Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (18 page)
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Authors: James Dugan,Carroll Stewart
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BOOK: Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943
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The Circus ran for Ploesti across dizzy strips of alfalfa, tall green
corn, and bundles of harvested wheat lying in shining stubble. Baker's
22 Liberators went lower, drawing together, until they were knit tightly
fifty feet from the ground. Through fragile windows the officers faced
the ground barrage and tried to find an objective. The haze dissolved
and threw up a welter of stacks, storage tanks and barrage balloons, or
"blocking balloons," as the Luftwaffe called them. The balloon cables
were festooned with contact explosives. The weeks of target briefings
and rehearsals were no use to the Circus crews now. They were going in
on an entirely unfamiliar heading. Their target, White Two, was on the
other side of the city. The setting factors were complete.
The Circus came to bomb. Baker was leading as he said he would.
In Tupelo Lass, K.O. Dessert's co-pilot called off the flak batteries for
his gunners. "Eight o'clock! Twelve o'clock! Three o'clock," cried Jacob
Epting. "Shoot all over!" Among the shell bursts he saw "pink stuff,
white stuff, red stuff, black stuff." Below, he saw "two men fall over
their gun. Two others pushed them aside and took over. The planes ahead
were chewing the air, but to hell with prop-wash. We went as low as we
could. It was safer than standing in the range of all those guns. We
went into the target at twenty feet." Over Epting's head in Tupelo Lass
stood one of the finest gunners in the Eighth Air Force, Ben Kuroki,
turning his whining turret here and there to strafe flak towers. Kuroki
had won a personal campaign against the U.S. Air Force for the privilege
of performing this service. He was a Japanese-American truck farmer from
Hershey, Nebraska.
Ben Kuroki had volunteered for the service on the night of Pearl Harbor
and was turned away because of his ancestry. He besieged the Army and
was accepted for a nonsensitive" clerk's job in the infant Circus bomb
group, whose members shunned him. His name was not on the shipping list
when the group was sent to England. He pleaded with Ted Timberlake,
who was at first confused, then touched and honored by the tears of
Private Kuroki. Timberlake put his name on the list and Ben went to
Britain on the Queen Elizabeth, scrubbing kitchen pots and sleeping on
coiled decklines. In England, Ben slipped into air-gunnery classes and
graduated with top qualifications, but no air crew would have him. Exactly
one year after Pearl Harbor, Jake Epting needed a last-minute replacement
gunner, and rather than ground his plane, took Kuroki on a mission. The
Nisei warrior soon demolished the "yellow man" prejudice by his deeds
in combat. A few months before Ploesti he was shot down in Algeria and
escaped through Spain and Portugal to rejoin the Circus in England.
As Kuroki's plane ran up the twenty-mile, five-minute corridor to Ploesti,
the sides of haystacks flew open, revealing spitting guns, and freight
cars on railway sidings collapsed to pour out 37-mm. fire. Ahead, high
barrage balloons were being reeled down and others were rising from the
ground. Pits opened in the fields and sprouted machine guns. Kuroki's twin
fifties joined other Circus guns in a direct fire fight with the larger
German pieces, which, muzzle down, shells short-fused, interlaced the air
with 20-mm., 37-mm., 88- and even 105-mm. shells. Flying gunners shot it
out with ground gunners. As the flak men tried to hit the low planes from
towers they killed flak gunners on other towers. The noise was beyond
decibel measure as the choir of 136 fourteen-cylinder engines, with a
total of more than a half-million horsepower, roared among muzzle blasts,
shrapnel crumps and the ship-shaking clatter of 230 machine guns in the
Liberators. Wheat shocks blew away in the bomber wakes like tumbleweeds.
In Utah Man, gunner John Connolly raked a man sending up a blocking balloon
and saw him and the bag vanish in a puff of smoke. Connolly blew up a
locomotive and did not recall it for three days afterward. He saw a
flak gunner cradling a shell, looking up with open mouth, and a grinning
soldier waving his cap on a bayonet.
Flight Officer Longnecker noted "an eighty-eight behind a row of trees at
a crossroad. I could see the muzzle flash and the projectile as it came
toward us. I forced Thundermug under this barrage. The shell removed the
left aileron, left rudder and half of the elevator on Captain Roper's
ship at my right. I went back into position with him. His plane looked
like a junk yard, but he was not wavering a bit. I could see Roper in
his cockpit, looking straight ahead, keeping his position. Resistance
grew stronger. Our gunners were pounding away steadily. We were going
in from the wrong direction at two hundred forty-five mph, sixty-five
miles more than our usual speed, pulling emergency power for so long it
was a question how much longer the engines could stand the abuse. All
I wanted was to get beyond that inferno of tracers, exploding storage
tanks and burning aircraft."
