Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (42 page)

 

 

Rifle shots were crackling outside the compound. The Romanians returned
the Americans' side arms. A high-level captive, Lieutenant Martin Roth,
said, "Well, I guess we're allowed to leave." Another said, "I don't want
to mess in it. It's between the Romanians and the Germans." Most of
the officers agreed they wanted no part of the shooting. Henry Lasco,
the low-level pilot, was smoking a cigaret. His face wounds had healed,
leaving an open hole in one cheek, and in order to take a puff, he had to
plug the fistula with a finger tip. He said, "Well, speaking for myself,
I'd like to take a crack at the krauts before it's over," and started for
the gate. Roth said, "Hold on a minute, Hank. I'm going with you." The
two-man patrol ventured into the dark, empty streets reverberating
with spang of rifles, distant cries and pounding boots. The fusillades
thickened and the airmen espaliered themselves against buildings,
moving cautiously into this unfamiliar type of war. Hands came out of
a doorway and hauled them in. The captors were Romanian patriots who
embraced them and rained kisses on Lasco's shattered cheeks, crying,
"The Americans are with us!" The Romano-American band went into the night
to round up Germans. Lasco felt a knock on the head. He had walked into
the boot of a German soldier hanged by the neck from a lamppost.

 

 

Toward morning they understood what was happening in Bucharest. Roth said,
"There was a tight Romanian ring around the city. The Germans could not
get through it. Outside the Romanians the Germans were milling around,
trapped by the third ring -- a powerful Russian encirclement with big
tanks. After two days Hank and I decided to let them settle it among
themselves and went back to the compound."

 

 

General Gerstenberg was trapped in the double encirclement north of
Bucharest, trying to remove some of his forces pinched between the
Russians and Romanians. The last movement he was able to control was the
evacuation of 1,200 Luftwaffe airwomen through the Russian ring. Their
colonel was killed defending the rear of the female convoy. The Protector,
who had placed such a high end-game value on
Festung Ploesti
, was
unable to get into the city when the crisis came. The redoubt was now
just another devastated place on the map, instead of the key defense of
Südostraum. Gerstenberg's command was shattered. The Danubian plain
was flooded with about 100,000 German troops in hopeless flight, paced
by the fastest runners from the broken eastern front army. In addition,
there was a fantastic rabble of German civilians crossing Romania, trying
to bring home loot from farms they had been awarded in the Ukraine. Heinz
Schultz was carting his farm implements in eight wagons drawn by sixteen
oxen and sixteen horses, with twelve Ukrainian peasants aboard. He was
threading through the battle lines on back roads and river fords. Other
displaced German agriculturists plodded home with their plunder packed
on Caucasian camels.

 

 

Flak man Werner Horn said, "With the Russians moving in, our fate was
sealed. We had no equipment to defend ourselves against tanks." The last
hopes of Gerstenberg's people touched the extremes of illusion. "We expected
American airborne troops to occupy Romania," said Horn, "rather than
relinquish her to the Russians. But nothing happened. Thus came the
inglorious end of the German Air Force in Romania. We went into Russian
captivity."

 

 

Even in the
Oberkommando
in Berlin it was now evident that both the
eastern and western fronts were broken and Bucharest and Paris were being
delivered. Hitler reacted in perfect Hitlerian form. He ordered the
Luftwaffe to bomb both disloyal capitals. His commanding air generals
in Bucharest and Paris, Alfred Gerstenberg and Otto Dessloch, were old
comrades from World War I days. Dessloch had taken over in Paris only a
few days before, direct from a post with Gerstenberg as commander of Air
Fleet four, Balkans. Looking at Hitler's wanton order, Dessloch faced the
moral crisis of his career. He told Berlin he did not have the planes
to bomb Paris. This statement was substantially true after the massive
destruction of the Luftwaffe in France since D-day. Hitler's order was
obeyed, however, by a Luftwaffe general in eastern France who sent planes
that set fire to wine storehouses in the Paris produce market, Las Halles.

 

 

In Romania, nobody could find Alfred Gerstenberg to deliver the order to
bomb Bucharest. The phones rang in his empty H.Q. at Pepira. Signals went
to the fighter control center at Otopenii. There was no acknowledgment.
Several days before, a Romanian partisan band had taken Gerstenberg in
his last post in the field and was holding him and his staff to hand
over to the Russians.

