Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (7 page)

 

 

Before he told anyone of the wild idea, Smart turned devil's advocate and
tried to upset his own reasoning. "Of all aircraft there is probably none
less suited to low-level work than the B-24," he said to himself. "To the
man on the ground it appears as though he could knock it down with a
rock." He took off his horns and answered, "The quality of our B-24
pilots is pretty high. With special training they could fly formation
on the deck and make it work. Moreover, for the first time in heavy
bombing experience the machine gunners in the Liberators will be able
to fight the flak men, not just the fighter craft. Previously, flak
crews have been subjected only to an occasional nearby bomb burst or
strafing by fighters. How would they behave in the face of hundreds of
fifty-calibers firing from the low-flying Liberators?" Each question
produced a satisfactory answer. The revolutionary low road was the right
road to Ploesti. The most radical tactic was the most practical. The
coup de main would be delivered at zero altitude.

 

 

Smart placed his low-level proposal in the Ploesti folder that lay before
the Allied chiefs at the Trident Conference in Washington in May.
The meeting was obsessed with the invasion of Sicily, scheduled to begin
in two months' time, and the conferees could pay little attention to
Ploesti or whether it was to be tackled high or low. Sir Charles Portal,
Britain's chief of the air staff, voiced misgivings about a Ploesti
assault by either technique. He noted that the entire Liberator force in
Britain, the redoubtable Traveling Circus and the Eight Balls (44th Heavy
Bombardment Group), were to be removed to Africa, along with the newly
arrived Sky Scorpions, to make up the mission force with two Ninth Air
Force groups. All would be taken off operations for low-level training
at a time when they would be sorely needed in the Sicilian invasion
and the round-the-clock offensive on Germany. Sir Charles also wondered
aloud whether, if the mission failed to destroy enemy oil production in
one blow, the Germans would not build up heavier defenses at Ploesti to
cope with the succeeding attacks which would have to be made.

 

 

The U.S. chief of staff, General Marshall, replied that even "a fairly
successful" attack on the refineries would stagger the enemy. He held that
Tidal Wave was the most important action that could be taken to aid the
Soviet and the coming invasion of the Continent. The overtasked Trident
Conference countersealed the Tidal Wave order to the Ninth Air Force.

 

 

The conferees, minus President Roosevelt, repaired to Africa to make
their writ known to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the theater commander.
He agreed to the mission and its time of execution, but did not give an
opinion on whether it should be executed high or low. Jacob Smart was
accorded a private audience with Mr. Churchill to describe the low-level
scheme. The imaginative Churchill, a lifelong lover of surprise raids,
responded enthusiastically. He offered four crack Royal Air Force
Lancaster crews to lead the Americans to the target.

 

 

Smart replied that the Lancaster bomber and the Liberator had differing
characteristics of range, load, altitude and speed, and that it would
be impossible for the two types to maintain close formation on the long
journey to Romania. Mr. Churchill yielded. Smart did not have to bring
up the additional consideration that American airmen would resent the
implication that they could not find the target themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The whole art of war consists of getting at what is on the other
side of the hill.
-- The Duke of Wellington

 

 

3 ZERO RAIDERS

 

 

While the inner circle of the U. S. Army Air Forces was buzzing with
Smart's daring low-level proposition, the R.A.F. furnished ostensible
proof that low strikes by heavy bombers were too costly. Twelve Lancasters
assailed U-boat engine works at Augsburg, Germany, and five returned. Wing
Commander Guy Gibson took nineteen hand-picked Lancaster crews to destroy
the Mohne and Eder hydroelectric dams and flood the industrial Ruhr. Three
planes aborted after take-off. Sixteen bombed from an altitude of sixty
feet, and eight returned. The gallant Gibson was awarded the Victoria
Cross, Britain's Medal of Honor. Bomber Harris remarked, "Any operation
that deserves the V.C. is in the nature of things unfit to be repeated
at frequent intervals." It was a matter of plain arithmetic. If you lost
half your sixteen planes on a mission, four raids afterward you would
have one plane. The U.S. Air Force in Europe demanded 25 missions of a
combat flier by day, and Bomber Harris insisted on 35 by night.