In the last ship of the Circus, a command observer, Lieutenant Colonel
William A. Beightol, looked back for the Liberandos, the mission leaders
last seen hanging on the rim of Bucharest. He saw their dim frontal
silhouettes turning to follow the Circus into Ploesti. A minute or so
later Beightol saw them turning east, breaking off the attack. He concluded
that the Liberandos "had abandoned in the face of restrictive opposition."
Closing on the target city, several Circus planes were trailing smoke from
smashed engines, and men were bleeding and dying on the air decks among
hot bullet casings, and taking new wounds through the thin-skinned planes,
their cries drowned by the deafening air-ground battle. Glittering shards
of aluminum and plexiglass floated past in the slip streams. Fires bloomed
from the Tokyo tanks they had brought to take them home. Longnecker
said, "I saw Enoch Porter take a direct hit in the bomb bay and become a
fountain of flame. Two red streams poured out the sides around the tail
turret and joined in a river of fire flowing behind for two hundred
feet. Porter climbed in a desperate bid for altitude, to let people
parachute. The ship stalled, hanging like a cloud of fire, and out of
the nosewheel door tumbled the bodies of Jack Warner and Red Franks."
Warner's shoulder blade had been shattered by flak. At his request Red
Franks pushed him through the nosewheel hatch and followed him. Franks's
chute did not open. Warner's silk spread just in time to save his life. He
hit the ground hard and slid unconscious into a shallow stream. Enoch
Porter climbed Euroclydon a little higher, and two gunners, Jack Reed
and James Vest, bailed out safely. The first plane to go down in battle
burned at the edge of a village, the pages of
As You Like It
opening
and shriveling in fiery fingers.
A provident pilot named Earl C. Hurd roared toward the city in Tarfu. He
had taught all his men how to land the plane in the event the pilots were
knocked out. He struck a balloon cable, which stripped off a de-icer boot,
but Tarfu stayed in the air. The co-pilot, Joseph Clements, opened his
window and started firing a submachine gun at the German gunners. Hurd
clapped his shoulder and yelled, "For God's sake, Joe, be ready to take
over when they get me!"
Up front in Hell's Wench, Addison Baker and John Jerstad held an adamant
course with Stewart's Utah Man. The Mormon was hit in the left aileron,
but did not waver. It seemed impossible that any plane could force the
city guns now belching into the Circus. "I didn't see how anyone could
get through that mess alive," said Hurd.
Hell's Wench struck a balloon cable. The plane went on and the severed
balloon wandered up into the air. The flagship received a direct bit
in the nose from an 88. That was the station of bombardier Pezzella,
of the "Ball one!" quip. Joseph Tate, leading the second wave behind
Baker, saw him hit three more times -- in the wing, wing root and then
a devastating burst in the cockpit. The wing tanks and Tokyo tanks took
flame. The stricken command ship was still two or three minutes from
the bomb-release line.
Baker and Jerstad jettisoned their bombs to keep Hell's Wench in the
air and lead the force over the target. "You can tell from the way
they drop whether it is the bombardier or the pilot who dumped them,"
said Tate. Colonel Brown in Queenie, leading the parallel column, saw
"open wheat fields in front into which Baker could have mushed with
ease." Instead, the flaming Liberator flew on, aiming for an opening
between two tall refinery stacks. Tate saw a man coming out of the
nosewheel hatch of Hell's Wench. "He came tumbling back," said Tate,
"his chute opening. He drifted over top of us so close we could see his
burned legs."
Immediately before the target, the flagship received another direct hit.
"Baker had been burning for about three minutes," said Carl Barthel,
Queenie's navigator. "The right wing began to drop. I don't see how
anyone could have been alive in that cockpit, but someone kept her leading
the force on between the refinery stacks. Baker was a powerful man, but
one man could not have held the ship on the climb she took beyond the
stacks." Hell's Wench staggered up to about three hundred feet and three
or four men came out. She fell off on the right wing and came drifting
back toward Colonel Brown. The falling flagship cleared him by six feet,
and, as she "flashed by, flames hid everything in the cockpit," said
Brown. Hell's Wench crashed on her wing tip in a field. Brown said,
"Baker went down after he flew his ship to pieces to get us over the
target." None of Baker's crew survived, not even the men who jumped.
