Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (22 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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Tabb toggled the bombs and the other planes dropped theirs in unison --
three dozen 500-pounders fused to explode in 45 seconds. But there was
an immediate thunderous explosion, possibly caused by an air gunner
hitting something volatile. The blast levitated Barwell in the top
turret. Appold's "smooth ride" over the target turned out to be a big jolt
that flung him over the stacks. Almost instantaneously there came a blast
to the left that displaced the hurtling airships so smartly to the side
that Barwell had "the unique experience for a top gunner of seeing our
bombs alongside, still falling. They crashed into a large cracking plant."
In the upheaval Appold's compass fell out of its rubber shock mount
and his radio was shaken to pieces. Just past the target, roof-top
gunners fired into his nose, knocking out a waist gunner, blowing the
aerial camera out of its anal position, riddling the left wing, and
holing an empty bomb bay tank. Appold said, "I went into a right bank,
trying to gain a few feet more of altitude. I put Storz, on my right
wing, in an uncomfortable position. He slid down to the right and had
to practically brush his wings on buildings to keep me off." Appold's
five-plane improvisation had hit Concordia Vega hard. About 40 percent
of its refining capacity was destroyed.
Now Appold had to avoid crashing into Potts and the last of the Circus.
The two formations were closing head-on over the roof tops at a combined
speed of nearly 500 miles an hour. Potts stayed low and Appold lifted
a bit. Killer Kane's higher wave was almost upon them. The center of
Ploesti was roofed with three layers of interweaving Liberators. In the
open street below stood General Alfred Gerstenberg, in awed admiration
of the galaxy of bombers maneuvering precisely at top speed without
colliding. He had no suspicion that it was all a horrible foul-up.
Appold's wingman, Storz, saw a green airplane coming toward him,
"a hundred feet off my wing, low, and laboring hard. I was quite certain
we would have a mid-air collision. As our courses were about to intercept,
he entered a three-story building." Storz had seen the B-24 crash into
the Women's Prison.
Appold's commando crossed the city and plunged into the billows
rolling off White Five. From his smoke-filled fuselage came a shout,
"We're on firel" Appold steered due west. Fresh air, entering through
battle holes, ventilated the ship. Nothing was on fire. Appold went to
his usual altitude, "five feet plus," and asked Barwell to count his
ships. The British gunner wheeled his turret and reported, "They're all
still with us. They appear to have sustained numerous hits, but none
seems disabled." Appold said, "I get a smell of hydraulic fluid." The
engineer replied, "The whole hydraulic system is out."
North of the city there was another unscheduled crosshatching of bombers.
As K.K. Compton's reforming Liberandos drove west across the ravines,
the Sky Scorpions came down from Red Target at right angles to them.
No other Liberators were supposed to be within miles of the Scorpions
at this phase, yet here were desert ships crossing their course and some
of them dumping bombs into outlying units of the Scorpion objective.
The Scorpions looked upon the Liberandos like men seeing pink elephants.
All the ships avoided collision.
Appold nestled into a semidry river course, crouching under guns and
radar, and his followers streamed behind, riffling stagnant pools
and whipping brush along the banks. Barwell phoned, "Directly ahead,
large stone bridge. Looks like a flak tower atop it." The observation
was confirmed by orange fireballs skipping toward them along the stream
bed. Barwell said, "Norm, could you drop the nose a bit?" Appold thought
this "an unreasonable request, but I had learned that when Barwell
wanted me to lower his gunning horizon, the favor paid off." He put the
nose deeper. "The top turret clattered," said the pilot, "and there,
without fail, we saw the slugs disintegrate the tower, gunners and all,
from a distance of at least a half mile. It was over in four or five
seconds. That was the maximum time I could maintain flight with the
nose pressed down, and it was all that Barwell ever needed. I felt
strongly relieved. We skirted the flak tower and eased down again, to
begin what was going to be a long, lonely journey to base if our gas
and luck held out."
The two finest aerial marksmen in the battle of Ploesti, Gamecock Hahn
and George Barwell had neither one got a shot at an enemy aircraft that
day. By taking to the river bed, Appold slipped his guerrillas past the
Messerschmitts and sighted no hostile planes all the way home.
As Appold fled Ploesti, the Eight Balls and Pyramiders were plunging
across the city from the northwest toward their briefed targets, which
were now in a convulsion of flames and explosions.
