We practiced low-altitude formation until we almost got vertigo when we found ourselves flying above five hundred feet. It was usual to see a three-ship flight or a six-ship squadron of big Libs scudding over the flat desert land actually four or five feet from the ground. Of course the lowest ships of those formations were about four or five feet above the ground, and the highest were not over fifteen feet. I have seen three-ship flights approach our field so low they would have to pull up to get over a parked aircraft. Arab tents were knocked down in what some thought great sport. Two of the ships practicing for the mission actually hit the ground and got into the air again. They didn't make the raid because of buckled bulkheads and other damage they sustained from the collisions, but they got home okay.
This was the type of flying every hot pilot had dreamed of all his life, but it was the sort that had cost many hundreds of pilots’ lives in the States—pilots who were on their cross-country flights home and couldn't resist giving the home folks a show. Now it was legal and, of course, as such it wasn't quite as much fun; but it was still a thrill, because when you fly that low you get a sense of speed which you lose at a few hundred feet altitude. When you go 200 miles per hour at an altitude of eight feet, you really know you're going 200 miles per hour.
I heard that Colonel Ted Timberlake had spent months working our big mission down to the minutest detail. His ideas were joined with those of General Ent and many other bigwigs in on the general planning of it. Evidently, and from the piecemeal bits of information we got, it was going to be the most ornately planned thing of its kind ever done.
After we had practiced low-altitude formation for a long time in small three- and six-ship formations, we began to practice shifting from a group formation of thirty ships or more to break up into sixes and later into flights of three, so as to pass over a given point in a matter of seconds. We would get considerable altitude and at a given signal would pull off a lot of power and start getting down as quickly as possible, still maintaining a sort of formation and yet splitting up into these smaller units. After going over the designated point we would practice reassembly in the quickest manner possible.
Finally, in the last stages a series of squares were drawn in the sand of the flat desert. They were of the exact shape and dimensions in width and length of the targets we were to hit. We practiced coming in one flight after another, the first flight making a run straight over, the second coming in from the left, the third straight over, the fourth in from the right, the fifth straight over, and so on. It was a precise pattern and required precise flying. We tried to clip as many seconds as possible from the lapse of time between the bomb run of the first flight and the runs of the flights succeeding. We wanted to take only enough time to insure each flight unobstructed bombing. Towards the end of our training our ships were equipped with a new type of bombsight. Sighting for this kind of low-altitude bombing was extremely simple. We were not planning to carry our complicated Norden sights, which were primarily high-altitude instruments. Furthermore, a major came in to demonstrate what could be done with this low-altitude sight.
We erected a target consisting of a wooden frame standing vertically about twenty feet square. From the top of it we hung strips of cloth, and across the bottom we placed empty gasoline cans. These were to give better reference as to where the bomb went. We set up a two-way radio at the target to control the approach of aircraft and give us two-way communication with bombers on the target. The major would fly his ship over loaded with hundred pound practice bombs, and call out to us: “This time I'll put one right through the middle.” He would fly at an altitude which would permit clearance of the wooden frame by about five feet, and he would do exactly what he said. He would put his bomb right through the middle of the target. The next time he would announce that the bomb would drop twenty feet short and skip through the target. Sure enough, the bomb would hit twenty or twenty-five feet short and skip right through the center of the frame. The third time he went over he said he would knock out one of the middle gasoline cans standing in the row across the bottom of the frame. This, too, he did, and thus we were completely sold on the accuracy of this new method.
We worked hard perfecting the technique. And then about four or five days before the great day, the officers were called in. We were told officially for the first time that we were going on a long, low-level attack on the Romanian oil fields and were given to understand that this raid was considered of greatest strategic import to the future conduct of the war. It was said we must expect extremely heavy losses, but if we were successful we might take consolation from the fact that our losses would be given in a great cause. If we should fail, many thousands might die who otherwise would live. However, if we were successful we would cripple Germany's oil production sufficiently to require a general rearrangement of the Nazi plan of war.
