Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (29 page)

 

 

Along the Turkish distress route Sweet Adeline came upon a badly shot-up
pink ship, dragging along alone. Pilot Podolak phoned, "Hey, you from
the 98th. What's your situation?" There was no reply. Co-pilot James
Case flashed a lamp signal: "Heading Cyprus. Come on radio." The pink
one winked back, "Radio shot out. Will you stay with us?" Podolak said
to Case, "Tell 'em we sure will." Sweet Adeline slowed down and the
two ships crossed the Turkish border, wing to wing. Three U.S.-built
Warhawks, wearing star-and-crescent livery, climbed alongside and
radioed, "You come land with us." Podolak told his crew, "To hell with
landing in Turkey. Everybody level guns on them but don't shoot. You
okay, Junior?" From the ball turret young Private McGreer replied,
"Yeah. Got 'em right in my sights." The Turkish pilots saw the guns and
dived away. Sweet Adeline and the pink cripple continued toward Cyprus,
where they landed safely.

 

 

Another pair on the southern heading were Harold James's Liberator
and that of the dead Captain Mooney, whose co-pilot, Henry Gerrits,
was flying the machine beside the empty seat. James asked radioman Earl
Zimmerman to code a message to Benghazi saying they were heading for
Turkey. Before sending it Zimmerman warmed up on the group frequency and
phoned the pilot, "I hear an S.O.S. and another ship calling for a QDM
[bearing]." James said, "Turn it off. Don't send anything. It would
interfere with planes in worse shape than we are."

 

 

Two Turkish Warhawks came alongside and lowered their landing gear,
the summons to surrender. Gerrits and James were very low on fuel. They
dropped their wheels. Gerrits landed his dead and wounded in a wheat field.
A Turkish fighter came in with him, hit a ditch, and broke up. The pilot
got out, but he was court-martialed and sentenced to twenty years for
destroying government property.

 

 

James landed on a fighter strip and burned his brakes out on the short
run. His crew was surrounded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. A Turkish
officer arrived, gave the Americans a smiling hello, then turned and
knocked the nearest soldier flat on the ground. Turkish officers got
into the plane, berserk with curiosity. They pulled the rip cords on the
parachutes, emptied the first-aid kits, and unrolled the bandages. "They
even squeezed the ointment from the tubes," said Zimmerman.

 

 

Crossing Turkey, the engineer of Vagabond King, the last plane to bomb
during the mission, was transferring gas when all four engines cut out
at once. Pilot McCormick said, "Ringing the bail-out gong was out of the
question because of Van Buren's shot-up parachute. We just stuck with
it. The motors came back in. We landed at Cyprus on an uphill runway,
feeling very good. I turned off to find a place to park and a truck hit
us. We were on a highway." *

 

 

* McCormick and his crew were shot down three months later in the
North Sea.

 

 

On the southern route Killer Kane was trying to lift his airborne wreck
over the lowest pass in the Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria. Hail Columbia
was 200 feet too low. The controls were pulling the pilots' arms out of
their sockets, and the harness was binding into their chests. Kane gasped,
"Hey, navigator, what's the altitude?" Whalen replied, "I guess we'll
get over it." Kane howled, "Guess, hell! You'd better be right or it'll
be everybody's ass!" The sluggish moloch sailed slowly toward the peak.

 

 

There was a tiny favor of weather. A small thermal flicked up under Hail
Columbia. She was over the top and free. The tail gunner said, "Killer,
I swear I felt the belly scrape the mountain." White Four Leader replied,
"You can get good and plastered, boy, when we land. And that goes for all
of you." He kept the intercom open to pay tribute to the Kane-deafened
Whalen: "That was one hell of a swell job of navigation, fella." Kane
was bluffing to give his men hope. He thought, "we have about as much
chance as a snowball in hell to come out of this." He was short on gas,
with one engine gone and another turning a buzzing prop with two shot-up
tips. He had a warped main spar and hundreds of flak holes. Yet the
astonishing B-24 still flew.

 

 

Fred Weckessler, the flight engineer, phoned Kane, "There might be some
gas in the left bomb bay tank. She indicates zero. All the same I think
there's juice left in her." Kane said, "Get to work." Weckessler cleared
a clogged outlet and pumped the bonus into a wing tank. The corporals
dropped the auxiliary tank through the bomb bay, hoping not to go down
like that.