Bombs Away: 1211 hours
It was now high noon. The battle of Ploesti was fifteen minutes
old. The Circus and Liberandos had left three refineries in flames,
and the two biggest forces of the mission, Leon Johnson's Eight Balls
and Killer Kane's Pyramiders, were still coming. They had reached and
turned the correct Third Initial Point on the northwest and were coming
down astraddle the Floresti-Ploesti railway. As they passed over the
force-landed Circus ship Honky-Tonk Gal, Robert Lehnhausen saw emerging
from its right waist window "a fellow without a stitch of clothing."
The two groups coming in abreast, exactly as the plan required, were divided
into three target forces. On the left was Kane, bound for White Four,
then Leon Johnson with 16 planes, driving for White Five, and on his
right James Posey, his deputy leader, guiding 21 ships toward Blue Target.
In the lead ship of the Eight Balls, Suzy-Q, piloted by Major William
Brandon, the co-pilot was Colonel Leon Johnson, the group commanding
officer. Johnson was a mild, snub-nosed Kansan with a blond R.A.F.-type
mustache. Following graduation from Moline High School, he had gone to
work in his father's bank. After seeing a friend in a U.S. Military
Academy uniform, he went to West Point and was commissioned as an
infantry shavetail. In 1929 he transferred to the Air Force because
"things looked more interesting from the air." While the infant Eighth
Air Force in Britain was shaking out commanders, Johnson was promoted
group leader of the Eight Balls. He told his men, "I never expected this
appointment. Frankly, I'd be suspicious of men who do not miss their
former CO, and I expect I'll be resented. But I have a feeling we'll
get along all right." They did. The Eight Balls followed their quiet
leader in bombing a 5,000-mile arc around Hitler's Reich, from Kiel to
Bordeaux to Naples and now to Ploesti.
As he sat in front of them on the target run, Johnson squinted hard
through the lilac haze for his target, White Five, the Colombia Aquila
refinery complex, whose six aiming points were only 310 feet wide,
strung along a bomb alley 1,000 feet deep. Johnson could see nothing
but a dark shroud hanging 2,000 feet high over his target heading.
He was puzzled about it, but, pending a closer look, assumed that it
was smog. Soon the dark curtain sharpened into focus and Johnson saw
that it was not an atmospheric effect; it was a forest of surging black
smoke with mangrove roots of flame. Someone had already struck his target.
Bombs exploded in White Five. Storage tanks jumped into the air.
Pilot Brandon looked at Colonel Johnson with a critical, unspoken
question: "Shall we turn back?" Johnson said in a calm, steady voice,
"William, you are on target." The force drove on. The bombardiers in
five waves of Liberators lined up on their pinpoint objectives hidden
in the geysers of smoke and flame.
As Johnson and Kane faced the chosen ordeal, a series of magic boxes
opened up on the railway that they were following to their targets. On
a freight train speeding south the sides of box cars fell, and a line
of artillery fired right and left into the flanking B-24's overtaking
the train at virtually the same altitude.
The flak train was one of Gerstenberg's most effective surprises.
It resembled a Q-ship of the First World War. Commanded by a captain,
the Q-train was a string of prosaic-looking four-wheeled freight wagons,
which contained bunk cars, a kitchen and recreation room, ammunition
magazines and dozens of antiaircraft guns concealed in collapsible car
bodies. This self-contained mobile destroyer could not have been placed in
a better position. An hour or so before, when the predicted B-24 course
spotlighted Floresti, the defenders had rolled the Q-train onto the
line, and now it roared along between the two parallel bomber columns,
firing into Johnson on the right and Killer Kane on the left. And the
Liberators could not elude flak while holding on the bomb run. The air
gunners enfiladed the train and blew up the locomotive, but not before
it had hit some ships so hard they would not get far beyond the target.
Leon Johnson faced right into the seething wall of smoke. Seconds before
he plunged into the holocaust there was a blast in the refinery of such
magnitude that the updraft sucked the smoke high off bomb alley. The Dubbs
stills and cracking towers were framed against a patch of blue sky beyond.
Suzy-Q rode through a tunnel of clear, hot, turbulent air, arched over
by crackling yellow and black clouds, and bombed her objective.
