Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (36 page)

 

 

American officers received the equivalent pay of their rank in the
Romanian Army -- in the case of a first lieutenant, 22,400 lei (about
$22.50 U.S.) a month, a large salary in Romania. A hard-working peasant
was lucky to earn two dollars a month in Hitler's protectorate. Two
hundred lei per day was deducted from each officer's salary for
rations. Although that amounted to twenty cents, it bought plenty of
good food.

 

 

When the word got out in the countryside that Timisul was full of rich
Americans, farm wives arrived at the wire with a small harvest fair: juicy
peaches and plums, squealing piglets, chicken and geese, apples, slabs of
bacon and pungent sausages, goose liver salami, and two veritable marvels
-- ripe watermelons and roasting ears of corn. The officers quickly
learned the word for beer -- the famous brand name "Bragadir";
tsuica
,
pronounced "sweeka," for plum brandy; and "Monopol" for champagne.

 

 

Romania held in escrow from the officers' wages all but the allowance for
rations and comforts. The depositors figured their growing bank accounts
and plunged heavily at craps and poker, using I.O.U.'s. Caminada and
Johnson received captains' salaries, which the veterinarian said "were
of little use to us. We could not always compete with the 'Damn Yanks'
at poker. We poor 'Limeys' were easy prey." One officer won $3,000 from
his cagemates. Some of the shouting card-slappers and pot-rakers had
"appalling wounds and burns, which really should have been attended
to in hospital," said Johnson. There came a shipment of medications
from the British Red Cross and the "Limey Pig-Doctor" looked after
the "Damn Yanks." "I worried each time I dressed the burns, because
it was inevitable that I had to take off more layers of flesh," said
Johnson. "The only way I managed to get any cure was to expose the wounds
and put the men out to sunbathe."

 

 

 

 

Seventy-nine other Tidal Wave men were interned in the first-class Yeni
Hotel in Ankara, Turkey. General William D. Tindall, the U. S. military
attaché, paid their full salaries, obtained parole for them from morning
to night, and shipped the disabled men to the States. The fliers walked
in Captain Mooney's funeral procession. As it passed the German Embassy,
a drooping swastika banner almost brushed the Stars and Stripes on
Mooney's catafalque. When the Turkish honor guard fired the last volley,
storks flew out of their nests in the trees. Franz von Papen, the Nazi
ambassador, protested to the Turkish Government over the insult done
his banner by permitting the American flag to parade past it.

 

 

Tindall got the men credits to buy civilian clothes. Earl Zimmerman said,
"As Uncle Sam was paying the bill, we wore nothing but the best." They
played chess with interned Russian airmen, who inquired after the health
of previous American chess opponents, the Halpro men. They dined at the
best restaurant in the capital, Pop Karpic's. He sent gifts of caviar
to their tables, particularly when von Papen was sitting nearby. One
of the bored B-24 men went on a spree and was jailed for striking a
policeman. Karpic sent him caviar and champagne.

 

 

The military attaché evacuated them piecemeal. Sergeant Zimmerman
departed via Syria and arrived in Prestwick, Scotland, in General Sir
Bernard Montgomery's private plane. Charles Hughes, Sylvester Hunn
and two brother officers were taking an aperitif on the waterfront
at Izmir when a smiling Greek named Thorgarous Christopholis invited
them to inspect his little fishing caïque. As the airmen recoiled from
the cramped, reeking and verminous forecastle, Captain Christopholis
said, "This is where you will stay." His lone seaman was casting off
lines. During four miserable days the Americans remained belowdecks
as German patrol planes buzzed the boat, sighting nothing but a sailor
toiling and a skipper squatting on the afterdeck, arm over the tiller,
mouth sucking on a hubble-bubble pipe. Christopholis landed the airmen
in Cyprus, and the R.A.F. returned them to their squadrons.

 

 

Three weeks after Tidal Wave, Washington target analysts held a convention
to "reach agreement" on the damage inflicted on Ploesti. They concluded
that "the most important effect was to eliminate the cushion between
production and capacity." It was tantamount to admitting that the
unprecedented effort and sacrifice had not taken any oil from Hitler.