The death of A Force Leader dropped into the subconscious beneath the
scream of battle. Utah Man, sole survivor of the lead wave, pulled up
to sixty feet to get on top of a refinery unit. Pilot Stewart heard
"Bombs away!" and a terrific flak burst came in the left side of
his ship. Stewart's bombardier, Ralph Cummings, a former Texas League
baseball player, placed the first bombs of Tidal Wave between the plant
and its two-foot-thick blast wall. He hit the Colombia Aquila refinery,
Target White Five, which was assigned to the Eight Balls, still coming
somewhere in the sky. Paul Johnston, the tail gunner of Utah Man,
reported on the interphone, "Saw two bombs go into the target. Didn't
see any more fall out. The incendiaries hit on top."
Stewart saw a 200-foot radio tower directly ahead of Utah Man.
Its pinnacle was whipping back and forth in gusts of antiaircraft fire.
"To go over it would have meant running into that flak," said the pilot.
"I said to Larry [co-pilot Loren Koon, an American veteran of the R.A.F.],
'Watch out when the tower goes by.' We rolled the left wing into the
street below and stood the right wing to miss the tower. Flak chewed
off the high wing tip before we leveled off." Utah Man roared across
the housetops of Ploesti, spraying gasoline from shrapnel holes.
Flight Officer Longnecker, coming in to bomb, saw up ahead "a B-24
sliding down a street, with both wings sheered off. A plane hit a barrage
balloon and both disintegrated in a ball of fire. We saw bombs dropped by
other planes skipping along the ground, hitting buildings, and passing
on through, leaving gaping holes in the brickwork. They seemed like
rats, gnawing through building after building to find a better place
to rest. Suddenly a huge oil storage tank exploded directly in front
of my wingman, Vic Olliffe, raising a solid column of fire and debris
two hundred feet, waiting for Let 'Er Rip. He couldn't possibly avoid
it. The next instant I glanced out and saw Olliffe crossing under Roper
and myself, barely clearing us, and then going over a pair of stacks like
a hurdler before putting his bombs in a cracking tower. How he missed
the explosion, our ships and the stacks is a mystery and always will be.
"The tracers were so solid in front of us that it looked like a fishing
net woven of fiery cords. I thought the flight was over for us. From
the expression on Deacon Jones's face, I am sure the same thing was
crossing his mind; not fear, but rather a sense of vast disappointment,
like having to give up a good book before reading the last chapter. As we
were about to touch this web of death and destruction, it parted and fell
away. Willie Schrampf dropped his bombs and Deacon said his first words:
'Let's get the hell out of here!'"
Beneath them, near the refinery, Corporal Wegener scuttled into his
infirmary as gigantic planes spread their wings over it, strafing the
wooden barracks. The priest-medic and his patients huddled against
the baseboards. In a moment the sick bay was riddled and smoke puffed
through the bullet holes. Wegener stuck his head above a window sill;
outside the world was aboil with black clouds and flickering yellow
flame. "It's black as night!" he exclaimed. He turned to his men. Not
one of them had been hit in the storm of fifty-caliber shells. They
went outside. An officer yelled, "Don't go near the refinery! The tanks
are exploding. Everything is on fire!" Wegener shepherded his patients
inside. They were convinced that the bombers were Canadian.
Overhead, the second wave of the Circus streamed across White Five, led
by Ball of Fire Jr., which was stolen property. In England the pilot,
Joseph Tate, who had lost his first Ball of Fire to battle damage,
happened upon an unattended Liberator on a ferry base and flew off with
it. As Tate bombed Ploesti he closed his mind over his comrades' deaths
and a deep inner wound. A few days before, he had received a disturbing
letter from his wife.
Tate came off the refinery unbelievably untouched and saw a roof-top
battery addressing him directly. All at once the men and guns vanished in
an explosion. Tate's tail gunner saw something he "didn't like to talk
about" -- a blazing B-24 climbing and two parachutes opening before the
plane crashed and spread an acre of fire. The parachutes drifted into the
flames. In order to deny gasoline to fascism the mission force carried
a half-million gallons of it to Ploesti.
In the middle of the formation a veteran co-pilot went berserk with fright.