Johnson's flankers, Bewitching Witch and Scrappy II, hit their aiming
points in the aerial cave and came out flying. The second wave, led by
Captain Cameron in Buzzin' Bear, drove under the suspended fire cloud and
ploughed their yellow bombs into the target. Buzzin' Bear came off at a
height of 75 feet, with a rudder nearly shot off its hinges. Cameron's
co-pilot, William C. Dabney, said, "Bill, we're too low. Pick 'er up
a little." Cameron refused, and he won his point when two B-24's and a
pursuing Messerschmitt crossed beneath them. The Eight Balls that had
survived so far now entered the range of the guns southwest of Ploesti
that had mauled the Circus. Waiting also were the roving Messerschmitts,
IAR-80's, Me-110's and Ju-88's, all seeking cripples.
On Cameron's right wing, Charlie Porter Henderson was shot up by a Ju-88,
wounding navigator Robert S. Schminke and bombardier John R. Huddle.
Radioman John Dayberry saved Huddle's life with a quick and efficient
tourniquet while the ship was under attack by another twin-engined
fighter. It drove in obliquely from the rear, cutting rudder cables
and ripping up the tail. Gunner James R. Porter fell wounded. The top
turret man, Harold Cooper, and tail gunner C.H. Confer hit the Ju-88,
and Confer saw it strike the ground on fire. Another German crossed over
them, dropping disklike objects which burst into flame but did not fall
on the Liberator. Sergeant Dayberry tended the wounded and took Schminke's
place as navigator to give Henderson a bearing for Malta.
The black crematory door lowered on the third Eight Ball wave, led by
Worden L. Weaver piloting Lil Abner. He came out with three engines
mangled and his controls shot away. Forty miles from the target Weaver
could no longer hold in the air. He bellylanded near Visnia-Dombovitsa,
and a wing tipped the ground during the skid. Lil Abner came to a halt
with the nose rolled under the body, the bomb bay telescoped into the
flight deck, and the engineer, William J. Schettler, crushed dead under
the fallen top turret. The wreck burst into flame midships. Six men got
out of the rear, but the pilots and the navigator were imprisoned in the
cockpit. Weaver seized a crack in the windshield, forced open a hole,
and wriggled out. As navigator Walter M. Sorenson followed, his parachute
harness fouled in the opening, and he was stuck halfway out with co-pilot
Robert R. Snyder trapped behind him. The flames spread forward.
One of the fuselage escapees, bombardier Lloyd W. Reese Jr., went through
the fire and popping ammunition and cut away Sorenson's parachute harness.
Reese and radioman Jesse W. Hinley hauled both trapped men clear.
The survivors split up and ran in opposite directions. A German fighter
circled Weaver's party, "evidently reporting our position," the pilot
thought. Weaver tried his Romanian glossary on a farm boy, who led them
to a village. Women dipped feathers in a homemade balm and gently brushed
their seared flesh.
K for King, commanded by Robert E. Miller, led the fourth wave into
the dark and fiery target. "There was a hell of a lot of chatter on
the intercom about flak batteries," said Miller, "but through it all I
heard the voice of our bombardier, Robert Edwards, steady and cool even
though we were enveloped with smoke and fire. One of our gunners, Daniel
Rowland, got a direct hit in the thigh, which almost tore his leg off.
He put on the tourniquet himself." The co-pilot, Dexter L. Hodge, said,
"The way our gunners worked over the flak guys, I was convinced they
were the best men ever to squeeze a trigger." K for King emerged with
a two-foot gap in the fuselage, the top ripped open, a missing vertical
stabilizer, oil gushing from the cracked hub of No. 4 engine, a shattered
supercharger and the induction systems gone. In that state Miller and
Hodge faced the 1,100-mile voyage back to Africa. Missing were the two
wingmen who had entered White Five with them. Thomas E. Scrivner's ship
came out in flames, with the pilots fighting for a crash-landing. They
sledded into a wheat field, but before the slide was spent, the ship
exploded in a hundred-foot sphere of flame. None of the men Scrivner
tried to save came out of it.
K for King, with an engine afire, hedgehopped through twenty separate
fighter attacks. Flight engineer William J. Murphy, Jr., cut off the gas
on the flaming engine, pilot Miller feathered the prop, co-pilot Hodge
recovered the ship, and tail gunner C. J. Ducote dueled warily with a
Romanian plane that clung to him like a glider on a short tow. The Gypsy
would not break off until he had learned how to deal with a bomber that
refused to come off the ground and fight. The Romanian crept closer. When
he came within a hundred yards, Ducote buried fifty rounds in him. The
Romanian resorted to the textbook for high fighting. He peeled off,
presented his armored belly to the rear gunner, and dived. "The next
instant the woods for three blocks around were on fire," said Ducote.
three dozen 500-pounders fused to explode in 45 seconds. But there was
an immediate thunderous explosion, possibly caused by an air gunner
hitting something volatile. The blast levitated Barwell in the top
turret. Appold's "smooth ride" over the target turned out to be a big jolt
that flung him over the stacks. Almost instantaneously there came a blast
to the left that displaced the hurtling airships so smartly to the side
that Barwell had "the unique experience for a top gunner of seeing our
bombs alongside, still falling. They crashed into a large cracking plant."
