Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (11 page)

 

 

Geerlings said, "Jake Smart was the unfailing sparkplug who kept
the operation from bogging down." A week before the mission a wave
of amoebic dysentery hit the bases and Smart was among those ordered
to bed. Geerlings dropped in to see Smart, "not daring to tell him how
badly he was needed at headquarters. There was a growing pessimism at all
levels." Fliers near Smart in the infirmary tent "rather hoped they would
not be restored to active duty for the raid," Geerlings noted. After
several days Smart staggered to his feet and drove around among the
groups, rebuilding confidence.

 

 

Trucks carted the relief models of the target around the bases for the air
crews to study. The smallest-scale relief -- the general target area --
portrayed the Alpine valleys above Ploesti with a vertical exaggeration of
five times. The fliers lingered gloomily over the model, wondering what
would happen to a tight, low formation tossing in the tricky drafts of
these deep defiles. "No amount of explanation that the actual ravines
were relatively shallow would satisfy them," said Geerlings. The men
examined the miniature of the entire refinery complex and models of
each refinery, which were in true scale, and glanced back at the steep
canyons. All would have to fly contours over them, and the Sky Scorpions
were to go farthest into them and attack down one of the draws to hit
Red Target at Câmpina. However, few combat men anticipated what could
endanger them atop the targets. Intelligence said nothing about fire
hazards to the Liberators from bombs and bullets ripping into storage
tanks of volatile fuels. One pilot predicted, "It'll be like looking
for a gas leak with a lighted match."

 

 

Four days before Tidal Wave the U.S.A.A.F. captured a Romanian pilot,
Lieutenant Nicolai Feodor, who said Ploesti "was the most heavily
defended target in Europe." There was no way to check this alarming
assertion. The mimeograph machines were rolling out Intelligence estimates
that "The heavy guns would be unable to direct accurate fire at low-flying
formations because of their inability to follow fast-moving targets. The
results would be nil. The target has been unmolested for years and is
not expected to be alert."

 

 

Squadron operations officers searched files and faces to find men to fill
out the combat crews. Walter T. Holmes, who had completed his own ordained
missions, was the operations man in an Eight Ball squadron. Hating to do
it, he called in pilot Robert Lehnhausen, who was not yet recovered from
his crash in the sea. Lehnhausen said, "I have no desire to fly a mission,
but will if I am ordered to go." Holmes, a shy man, mumbled something
which the pilot construed as a direct order: "Okay, Bob," said Holmes,
"check yourself into the green hut." Holmes had already been in the hut
and felt sorry for the men he had to send there. He did not know that
on the eve of the raid he would look over his crew lists, find nobody to
pilot a first wave ship on Blue Target, and would write in his own name.

 

 

Lehnhausen joined the crowd in the green hut and looked at the exhibits.
"Ploesti?" he asked himself. "Where have I heard of that before?" The
occasion came back to him in a seizure of trepidation: in the hospital
at Malta three weeks before, an American colonel coming to his bed
and saying, "Did you people come out here to bomb Ploesti?" Lehnhausen
wondered how many other outsiders knew the objective. "Does the enemy
know it too?" The pilot left the hut, keeping "the feeling of horror"
to himself, not wishing to alarm the others.

 

 

 

 

On this day in the enemy camp General Gerstenberg also received bad
news. A terrible thing had happened in Germany. He went to the railway
station to bid goodbye to one of his two precious 500-man regiments
of fire police. They had been ordered to Hamburg to fight the fire
typhoon which took 60,000 lives in three nights. The cataclysm
began with one secret weapon and ended with another. On 25 July the
R.A.F. reached Hamburg, almost unopposed, by dropping a blizzard of
metalized paper strips to craze the German radar. The bombers dropped
the new RDX-2 blast bomb, whose monstrous explosion raised a tornadic
updraft that sucked in ground air in a fiery tempest that seethed
through whole blocks of buildings. It carried flaming trees torn out
of the ground by the roots. The survivors said it was "beyond all human
imagination." Gerstenberg's people wondered whether the new weapon was
coming to Ploesti. Quite the contrary was true: the Americans had only
general-purpose bombs, and recent tests on a U.S. proving ground had
determined the dismaying fact that 50 percent of the 1,000-pound bombs
failed to detonate and a quarter of the 500-pounders did not go off.

