Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (38 page)

 

 

As the shaft neared the wire, men began to have second thoughts about
the ordeal ahead. Collins said, "It was always understood that a man
could drop out any time he had the slightest doubt about the deal.
No one thought there was anything cowardly about it. In fact, Lancaster
and I encouraged drop-outs among the guys we thought didn't stand much
chance of making it. The fewer that got out, the better our prospects
were." As they came to the last feet of excavation, there were eight
men left of the original sixteen.

 

 

The British Vanishers' experience had been that dusk was the best time
for emerging from escape tunnels. Then the guards' vision was adjusting to
floodlights. Accordingly the breakout was scheduled for 6 p.m., which gave
the party three hours before roll call. A man went into the tunnel and
broke through the last inches to the surface. He came back and announced,
"Christ. It's like daylight out there." The floodlights were on.

 

 

Collins went down to lead the escape. "In a jump of this sort," he said,
"one always feels nervous, like a jockey before the gate goes up. It was
so bright outside the hole, it seemed impossible that one could stick
one's head up and not be seen. But for national pride, I most certainly
would have gone back. I foolishly put my hat up on a stick to see whether
it would be shot at. I was under the influence of American movies. To
my secret disappointment, nothing occurred. I heaved a sigh and pushed
my face out."

 

 

He slithered to the surface and crawled for a stockade fence outside the
wire. The floodlights were so placed that they cast a long, deep shadow
under the fence. Collins intended to employ the shadow to hide his men
until they reached a sentry box at the high corner of the stockade. If
they could get past the sentry undetected, they were free in the nearby
woods. He paused momentarily in the shadow and saw Lancaster crawling
toward him. Behind were Limey Huntley, Harry Baughn, Philip Rurak, James
Brittain and Joseph Brown. * When the British Vanishers were together,
they scrambled past the sentry, got safely into the wooded mountain slope,
and started running.

 

 

* The escapees did not remember the identity of the eighth man.

 

 

As they reached the top of a ridge, firing started in the camp. Collins
said, "Teddy and I crossed the hill and ran down the other side like a
couple of Jesse Owenses."

 

 

About a mile away there was a road intersection with a clearing a hundred
feet wide, which they had to cross. It would be the first interception
point for patrols pursuing the tunnelers. The moon came out and lighted
up the road crossing. Collins and Lancaster dashed across. A truckload
of guards arrived, set up machine guns, and began raking the trees into
which they had disappeared. Bullets sprinkled twigs on their heads as
they hurled themselves up the slope. The fire came so low they had to
stop and huddle to the ground. Lancaster said, "I can hear your bloody
heart beating." "So can I," said his partner. "I just hope the Romanians
don't hear it."

 

 

Back near the fence, five of the escapers were being rounded up. Their
chances of freedom had been lost when the eighth man imagined a guard
had seen him crawling along the fence. He got up and ran, which did
attract the guard. Baughn was the only man other than the two Britons who
remained at large. He had to sacrifice his heavy pack of food to make
it over the first hill. Without provisions, alone in a strange forest,
he thought of the Tidal Wave escape instructions warning of wolves and
bears in the Carpathians, but he kept on going.

 

 

Collins and Lancaster lay low in the hills for two days and then walked
twenty miles north to Brasov. There, using the German they had learned
in the stalags, the British Vanishers bought tickets and boarded the
Trans-European Express for Bucharest. They passed the POW camp on the
way. The guards were beating up the recaptured men. They dragged Rurak
around by his beard. Baughn had been picked up when he had had to beg
for food.

 

 

From Bucharest the British sergeants took a train for Constanta. They did
not intend to try boarding a Turkish ship at that port, as the U.S. escape
plans advised. Instead, they got off at the first stop beyond the Danube
and hiked to the Romano-Bulgarian border, intending to cross Bulgaria to
Turkey. They felt immensely confident after negotiating the big river that
had twice foiled them. They found the border thick with guards on both
sides. They reconnoitered for a weak spot and started running. Romanian
guards opened fire and captured them again. They were taken to Constanta
for interrogation. Lancaster had now come from the Arctic Ocean to the
Black Sea, a unique escape journey among Allied prisoners of war.