In the upheaval Appold's compass fell out of its rubber shock mount
and his radio was shaken to pieces. Just past the target, roof-top
gunners fired into his nose, knocking out a waist gunner, blowing the
aerial camera out of its anal position, riddling the left wing, and
holing an empty bomb bay tank. Appold said, "I went into a right bank,
trying to gain a few feet more of altitude. I put Storz, on my right
wing, in an uncomfortable position. He slid down to the right and had
to practically brush his wings on buildings to keep me off." Appold's
five-plane improvisation had hit Concordia Vega hard. About 40 percent
of its refining capacity was destroyed.
Now Appold had to avoid crashing into Potts and the last of the Circus.
The two formations were closing head-on over the roof tops at a combined
speed of nearly 500 miles an hour. Potts stayed low and Appold lifted
a bit. Killer Kane's higher wave was almost upon them. The center of
Ploesti was roofed with three layers of interweaving Liberators. In the
open street below stood General Alfred Gerstenberg, in awed admiration
of the galaxy of bombers maneuvering precisely at top speed without
colliding. He had no suspicion that it was all a horrible foul-up.
Appold's wingman, Storz, saw a green airplane coming toward him,
"a hundred feet off my wing, low, and laboring hard. I was quite certain
we would have a mid-air collision. As our courses were about to intercept,
he entered a three-story building." Storz had seen the B-24 crash into
the Women's Prison.
Appold's commando crossed the city and plunged into the billows
rolling off White Five. From his smoke-filled fuselage came a shout,
"We're on firel" Appold steered due west. Fresh air, entering through
battle holes, ventilated the ship. Nothing was on fire. Appold went to
his usual altitude, "five feet plus," and asked Barwell to count his
ships. The British gunner wheeled his turret and reported, "They're all
still with us. They appear to have sustained numerous hits, but none
seems disabled." Appold said, "I get a smell of hydraulic fluid." The
engineer replied, "The whole hydraulic system is out."
North of the city there was another unscheduled crosshatching of bombers.
As K.K. Compton's reforming Liberandos drove west across the ravines,
the Sky Scorpions came down from Red Target at right angles to them.
No other Liberators were supposed to be within miles of the Scorpions
at this phase, yet here were desert ships crossing their course and some
of them dumping bombs into outlying units of the Scorpion objective.
The Scorpions looked upon the Liberandos like men seeing pink elephants.
All the ships avoided collision.
Appold nestled into a semidry river course, crouching under guns and
radar, and his followers streamed behind, riffling stagnant pools
and whipping brush along the banks. Barwell phoned, "Directly ahead,
large stone bridge. Looks like a flak tower atop it." The observation
was confirmed by orange fireballs skipping toward them along the stream
bed. Barwell said, "Norm, could you drop the nose a bit?" Appold thought
this "an unreasonable request, but I had learned that when Barwell
wanted me to lower his gunning horizon, the favor paid off." He put the
nose deeper. "The top turret clattered," said the pilot, "and there,
without fail, we saw the slugs disintegrate the tower, gunners and all,
from a distance of at least a half mile. It was over in four or five
seconds. That was the maximum time I could maintain flight with the
nose pressed down, and it was all that Barwell ever needed. I felt
strongly relieved. We skirted the flak tower and eased down again, to
begin what was going to be a long, lonely journey to base if our gas
and luck held out."
The two finest aerial marksmen in the battle of Ploesti, Gamecock Hahn
and George Barwell had neither one got a shot at an enemy aircraft that
day. By taking to the river bed, Appold slipped his guerrillas past the
Messerschmitts and sighted no hostile planes all the way home.
As Appold fled Ploesti, the Eight Balls and Pyramiders were plunging
across the city from the northwest toward their briefed targets, which
were now in a convulsion of flames and explosions.
Bombs Away: 1211 hours
Then let each man turn straight to the front,8 THE TUNNEL OF FIRE
come death, come life --
that's how war and battle kiss and prattle.
