Ploesti

by Dugan; Stewart

  Flak man Werner Horn said, "With the Russians moving in, our fate was sealed. We had no equipment to defend ourselves against tanks." The last hopes of Gerstenberg's people touched the extremes of illusion. "We expected American airborne troops to occupy Romania," said Horn, "rather than relinquish her to the Russians. But nothing happened. Thus came the inglorious end of the German Air Force in Romania. We went into Russian captivity."

  Even in the Oberkommando in Berlin it was now evident that both the eastern and western fronts were broken and Bucharest and Paris were being delivered. Hitler reacted in perfect Hitlerian form. He ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb both disloyal capitals. His commanding air generals in Bucharest and Paris, Alfred Gerstenberg and Otto Dessloch, were old comrades from World War I days. Dessloch had taken over in Paris only a few days before, direct from a post with Gerstenberg as commander of Air Fleet four, Balkans. Looking at Hitler's wanton order, Dessloch faced the moral crisis of his career. He told Berlin he did not have the planes to bomb Paris. This statement was substantially true after the massive destruction of the Luftwaffe in France since D-day. Hitler's order was obeyed, however, by a Luftwaffe general in eastern France who sent planes that set fire to wine storehouses in the Paris produce market, Las Halles.

  In Romania, nobody could find Alfred Gerstenberg to deliver the order to bomb Bucharest. The phones rang in his empty H.Q. at Pepira. Signals went to the fighter control center at Otopenii. There was no acknowledgment. Several days before, a Romanian partisan band had taken Gerstenberg in his last post in the field and was holding him and his staff to hand over to the Russians.

  Hitler's order to bomb Bucharest was heard by Luftwaffe officers still left on the bases at Mizil and Zilistea, in the northeast sector, out of the path of the Soviet advance. They had about thirty Junkers 88's and Stuka dive bombers. Without hesitation the new German pilots flew to punish defenseless Bucharest.

  At Pepira, the Romanian pilots refused to fly, either to bomb or defend their capital, and that was the end of the playboys of the Royal Romanian Air Force. The bombing of the open city began. A few Romanian flak crews resisted it with light guns.

  The bombing turned the precarious German situation into a complete debacle. The nation rose against the Germans. King Michael declared war on Hitler immediately. A handful of Romanian pilots took to the air and fought the Luftwaffe. Romanians captured heavier flak guns and turned them on the bombers. But explosives continued to fall on Bucharest. An American POW was killed when he ran from a shelter to the hospital to rescue a Romanian nurse. The bombers flattened the POW compound and started on the hospital. A Ju-88 hit a prosthetics shop and destroyed an articulated wooden leg that was being made for John Palm. The Texan filled his old hollow leg with mementos of his halcyon days, including a small pistol. A Bucharest heiress importuned him to store her jewels in his leg, but, upon reflection, Palm declined.

  A Stuka hit the POW hospital and the ceiling fell on Francis Doll. He dragged himself out and helped carry wounded through the empty streets to a new shelter. As the Germans buzzed overhead, he and a buddy decided to leave Bucharest. On the edge of the city two girls took them home, fed them, and let the grimy sergeants wash up. Another raid alert sounded. A mile out of town a woman advised them to go no farther. There was a German machine gunner around the next corner. A man across the street hurled a grenade at them. Doll and his friend ran away from the burst and were not hit. They entered a Romanian garrison, where the guards gave them helmets and guns, and introduced them to an old man who had a son in America. He took the sergeants into his home and his neighbors came with gifts of food and wine and patted them on the back.

  Up in the mountain, out of the war, the low-level men still frolicked in Pietrosita. Robert Johnson, the veterinarian, left the village, and Collins, Caminada and Gukovsky, the Palestinian parachutist, asked Captain Taylor's permission to depart for Bucharest. The American commander said he had no objection but intended to keep his own men in Pietrosita until he could safely move them. A chauffeur-driven limousine arrived in the village and out stepped Johnson. He had liberated Antonescu's car and driver. He took the British party in style to Bucharest, where the Swiss consul, in charge of United Kingdom affairs, put them up in suites in the Hotel Ambassador, recently vacated by the German general staff.

