Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (14 page)

 

 

Out of seven leagues of dust the lumbering monsters heaved into the air
at two-minute intervals and climbed into the five formations circling
2,000 feet up. Through thickening dust they continued taking off for
an hour and finding their places in the swarms slowly turning over the
airdromes. Dawn touched the pink ships and the green ships as they took
up group order, with Flavelle out front pointing to Corfu, 500 miles
away. Many of them saw what happened to one of the last ships to leave
the ground, Robert J. Nespor's Kickapoo, which had been loaned by the
Circus to the Pyramiders for the day. John C. Riley was the co-pilot.
One of its engines failed shortly after take-off. Nespor banked back into
the dust for a blind emergency landing. His wing struck a ferroconcrete
telephone pole and Kickapoo crashed and burned. There were two survivors,
Second Lieutenant Russell Polivka and tunnel gunner Eugene Garner.

 

 

Behind K.K. Compton's 29 pink Liberando ships the battle order stood:
39 green planes of the Traveling Circus, led by Addison Baker; Killer
Kane's 47 lion-colored Pyramiders; 37 green Eight Balls following Leon
Johnson; and at the end, Colonel Jack Wood's 26 factory-fresh Liberators
crewed by the novice Sky Scorpions.

 

 

The armada now standing for Corfu was the most intensively prepared and
most experienced large force that has been dispatched in the history
of aerial warfare. Except for the Sky Scorpions, each man aloft had
flown an average of fifteen raids, most of them over western Europe in
the hardest theater of the air war. Three hundred of them had made more
than 25 missions and had long since used up their odds on staying alive
or out of captivity. There might be 50 percent casualties -- some even
predicted 100 percent -- at Ploesti. They flew to shorten ihe war.

 

 

Each group was formed of V's, the basic three-plane units adopted by
American heavy bombers in World War II. The V permitted the fullest
concentration and field of fire from thirty guns. The V's were stepped
up toward the rear of each group. The air fleet, gleaming in the sunrise,
streamed north, laying five miles of fleeting shadows on the quiet sea. It
was a flying city. Its metal and glass terraces passed like a legend of
the Mediterranean, stranger than Minos or Troy. It was a dumb, cloistered
city. The men in each plane could talk to each other on the interphone,
but there was no talking between planes. The command radio frequency
was to be silent the whole way to avoid the enemy's radio-detection.

 

 

The precaution was useless. The Germans knew immediately that the force
was up from Benghazi. Unknown to Allied Intelligence, the Luftwaffe had
recently placed a crack Signal Interception Battalion near Athens.
It had broken the Allied code and was reading Ninth Air Force transmissions.
Although the attackers were not broadcasting their destination, they had
to spread a short, essential message to Allied forces in the Mediterranean
theater, simply announcing a large mission was airborne from Libya. It
was necessary to alert friendly air, sea and ground forces not to jump
to the wrong conclusion if a big formation was sighted. Only a few weeks
before, in the invasion of Sicily, the U.S. Navy had tragically shot
down dozens of American troop carriers, mistaking them for Germans.

 

 

In Greece, one of the German Signal Interception officers, Leutnant
Christian Ochsenschlager, took the decoded message and relayed it to
all defense commands "interested or affected." The message said that
a large formation of four-engined bombers, believed to be Liberators,
had been taking off since early morning in the
Benghazi area.*

 

 

* Allied Intelligence people interviewed as late as 1961 were still
unaware of the radio intercept at Athens.

 

 

Conceding the greatest possible round-trip range of the B-24's the area
affected spread from central Italy to Austria, Romania and Greece. This
comprised six Luftwaffe defense zones, each covering about 115,000 square
miles. These huge rectangles were in turn divided into a hundred sectors
each. The most important one today, as it turned out, was Zone 24 East,
and the bombers would first enter it at Corfu, which was Sector 00 on
the southwest corner. Zone 24 East was controlled from Luftwaffe Fighter
Command at Otopenii, five miles north of Bucharest. It was housed in
a windowless two-story camouflaged building sunk in the ground near a
small clearing in a wood. The meadow was used to land liaison planes.
In the building a two-story amphitheater faced a huge glass map of the
war theater, cross-hatched with defense grids. Here 120 specialists were
on duty around the clock. A long bench of
Luftnachrichtenhelferinnen
(Luftwaffe Airwomen), wearing headphones, sat facing the map. They were
hooked with radio-detectors, radar and audio-visual spotters throughout
Gerstenberg's command. When they received the location of a plane, friend
or foe, they directed a narrow flashlight beam to its map position,
and airmen on ladders crayoned it on the glass -- white marks for Axis
planes and red ones for the enemy.