-- The Iliad , Book XVII
It was now high noon. The battle of Ploesti was fifteen minutes
old. The Circus and Liberandos had left three refineries in flames,
and the two biggest forces of the mission, Leon Johnson's Eight Balls
and Killer Kane's Pyramiders, were still coming. They had reached and
turned the correct Third Initial Point on the northwest and were coming
down astraddle the Floresti-Ploesti railway. As they passed over the
force-landed Circus ship Honky-Tonk Gal, Robert Lehnhausen saw emerging
from its right waist window "a fellow without a stitch of clothing."
The two groups coming in abreast, exactly as the plan required, were divided
into three target forces. On the left was Kane, bound for White Four,
then Leon Johnson with 16 planes, driving for White Five, and on his
right James Posey, his deputy leader, guiding 21 ships toward Blue Target.
In the lead ship of the Eight Balls, Suzy-Q, piloted by Major William
Brandon, the co-pilot was Colonel Leon Johnson, the group commanding
officer. Johnson was a mild, snub-nosed Kansan with a blond R.A.F.-type
mustache. Following graduation from Moline High School, he had gone to
work in his father's bank. After seeing a friend in a U.S. Military
Academy uniform, he went to West Point and was commissioned as an
infantry shavetail. In 1929 he transferred to the Air Force because
"things looked more interesting from the air." While the infant Eighth
Air Force in Britain was shaking out commanders, Johnson was promoted
group leader of the Eight Balls. He told his men, "I never expected this
appointment. Frankly, I'd be suspicious of men who do not miss their
former CO, and I expect I'll be resented. But I have a feeling we'll
get along all right." They did. The Eight Balls followed their quiet
leader in bombing a 5,000-mile arc around Hitler's Reich, from Kiel to
Bordeaux to Naples and now to Ploesti.
As he sat in front of them on the target run, Johnson squinted hard
through the lilac haze for his target, White Five, the Colombia Aquila
refinery complex, whose six aiming points were only 310 feet wide,
strung along a bomb alley 1,000 feet deep. Johnson could see nothing
but a dark shroud hanging 2,000 feet high over his target heading.
He was puzzled about it, but, pending a closer look, assumed that it
was smog. Soon the dark curtain sharpened into focus and Johnson saw
that it was not an atmospheric effect; it was a forest of surging black
smoke with mangrove roots of flame. Someone had already struck his target.
Bombs exploded in White Five. Storage tanks jumped into the air.
Pilot Brandon looked at Colonel Johnson with a critical, unspoken
question: "Shall we turn back?" Johnson said in a calm, steady voice,
"William, you are on target." The force drove on. The bombardiers in
five waves of Liberators lined up on their pinpoint objectives hidden
in the geysers of smoke and flame.
As Johnson and Kane faced the chosen ordeal, a series of magic boxes
opened up on the railway that they were following to their targets. On
a freight train speeding south the sides of box cars fell, and a line
of artillery fired right and left into the flanking B-24's overtaking
the train at virtually the same altitude.
The flak train was one of Gerstenberg's most effective surprises.
It resembled a Q-ship of the First World War. Commanded by a captain,
the Q-train was a string of prosaic-looking four-wheeled freight wagons,
which contained bunk cars, a kitchen and recreation room, ammunition
magazines and dozens of antiaircraft guns concealed in collapsible car
bodies. This self-contained mobile destroyer could not have been placed in
a better position. An hour or so before, when the predicted B-24 course
spotlighted Floresti, the defenders had rolled the Q-train onto the
line, and now it roared along between the two parallel bomber columns,
firing into Johnson on the right and Killer Kane on the left. And the
Liberators could not elude flak while holding on the bomb run. The air
gunners enfiladed the train and blew up the locomotive, but not before
it had hit some ships so hard they would not get far beyond the target.
Leon Johnson faced right into the seething wall of smoke. Seconds before
he plunged into the holocaust there was a blast in the refinery of such
magnitude that the updraft sucked the smoke high off bomb alley. The Dubbs
stills and cracking towers were framed against a patch of blue sky beyond.
Suzy-Q rode through a tunnel of clear, hot, turbulent air, arched over
by crackling yellow and black clouds, and bombed her objective.