The pilot held him and the control column until the navigator dragged
the man out and sat on him.
corn, and bundles of harvested wheat lying in shining stubble. Baker's
22 Liberators went lower, drawing together, until they were knit tightly
fifty feet from the ground. Through fragile windows the officers faced
the ground barrage and tried to find an objective. The haze dissolved
and threw up a welter of stacks, storage tanks and barrage balloons, or
"blocking balloons," as the Luftwaffe called them. The balloon cables
were festooned with contact explosives. The weeks of target briefings
and rehearsals were no use to the Circus crews now. They were going in
on an entirely unfamiliar heading. Their target, White Two, was on the
other side of the city. The setting factors were complete.
The Circus came to bomb. Baker was leading as he said he would.
In Tupelo Lass, K.O. Dessert's co-pilot called off the flak batteries for
his gunners. "Eight o'clock! Twelve o'clock! Three o'clock," cried Jacob
Epting. "Shoot all over!" Among the shell bursts he saw "pink stuff,
white stuff, red stuff, black stuff." Below, he saw "two men fall over
their gun. Two others pushed them aside and took over. The planes ahead
were chewing the air, but to hell with prop-wash. We went as low as we
could. It was safer than standing in the range of all those guns. We
went into the target at twenty feet." Over Epting's head in Tupelo Lass
stood one of the finest gunners in the Eighth Air Force, Ben Kuroki,
turning his whining turret here and there to strafe flak towers. Kuroki
had won a personal campaign against the U.S. Air Force for the privilege
of performing this service. He was a Japanese-American truck farmer from
Hershey, Nebraska.
Ben Kuroki had volunteered for the service on the night of Pearl Harbor
and was turned away because of his ancestry. He besieged the Army and
was accepted for a nonsensitive" clerk's job in the infant Circus bomb
group, whose members shunned him. His name was not on the shipping list
when the group was sent to England. He pleaded with Ted Timberlake,
who was at first confused, then touched and honored by the tears of
Private Kuroki. Timberlake put his name on the list and Ben went to
Britain on the Queen Elizabeth, scrubbing kitchen pots and sleeping on
coiled decklines. In England, Ben slipped into air-gunnery classes and
graduated with top qualifications, but no air crew would have him. Exactly
one year after Pearl Harbor, Jake Epting needed a last-minute replacement
gunner, and rather than ground his plane, took Kuroki on a mission. The
Nisei warrior soon demolished the "yellow man" prejudice by his deeds
in combat. A few months before Ploesti he was shot down in Algeria and
escaped through Spain and Portugal to rejoin the Circus in England.
As Kuroki's plane ran up the twenty-mile, five-minute corridor to Ploesti,
the sides of haystacks flew open, revealing spitting guns, and freight
cars on railway sidings collapsed to pour out 37-mm. fire. Ahead, high
barrage balloons were being reeled down and others were rising from the
ground. Pits opened in the fields and sprouted machine guns. Kuroki's twin
fifties joined other Circus guns in a direct fire fight with the larger
German pieces, which, muzzle down, shells short-fused, interlaced the air
with 20-mm., 37-mm., 88- and even 105-mm. shells. Flying gunners shot it
out with ground gunners. As the flak men tried to hit the low planes from
towers they killed flak gunners on other towers. The noise was beyond
decibel measure as the choir of 136 fourteen-cylinder engines, with a
total of more than a half-million horsepower, roared among muzzle blasts,
shrapnel crumps and the ship-shaking clatter of 230 machine guns in the
Liberators. Wheat shocks blew away in the bomber wakes like tumbleweeds.
In Utah Man, gunner John Connolly raked a man sending up a blocking balloon
and saw him and the bag vanish in a puff of smoke. Connolly blew up a
locomotive and did not recall it for three days afterward. He saw a
flak gunner cradling a shell, looking up with open mouth, and a grinning
soldier waving his cap on a bayonet.
Flight Officer Longnecker noted "an eighty-eight behind a row of trees at
a crossroad. I could see the muzzle flash and the projectile as it came
toward us. I forced Thundermug under this barrage. The shell removed the
left aileron, left rudder and half of the elevator on Captain Roper's
ship at my right. I went back into position with him. His plane looked
like a junk yard, but he was not wavering a bit. I could see Roper in
his cockpit, looking straight ahead, keeping his position. Resistance
grew stronger. Our gunners were pounding away steadily. We were going
in from the wrong direction at two hundred forty-five mph, sixty-five
miles more than our usual speed, pulling emergency power for so long it
was a question how much longer the engines could stand the abuse. All
I wanted was to get beyond that inferno of tracers, exploding storage
tanks and burning aircraft."
