Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (32 page)

 

 

Lucky, Ramsay Potts's surviving wingman, proved to be aptly named. Pilot
Harold Kendall was groping for Sicily with a 20-mm. hole in his bomb
bay tanks which had let out most of the gas before the crew could plug it.
Kendall, down to his last gallons and his crew in parachutes, waiting
for the jump gong, spotted a fighter strip in southern Sicily and landed
halfway up the short runway without hydraulic fluid to set his brakes.
Lucky ate up the runway, ran over a hill, picked up some unoccupied
British bell tents, and was halted by crashing into seven P-40 fighters.
Kendall's men tumbled out and kissed the ground. The top turret man, James
Goodgion, stroked the lucky live lizard that he carried on missions. He
saw the P-40 ground crews approaching and got ready for a big welcome. A
mechanic greeted him with "Jesus Christ! We just got finished taking
fifteen crackups apart to make these good airplanes and you guys come
along and smash 'em all up." Captain Kendall, a lifelong teetotaler,
went to a village wine shop and drank two liters of
vino rosso
.

 

 

Charles Porter Henderson of the Eight Balls stretched his flight on to
Malta, landing on the Luqa fighter runway high on the rock. As his thankful
men dismounted, an R.A.F. man pointed to the brink of a quarry 150 feet
ahead of the plane. "Bloody good landing, sir," he said. "We've had lots
of chaps go in there."

 

 

Forlorn Utah Man, far behind the general decampment, reached the Adriatic
slope. Stewart called, "Connolly, give me a fuel check." The engineer
replied, "Number Three is clear out and has been since the target. One,
Two and Four are dipping empty." The pilot asked, "How much time does
this give us?" The sergeant answered, "I don't know, Walt. I've never
been in a ship registering this low before." Stewart said, "Well,
fellows, shall we set down here on the shore and give ourselves up,
or do you want to try to make it? We've got five hundred miles of water
ahead." Bartlett chimed in, "Before we vote, let me make a speech. Do you
call this a sea? Why, we have rivers in Montana wider than this two-bit
pond. Let's go! If we have to set down, I could pull this tub with one
hand and swim with the other." The Paul Bunyanesque address produced a
ten-nothing vote to carry on.

 

 

In a ship nearer home, Alva J. Geron gave control to his co-pilot and
went aft to give morphine to gunner Paul T. Daugherty, who had a gaping
flak wound in his chest. "Kill me, Lieutenant," said the gunner. "You
know I won't live. Put me out of my misery." Geron injected more anesthetic.
"Lieutenant, can you pray?" asked Daugherty. "Yes, I can," said the pilot.
"Will you say a prayer for me?" Geron took him in his arms and prayed.
The gunner squeezed the pilot's hand and slumped in death.

 

 

One of Geron's engines had been shot out. Now another failed. The crew
threw guns, ammunition, everything loose out the waist bays. The pilot
called a conference on the intercom and asked if all agreed on a
water-landing. One of the gunners said, "No, sir. Not with Daugherty
here. We oughtn't to let him sink in the sea." To bear the pall, the
crew stayed with the airplane.*

 

 

* They landed in Libya with five minutes of gas left. The gunner
was buried in the desert and the pilot and several of the crew
went missing in action over Germany three weeks later.

 

 

On the dusty Libyan bases it had been a long, silent, corrosive day.
Despite General Ent's "Mission Successful" signal, the camps were full
of sick longing to know what had happened and who would return. The
R.A.F. was relaying distress calls from an appalling number of Liberators.
Outside the command radio shack Gerald Geerlings, the mission draftsman,
played a distracted game of horseshoes with Jacob Smart, Ted Timberlake
and Leander Schmid, the leaders who had been pulled out of the planes
before take-off. Inside sat General Brereton, silently fretting, growing
more and more annoyed at the cheerful telephone conversations of the duty
officer who affected R.A.F. slang. Late in the afternoon Brereton heard
one "Bang-on, ruddy good show" too many. He went over to the junior and
snarled, "You're a moron!" The surprised officer was trying to shape an
apology when the phone rang again. He said, "Sir, General Ent's plane
has just landed at Berka Two." Brereton ran to his car to meet the first
plane home.