 

 

The eight escapers were sent to a punishment camp at Slobozia, which means
"freedom" in Romanian. It held two thousand hard-case Soviet officers and
paratroopers. The compound was dotted with "sweat boxes" in which Russians
were kept for days, unable to sit or stand. The Timisul party was put
into a dark, unheated room, and each man was fed a piece of bread and
two watered soups a day. They talked in low voices with Russians in the
next room. Collins said, "They asked when the western Allies were going
to get off their backsides and start a second front. We pointed out our
enormous successes in North Africa and Italy. The Russians smuggled food
to us -- pieces of sausage and salami."

 

 

After a month the escapees were sent back to Timisul. They arrived
on a snowy night with bright moonlight gleaming on a picture postcard
setting. As the guards came to admit them Collins roared, "Rotten Romanian
bastards!" and the mountain echoed it hollowly back. They began laughing
hysterically. The camp awoke, yelling and laughing. The party marched
smartly into the compound singing "Tipperary." The first American Red
Cross parcels had just arrived. Collins said, "We stuffed on Spam nnd
other riches, were violently ill and very happy."

 

 

The British Vanishers were unhappy about the snow, however. It made escape
impossible. "But we needed a period of quiet to lull the guards," said
Collins. "We laid plans for another break in the spring."

 

 

The last of the wounded were brought to camp from the Sinaia hospital.
Among them were the ranking U.S. officer and NCO, who became
prisoner-commandants of the respective compounds -- Captain Wallace
C. Taylor, only survivor of the plane he had piloted in the last wave
at White Four, and Master Sergeant Edmond Terry, who had crashed in
with Lindley Hussey. The new leaders came under the expert appraisal of
Douglas Collins, who pronounced them "first-class chaps." A Romanian guard
officer complained to Terry, "Is it correct in your army for soldiers
to curse an officer the way your men are abusing me?" Terry replied,
"Sir, how can you expect enlisted men to respect an officer who begs
cigarets from them?" The Romanian said, "Yes. You are right, Sergeant."

 

 

Now, with the wounded in camp, all 108 of the living deposited in Romania
on Tidal Wave were together, except for John Palm. The crippled pilot of
Brewery Wagon remained at large in Bucharest, punching his peg leg into
the carpets of the best salons as Queen Helen showed off her personal
hostage. Palm was not a defector or a collaborator. No one had suggested
imprisonment for the queen's friend and the Texan saw no reason why he
should request it.

 

 

In the mountain camp above, brother officers yearned for the fleshpots,
and several found that if they were nice boys they could obtain week-end
paroles in Bucharest with casual escort. If they made their guards drunk
early, they could enjoy the overnight freedom of the capital. One of
them, "Officer Z," as he will be called here (his real name is not among
the Tidal Wave fliers mentioned in the chronicle) felt called upon to
spread cheer in a society growing more depressed by Russian advances
and the threat of new American bombings from Italy. Officer Z accepted
an invitation to address the Rotary Club of Bucharest. He said, "I have
traveled the whole world in an airplane and I have fought on all the
fronts. I have made over one hundred missions in Japanese territory and
was shot down three times in the Philippines, where our army lost twenty
thousand men. Each time I have been unharmed. I have made many missions
over the Atlantic, in Africa and Germany, and last of all Romania.

 

 

"I have heard only good things about Romania, about the heroic battle
the Romanian Army has been fighting in Russia and how they repelled
the Russians. I commanded a group of heavy bombers on the low-level
raid on Ploesti. With the wish not to bomb civilians, I took over the
controls myself. Never before have I seen such well-organized antiaircraft
fire. There were also Romanian fighters in this sector. Your fliers must
be proud of their work. They are well trained.

 

 

"I was taken prisoner. Life is good. The attitude of the people is very
humane. We have everything we need. We are treated as if we were in our
own country. If my wife and children were near me, I could never say
that I was a prisoner of war."