In the last ship of the Circus, a command observer, Lieutenant Colonel
William A. Beightol, looked back for the Liberandos, the mission leaders
last seen hanging on the rim of Bucharest. He saw their dim frontal
silhouettes turning to follow the Circus into Ploesti. A minute or so
later Beightol saw them turning east, breaking off the attack. He concluded
that the Liberandos "had abandoned in the face of restrictive opposition."
Closing on the target city, several Circus planes were trailing smoke from
smashed engines, and men were bleeding and dying on the air decks among
hot bullet casings, and taking new wounds through the thin-skinned planes,
their cries drowned by the deafening air-ground battle. Glittering shards
of aluminum and plexiglass floated past in the slip streams. Fires bloomed
from the Tokyo tanks they had brought to take them home. Longnecker
said, "I saw Enoch Porter take a direct hit in the bomb bay and become a
fountain of flame. Two red streams poured out the sides around the tail
turret and joined in a river of fire flowing behind for two hundred
feet. Porter climbed in a desperate bid for altitude, to let people
parachute. The ship stalled, hanging like a cloud of fire, and out of
the nosewheel door tumbled the bodies of Jack Warner and Red Franks."
Warner's shoulder blade had been shattered by flak. At his request Red
Franks pushed him through the nosewheel hatch and followed him. Franks's
chute did not open. Warner's silk spread just in time to save his life. He
hit the ground hard and slid unconscious into a shallow stream. Enoch
Porter climbed Euroclydon a little higher, and two gunners, Jack Reed
and James Vest, bailed out safely. The first plane to go down in battle
burned at the edge of a village, the pages of
As You Like It
opening
and shriveling in fiery fingers.
A provident pilot named Earl C. Hurd roared toward the city in Tarfu. He
had taught all his men how to land the plane in the event the pilots were
knocked out. He struck a balloon cable, which stripped off a de-icer boot,
but Tarfu stayed in the air. The co-pilot, Joseph Clements, opened his
window and started firing a submachine gun at the German gunners. Hurd
clapped his shoulder and yelled, "For God's sake, Joe, be ready to take
over when they get me!"
Up front in Hell's Wench, Addison Baker and John Jerstad held an adamant
course with Stewart's Utah Man. The Mormon was hit in the left aileron,
but did not waver. It seemed impossible that any plane could force the
city guns now belching into the Circus. "I didn't see how anyone could
get through that mess alive," said Hurd.
Hell's Wench struck a balloon cable. The plane went on and the severed
balloon wandered up into the air. The flagship received a direct bit
in the nose from an 88. That was the station of bombardier Pezzella,
of the "Ball one!" quip. Joseph Tate, leading the second wave behind
Baker, saw him hit three more times -- in the wing, wing root and then
a devastating burst in the cockpit. The wing tanks and Tokyo tanks took
flame. The stricken command ship was still two or three minutes from
the bomb-release line.
Baker and Jerstad jettisoned their bombs to keep Hell's Wench in the
air and lead the force over the target. "You can tell from the way
they drop whether it is the bombardier or the pilot who dumped them,"
said Tate. Colonel Brown in Queenie, leading the parallel column, saw
"open wheat fields in front into which Baker could have mushed with
ease." Instead, the flaming Liberator flew on, aiming for an opening
between two tall refinery stacks. Tate saw a man coming out of the
nosewheel hatch of Hell's Wench. "He came tumbling back," said Tate,
"his chute opening. He drifted over top of us so close we could see his
burned legs."
Immediately before the target, the flagship received another direct hit.
"Baker had been burning for about three minutes," said Carl Barthel,
Queenie's navigator. "The right wing began to drop. I don't see how
anyone could have been alive in that cockpit, but someone kept her leading
the force on between the refinery stacks. Baker was a powerful man, but
one man could not have held the ship on the climb she took beyond the
stacks." Hell's Wench staggered up to about three hundred feet and three
or four men came out. She fell off on the right wing and came drifting
back toward Colonel Brown. The falling flagship cleared him by six feet,
and, as she "flashed by, flames hid everything in the cockpit," said
Brown. Hell's Wench crashed on her wing tip in a field. Brown said,
"Baker went down after he flew his ship to pieces to get us over the
target." None of Baker's crew survived, not even the men who jumped.