We knew no matter how successful we were we could not destroy the oil fields. But we believed if we did a good job we could cut down the output of the refineries 50 or 75 percent. Our aim would be to knock out the refineries as effectively as possible, realizing if we did it right it would be a matter of months before they got going again. By that time, who knows? We might be able to hit them from bases much closer with much greater tonnages and at high altitude. That would mean lighter losses that could be sustained in repeated raids.
A day or two after the first, sketchy information came out we were all called in for a more extensive briefing. This time the briefing included everyone who would participate. We were shown movies of how our run into the target would look. There were a couple of British Intelligence men who were authorities on the oil fields to answer questions. One had lived in the Ploesti region a good part of his life. He brought a relief miniature of the town near our target and the Steaua Romana refinery, which was to be the aiming point of our group. The model was so perfect that he could even point out to us a house where he used to live.
Very soon the eve of the big raid was upon us. Special services were held, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. Father Beck gathered his flock of Catholics to give them the comfort our Protestant chaplain was giving us, and a rabbi gave his.
Paul Burton was the only squadron commander who was not flying the mission. Instead Colonel Wood would ride with Captain Caldwell, Paul's prize first pilot, and John Brooks. It was decided to carry as little extra ballast as possible, and unless an officer had a definite mission to fulfill he was not supposed to go. Del Cross planned to lead his squadron, Hank Yaeger was going to lead his, and, of course, I would lead mine.
Before I went to bed that night I took a piece of masking tape and secured a hacksaw blade to the bottom of my right foot. The tape was just about skin color. I felt if I were shot down I might be carefully searched. My clothes would probably be gone over, but one way or another I could so divert the attention of my captors that the hacksaw blade would escape notice.
I had decided that if captured I would try to escape and make my way across the mountains to the west of the oil fields, across the Danube and into Yugoslavia. I had instructed some Yugoslavs in Tucson, Arizona, in flying B-24s. I had picked up a few words of the language and I also remembered some of their names. I thought that with luck I could make Yugoslavia, where I would join Tito's forces and continue to fight with the guerrillas. I packed a musette bag with many things, including two clean suits of underwear, chewing gum, cigarettes, and many other odds and ends. I didn't smoke, but I thought the cigarettes might be good for bartering.
Hank Yaeger packed his Air Corps type B-4 bag—a large affair that would carry enough stuff to keep him well furnished for a month or so. He and Del and I had talked the situation over many times and had agreed that if we were so badly shot up we couldn't get home we would not parachute out of our airplanes. We would try to crash land them in some isolated spot where we would be unlikely to be found for a few hours. This would enable the crew to take many items to assist an escape. It was a common comment in the group afterwards that all
the combat crew members had so many compasses concealed on them “the only way they could walk was north.”
On that night before the raid I was certain the next night would see parts of Romania overrun by American fliers. I had commented that if enough of us were shot down all we would have to do would be to call a general election, vote the old government out, vote ourselves in, make a quick peace with the Allies, and the war would be over in Romania. At any rate, I had the feeling that there was more than a fifty-fifty chance I would be shot down. That feeling was parent to what might be called a sense of exhilaration about how I was going to make my escape. I had spent weeks planning it. I had conditioned my mind completely to the trials of such an eventuality, and I had confidence in my ability to come through it.
That night before I retired I wrote a long letter to Anne. I went to bed not as early as I would have liked to, but as early as I could in view of all my packing and preparations. Hank was outside the tent sitting in the dark in a jeep talking with Paul. Del was asleep. While it was still dark the racket of all the alarms going off woke us. Men in jeeps tore around from tent to tent blowing horns. “Get up, get up, you guys! This is the day. Get up! Roll out of those sacks!”