Johnson's flankers, Bewitching Witch and Scrappy II, hit their aiming
points in the aerial cave and came out flying. The second wave, led by
Captain Cameron in Buzzin' Bear, drove under the suspended fire cloud and
ploughed their yellow bombs into the target. Buzzin' Bear came off at a
height of 75 feet, with a rudder nearly shot off its hinges. Cameron's
co-pilot, William C. Dabney, said, "Bill, we're too low. Pick 'er up
a little." Cameron refused, and he won his point when two B-24's and a
pursuing Messerschmitt crossed beneath them. The Eight Balls that had
survived so far now entered the range of the guns southwest of Ploesti
that had mauled the Circus. Waiting also were the roving Messerschmitts,
IAR-80's, Me-110's and Ju-88's, all seeking cripples.
On Cameron's right wing, Charlie Porter Henderson was shot up by a Ju-88,
wounding navigator Robert S. Schminke and bombardier John R. Huddle.
Radioman John Dayberry saved Huddle's life with a quick and efficient
tourniquet while the ship was under attack by another twin-engined
fighter. It drove in obliquely from the rear, cutting rudder cables
and ripping up the tail. Gunner James R. Porter fell wounded. The top
turret man, Harold Cooper, and tail gunner C.H. Confer hit the Ju-88,
and Confer saw it strike the ground on fire. Another German crossed over
them, dropping disklike objects which burst into flame but did not fall
on the Liberator. Sergeant Dayberry tended the wounded and took Schminke's
place as navigator to give Henderson a bearing for Malta.
The black crematory door lowered on the third Eight Ball wave, led by
Worden L. Weaver piloting Lil Abner. He came out with three engines
mangled and his controls shot away. Forty miles from the target Weaver
could no longer hold in the air. He bellylanded near Visnia-Dombovitsa,
and a wing tipped the ground during the skid. Lil Abner came to a halt
with the nose rolled under the body, the bomb bay telescoped into the
flight deck, and the engineer, William J. Schettler, crushed dead under
the fallen top turret. The wreck burst into flame midships. Six men got
out of the rear, but the pilots and the navigator were imprisoned in the
cockpit. Weaver seized a crack in the windshield, forced open a hole,
and wriggled out. As navigator Walter M. Sorenson followed, his parachute
harness fouled in the opening, and he was stuck halfway out with co-pilot
Robert R. Snyder trapped behind him. The flames spread forward.
One of the fuselage escapees, bombardier Lloyd W. Reese Jr., went through
the fire and popping ammunition and cut away Sorenson's parachute harness.
Reese and radioman Jesse W. Hinley hauled both trapped men clear.
The survivors split up and ran in opposite directions. A German fighter
circled Weaver's party, "evidently reporting our position," the pilot
thought. Weaver tried his Romanian glossary on a farm boy, who led them
to a village. Women dipped feathers in a homemade balm and gently brushed
their seared flesh.
K for King, commanded by Robert E. Miller, led the fourth wave into
the dark and fiery target. "There was a hell of a lot of chatter on
the intercom about flak batteries," said Miller, "but through it all I
heard the voice of our bombardier, Robert Edwards, steady and cool even
though we were enveloped with smoke and fire. One of our gunners, Daniel
Rowland, got a direct hit in the thigh, which almost tore his leg off.
He put on the tourniquet himself." The co-pilot, Dexter L. Hodge, said,
"The way our gunners worked over the flak guys, I was convinced they
were the best men ever to squeeze a trigger." K for King emerged with
a two-foot gap in the fuselage, the top ripped open, a missing vertical
stabilizer, oil gushing from the cracked hub of No. 4 engine, a shattered
supercharger and the induction systems gone. In that state Miller and
Hodge faced the 1,100-mile voyage back to Africa. Missing were the two
wingmen who had entered White Five with them. Thomas E. Scrivner's ship
came out in flames, with the pilots fighting for a crash-landing. They
sledded into a wheat field, but before the slide was spent, the ship
exploded in a hundred-foot sphere of flame. None of the men Scrivner
tried to save came out of it.
K for King, with an engine afire, hedgehopped through twenty separate
fighter attacks. Flight engineer William J. Murphy, Jr., cut off the gas
on the flaming engine, pilot Miller feathered the prop, co-pilot Hodge
recovered the ship, and tail gunner C. J. Ducote dueled warily with a
Romanian plane that clung to him like a glider on a short tow. The Gypsy
would not break off until he had learned how to deal with a bomber that
refused to come off the ground and fight. The Romanian crept closer. When
he came within a hundred yards, Ducote buried fifty rounds in him. The
Romanian resorted to the textbook for high fighting. He peeled off,
presented his armored belly to the rear gunner, and dived. "The next
instant the woods for three blocks around were on fire," said Ducote.
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