 

 

A second-floor balcony looked into this elegant war room. Off the balcony
were the bedrooms and offices of the commanders. Due to the absence of
Colonel Bernhard Woldenga, a young Prussian fighter pilot from Gerstenberg's
staff was the senior controller at Fighter Command that morning. This
officer arose, bathed and shaved, and glanced from the balcony into
the war room before he went to breakfast. He noticed an unusual stir in
"the business end of the room," and went down to see what it was. Bombers
were up from Benghazi.

 

 

Aboard the Liberators were hundreds of men with German names, enough to
make up a Luftwaffe squadron. Indeed, the highest-ranking U.S. officer
aboard, General Ent, bore a name from the German Palatinate. The name of
this young Prussian officer who would give them battle today was Douglas
Pitcairn of Perthshire.*

 

 

* His legal name includes the seat.

 

 

Pitcairn of Perthshire was descended from a Scottish Protestant clan
which had emigrated to East Prussia in 1830 after religious quarrels with
Catholic neighbors. One of his ancestors was the midshipman who first
sighted Pitcairn Island, the haven of H.M.S. Bounty's mutineers. The
German Pitcairn had grown up in Memel, joined the revived German air
force in the early thirties, and was secretly trained as a fighter pilot
in Gerstenberg's school at Lipetsk in the Soviet Union. He entered combat
in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 with a Heinkel 51 squadron flying for
Franco, and his first enemy aircraft destroyed was a U.S.-built Curtiss,
piloted by a French volunteer for the Loyalists. The next year some of
Pitcairn's former Lipetsk instructors turned up in Spain in four-cannon
Ratas. The Russians knocked down fifteen of the twin-cannon Heinkel
biplanes in the first fifty encounters. Soon after the rehearsal war in
Spain, Pitcairn was flying in the Battle of Britain, fighting his own
clansmen in Hurricanes and Spitfires. Pitcairn was grounded after his
crash injuries and sent to help create the Fighter Command he was now
to move into battle for the first time.

 

 

Pitcairn greeted the five liaison officers seated at a desk near the
girls. They were linked by phone to the day fighters, the night-fighter
base, the flak command, the Romanian fighter bases, and the telegraphic
and radio network which terminated in a room visible behind the glass.
Pitcairn checked the Würzburg Table -- the central radar monitor, linked
to the radar antennae ringed around Ploesti and Bucharest. He glanced
at a prominent red button which set off the civilian air raid sirens
in Romania.

 

 

Examining the swarm of red marks over Benghazi, Pitcairn remarked,
"It looks like another training mission. If I were running a training
mission in the desert, I too would take advantage of the cool morning
hours." A few minutes later the signals officer got a fresh decode from
the room behind the glass. It was from Luftwaffe, Salonika, reporting
that the bombers were at 2,000-3,000 feet and headed north over the
Mediterranean. "It can't be a training mission," said Signals.*

 

 

* The authors have found no evidence on how the Germans determined
the altitude and course of the mission this early in the
Mediterranean crossing. The Liberators were far out of range of
enemy radar on Crete, Sicily and Italy. It is highly doubtful that
the Germans in 1943 had detection apparatus that could pick up
planes maintaining radio silence. There are three circumstantial
possibilities for the oversea course detection. When Rommel was
chased out of Libya, he left three German weathermen hiding in
a gully near the Benghazi bomber bases. They radioed the Libyan
weather to Crete and could have reported sighting the take-off
and northerly course. These spies, living on ambushes of lone
Allied vehicles, were not discovered until April 1944. A further
possibility is that, following the Athens intercept, Crete sent a
high-altitude reconnaissance plane to have a look at the American
formation over the water. Also, one Liberator crew reported sighting
"a slim gray warship" at 30° N. and 19° 50' E., which may have
been an enemy spotter.