  Collins took a stroll, curbing an impulse to start running when he saw policemen. He encountered Lancaster in the street and the comrades yelled for joy. Lancaster said, "Let's make for Constanta and take a ship for Turkey." He couldn't quit escaping. Collins said, "I think we ought to sit tight and see what happens here." His partner agreed.

  A day or so later, after the bombing had ceased, Captain Taylor brought the low-level men to Bucharest. He and Top Sergeant Edmond Terry were appalled to find wounded Americans lying around the city, uncared for. The bombing had killed five POW's. Four others died when a German stepped into a restaurant with a machine gun and cut down the diners. Dozens had been wounded in the Luftwaffe attacks and there were dozens more with untended wounds from the final air battles at Ploesti. Terry took a gang of POW's to the bombed hospital and cleaned up several wards. He collected a hundred wounded men and started looking after them. But since the departure of the Romanian jailers there was no money for food or medication. Terry asked John Palm to raise some money. The pilot of Brewery Wagon stumped away and applied to one of his useful acquaintances, Arieh Fichman, another Palestinian agent who had been parachuted into Romania by British Intelligence. Fichman was carrying a fortune in operational funds. He peeled off several million lei for the starving Americans.

  Francis Doll drifted back from his refuge on the outskirts of town and reported to his favorite topkick. Terry handed him a stack of lei and told him he was the hospital cook. Doll's first menu consisted of roast beef and gravy, mashed potatoes, milk, coffee, apples, cakes and all the beer they could drink.

  The senior U.S. prisoner of war was Lieutenant Colonel James A. Gunn (not related to Captain James A. Gunn III, lost on the low-level mission), who had been shot down on one of the last American raids. With some of his men dead and others dying, Gunn undertook to save the rest. He got permission from the new Romanian government to radio the 15th Air Force in Italy about the plight of the 1,274 American and Allied personnel trapped in Bucharest. The 15th did not want to discuss it on the open radio and requested Gunn to report personally to Italy. He borrowed an ancient Savoia-Marchetti, was checked out briefly on the Italian instrument panel, and took off. The plane was incapable of the long flight and Gunn was forced to return. Princess Caradja's cousin, a big, resourceful pilot, Captain Constantine Cantacuzene, volunteered to fly Gunn to Foggia in an Me-109 single-seater. This entailed painting an American flag on the craft, folding the lanky colonel into the empty radio compartment, and screwing the entry panel shut on him.

  Cantacuzene alighted at Foggia and announced, "I have somebody here you will be pleased to see." He removed the panel and a soldier said, "Get a load of those G.I. boots," as Gunn uncoiled from his cramped nest.

  The Fifteenth Air Force sent a fighter reconnaissance to Bucharest to determine if Popestii airport was safe for aerial evacuation of the POW's. Cantacuzene led the flight in a Mustang, a machine he had recently opposed in the air but had never piloted. The scouts reported that the airport seemed secure, although there were German machines still in the air.

  A flight of Fortresses went to Bucharest with a liaison party, including medical officers, to round up the men and prepare history's first large-scale air evacuation from a point 550 miles inside enemy lines. At Foggia, ground crews fitted fifty Fortresses with bomb-bay seats and litters in the fuselage to accommodate twenty men in each ship. Many of the mechanics had sat out long nights waiting for men who did not return; now they cried and cursed with joy and fatigue as they rigged the bombers for deliverance instead of death.

  A special B-17 flew to Bucharest with an Office of Strategic Services party to pick up German records and survey damage to the
Ploesti refineries. It was led by Sergeant Philip Coombs, a former economics professor, who brought a ton of C-rations to see his people through the hardships of the field. At the Bucharest airport Coombs was surprised to find another O.S.S. man, a Washington journalist named Beverly Bowie, in a U.S. Navy uniform. Bowie had hitchhiked from Italy some days earlier. He ushered Coombs's people into a fleet of Buicks and Packards given to him by Romanians who wished to keep them from the Germans and Russians. Bowie howled when he saw Coombs's field rations. He took them to lunch in an outdoor restaurant called Mon Jardin, where the buffet consisted of pâté de foie gras, Black Sea caviar, roasts of beef, ham and goose, a six-foot sturgeon and pheasants in paper pantaloons. As the waiter captain uncorked a magnum of champagne, Bowie said, "Welcome to operation bughouse."