 

 

Tidal Wave labored under another severe handicap. Normally the Liberator's
Pratt & Whitney engines had a life of 300 hours. However, in the desert
grit they were good for only 60 hours. Sam Nero had hundreds of "Pratt &
Wog" engines on his hands -- tired mechanisms that had been repaired all
too often in the desert. The minimum 2,300-mile trip to Ploesti required
new-engine performance. Nero called for 300 engines from the States,
an order beyond the lift capacity of Air Transport Command. Washington
borrowed the fast liner Mauretania from Britain and she brought the
engines to Benghazi two days before the mission. The mechanics began a
sleepless 48-hour job to install them in time.

 

 

Killer Kane's khamseen-weary ships were already in shocking condition
when his engineering inspector came down with dysentery. He borrowed
an inspector from the Eight Balls -- Master Sergeant Francis I. Fox,
Regular Army -- who pronounced 32 of Kane's Liberators unfit to fly.
Fox cracked the whip on the numb ground crews, teaching, hectoring,
cozening, and gave Kane 40 Pyramider planes for take-off.

 

 

On Friday, 30 July, General Brereton flew from his Cairo headquarters to
Benghazi, bringing along Lord Forbes and Frank Gervasi, a war correspondent
of
Collier's
magazine. En route, the general sat cross-legged on the
flight deck, playing gin rummy with his aide, Colonel Louis Hobbs. "As far
as I could tell from Brereton's poker face," said Gervasi, "he was
somewhere between worry and outright anxiety." Brereton pushed the cards
away and said to Gervasi, "Well, Frank, this is it. This is where the
Ninth Air Force makes history or wishes it had never been born. Hap
Arnold has handed us a tough one." The correspondent did not know what
this was all about until he was signed into the compound, forbidden to
leave, and admitted to the green hut.

 

 

To cover one of the war's greatest stories there was only one other
correspondent present -- Ivan Dmitri, who was stopping over at Benghazi
by chance while on a globe-girdling assignment for the
Saturday Evening
Post
. Four other civilian visitors happened to be on the base --
the Yacht Club Boys, a variety troupe on a camp show tour. Caught in
the Tidal Wave quarantine but not admitted to the secret, the Yacht
Club Boys feared that they were being held as cultural hostages by the
entertainment-starved desert rats.

 

 

On Saturday morning, the day before the mission, the five bomb groups went
on a full-dress rehearsal on the desert mock-up, using live hundred-pound
bombs. It was a spectacular success, the widest, tightest and lowest
heavy-bomber front ever flown. Five miles wide, wing tip to wing tip,
the Liberators crossed the facsimile target and obliterated it in two
minutes. The wildly elated men finished with an unauthorized buzz of the
bases, clipping the tops from palms and tearing up tents by the stakes
with their prop-wash. The days of gloom and doubt were done. Tomorrow
there would go against fascism the poised strength of the finest aerial
task force the world had ever seen.

 

 

In the afternoon the airmen convened on bomb-fin containers to hear
Brereton's final campaign address. Their small, bespectacled general,
in full medals, beat his riding crop against his pants to punctuate
his stirring remarks. As Walter Stewart remembers it, Brereton said:
"Gentlemen, I am the only person I know of who has held a commission in
both the Army and the Navy. I have seen the fleet steam up the Hudson
and I have seen the corps of cadets pass in full-dress parade. These
sights are soul-stirring. But today, as I saw your hundred seventy-five
four-engined bombers come roaring across the African desert at fifty feet
altitude, bringing dust from the ground with your mighty roar, I enjoyed
the great thrill of my entire life. Tomorrow, when you advance across that
captured country, you will tear the hearts out of them. You are going
in low level to hit the oil refineries, not the houses, and leave your
powerful impression on a great nation. The roar of your engines in the
heart of the enemy's conquest will sound in the ears of the Romanians --
and, yes, the whole world! -- long after the blasts of your bombs and
fires have died away."

 

 

The general concluded with special injunctions for the bombardiers.
He wanted precision, precision, precision, on the targets. "When you get
on the bomb run, bombardiers," he cried, "I want you to go in like -- "
Before he could point his simile, a dust devil blew him off the platform
into the crowd. The general picked himself up and shouted, "I want you
to go in like that!"