 

 

Norman Appold landed soon afterward at Berka Two without flaps or
brakes. In the interrogation shack he and George Barwell found Brereton,
Ent and K.K. Compton huddled in a low, gloomy discussion. Barwell said,
"Norm, I am really quite sorry for General Ent. He's one of the best
of your chaps I've met, a nice man, a very unusual man." Appold said,
"Let's find A-Two and tell the sad story." Ent's decision to break off
the target run in the face of Gerstenberg's flak had preserved all but
two of the 26 Liberando ships that had reached the target area.

 

 

Barwell found that a clerk had put his name on the mission sortie list
for the first time in his many unauthorized flights with the Americans.
Cross and bone-weary, the master air gunner went to his tent and
flopped on a cot. One of the Yacht Club boys thrust his head through
the flaps and said, "You had a hard day, pal? Want a drink?" Barwell
said, "Ghastly. Thanks." He got up and joined the artists. Next day
he was summoned to Cairo by a very senior Royal Air Force officer,
who reprimanded him for flying without permission and packed him off
for England. Barwell was the only man on Tidal Wave who never received
a decoration for it.

 

 

 

 

Russell Longnecker's spectral day in Thundermug, his first as the
commander of an airship, had been splotched with somber shades of the
deaths of many comrades and rainbows of luck for him. Now, nearing Africa,
the picture would be ending, black or bright. Sergeant Pinson said, "The
sight gauges are empty." Longnecker sang out with a confidence that had
no substance, "We ought to be hitting land any minute now." In the miasma
ahead there was a yellow flash, followed by a heavy crump. Longnecker's
heart leaped. "We're home!" he cried. "The British ack-ack boys are
saying hello." He queued up on another Liberator to land and recognized
Ramsay Potts's ship, Duchess. He told himself, "At least somebody else
got back almost as late as me." As the Circus base spread in front of his
glide, he did not see a single B-24 on the ground. Longnecker was in the
Intelligence shed before he realized what had happened at Ploesti. Eleven
more crews reported in after him. Addison Baker had left that morning
with 39 bombers.

 

 

Timberlake and Geerlings jeeped out to meet Ramsay Potts's ship.
The ashen-faced B Force Leader came out from under the bomb bay with
blazing eyes, shaking with fury. "A torrent of words tumbled out of him
about what had gone wrong with the mission," said Geerlings.

 

 

A ship reached Benina Main in the twilight, firing red flares.
The controllers stacked the others in the air to let it in first.
Chaplain Patterson went in the ambulance to meet it. Through the waist
window the gunners passed out a litter upon which lay a wounded comrade,
numbed with morphine, but wearing a crooked smile. He said to Patterson,
"I made it back from Ploesti, Chappie. See you later." The Chaplain looked
at him again and drew a blanket over a dead face. The top turret gunner
watched, shakily lighting a cigaret with a kitchen match. He held the stem
in front of his eyes, watching it burn in yellow sap-flame, curl over
black, and die. "Is life like that, Chappie?" he asked. Patterson said,
"Yes, Sergeant, life is like that." Top turret trampled the ember in
the dust and walked to interrogation.

 

 

Reginald Phillips, leader of the second wave over Blue Target, sat
in the shack, dog-tired and thick of tongue. An Intelligence officer
asked, "What was your overall impression of the mission?" Phillips'
jaw worked. He said, "We -- were -- dragged through the mouth of -- hell."

 

 

Waist gunner Ernest V. Martin, a young Sky Scorpion man lent to Kane's
force, was brought home mortally wounded. Fellow crewmen said he had
stood his guns throughout the day. He died 48 hours later.

 

 

Earl Hurd landed Tarfu and helped lift out a wounded gunner, Thomas
D. Gilbert, back from his first war mission. Gilbert asked his pilot,
"Are they all like this?" Hurd, a 22-mission man, joked, "No, some
of them get pretty rough." He saw the spirit ebb from the youngster,
as he thought of 24 more missions worse than Ploesti. The pilot said,
"Look, I'm just kidding. This was my roughest one. The good Lord had
his hand on our shoulders today."

 

 

Sergeant William Nelson got out of Valiant Virgin and lay down on the
sand. A mechanic asked, "What was it like?" After some thought Nelson
said, "Well, we started out today comparatively inexperienced. Right
now I'd say we are one of the most experienced and oldest crews in the
Air Force."

 

 

Ben Kuroki, the Japanese-American top turret gunner, shouldered his
parachute and got down from Tupelo Lass. He and pilot K.O. Dessert walked
to interrogations in the fading daylight, passing shadowy, dejected groups
of ground crewmen waiting at empty stands. Ben wept. "The fools! Don't they
know they'll never come back!"