 

 

However, the European war was no longer static. The Allies were going
over to the land offensive on two fronts in Italy and the U.S.S.R.,
forcing Hitler to find more fuel than before. Just when he needed the
Ploesti cushion, it had disappeared. The German drive to seize the Soviet
oil centers had been defeated, and the Reich was now obliged to divert
labor and capital to synthetic oil production. The Ploesti raid hastened
German retreat in Italy, where the Allies were marching on Foggia and
Bari to build bases much closer to Ploesti than Benghazi. Although Tidal
Wave had fallen short of expectation, it made a pivotal contribution to
the crisis of the Third Reich.

 

 

The most telling effect of the mission was to inaugurate the downfall
of the German Air Force. The Reich was expanding fighter production at
an astonishing rate to meet the ever-growing, round-the-clock bomber
offensive. More than enough eager youths came forward to fly the new
German fighters, but there was not enough extra oil to give them proper
training. The Luftwaffe began to eat itself. A pilot parachuting from
a disabled plane was immediately given a new one, but a pilot lost in
battle could not be as readily replaced. There was no such thing as
retirement of an able-bodied flier in Goering's command. The fighter
pilots in Romania faced nothing but overwork, fatigue and death.

 

 

Tidal Wave was a pronounced moral victory for the Allies, a desideratum
of the great plan, which was realized to a greater degree than had been
hoped for. Romanian eyewitnesses spoke admiringly of the accuracy of
the strikes, "like a postman dropping a letter in the box." Europe is
a community, even when divided by war, and this sort of talk spread
from country to country. In Britain the U.S. Office of War Information
produced a Tidal Wave booklet in French, which showed the extraordinary
photographs of Liberators flying in the target flames and smoke. It was
airdropped in France and Belgium and passed from hand to hand around
Europe, which despised the inaccurate Allied high-level bombings that
killed many innocent and friendly people. To Europeans Tidal Wave was
evidence that U.S. bomber men were brave enough to fight on the ground
amidst their own explosions, and that they could deliver bombs accurately
on military objectives with a minimum toll of civilians.

 

 

The mission was the last act of chivalry in aerial bombing. There was
probably no other urban air raid of the war in which more airmen died than
civilians. Excluding German military casualties, 116 Romanian military
and civilians were killed, against 310 U.S. airmen. One hundred fifty
Romanians were wounded, against a comparable number of Liberator men.

 

 

In the target kingdom respect for Allied power, not Soviet might alone,
leaped in a day. In power psychology -- the only terms by which abused
Romania could judge friend or foe -- the United States suddenly became
as highly regarded as Germany and the Soviet. The First of August aroused
stirrings of national spirit, and Romania began a slow upturn from
resignation to active resistance toward the Nazis.

 

 

Although Tidal Wave was not a strategic success, it bore out Jacob Smart's
contention that a zero strike would be more efficient than the orthodox
high-altitude approach. Damage surveys after the war found that the
low-level mission produced a greater rate of destruction per ton of
bombs against tons of oil than any of the mighty high-altitude raids
that were to follow it.

 

 

These assaults were now being planned. The Ploesti file was left open in
Washington, although it was being closed in the desert. In his Tidal Wave
summation to the Chiefs of Staff, General Brereton ticked off the mission
leader for the wrong turn into the bomb run and the Circus commander for
striking out on his own from the erroneous course. However, he did not
reprimand these officers. "Combined operations of this nature," Brereton
said, "require extreme precision and are most difficult to control
. . . when navigation must be conducted over great distances. Hindsight
suggests that a decision to break radio silence and reassemble the entire
formation at the Danube might have resulted in greater success and fewer
losses." Brereton apparently did not think of the consequences had all
the groups followed the mission leader on the wrong turn toward Bucharest.

 

 

Subsequent official U. S. Air Force historians have attributed the
disappointing results of Tidal Wave to the error at Targoviste, which
they thought had alerted the defenses and spoiled the surprise. Neither
Brereton nor the historians knew that the enemy had detected the take-off
and tracked the bombers most of the way to the target.