 

 

Sir Arthur Tedder addressed them. "I am proud to be here with you just
before this job," said the R.A.F. desert chief. "I want to wish you the
best of luck with it. It's a hard, dangerous mission. It will take all
your famous American courage and resourcefulness."

 

 

A gunner visited an operations clerk who had chased him over a lot of
airdromes to get him to recognition and gunnery classes. He gave the
clerk his watch, ring and billfold with Ł200 in it. "I've had it," said
the airman. "There's my mother's address. Go see her after the war." In
the evening the chaplains received hundreds of men. They brought their
worldly goods -- family photos, high school rings, camel whips, medals,
and money for the chaplains to hold "just in case." One chaplain kept
$3,300 for his men. John Jerstad, who was to fly co-pilot with Addison
Baker in Hell's Wench, the lead ship of the Circus, gave Chaplain Burns
money to pay up a lapsed Sunday school pledge in a Wisconsin church.
Jerstad was among the hundreds who gave the chaplains last letters to
mail if they should not return. Jerstad told his parents, "I'm to be
one of the boys to try out the planning, so if you don't hear from me
for a couple of days, don't be too concerned, because it will take time
to work out some details and I probably won't be near a post office."

 

 

A young Mississippian named Jesse D. ("Red") Franks wrote the pastor
of the First Baptist Church at Columbus: "Dearest Dad: I want to write
you a little note before our big raid tomorrow. It will be the biggest
and toughest we've had yet. Our target is the refineries that supply
Germany with three-fourths of her oil. We will get the target at any
cost. We are going in at fifty feet so there will be no second trip to
complete the job. We will destroy the refineries in one blow. Dad, if
anything happens, don't feel bitter at all. Please stay the same. Take
care of yourself, little Sis, and don't let this get you down, because
I would never want it that way. Hope you don't get this letter, but one
never knows what tomorrow may bring. My favorite chapter is the 91st
Psalm. Your devoted son."

 

 

 

 

In Ploesti it was market day; the rich 1943 harvest was evident in
heaps of corn, beans, tomatoes, apples, chickens, cheeses and salamis
in the white-tiled market place. The stalls were tended by women in
embroidered skirts and old men in white tunics and hard black hats;
the young farmers were dying for the Germans in Russia. Plump corn-fed
pigs could be bought without ration cards in the only wartime country
in Europe where such a fantasy was real.

 

 

Around the oil city the defenses were ready. At Mizil, twenty miles
east of Ploesti, lay the main German air base, where four wings
of Messerschmitt 109's, totaling 52 aircraft, formed Jaegergruppe
4. Hauptmann (Captain) Manfred Spenner, leader of Yellow Wing, was one
of the few pilots who left the station that Saturday. For him Romania
was a blessed respite from endless battle. The winter before he had been
four weeks in the chopper at Stalingrad, and he had served in the battle
of Tunisia after that. Spenner had an appointment in Bucharest with a
dentist who was swapping fillings for flying lessons.

 

 

A few miles east of Mizil, at Zilistea, seventeen black, clipped-wing,
two-engine Messerschmitt 110 night fighters were ready under Major Lutje.
In addition to the pilot, the Me-110 carried a radioman with swivel guns,
which often made this machine a testier bomber opponent than the
single-seat Me-109 with its fixed forward guns. Months before, Goering
had promised to replace all of Gerstenberg's solo Messerschmitts with
the twin-engine machines, but the half-strength of Nachtjaegergruppe 6
at Zilistea represented all that had arrived so far.

 

 

More than half of Gerstenberg's total fighter strength in the target area
was Romanian. One of the Me-109 wings at Mizil was commanded by Romanian
Captain Toma, whom the Germans accounted "a first-class flier." He was
a close student of U.S. bombers. In front of his operations building
on a flagpole as high as the flanking swastika and Romanian flags,
Toma had perched a huge wooden model of a Flying Fortress mounted
on a universal joint so that its angle could be adjusted to various
perspectives. Captain Toma studied it so closely from the air that
one day, during a mock attack, his propeller chopped off a piece of
the wooden enemy. However, one of the German pilots said, "Most of the
Romanian pilots were wealthy boys from the play-sports set. They took
poor care of aircraft. Considering the few they were flying, they wrecked
many Messerschmitts, although every time they got a new one a bearded
Orthodox priest came out and blessed it."