 

 

Kane clattered across Turkey, eking out the miles to avoid internment
and reach Cyprus, a half hour beyond the Turkish coast. He radioed
his position to Benghazi via the R.A.F. stations at Cyprus and Cairo.
R.A.F. Station 73B at Nicosia, Cyprus, called Kane: "We can receive
you. If after dark, we shall make a green light. Reply with same and
we'll give you a flare path." The Liberators crossed the last mountains
of Turkey in the setting sun and sighted the twilight blue of the Gulf
of Antalya. Hadley's Harem phoned Kane, "We've lost another engine. Going
to try landing on the beach."

 

 

Gilbert Hadley still had a mile-high column of air between his plane
and the wine-dark sea. His last two engines started to kick. He polled
his crew: "Do you want to bail out or ride her in?" They voted for a
crash-landing. Radioman William Leonard broadcast their position as
Hadley banked around, and the Harem faltered toward the Turkish shore
near Alanya. The crew removed clothing and opened the top escape hatch
in the radio compartment. Hadley tried to will his ship as far as the
beach. He pushed up all the power he had. The last two engines failed.
A wing hooked into the water. The plane sprawled and sank. A wave slapped
shut the escape hatch. The pilots and engineer Page shoved at the hatch,
but water pressure sealed it beyond their strength. The pilots swam toward
the hole in the nose. Page popped back up in his turret and breathed from
a sweet pocket of air. He filled his lungs and dived again, feeling his
way back to the crash opening. He bobbed out to the sea surface. The world
was pink and glorious and he heard angel voices. Afloat in the still,
warm water were the wounded navigator, Tabacoff, radioman Leonard, and
Sergeants Pershing W. Waples, Leroy Newton, Frank Nemeth and Christopher
Holweger. The wreckage sank, sucking and gurgling, carrying down Hadley
and his co-pilot Lindsay and bombardier Storms's body.

 

 

The survivors inflated their life vests and swam for the darkening
shore. Hadley had stretched his last flight to within a half-mile of
land. The seven castaways fell exhausted on the Turkish beach. Fisherfolk
coming with ancient rifles recognized them as miserable, harmless souls
and built a driftwood fire. The naked airmen crawled to the warmth,
and the fishermen squatted around all night watching them.

 

 

Air-Sea Rescue at Cyprus had heard Hadley's last position on the radio.
In the morning a Wellington spotted the beach bivouac and dropped a note.
The survivors confirmed that they were U.S. airmen by spelling out a
message on the sand with stones. A high-speed rescue launch arrived from
Cyprus, anchored offshore, and its captain and an interpreter came to the
beach in a dinghy. The British skipper addressed the local pasha: "These
men cannot be interned. They sank at sea. Is that not so?" The fishermen
nodded. "Therefore they are shipwrecked mariners! And we have come to
rescue them." This invocation of Admiralty Law touched the Turkish sense
of justice and humor and Air-Sea Rescue was allowed to take them off.

 

 

After Hadley's Harem sank, Killer Kane's trio continued for Cyprus in
complete darkness. Kane saw a green dot -- the promise of Nicosia --
and saluted it with a green flare. R.A.F. men lighted the runway flare
path. Unknown to Kane, at either end of the runway there were ditches,
which the R.A.F. customarily placed to encourage precise landings. In
the feeble light, "exhausted, too tired to fight the unbalanced pull
of the engines any more," Kane saw that he was landing too short, his
wheels headed for the ditch. "I tried to stretch the glide and float
the plane those extra yards," he said.

 

 

Hail Columbia's undercarriage snagged the ditch and she bounced with
her tail rising. Kane saw the flare path climbing his windshield and
glowing through the astradome. He was coming in standing on his nose.
He and Young braced their feet on the instrument panel and pulled the
control columns hard against their chests. Slowly the tail fell back
and hammered the ground. In the B-24's landing beams Kane saw "amazing
things rolling ahead of us -- the prop from the dead engine and our two
main wheels." Hail Columbia screeched along the tarmac, slewed around,
and stopped, facing backward. The tower shot a red flare to warn the
other incoming B-24's of a ship wrecked on the runway. The light glared
into Kane's flight deck. Young yelled "Fire!" and leaped for the top
hatch. Kane switched off the engines and electricity. Young dropped back
and said apologetically, "After you, sir." Kane shoved the co-pilot's
rump through the escape hatch and unbuckled his seat belt. He got up,
and fell back into the seat. His legs were numb after thirteen hours of
pedal-tramping. On the second try he gained his feet. He climbed out on
top of Hail Columbia and sat there, a red man in the dying flare. Below,
his men were kissing the ground and contentedly sifting handfuls of sand
over and over. Kane slid down and pawed the earth.