This was it. My stomach felt a little sinky and shaky, possibly because I hadn't had a chance to put any coffee in it. We ate hurriedly, though quietly, then walked to the briefing room for last-minute instructions. Weather might be a little bad, we were told; but we would go anyway, and we would get there, and we would destroy our target. Nothing was said about getting home. When the general briefing was over I told all the boys of my squadron I wanted to see them outside. I saw my men gathering in a little knot by the briefing room door. There was Fowble, pale as a ghost. He had been in the hospital with dysentery and had been let out a day early at his own insistence so he could go on the raid. Others had been ill, but not a man would sell his chance to make this mission for anything.
“Fellows,” I said, “today is the great day. If our hearts are in this war, this is the time to pay off. Last night I said a prayer for myself and in it I included a word for all of you, my good men and great friends. I would like to be able to tell you all how deeply my feelings will be tied up today in the welfare of each of you. I can't. Good luck. Let us say we'll see each other here tonight.”
We went to our ships and fired up engines. Flames blasted from exhaust stacks and dust flew in clouds around our propellers as the first rays of dawn crept over the edge of the desert. And soon we were winging our way across the Mediterranean. Just off the coast of Greece, over the Adriatic, I saw a smoking oil fire in the sea. Obviously a plane had gone down burning. We learned later it was the lead aircraft of one of the groups ahead. We took pictures, commented, and flew on. Across Yugoslavia we went, and on to the wide, blue Danube River. There we saw a tremendous amount of river traffic. Barges were lined up side by side six deep in some places. Some of the boys reported seeing a nude bathing beauty in the Danube.
As we went farther and farther on I felt it necessary to go to the flight deck, the little room just behind the pilot-copilot compartment, to use the relief tube. Good old Ed Fowble had warned me that the thing wasn't working right. Sometimes it caused a smear to come over the glass of the tail gunner's turret. The outlet was somewhere near the tail of the ship. I decided circumstances demanded that I give it a try. As soon as I started Ed, who was standing by on interphone, broke out in a laugh. “You'll have to hold up. Tail gunner wants to know who the louse is smearing up his turret. He's swearing like a trooper.” I held up only long enough to discover a stack of Dixie cups on the radio operator's table. With the lever in the bomb bay I cracked open the bomb bay doors a little way and sat on the floor of the flight deck dropping out several full Dixie cups and chuckling to myself about the tail gunner.
I got back in the copilot's seat as we went on across Romania. The weather was getting worse. We couldn't maintain our formation at the altitude we were flying because of increased amounts of cloud, and so we began to let down under it. Until we struck the darkening skies over Romania we had been able to keep in sight of two of the other groups. When we got under the stuff we appeared to be completely alone. On we flew over rough terrain, trying as well as we could to follow out our flight plan.
Finally we turned down a valley between two steep ridges of mountains. We were supposed to make a run down a valley to the little town of Campina, north of the town of Ploesti. Steaua Romana, the most modern refinery in all Romania, lay on the edge of Campina in the Ploesti region. As soon as we turned down the valley I got a call from Lieutenant Solomon, the navigator. Sollie's voice was the voice of calm as he said over the interphone, “They've turned too soon. We are not in the right valley.” He was an excellent navigator and his calmness on that harrowing day is something I'll not forget.
Sure enough, after we had flown about twenty minutes on the wrong heading we got a call from the lead ship indicating they had located their error and were turning north again to resume the proper course. One of the factors that we were briefed on as a most hopeful aspect of the mission was that we might take the enemy defenses of the oil fields by surprise. Now we realized that asset was spent. We must have been picked up by enemy radar, and we knew that after all this milling around we would meet enemy defenses fully alerted to our presence.
We turned south again. This time we were going down the right valley. My squadron was to be the second over the target. Ahead of the lead element of my squadron—that is, the three ships in my immediate formation—were six airplanes. We saw them spacing themselves the way they had been briefed. We slowed up. The first three ships headed straight down the valley, letting down fast to hit the deck as quickly as possible. The second element of three turned to the left for a few seconds and then turned back to the right to come in from the briefed angle. We spaced ourselves for a straight-in run over the same course as the first three ships. The bombs we carried were fused to allow sufficient delay so that all our ships could get over the target before the first bombs began blowing up. They were also fused so that if any rescue crews tried to enter the refinery after they were dropped and remove the fuses, they would blow up at once. This would, of course, prevent successful rescue work.