 

 

Hitler's order to bomb Bucharest was heard by Luftwaffe officers still
left on the bases at Mizil and Zilistea, in the northeast sector, out
of the path of the Soviet advance. They had about thirty Junkers 88's
and Stuka dive bombers. Without hesitation the new German pilots flew
to punish defenseless Bucharest.

 

 

At Pepira, the Romanian pilots refused to fly, either to bomb or defend
their capital, and that was the end of the playboys of the Royal Romanian
Air Force. The bombing of the open city began. A few Romanian flak crews
resisted it with light guns.

 

 

The bombing turned the precarious German situation into a complete debacle.
The nation rose against the Germans. King Michael declared war on Hitler
immediately. A handful of Romanian pilots took to the air and fought
the Luftwaffe. Romanians captured heavier flak guns and turned them on
the bombers. But explosives continued to fall on Bucharest. An American
POW was killed when he ran from a shelter to the hospital to rescue a
Romanian nurse. The bombers flattened the POW compound and started on the
hospital. A Ju-88 hit a prosthetics shop and destroyed an articulated
wooden leg that was being made for John Palm. The Texan filled his old
hollow leg with mementos of his halcyon days, including a small pistol.
A Bucharest heiress importuned him to store her jewels in his leg, but,
upon reflection, Palm declined.

 

 

A Stuka hit the POW hospital and the ceiling fell on Francis Doll.
He dragged himself out and helped carry wounded through the empty streets
to a new shelter. As the Germans buzzed overhead, he and a buddy decided
to leave Bucharest. On the edge of the city two girls took them home, fed
them, and let the grimy sergeants wash up. Another raid alert sounded.
A mile out of town a woman advised them to go no farther. There was a
German machine gunner around the next corner. A man across the street
hurled a grenade at them. Doll and his friend ran away from the burst
and were not hit. They entered a Romanian garrison, where the guards
gave them helmets and guns, and introduced them to an old man who had
a son in America. He took the sergeants into his home and his neighbors
came with gifts of food and wine and patted them on the back.

 

 

Up in the mountain, out of the war, the low-level men still frolicked
in Pietrosita. Robert Johnson, the veterinarian, left the village, and
Collins, Caminada and Gukovsky, the Palestinian parachutist, asked Captain
Taylor's permission to depart for Bucharest. The American commander said
he had no objection but intended to keep his own men in Pietrosita until
he could safely move them. A chauffeur-driven limousine arrived in the
village and out stepped Johnson. He had liberated Antonescu's car and
driver. He took the British party in style to Bucharest, where the Swiss
consul, in charge of United Kingdom affairs, put them up in suites in
the Hotel Ambassador, recently vacated by the German general staff.

 

 

Collins took a stroll, curbing an impulse to start running when he saw
policemen. He encountered Lancaster in the street and the comrades yelled
for joy. Lancaster said, "Let's make for Constanta and take a ship for
Turkey." He couldn't quit escaping. Collins said, "I think we ought to
sit tight and see what happens here." His partner agreed.

 

 

A day or so later, after the bombing had ceased, Captain Taylor brought
the low-level men to Bucharest. He and Top Sergeant Edmond Terry were
appalled to find wounded Americans lying around the city, uncared for.
The bombing had killed five POW's. Four others died when a German stepped
into a restaurant with a machine gun and cut down the diners. Dozens
had been wounded in the Luftwaffe attacks and there were dozens more
with untended wounds from the final air battles at Ploesti. Terry took
a gang of POW's to the bombed hospital and cleaned up several wards.
He collected a hundred wounded men and started looking after them.
But since the departure of the Romanian jailers there was no money
for food or medication. Terry asked John Palm to raise some money.
The pilot of Brewery Wagon stumped away and applied to one of his useful
acquaintances, Arieh Fichman, another Palestinian agent who had been
parachuted into Romania by British Intelligence. Fichman was carrying
a fortune in operational funds. He peeled off several million lei for
the starving Americans.

 

 

Francis Doll drifted back from his refuge on the outskirts of town and
reported to his favorite topkick. Terry handed him a stack of lei and
told him he was the hospital cook. Doll's first menu consisted of roast
beef and gravy, mashed potatoes, milk, coffee, apples, cakes and all
the beer they could drink.