 

 

The R.A.F. brought LeBrecht and Banks in on a transverse runway, followed
by five more Liberators. Two had arrived ahead of Kane. An R.A.F. flight
surgeon said, "We didn't know you were coming, Colonel, and our mess is
closed. Could I give you dinner in town?" Through the blackout curtains of
a Nicosia night club, into a brilliantly lighted foyer, came the crew of
Hail Columbia. Killer Kane caught sight of himself in a pier glass. One
arm was sooty from the fires of White Four. His suntans were lace-white
with encrusted sweat. Red eyes stared at him from a harlequin face caked
with salt and soot. At dinner the crew fell asleep with their heads on
the table, oblivious to flimsily clad Cyprians kicking high.

 

 

While Killer Kane and the Cypriot and Turkish refugees were unwinding
their destinies, the majority of ships, still widely strewn over the sky,
were crossing western Bulgaria on the planned withdrawal course. Lewis
Ellis, who had felt "enormously tired" on the way to Ploesti, suddenly
felt "fresh and almost completely rested. In spite of everything that
happened, I thoroughly enjoyed flying." Crossing low over a village, he
glanced at the plane at his side. "I was horrified to see the bombardier
fire his nose gun, knocking two men flat," said Ellis. "We had been
specifically briefed against firing at civilians." *

 

 

* Later, during interrogation, Ellis hung around the bombardier to
see if he would report the incident. The bombardier said, "Oh, yes,
on the edge of a town there were two German soldiers firing at us
with rifles, and I knocked them out." "Furthermore," said Ellis,
"his crew had taken pictures of the two men that proved they
were soldiers."

 

 

Since his mortification in the forenoon, which found his best pilots off
post, Colonel Vulkov, commanding the Bulgarian Sixth Fighter Regiment,
had pulled his four bases into readiness for the return voyage of the
bombers. From Karlovo and Asen, 46 Avias and six Messerschmitts climbed
to intercept the south-bound American convoys, while the two squadrons
of Avias near Sofia went up to block the bombers in the Osogovska Mountains.
This time the B-24's were low enough to be reached by the oxygenless Avias.

 

 

Climbing between Pleven and Sofia, Daisy Mae was passing through dark
thunderheads when top turret gunner Owen Coldiron called, "Fighters at
three o'clock and a little high. I think they're Italians." Lieutenant
Rusev of Squadron 622 drove at Ellis. The B-24's threw brilliant
tracers across the somber clouds and collected a few more rents in their
hides. The Bulgarian fighters got on Ned McCarty's Pyramider Liberator
and hit him hard in both left engines. They streamed white smoke, but he
kept them turning. His plane sank, threading its way through the hills,
barely matching the air speed of the formation. The Bulgarians had only
one sting in them. After one pass their old machines could not overtake
the bombers. Rusev broke off with little result.

 

 

As the brush ended, Ellis was overjoyed to see his close friend, Julian
Darlington, sailing along in The Witch, close to the wing of James
A. Gunn in Prince Charming, both planes seemingly in good fettle. The
three formed a diamond with another plane. As they ascended through
clouds, Lieutenant Petrov's Bulgarian Squadron 612 located the diamond
and attacked. Again the Bulgarians failed to inflict serious damage. The
Liberators disappeared in a cloud, and the second Bulgarian squadron
had lost its chance.

 

 

At that point the Bulgarian fortune improved. By an eerie, intuitive
stroke, Lieutenant Stoyan Stoyanov showed up leading the Karlovo
Messerschmitts, the only six planes in the Bulgarian polk that were faster
than the bombers. Stoyanov drilled into a cloud top and destroyed the
No. 2 and No. 3 engines on The Witch. In the next patch of visibility,
Stanley Horine, the tail gunner of Prince Charming, phoned his pilot,
"The Witch has been hit bad. She's falling behind." Without temporizing,
James Gunn throttled back to take Darlington's side against the foe. As
he drifted back, the Bulgarians struck Prince Charming, which began
to emit white smoke. By the time Gunn had come abreast of Darlington,
flame was coming out, of his waist windows.