 

 

On the fighter base near Constanta, Colonel Woldenga received the news
from Salonika. He felt no concern over being absent from his post; it
was by no means clear that the target was Ploesti, and three capable
men were on duty as fighter controllers near the target. In addition
to Pitcairn at Otopenii, there were two controllers in Gerstenberg's
headquarters at Pepira: Major Werner Zahn, for night-fighter operations
and Major Hermann Schultz for day fighters. The news about the U.S. force
was still confined to command level. There would be no need to alert
squadrons and batteries until, and if, the bombers could be detected on
a course for Ploesti. Their objective could still be the Messerschmitt
plant at Wiener Neustadt in Austria, or Sofia, or even Athens. When the
planes came over land, there were plenty of visual spotters, and Würzburg
units to report them again.

 

 

In the war room at Otopenii, Pitcairn raised his voice. "All right,
everyone, let's have a big breakfast. We may be here quite a while." The
staff went out in relays to eat. Before joining them he sent the
first-stage alert out to the next lower echelons of command. This merely
required them to turn everyone out on duty.

 

 

At the main day-fighter base at Mizil the German and Romanian pilots
were confined to the field. They hung around the operations room, or
lounged outside staring at sheep grazing on the grassy field, against
the blue Carpathians. The station kept the sheep as lawn mowers for its
airstrip. Some pilots gathered around fence posts upon which were mounted
models of Liberators and Flying Fortresses. It was hard to avoid seeing
an American bomber model at Mizil; inside they hung from the ceilings
and stood on tables.

 

 

One of the most diligent students of U.S. craft was the commander
of First Fighter Wing, or White Wing, Hauptmann Wilhelm Steinmann of
Nuremberg. He was called "Uncle Willie" because of his advanced age --
he was thirty. He understood bombers. During the Blitz he had hauled
tons of high explosives to Hull, Manchester, Sheffield, London and
Glasgow. One night over London, Uncle Willie was trapped in an apex of
searchlights and the tracers closed in. He could not shake the cone and
he knew he was moments from destruction. He turned on his running and
landing lights, fired "friendly" recognition flares, and went into a
steep dive. "I wanted the searchlight and flak battery people to think,
'No German could be that crazy.'" The British fire stopped and he passed
safely beyond the searchlights.

 

 

Defeated in the Blitz of England, and facing frantic demands for more
fighter pilots to defend the Reich, the Luftwaffe put bomber pilots like
Steinmann into fighters. His combat philosophy was simple and adequate
so far: "You've got to have belief. You've got to have confidence. It's
either you or me." Uncle Willie even managed to radiate this confidence
to his wife, Else, in Nuremberg, who never worried about him.

 

 

A pilot who thought about combat and death with the same self-confidence
as Steinmann was the ex-Mormon missionary, Walter Stewart, flying Utah Man
next to Baker, the Circus leader. As the B-24's paraded over the blue sea,
Stewart, a 25-mission veteran, was thinking about the Luftwaffe. He had
faith in his gunners, each at his post by his "wonderful fifties." Stewart
said, "I was especially attached to those guns because my great-uncle,
John M. Browning, used to sit on the porch and tell us kids how he invented
the machine gun. Uncle John never got anything out of his invention, but
we certainly did." Stewart was scanning the horizon for fighters when
his heart missed a beat. A blast of machine-gun fire came right over
his head. "Then I heard the fiendish laugh of the big logger," Stewart
said. Richard Bartlett, the top turret man, a lumberjack from Montana,
was test-firing his guns without warning the edgy crew. Around the sky
the other gunners cleared their weapons with short bursts.

 

 

Stewart decided to return Bartlett's scare. "I moved over to another B-24,
showing how close the old baby could fly formation. As he brought the
prop tips right over the other ship, the logger said, "Skipper, do you
have the D.F.C.?" Stewart replied, "I think so." "Do you know what it
stands for?" Bartlett asked. "I guess so," Stewart answered. The turret
man said, "It's not what you think. It means Don't Fly Close."

 

 

The boy pilots Longnecker and Jones had gotten Thundermug off the ground
in their first try at taking off a loaded airplane. The newly appointed
first pilot, Longnecker, now demonstrated an administrative trait of
command -- that of confidently placing responsibility on a junior. He
said to Jones, "Deacon, you fly 'er a while and I'll go back and check
on the enlisted men." He came upon Sergeants J.C. Pinson, Bernard
C. Strnad, Edward A. Sand, Howard J. Teague, Leonard J. Dougal and
Aloysius G. Cunningham sitting around on ammunition boxes, stark naked.