We were very close behind the second flight of three ships. As their bombs were dropping we were on our run in. There in the center of the target was the big boiler house, just as in the pictures we had seen. As the first ships approached the target we could see them flying through a mass of ground fire. It was mostly coming from ground-placed 20 mm. automatic weapons, and it was as thick as hail. The first ships dropped their bombs squarely on the boiler house and immediately a series of explosions took place. They weren't the explosions of thousand pound bombs, but of boilers blowing up and fires of split-open firebanks touching off the volatile gases of the cracking plant. Bits of the roof of the house blew up, lifting to a level above the height of the chimneys, and the flames leaped high after the debris. The second three ships went over coming in from the left, and dropped partly on the boiler house and partly on the cracking plant beyond. More explosions and higher flames. Already the fires were leaping higher than the level of our approach. We had gauged ourselves to clear the tallest chimney in the plant by a few feet. Now there was a mass of flame and black smoke reaching much higher, and there were intermittent explosions lighting up the black pall.
Phifer, the bombardier, said over the interphone, “Those damn bombs are going off. They ain't supposed to do that.”
“That ain't the bombs,” I answered, “that's the gas they're cookin’ with.”
We found ourselves at that moment running a gauntlet of tracers and cannon fire of all types that made me despair of ever covering those last few hundred yards to the point where we could let the bombs go. The antiaircraft defenses were literally throwing up a curtain of steel. From the target grew the column of flames, smoke, and explosions, and we were headed straight into it.
Suddenly Sergean
t Wells, our small, childlike radio operator who was in the waist compartment for the moment with a camera, called out, “Lieutenant Hughes's ship is leaking gas. He's been hit hard in his left wing fuel section.”
I had noticed it just about that moment. I was tired of looking out the front at those German guns firing at us. I looked out to the right for a moment and saw a sheet of raw gasoline trailing Pete's left wing. He stuck right in formation with us. He must have known he was hard hit because the gas was coming out in such volume that it blinded the waist gunners in his ship from our view. Poor Pete! Fine religious, conscientious boy with a young wife waiting for him back in Texas. He was holding his ship in formation to drop his bombs on the target, knowing if he didn't pull up he would have to fly through a solid room of fire with a tremendous stream of gasoline gushing from his ship. I flicked the switch intermittently to fire the remote-control, fixed fifty caliber machine guns specially installed for my use. I watched my tracers dig the ground. Poor Pete. How I wished he'd pull up a few hundred feet and drop from a higher altitude.
As we were going into the furnace, I said a quick prayer. During those moments I didn't think that I could possibly come out alive, and I knew Pete couldn't. Bombs were away. Everything was black for a few seconds. We must have cleared the chimneys by inches. We must have, for we kept flying—and as we passed over the boiler house another explosion kicked our tail high and our nose down. Fowble pulled back on the wheel and the Lib leveled out, almost clipping the tops off houses. We were through the impenetrable wall, but what of Pete? I looked out right. Still he was there in close formation, but he was on fire all around his left wing where it joined the fuselage.
I could feel tears come into my eyes and my throat clog up. Then I saw Pete pull up and out of formation. His bombs were laid squarely on the target along with ours. With his mission accomplished, he was making a valiant attempt to kill his excess speed and set the ship down in a little river valley south of the town before the whole business blew up. He was going about 210 miles per hour and had to slow up to about 110 to get the ship down. He was gliding without power, as it seemed, slowing up and pulling off to the right in the direction of a moderately flat valley. Pete was fighting now to save himself and his men. He was too low for any of them to jump and there was not time for the airplane to climb to a sufficient altitude to permit a chute to open. The lives of the crew were in their pilot's hands, and he gave it everything he had.
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