Ploesti
Page 33
At Camp Choumen, in the wilds of Bulgaria, there were still 257 men who had fallen along the low road and the high to Ploesti. They lived in lice, mud, misery and abuse, licking their wounds, shut off from the jubilee at Bucharest. On the eighth of September Soviet planes flew over Bulgaria, dropping leaflets announcing that the Red Army was coming and calling upon Bulgarians to lay down arms and release prisoners of war. Within a day Julian Darlington, his nine Tidal Wave men and the rest were aboard a train for Turkey. Six weeks later they arrived in an Army transport ship at Newport News, Virginia.
The Ploesti men were the first of democracy's warriors to be redeemed en masse from world fascism, which lived briefly by killing forty million people.
The British Vanishers returned to England, where Edward Lancaster was discharged as medically unfit. Douglas Collins rejoined his regiment and led a platoon through the liberation of Belgium and Holland. He was in Germany again, with a machine gun in his hand, at the end of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.
As it fell, tanks of the U. S. Third Army liberated a prisoner-of-war camp at Moosberg, near Munich. A tall U.S. Air Force officer greeted the tankers with "Colonel Smart. Glad to see you." The planner of the low-level attack on Ploesti, the possessor of the atomic bomb secret, had survived nearly a year in Nazi hands.
The Allied chiefs, who had been living in dread that the secret had been tortured from Jacob Smart, brought him immediately to Washington to report on what had happened to him. "When my aircraft came apart in the air at Wiener Neustadt," he said, "I found myself falling among the debris. My parachute opened. I landed in a meadow and took cover in a woods. I had body and face wounds that were not serious, but they were painful, and I was losing considerable blood. I fell asleep and was awakened by soldiers out looking for prisoners.
"I was in German hospitals for two months, wearing my dog tags and insignia, and no doubt my right name on laundry marks. My co-pilot survived but died later. The tail gunner is still living. The tail snapped off in the explosion and he rode it to within a few hundred feet of the ground before bailing out. I was at Stalag Three in eastern Germany until the Russians came near it in January 1944. The Germans then marched us west and put us on a train for Moosberg, where I was liberated."
Smart had been delivered from German hands four months before the first atomic bomb was to fall on Hiroshima. Now, in Washington, he realized what the anxious audience of generals and colonels wanted to know. He concluded his report with it. He smiled and said, "At no time did the Germans ever question me about nuclear fission."
IN ORDER to bring you this magnificent book at its very
low price, it has been necessary to omit a complete roster of
the American airmen on Tidal Wave, a list of the Axis
combatants, and a partial roster of Halverson Project No. 63.
These may be found in the original edition, published by
Random House, Inc.
"TREMENDOUSLY EXCITING ... THE WILDEST
U.S. AIR RAID OF WORLD WAR II."
-- Life Magazine
--------------------------------------------------------
On August 1, 1943, 178 Liberators left Africa to bomb
Ploesti, the Rumanian oil refineries -- the "Taproot" of
German Might." The air armada carried 1,250,000 rounds
of tracers and 311 tons of bombs -- more fire power than
two Gettysburgs.
--------------------------------------------------------
The planes skimmed so low over the field that corn-
stalks stuck in their bom-bay doors. American gunners
shot it out point-blank with flak towers and "Q-trains,"
and pilots maneuvered crazily between the refineries'
smoke stacks. In this maddening holocaust of explosions
and death, five men won the Medal of Honor.
--------------------------------------------------------
"The story of one of the major war efforts, on of great
heroism and daring."
-- Christian Science Monitor
--------------------------------------------------------
"Compelling, controlled excitement."
-- New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------