  Bowie was sitting in by invitation on Liberation cabinet sessions. He explained to Coombs, "Before they vote on anything, they ask me what I think. I go into a trance and figure out what Franklin D. Roosevelt would do, then give 'em the answer. They pass all my laws unanimously. I never thought running a country was so easy."

  Bowie drove the field team to the Hotel Athenée Palace, in front of which a Red Army band was playing. A haggard youth in rags came through the crowd, calling, "Professor Coombs! Don't you remember me? Irving Fish? I took Economics One under you at Williams." Coombs took his former pupil, a high-level POW, into the hotel for a square meal. The O.S.S. men drove to Ploesti. Along the road they came upon an emergency hospital full of airmen shot down on the last raids. The place stank of gangrene. The Romanian physician in charge said, "We can do nothing. We have heard of penicillin, but we haven't got any." The O.S.S. radioman cranked out a message to Italy, and a B-17 took off with drugs and doctors.

  Coombs's party found Ploesti seemingly in utter ruin. However, during three days of detailed inspection and interviews, they found that the remains of five plants, linked by Gerstenberg's pipeline web, were still producing 20 percent of capacity. This was the residuum of the resistance put up by the defensive genius, Alfred Gerstenberg, against 23 heavy bombing raids, totaling 9,173 individual bomber and fighter sorties, which had dropped 13,709 tons of explosives.

  The statistic is Gerstenberg's only note in the official military history of World War II. By then the Protector was in O.G.P.U. H.Q., Moscow, chatting with secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, who passed on praises of Gerstenberg from Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, who had been his commander at the clandestine German air school in the U.S.S.R. fifteen years ealier. Beria promised to use Gerstenberg again. Instead, the Protector was sent to Lefort Prison to solitary confinement for two years. He was to be in Soviet prisons for twelve years.

  In Bucharest, Coombs's O.S.S. men found Gerstenberg's H.Q. untouched. They sent two tons of his archives by air to Italy, and began looking for the German espionage center for southeast Europe, which Coombs had reason to believe was loacted in Bucharest. He could not find any live Germans to help him, but he heard there were two dead ones in the German Embassy. The Nazi ambassador, Baron von Buch-Killinger, who had purchased Antonescu to begin the tragedy of Romania, and his counselor had committed suicide. Coombs thought there might be some living Germans in the building, which was guarded by Red Army men.

  Coombs procured a hearse and two pick-up coffins. In one he placed O.S.S. man Fred Burkhart, a philosophy professor in civilian life, who spoke German. Coombs figured to get the hearse down a basement ramp entry to the embassy on the pretext of removing the corpses, and smuggle out a live German and Professor Burkhart in the boxes. Coombs drove circumspectly behind the hearse. As it turned into the ramp, a Red Army officer halted it. The driver explained his mission in Romanian, which the Russian did not understand. Coombs showed himself in U.S. uniform and tried English, but the Russian could not understand that either. The lid of the pick-up coffin opened and Professor Burkhart joined the argument in German. A second Red Army officer approached and said in English, "What is it you wish?" Coombs said, "We have come to pick up the bodies of the ambassador and the counselor." The Russian said, "There are no Germans here, living or dead. We took them all away yesterday." Coombs drew himself up and said sternly, "Don't you know that it is a violation of international law to seize an embassy?" The Russian apotogetically replied, "We only came for our furniture." Coombs began to understand why Bowie had called it operation bughouse. The Russian explained, "You see, when Germany attacked us in 1941, Buch-Killinger looted our furniture from the Soviet Embassy here. We are only making an inventory to get our state property back."