 

 

As the distracted airman sat for questioning, night settled on the desert.
The interrogators did not get much from men in shock and deep fatigue
and released them to stumble off to sleep. As the bomber camps sank into
torpor, out in the Mediterranean night three Homeric Liberator crews
were still in the air with dead radios, yearning for home.

 

 

One of them was Utah Man with 13 hours and 45 minutes on the flight
log. The Mormon pilot took up a glide path on the Circus base and quipped
on the interphone, "We're going over our tent. Watch the vultures
run out. The boys are probably dividing up our junk." (The next day,
sheepish people returned their belongings.) Stewart rolled to a stop in
the sands and dropped out of the plane into a welter of greeters -- his
ground crew, truck drivers, cooks, Red Cross girls, Chaplain James Burns,
Brutus Hamilton and Ted Timberlake, laughing and weeping and embracing
the crew of Utah Man. They told him of the cloud collision in which he
had lost his friend Hugh Roper of Exterminator. Stewart and his fellow
officers went to their tent, knelt together, and "thanked God for hearing
our prayer of just twenty-four hours before." The crew chief of Utah
Man, Master Sergeant Scott, entered and said, "Walt, I know you're beat
and don't want to talk to anybody, but I got to tell you something.
I just went over our plane with seventeen crew chiefs from ships that
didn't get back. Did you smell gas over the target?" Stewart said, "I
sure did. But it stopped about twenty-five minutes later and the gauge
showed empty." Scott said, "It follows. You have a flak hole the size
of a baseball under the wing tank and you got one as big as a basketball
where it went out the top. The bottom one got sealed off and the only gas
you lost went out the top a while. I don't know how much you have left,
but the way she sits on the oleo struts, I'd say you are now out of gas."

 

 

When Stewart brought his miracle to earth, Lewis Ellis was still out
in the night with Daisy Mae, trying to work another. Dillman reported,
"All fuel gauges showing zero, sir." Coldiron, slumping tired and
wounded in the turret slings, announced, "Red flares ahead. It's got to
be land." Dillman spun the handcranks, letting the wheels down, to save
the last hydraulic fluid for the flaps. "We need only a few more minutes,"
Ellis told the crew. Daisy Mae was chewing the air, near to stalling.

 

 

Ellis set power as low as he dared to suck the last pints of gasoline,
Fager pumped the flaps half down as Daisy Mae settled into the dust
blanket over her home port. The pilot revved up to 2,100 rpm, ears
cocked for failing engines, and turned the elevator knob on the automatic
pilot. He was committed to land without a nosewheel, at night, inside a
bed of dust -- the same turbidity that had taken the Nespor-Riley ship
on the Tidal Wave take-off fifteen hours before. "We can never circle
again if we miss this one," said Ellis. Fager switched on the landing
beams and pistoled red flares out his window.

 

 

Daisy Mae submerged in the dust sea, touched earth at stalling speed,
and bounced. Ellis shoved the throttles to the bulkhead, demanding
all power to maintain horizontal progress. The engines cut out. But
Daisy Mae's wheels were running on the earth. She coasted on swiftly
and silently through the gritty fog and ploughed her nose gently into
the sand. An ambulance crew took out the twice-wounded bombardier from
the bloody flight deck. Gioana lifted a hand from the litter and said,
"Sure glad to be back." That night flight surgeons, employing four blood
transfusions, preserved his life.

 

 

At interrogations Ellis came upon a memorable scene: the man who had been
scared on his second mission was sitting with Generals Brereton and Ent,
"telling them just how it happened."

 

 

In the glum Liberando encampment, hours after the ships were all home
and the dust was settled, yawning towermen saw red flares arching into
the night off the end of the main runway and ordered landing lights on
the strip.

 

 

It was Liberty Lad, the last Tidal Wave bomber still in the air, with
both engines dead on one wing. McFarland and Podgurski were giving the
last of their tortured legs to bring their wounded to Berka Two, where
the hospital was located, instead of their own Circus field. The pilots
approached at 2,000 feet with half flaps, the rudders fixed grotesquely
to the right, held there by their stone legs for four hours. John H. Hayes
manually lowered the wheels. As McFarland made his commitment to land,
his instrument panel lights blew out. John Brown held a flashlight on
the air-speed indicator. It read 120 mph. If it increased, Liberty Lad
would crash in. If it decreased, the plane would stall in.