 

 

The senior U.S. prisoner of war was Lieutenant Colonel James A. Gunn (not
related to Captain James A. Gunn III, lost on the low-level mission),
who had been shot down on one of the last American raids. With some of
his men dead and others dying, Gunn undertook to save the rest. He got
permission from the new Romanian government to radio the 15th Air Force
in Italy about the plight of the 1,274 American and Allied personnel
trapped in Bucharest. The 15th did not want to discuss it on the open
radio and requested Gunn to report personally to Italy. He borrowed
an ancient Savoia-Marchetti, was checked out briefly on the Italian
instrument panel, and took off. The plane was incapable of the long
flight and Gunn was forced to return. Princess Caradja's cousin, a big,
resourceful pilot, Captain Constantine Cantacuzene, volunteered to fly
Gunn to Foggia in an Me-109 single-seater. This entailed painting an
American flag on the craft, folding the lanky colonel into the empty
radio compartment, and screwing the entry panel shut on him.

 

 

Cantacuzene alighted at Foggia and announced, "I have somebody here
you will be pleased to see." He removed the panel and a soldier said,
"Get a load of those G.I. boots," as Gunn uncoiled from his cramped nest.

 

 

The Fifteenth Air Force sent a fighter reconnaissance to Bucharest
to determine if Popestii airport was safe for aerial evacuation of the
POW's. Cantacuzene led the flight in a Mustang, a machine he had recently
opposed in the air but had never piloted. The scouts reported that the
airport seemed secure, although there were German machines still in
the air.

 

 

A flight of Fortresses went to Bucharest with a liaison party,
including medical officers, to round up the men and prepare history's
first large-scale air evacuation from a point 550 miles inside enemy
lines. At Foggia, ground crews fitted fifty Fortresses with bomb-bay
seats and litters in the fuselage to accommodate twenty men in each
ship. Many of the mechanics had sat out long nights waiting for men who
did not return; now they cried and cursed with joy and fatigue as they
rigged the bombers for deliverance instead of death.

 

 

A special B-17 flew to Bucharest with an Office of Strategic Services
party to pick up German records and survey damage to the Ploesti refineries.
It was led by Sergeant Philip Coombs, a former economics professor, who
brought a ton of C-rations to see his people through the hardships of
the field. At the Bucharest airport Coombs was surprised to find another
O.S.S. man, a Washington journalist named Beverly Bowie, in a U.S. Navy
uniform. Bowie had hitchhiked from Italy some days earlier. He ushered
Coombs's people into a fleet of Buicks and Packards given to him by
Romanians who wished to keep them from the Germans and Russians. Bowie
howled when he saw Coombs's field rations. He took them to lunch in an
outdoor restaurant called Mon Jardin, where the buffet consisted of pâté
de foie gras, Black Sea caviar, roasts of beef, ham and goose, a six-foot
sturgeon and pheasants in paper pantaloons. As the waiter captain uncorked
a magnum of champagne, Bowie said, "Welcome to operation bughouse."

 

 

Bowie was sitting in by invitation on Liberation cabinet sessions.
He explained to Coombs, "Before they vote on anything, they ask me what
I think. I go into a trance and figure out what Franklin D. Roosevelt
would do, then give 'em the answer. They pass all my laws unanimously.
I never thought running a country was so easy."

 

 

Bowie drove the field team to the Hotel Athenée Palace, in front of which
a Red Army band was playing. A haggard youth in rags came through the
crowd, calling, "Professor Coombs! Don't you remember me? Irving Fish?
I took Economics One under you at Williams." Coombs took his former pupil,
a high-level POW, into the hotel for a square meal. The O.S.S. men drove
to Ploesti. Along the road they came upon an emergency hospital full of
airmen shot down on the last raids. The place stank of gangrene. The
Romanian physician in charge said, "We can do nothing. We have heard of
penicillin, but we haven't got any." The O.S.S. radioman cranked out a
message to Italy, and a B-17 took off with drugs and doctors.

 

 

Coombs's party found Ploesti seemingly in utter ruin. However, during
three days of detailed inspection and interviews, they found that the
remains of five plants, linked by Gerstenberg's pipeline web, were still
producing 20 percent of capacity. This was the residuum of the resistance
put up by the defensive genius, Alfred Gerstenberg, against 23 heavy
bombing raids, totaling 9,173 individual bomber and fighter sorties,
which had dropped 13,709 tons of explosives.