  Coombs found the German espionage center through a tip by a Romanian: "Why not look in at von Schenker?" The O.S.S. man said, "What's that?" The informant said, "A German travel agency, the largest in the world, bigger than Cook's or the American Express." In von Schenker's Bucharest office Coombs found business going on as usual, as though German tourists were still visiting the Acropolis and booking freight home from the Ukraine. Von Schenker's was the spy center. A week after Bucharest was in Allied hands, the clerks of the German espionage apparatus continued to process reports.

  From the high-level POW's, Coombs picked a German-speaking Jewish sergeant and put him in charge at von Schenker's to sift its files for important papers. The German clerks worked industriously for the new management and completed the research in three days. The sergeant brought Coombs the gem of finds: the paybook of Nazi secret agents in southeast Europe, giving their real names and addresses.

  Coombs and the spy archives were flown to Washington, where General Arnold personally congratulated the sergeant. Afterward Coombs lunched at the Cosmos Club with President James Baxter of Williams College, where he had been an instructor. Hearing the tale of Ploesti, Dr. Baxter said, "Our alumnus, Irv Fish, lost his son there." Coombs said, "Irving Fish, Junior? He's alive! I saw him in Bucharest." Baxter hastened to phone the father.

  In the Romanian capital, young Fish and more than a thousand other Allied airmen, many of whose kin did not know they were alive, were drifting around the streets. In the midst of a monstrous war, they were free far inside hostile territory, enjoying the fulsome hospitality of a nation that had been their enemy the day before. Douglas Collins noted "small bands of Romanian communists trudging through the streets with banners proclaiming that the millennium had arrived, but there were more Americans than Russians to puzzle over the slogans." Collins ran into a few Royal Air Force men. Waiting, the occupational disease of soldiering, settled on them all.

  In Italy, the Fifteenth Air Force was now ready for the risky airlift of the POW's from Romania. It would be a 1,100-mile round trip by Fortresses virtually stripped of arms to make room for men. About 1,500 airmen, including the B-17 crews, would be in the air -- a tempting target for German fighters, of which quite a few were still operating. The rescue force, therefore, could not broadcast any formal order to the POW's that might be intercepted by the enemy. A courier went to Bucharest and started the news by word of mouth among the POW's. Collins was approached in the street by an American he had never seen before who muttered, "Tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock at the airport. We're all getting out of this sonofabitching country."

  Next morning at Popestii airport the liberated men stood around the perimeter in groups of twenty to board the planes quickly during the short turnaround. The British Vanishers arrived promptly at the rendezvous of their last escape. They, who had marveled at American military costume when they first saw it a year before, now descried it in the bloom of victory. The airmen were attired in rags and grimy bandages, wearing German helmets and Russian caps and sagging under the weight of wine bottles, captured dress swords, riding crops, balalaikas and cabinet photos of Romanian beauties. Some had sewn upon their tatters the large, resplendent insignia of the Royal Romanian Air Force and Parachute Corps. The better-dressed element sported Army pants newly distributed by the Red Cross. All the trousers in the shipment were size 40, and not one of the emaciated men could fill such a waistband. They had gathered them at the waist in pleat
s reaching the knee, and, to mock the current "zoot-suit" style of boys at home, had draped their identity necklaces across the belly like the watch chains the zoots wore there.

  John Palm was there, stumping around on his loaded artificial leg, exchanging adieux with sobbing lady friends. Fichman, the rich Palestinian parachutist, tapped him on the back and asked for the balance of the emergency fund he had lent the Americans. Palm returned a wad of lei and the Palestinian and the Texan, on behalf of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of the Treasury, traded penciled receipts to square Anglo-American joint accounts for Romania.

  It was a sultry morning on the Wallachian plain. Collins and Lancaster took shade under the wing of an old Heinkel, lay down, and dozed. At noon they were awakened by a "royal buzz" of P-51's, which swept up high and circled to cover the B-17 landings. The first two Fortresses rolled up to Collins, Lancaster, Caminada, Gukovsky, Johnson, Admiral Doorman, Baron van Lyndon, and 36 men of 205 Group, Royal Air Force. "We took off and circled," said Collins, "waited for the others to come into formation, and then we headed west, over the Danube that had beaten us, and over Yugoslavia where we had not been able to find Tito. Never had we dreamed of such an end to our efforts to escape from Europe."