He did, without half trying, and holding their noses and gesturing toward their clattering car, they passed the supply train. The Russians laughed so hard they forgot to seize the Chrysler. She detoured the tank column on country lanes, beat it to a village of foster homes, and hid the girls in the woods. The princess pushed the old car up the pass for the Timisul camp.
She found the G.I.'s in full charge. Although the gates were open and the guards gone, Captain Taylor had decided to keep the POW's together until some reasonable move materialized. Two days before, a German armored train had enfiladed the camp while passing north. Perhaps there were men on the train who remembered a prisoner mocking them as they rode south in the days of their glory. No one was hit in the spiteful volley.
The princess told Taylor, "We've got to get you out before the Russians come." It is doubtful whether the Russians would have done worse than leave them with hangovers, but the POW's were restless. They scrounged seven farm trucks, covered themselves with blankets, and Romanians drove them west across forest tracks to a valley that Gerstenberg had agreed not to use for evacuation. In a downpour of rain they arrived in Pietrosita, a hamlet spared the cruelty of war, and were billeted in private homes, where they found refugee girls from Bucharest. Morale took a leap. They awakened to sunlight and joyful stirrings: a peace festival in the town park, to which they were conducted by smiling people. They sat down at tables with corn on the cob, roast meats, melons, milk, fresh loaves and kegs of wine. A year before they had fallen in Hitler's black harvest. Now the victory yield was in.
Maidens with whirling skirts danced the hora to strumming balalaikas and guitars. A fallen Sky Scorpion, Sergeant James Sedlak, took to the band pavilion with his trumpet and lined out a screaming chorus of "Flat-Foot Floogey." Village strings and faltering voices of youths who had heard the tune on the illegal radio took up the nonsense words of Pietrosita's liberation paean. Princess Caradja said, "Those boys had all the fun there is in this world." In the middle of it a bleak convoy of disarmed Germans passed through, clutching their ears.
Collins returned to Timisul and found the camp deserted. A peasant told him his friends were in Pietrosita. Collins joined them there. "Those were riotous days," said the escaper, "but Captain Taylor did not let it get out of hand. He was the kind of officer no one wanted to let down."
Into the victory gala came an old acquaintance, the bully, Major Matiescu, now a most humble and sincere friend of the Americans. Huntley and Collins started for the camp commandant to pay him back for the whippings he had given them. Captain Taylor said, "Hold on, you guys! Be sensible. You don't want to lower yourself to the level of a Romanian officer, do you?" Collins hesitated and said, "Limey, he's right. There's too much at stake here for petty revenge." Huntley said, "I'd like to take just one crack at him, but what the hell." They turned away from Matiescu.
In Bucharest, the American high-level officers were holding on in their compound. They had heard the news of the Romano-Russian armistice late at night, and awakened the Romanian commandant, their spokesman saying, "What happens now?" He replied angrily, "What is the meaning of this?" The American said, "Your outfit is out of the war. Kaputt." The commandant made a phone call. He dropped the phone in the cradle. Without further remark he belted on his dress sword over his pajamas, saluted them, and handed over the blade in ceremonial surrender.
Rifle shots were crackling outside the compound. The Romanians returned the Americans' side arms. A high-level captive, Lieutenant Martin Roth, said, "Well, I guess we're allowed to leave." Another said, "I don't want to mess in it. It's between the Romanians and the Germans." Most of the officers agreed they wanted no part of the shooting. Henry Lasco, the low-level pilot, was smoking a cigaret. His face wounds had healed, leaving an open hole in one cheek, and in order to take a puff, he had to plug the fistula with a finger tip. He said, "Well, speaking for myself, I'd like to take a crack at the krauts before it's over," and started for the gate. Roth said, "Hold on a minute, Hank. I'm going with you." The two-man patrol ventured into the dark, empty streets reverberating with spang of rifles, distant cries and pounding boots. The fusillades thickened and the airmen espaliered themselves against buildings, moving cautiously into this unfamiliar type of war. Hands came out of a doorway and hauled them in. The captors were Romanian patriots who embraced them and rained kisses on Lasco's shattered cheeks, crying, "The Americans are with us!" The Romano-American band went into the night to round up Germans. Lasco felt a knock on the head. He had walked into the boot of a German soldier hanged by the neck from a lamppost.
Toward morning they understood what was happening in Bucharest. Roth said, "There was a tight Romanian ring around the city. The Germans could not get through it. Outside the Romanians the Germans were milling around, trapped by the third ring -- a powerful Russian encirclement with big tanks. After two days Hank and I decided to let them settle it among themselves and went back to the compound."
General Gerstenberg was trapped in the double encirclement north of Bucharest, trying to remove some of his forces pinched between the Russians and Romanians. The last movement he was able to control was the evacuation of 1,200 Luftwaffe airwomen through the Russian ring. Their colonel was killed defending the rear of the female convoy. The Protector, who had placed such a high end-game value on Festung Ploesti , was unable to get into t
he city when the crisis came. The redoubt was now just another devastated place on the map, instead of the key defense of Südostraum. Gerstenberg's command was shattered. The Danubian plain was flooded with about 100,000 German troops in hopeless flight, paced by the fastest runners from the broken eastern front army. In addition, there was a fantastic rabble of German civilians crossing Romania, trying to bring home loot from farms they had been awarded in the Ukraine. Heinz Schultz was carting his farm implements in eight wagons drawn by sixteen oxen and sixteen horses, with twelve Ukrainian peasants aboard. He was threading through the battle lines on back roads and river fords. Other displaced German agriculturists plodded home with their plunder packed on Caucasian camels.
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