 

 

Soon after the battle Leon Johnson and Killer Kane were gazetted for the
Medal of Honor for bombing their briefed targets, although they were
already burning and exploding. General Brereton hung the starry blue
ribbon around Kane's neck on the cricket pitch of the Gezira Sporting
Club in Cairo before a fashionable audience, and pinned Silver Stars and
Distinguished Service Crosses on fourteen other Ploesti warriors. Leon
Johnson received the highest U.S. award for valor one gray mizzling day
on an airdrome in England in front of rank after rank of great-coated
Liberator men.

 

 

It took months before the remaining three Medals of Honor for Tidal Wave
were announced, the laurels of one of the most intense battles in history.
Lloyd Hughes's posthumous medal for driving into flaming Red Target with
his ship streaming gasoline was won for him by the O.W.I. man, but there
was an inner-circle dispute over recognizing a similar deed by Addison
Baker and John Jerstad, who had flown their flaming lead ship to the
Circus target. A conservative faction in the award councils held that
men who had broken formation discipline could not be honored. Officers
who had served on Tidal Wave disputed this view with great vehemence
and won for Baker and Jerstad the first paramount award given to both
pilots of an aircraft for a mutual act of valor.

 

 

All over the United States, relatives and friends of the men who did not
return from Ploesti had had no word of them other than the War Department
telegram announcing that they were missing. One little town, Belvidere,
Illinois (population 8,000), had given four inseparable high school
companions to Tidal Wave, and two of them, Lieutenant Jack Lanning
and Sergeant Arthur White, were missing. The Belvidere
Republican
tried to strike a note of hope for Lanning by publishing a letter he
had posted to his bride the day before take-off. Under a headline,
JACK LANNING AND PALS HAD A NEW PLANE ON PLOESTI RAID, the story said,
"It is called Wingo-Wango, which is supposed to be some kind of a bird."

 

 

Brian Flavelle's Wingo-Wango was 3,000 feet down in the Ionian Sea.
Belvidere did not learn that until several weeks later when a letter
arrived from another of its Ploesti men, Sergeant George K. Holroyd,
telling of seeing his friend's ship go down. The letter barely arrived
before a telegram announcing that Holroyd had been killed in an air crash
in England. The town held a memorial service, at which Lanning's and
Holroyd's Distinguished Flying Crosses and Purple Hearts were given to
next of kin. Two unexpected waves of emotion came over the gathering. The
chairman was handed an announcement that the fourth local lad, Lieutenant
Lon Bryan, had been killed over Germany. And then he read a letter from
Sergeant White, alive in Romania!

 

 

It was one of the first letters to reach home from the fantastic prison
camp of the Ploesti men.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment,
Of innocent merriment.
-- W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado

 

 

14 THE GILDED CAGE

 

 

As the fallen Americans settled into the Timisul de Jos camp, the
Romanians brought the rest of their western Allied detainees to the
new foreign colony in the Alps. There were not many of them, but they
were unusual men. There were a stately Dutch admiral, L.A.C. Doorman,
and his aide, Baron van Lyndon, a young esthete, who had refused to
swear they would not take up arms again when the Germans smashed
into Holland. Carried off to a stalag, they broke out and walked
southeast, employing the admiral's five languages, but were recaptured
in Romania. There were two Yugoslav pilots who had run out of gas in
Romania while trying to reach the British lines as the Wehrmacht crashed
into their country.

 

 

Soon the oddest cage bird of them all arrived in the officers' stockade
-- a slender man with a broken leg in a cast. He was wearing a Royal Air
Force uniform, and his papers identified him as Flight Lieutenant Marcus
Jacobson. In heavily accented English he explained that he had broken
his leg in a parachute jump. The inmates thought everything about him
was queer. There had been no R.A.F. raids on Romania. Americans who had
served in the R.A.F. quickly ascertained that Jacobson knew nothing about
that service. In fact, he was highly ignorant of airplanes. Furthermore,
he spoke perfect Romanian. They concluded that the new man was a spy
and shunned him.