 

 

Jacob Smart flew to Britain to confer with the airman he wanted to
assume operational planning for Tidal Wave, Colonel Edward J. Timberlake,
dean of the Liberator combat school, who had just brought his Traveling
Circus back to England from the winter campaign in Africa. Timberlake had
promoted squadron leaders to commanding rank, including Group Colonel
K.K. Compton, who was to lead the force on Tidal Wave. As Jacob Smart
braced him, Timberlake was relinquishing command of the Circus to Addison
Baker, one of his squadron leaders, and moving up to command of the 201st
(Provisional) Combat Wing, a cadre charged with converting the onflow
of new B-24's and crews to a battle might. Timberlake accepted Smart's
challenge to take over the thousand and one details of Tidal Wave,
and began picking out the experts he needed.

 

 

As his operations officer, Timberlake selected one of his Circus squadron
leaders, a slight, sharp-witted youth from Racine, Wisconsin, named John
Jerstad, who suffered the nickname "Jerk." Major Jerstad had flown so many
more missions than his quota that he had stopped counting them. He had
come far since his first raid, after which he reported to interrogations,
"I never saw so much flak!" Jerstad kept a notebook of lessons learned
in combat; he had brought his men through many a dire sky engagement,
including a 105-minute running battle with the "Yellownoses," Goering's
smartest fighter group. Jerstad wrote his parents, "I'm the youngest kid
on the staff and it's quite an honor to work with Colonels and Generals."

 

 

The navigation officer of Timberlake's planning wing was a New York State
school teacher, Captain Leander F. Schmid, retired from combat but
prepared to fly to Ploesti as the target finder. Two outstanding Britons
joined the wing, Group Captain D.G. Lewis, R.A.F., an expert on enemy
fighters, and another ex-refinery manager from Ploesti, Wing Commander
D.C. Smythe, an advocate of low-level bombing.

 

 

As the tactical motif for the assault formed among the planners, they
became attracted to the idea of attacking Ploesti from the northwest,
the direction of the Reich itself. Coming down from the Carpathian
foothills and sweeping the targets simultaneously seemed to promise
maximum surprise. Moreover, from this direction there was a shining arrow
pointing straight at the target city -- the railway from Floresti to
Ploesti. The attack group could guide on the railway and run infallibly
upon the targets from Floresti, thirteen miles -- or three minutes --
away from the bombline. Thus Floresti, an obscure hamlet carried on only
the largest-scale survey maps, was selected as the final Initial Point,
the turning place for the bomb drive.

 

 

Looking down at Ploesti from the Initial Point, the planners found the
refineries neatly spaced across a five-mile-wide bombline. Men rushing
across a strange country could not be expected to learn place names,
much less the names of factories, so the refineries were assigned numbers
from left to right.

 

 

The lead group, Colonel K.K. Compton's Liberandos, accordingly drew Target
White One on the far left, the Romana Americana plant. The second group,
Addison Baker's Traveling Circus, would simultaneously strike White Two,
the Concordia Vega refinery. Section B of the Circus, led by Ramsay
Potts, would hit White Three, the parallel Standard Petrol Block and
Unirea Sperantza units. Killer Kane's heavy Pyramider force, coming
in on the center, would take out the number-one priority target of the
raid, Astro Romana, or Target White Four, the two-million-ton producer
that had eluded Halpro. On Kane's right, flying almost on top of the
railway, would come Leon Johnson's Eight Balls, aiming for White Five,
the Colombia Aquila refinery.

 

 

Johnson's deputy, James Posey, would veer off a few points further right
to carry his force to Blue Target, the important Creditul Minier plant,
five miles south of the White targets at a town called Brazi. The last
and seventh strike force in the bomber stream, Jack Wood's Sky Scorpions,
would climb the foothills and hit another isolated objective, the Steaua
Romana refinery at Câmpina, 18 miles north of Ploesti. It was named
Red Target.