 

 

The speech was published in a Bucharest newspaper. In the camp,
Sergeant Louis Medeiros, a printer from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who
had learned Romanian in six weeks, translated it for the gunners. An
auditor said, "After that load of stuff, all they can do is send for
his family." Another mused, "I don't get it. Aren't the Romanians our
enemies?"

 

 

Most of them laughed it off. Officer Z was the biggest bag of wind
in the camp. The Rotary Club speaker returned to the officers' mess
and described his triumph to a stony-faced audience. Norman Adams
followed it with a fable: "A little sparrow sat on a telephone line,
cold and hungry. A horse passed below and the little sparrow flew down
and consumed a great amount of fresh warm droppings. He flew back up
and opened his mouth wide in song. A hawk swooped down and devoured the
sparrow. The moral of the story is: If you are full of the stuff, keep
your mouth shut." Officer Z got up and went to his room. After that he
was served his meals there by the Russian orderlies.

 

 

 

 

All these months ten Tidal Wave men were in Bulgarian custody --
the survivors of The Witch, Prince Charming and Let 'Er Rip -- under
Lieutenant Darlington. At first they were treated humanely. Then, in
November 1943, U.S. bombers from the new bases in Italy, warming up for
the all-out offensive on Ploesti, raided Sofia twice. The Bulgarians
reacted primitively by abusing their captives. They force-marched
Darlington's men to a mountain camp along with parachuted ffiers from the
Sofia raids. The stockade had no running water and no medical attention
for the newly wounded. It was lice-ridden, and the rotten food gave the
men dysentery. Clifford Keon said, "It was rough as hell." More downed
fliers arrived, including a Yugoslav crew and a Greek who had been
dropped with money for the Bulgarian underground. The camp overflowed
and the Bulgarians built a larger and worse one at Choumen and herded
the prisoners there in an all-day mountain march.

 

 

In contrast to the Bulgarian misery, the men in Romanian detention enjoyed
a "Christmas that must have been one of the most extraordinary ever spent
by prisoners of war," said Collins. "We were being paid salaries, more
money was coming from the Red Cross, and the Pope sent seventy-two
thousand lei. We bought beer, wine and champagne. We were permitted
to do anything we liked except dig holes," he added. They listened on
the radio to a speech by President Roosevelt and to Bing Crosby singing
"White Christmas." The wealthy captives exchanged gifts. John Lockhart
gave two bottles of beer to each Russian cook and orderly. The enlisted
men entertained the officers at a steak dinner, followed by a concert from
an imported Russian POW orchestra and comedy skits by the internees. The
British Vanishers were the stars of the show. With nearly four years'
experience in prison theatricals, they easily outshone the American
amateurs.

 

 

The winter social season reached its acme on New Year's Eve, with the
officers returning the hospitality of the enlisted men. The Romanian
commandant made a fine speech, and one of his lieutenants got drunk with
the captives and came out on the losing end of a beer-slinging match. The
officers served the men champagne and hot dogs.

 

 

The first mail from home arrived after six long months of imprisonment --
a bounty of letters that the Timisul inmates rationed to themselves over
the days to stretch the pleasure as long as possible. Lawrence Lancashire
received the news that he was a father -- the baby was already seven
months old. It had been born ten days before he took off on Tidal Wave.

 

 

Romanian ladies lent them skis and skates. The winter of waiting went as
well as could be hoped, except for an incident involving a sentry box
on a slope outside the sergeants' compound. In cold weather the guard
liked to stay in the box as long as possible. One day be heard a mass
howl from the cage and stuck his head out. Seventy snowballs whizzed by,
several scoring direct hits. As punishment for the prank the prisoners
ate rejected potatoes for a week.

 

 

Folded in the deep February snows, the sleepers were awakened one night
at the thud of distant guns, fumbled into boots and overcoats, and went
out to look. To the south, over Ploesti, there were firefly winks in the
sky and delayed reports of flak bursting high in the air. "The boys are
back!" "They're hitting Ploesti again!" went the cries. But they heard
no bombs, just the remote tattoo of shrapnel. They stood in the snow
for an hour while the puzzling aerial show went on.