The death of A Force Leader dropped into the subconscious beneath the
scream of battle. Utah Man, sole survivor of the lead wave, pulled up
to sixty feet to get on top of a refinery unit. Pilot Stewart heard
"Bombs away!" and a terrific flak burst came in the left side of
his ship. Stewart's bombardier, Ralph Cummings, a former Texas League
baseball player, placed the first bombs of Tidal Wave between the plant
and its two-foot-thick blast wall. He hit the Colombia Aquila refinery,
Target White Five, which was assigned to the Eight Balls, still coming
somewhere in the sky. Paul Johnston, the tail gunner of Utah Man,
reported on the interphone, "Saw two bombs go into the target. Didn't
see any more fall out. The incendiaries hit on top."
Stewart saw a 200-foot radio tower directly ahead of Utah Man.
Its pinnacle was whipping back and forth in gusts of antiaircraft fire.
"To go over it would have meant running into that flak," said the pilot.
"I said to Larry [co-pilot Loren Koon, an American veteran of the R.A.F.],
'Watch out when the tower goes by.' We rolled the left wing into the
street below and stood the right wing to miss the tower. Flak chewed
off the high wing tip before we leveled off." Utah Man roared across
the housetops of Ploesti, spraying gasoline from shrapnel holes.
Flight Officer Longnecker, coming in to bomb, saw up ahead "a B-24
sliding down a street, with both wings sheered off. A plane hit a barrage
balloon and both disintegrated in a ball of fire. We saw bombs dropped by
other planes skipping along the ground, hitting buildings, and passing
on through, leaving gaping holes in the brickwork. They seemed like
rats, gnawing through building after building to find a better place
to rest. Suddenly a huge oil storage tank exploded directly in front
of my wingman, Vic Olliffe, raising a solid column of fire and debris
two hundred feet, waiting for Let 'Er Rip. He couldn't possibly avoid
it. The next instant I glanced out and saw Olliffe crossing under Roper
and myself, barely clearing us, and then going over a pair of stacks like
a hurdler before putting his bombs in a cracking tower. How he missed
the explosion, our ships and the stacks is a mystery and always will be.
"The tracers were so solid in front of us that it looked like a fishing
net woven of fiery cords. I thought the flight was over for us. From
the expression on Deacon Jones's face, I am sure the same thing was
crossing his mind; not fear, but rather a sense of vast disappointment,
like having to give up a good book before reading the last chapter. As we
were about to touch this web of death and destruction, it parted and fell
away. Willie Schrampf dropped his bombs and Deacon said his first words:
'Let's get the hell out of here!'"
Beneath them, near the refinery, Corporal Wegener scuttled into his
infirmary as gigantic planes spread their wings over it, strafing the
wooden barracks. The priest-medic and his patients huddled against
the baseboards. In a moment the sick bay was riddled and smoke puffed
through the bullet holes. Wegener stuck his head above a window sill;
outside the world was aboil with black clouds and flickering yellow
flame. "It's black as night!" he exclaimed. He turned to his men. Not
one of them had been hit in the storm of fifty-caliber shells. They
went outside. An officer yelled, "Don't go near the refinery! The tanks
are exploding. Everything is on fire!" Wegener shepherded his patients
inside. They were convinced that the bombers were Canadian.
Overhead, the second wave of the Circus streamed across White Five, led
by Ball of Fire Jr., which was stolen property. In England the pilot,
Joseph Tate, who had lost his first Ball of Fire to battle damage,
happened upon an unattended Liberator on a ferry base and flew off with
it. As Tate bombed Ploesti he closed his mind over his comrades' deaths
and a deep inner wound. A few days before, he had received a disturbing
letter from his wife.
Tate came off the refinery unbelievably untouched and saw a roof-top
battery addressing him directly. All at once the men and guns vanished in
an explosion. Tate's tail gunner saw something he "didn't like to talk
about" -- a blazing B-24 climbing and two parachutes opening before the
plane crashed and spread an acre of fire. The parachutes drifted into the
flames. In order to deny gasoline to fascism the mission force carried
a half-million gallons of it to Ploesti.
In the middle of the formation a veteran co-pilot went berserk with fright.
The pilot held him and the control column until the navigator dragged
the man out and sat on him.
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