 

 

The approach was shrewdly selected, considering the extra flying range the
B-24's would be given that day, the surprise angle, the lucky railroad,
and the fact that the last sixty miles to the Initial Point would be
flown over wooded foothills and ravines that Allied Intelligence was
almost sure had no antiaircraft defenses. Intelligence firmly estimated
that the flak and detection systems were arraigned in Ploesti's eastern
approaches, toward the Soviet, and denied the possibility of effective
defenses in the northern, western and southern salients of Ploesti. What
enemy commander could be expecting an incursion over the vast distance
from Africa, and especially one that went on an extra hundred miles or
so to attack through the back door? Unfortunately for this supposition,
Gerstenberg was definitely expecting an attack from Africa and was right
now building up his guns on the north, west and south.

 

 

Having picked Floresti as the turning point for the bomb run, the planners
redoubled assurances that the navigators could find the little town. They
projected a line west of Floresti and slightly south and found that two
much larger towns lay along this approach, Targoviste and Pitesti. So
Pitesti became the First Initial Point to find and Targoviste the Second
Initial Point. Crossing them correctly would bring one unerringly to the
Third I.P. In addition, there was a prominent landmark at Targoviste
that could be seen for many miles, a large ancient monastery on a hill.
Everything that could be done for the navigators was done. The three
principal plotters of the I.P.'s, Ted Timberlake, Leander Schmid and
John Jerstad, were going to fly the mission.

 

 

In England, Timberlake started low-level rehearsals among the two Eighth
Air Force Liberator groups selected to go to Africa for Tidal Wave -- his
former command, the Traveling Circus, and the Eight Balls, led by Colonel
Leon Johnson. Johnson introduced his flying officers to a specialist
who would teach them how to use a low-level bombsight. Pilot Robert
Lehnhausen said, "This was right after a very mean and costly mission
we'd made against the submarine pens at Kiel where we lost seven out of
eighteen ships. And a few days before, a squadron of speedy B-26 medium
bombers had tried a low-level raid on Holland and none came back. There
was much murmuring and grumbling. Colonel Johnson told us in a calm,
positive voice that if it was the desire of the Air Force to fly low-level
missions we would fly those missions and he would lead us. There was
complete silence in the room. If he was leading, we were going to follow."

 

 

The English-based groups, together with the newly arrived Sky Scorpions
(389th Bomb Group), began beating up and down the foggy East Anglian
countryside in treetop practice flights. None of the crewmen knew why,
but they reveled in the sudden legalization of buzzing, heretofore
a highly illicit pleasure. English farmers were not as happy about
it. They complained of horses in shock, cows gone dry, and bees on strike
against May flowers. To satisfy speculations about the low-level target,
Timberlake's Intelligence chief, Michael G. Phipps, a former ten-goal
polo player, planted a rumor that it was the German battleship Tirpitz,
hiding in a Norwegian fjord beyond the range of R.A.F. bombers. Phipps
borrowed Norwegian Navy officers to walk around the B-24 bases and go
in and out of operations rooms. The Norwegians had no idea why, but they
enjoyed their post exchange privileges.

 

 

The planners dreaded one aspect of the low-level scheme -- mid-air
collisions caused by propeller turbulence or slight errors in judgment.
During the rehearsals two Liberators collided, killing eighteen men.
The survivors, pilot Harold L. James and Sergeant Earl Zimmerman,
returned to duty. They were to go to Ploesti.

 

 

Timberlake befriended an unemployed Intelligence officer whom he found
wandering around Eighth Air Force H.Q., vainly trying to sell an idea.
He was a slender, ingenious Connecticut architect named Gerald K. Geerlings,
a World War I infantryman, and his idea was: "Flat aerial maps do not
coordinate with ground features until the navigator is directly over them.
Why not use oblique drawings to show how places look as you approach them?"
Timberlake admitted Geerlings to the Tidal Wave secret and gave him
instructions to prepare perspective views of Ploesti and the overland
route to the target.

 

 

The Allies had no such aerial pictures of the Balkans or the refinery
city and were prohibited from photo-reconnaissance lest the defenses be
alerted. The only way to fulfill the orders was for Geerlings to comb a
large random picture bank without alerting the custodians to his regional
interest. He went to the Bodleian Library at Cambridge, where there was
a large picture deposit of foreign scenery, gathered by appeals to the
public for snapshots and postal cards from prewar travels. Geerlings asked
for files on ten widely separated parts of the world and photographed the
mountain to get the mouse he was after -- a slender folder on the Balkans.