Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (10 page)

 

 

A Liberator exploded and fell. The young men stared in disbelief at the
injustice. The age-old shock to the maiden warrior's soul -- "They are
trying to kill
me
! What did
I
ever do to them?" -- was
felt in all hearts save one. Barwell saw a fighter coming with blazing
guns. He said, "Tail gunner, don't lead him. Fire right into him." As
the fighter passed undamaged, Barwell gave him an economical squirt and
the Messerschmitt broke up. "Navigator, credit one certain to the tail
gunner," said Barwell. On the next fighter pass, the Briton's borrowed
guns jammed, and he returned to note-taking.

 

 

Carried away by his educational opportunity, Barwell flew mission
after mission, sometimes two a day, never putting himself on the sortie
roster. "It was rather nerve-racking," he said. "The Americans swung
from ridicule to extravagant praise. Since they were always given to
extreme claims of enemy aircraft destroyed, they went around saying I
personally shot down everything. If I'd destroyed all those Jerries,
there'd have been no German air force left. Actually, I may have gotten
seven or eight while flying with the American chaps. The boys wrote
home to their mums, talking big about me, and I got touching letters
and homemade biscuits from the States. They called me Lucky Barwell.
I was trying to be scientific, but don't forget, one did need luck."

 

 

 

 

Leon Johnson's Eight Balls also entered the air war in the Mediterranean
theater. On their first raid, Pilot Robert Lehnhausen was shot down into
the sea. He was picked up from a life raft by a British mine sweeper
carrying General Montgomery's staff to Malta for the Sicilian invasion.
In a Maltese hospital an American infantry colonel asked him, "Did you
people come out here to bomb Ploesti?" Lehnhausen had never heard of
the place. He said, "I wouldn't know, sir."

 

 

At the time, from Brereton's Cairo H.Q., General Richard Royce was
writing General Arnold, "Security around this headquarters is practically
nonexistent. All the typists and file clerks are hired locally and I
suspect every one of them. The city is full of people gathering and
selling information." Strangers approached U.S. airmen on leave in
Cairo and asked, "When are you going to bomb Ploesti?"In Bucharest,
Gerstenberg was pondering the same question.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sir Richard Grenville persuaded the company, or as many as he could
induce, to yield themselves unto God, and to the mercy of none else:
but, as they had like valiant resolute men repulsed so many enemies,
they should not now shorten the honor of their nation by prolonging
their own lives for a few hours or a few days.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh, The Last Fight of H.M.S. Revenge, 1591

 

 

4 COMING BACK IS SECONDARY TODAY

 

 

Ten thousand feet above the Bay of Biscay, the happy hunting grounds of
Nazi fighters based in "neutral" Spain, five Liberators from England
drummed south for Africa on the ninth of July 1943. In this area, a
month before, German fighters had shot down an unarmed passenger plane,
carrying the actor Leslie Howard to his death. In Captain Hugh Roper's
lead B-24, the Tidal Wave architect, Gerald Geerlings, sat on a heap of
numbered anonymous parcels containing the charts, films and table models
of Ploesti. Should one item fall into enemy hands, the mission would have
to be canceled. Consequently Intelligence had bet on one plane arriving
safely, rather than distribute the secrets among the five.

 

 

Geerlings said, "Our plane was loaded with thermite bombs. If we were hit,
the entire contents would go up in a single splendid flash, leaving no
trace of the secrets. Only Hugh Roper and I knew about the incendiaries,
to save the crew unnecessary worry."

 

 

As Roper steered through broken cumulus off Saint-Nazaire, France,
his bombardier called, "Junkers 88's below!" Roper said, "I sure
hope they have some other business." The bombardier rejoined, "Looks
like they do. They're chasing a big fat Sunderland in and out of the
clouds." Geerlings said, "It wasn't exactly Christian, but it was some
minutes before we hoped the British flying boat got away." Roper's
explosion-prone Liberator drummed on, its people thinking of the long
travel ahead through German fighters. But the Mediterranean skies were
empty. The Luftwaffe was occupied over Sicily, where the Allied invasion
had begun that morning.

 

 

At Benghazi the briefing paraphernalia was carried to a green hut in the
H.Q. compound, and Geerlings and a corporal took turns sleeping against
the door with loaded.45's. Only command and group leaders were admitted
to the shack. Alfred Kalberer, leader of the original Halpro mission to
Ploesti, by this time the grounded operations officer of the Liberandos,
said, "This thing can't work. I'll have nothing to do with it. I figure
we'll lose thirty-two planes." He was relieved and sent home.

 

 

As more officers were admitted to its secrets, the stuffy, smoke-reeking
green hut became a theater of ill-concealed emotions. The initiate felt
awe and pride in taking part in one of the great efforts of the war,
and then he felt fear. This one was going to be rugged.

 

 

The group leaders groused to General Ent about the low-level plan. Leon
Johnson of the Eight Balls said, "I asked the planners about barrage
balloons, and they replied, 'We think your wings'll break the cables.'
Think! I'd rather know we'll be able to break them." Uzal Ent embodied
the complaints in a note to Brereton: "We estimate that seventy-five
aircraft will be lost at low level. Fifty percent destruction is the
best we can hope for. You have guessed our recommendation -- to attack
at high level until the target is destroyed or effectively neutralized."

 

 

Brereton was unable to take the advice. He had already submitted the
low-level plan to Eisenhower and had received the theater chief's approval.
The remaining problems of Tidal Wave were left to those who would fly it.

 

 

Eisenhower kept demanding planes. Italy was cracking ahead of plan. The
high command ordered a dashing propaganda raid. Ent was called on for
150 Liberators to strike precise military objectives in Rome on 19 July.
Intelligence officers agreed to exempt three categories of airmen
from the Rome-bound fleet: unwilling Roman Catholics (none objected);
Catholic-haters who might not care too much if they hit religious
buildings (three were grounded by Protestant chaplains); and men who
knew the Ploesti secret. Watching them fly away, Timberlake groaned,
"Damn it. I let Ramsay Potts go." John Jerstad said, "Squadron leaders
like Ramsay haven't been briefed yet on Tidal Wave." Timberlake said,
"You know Potts. He's probably figured out where we're going." Timberlake
and Jerstad sweated out Potts's return in Duchess. She came in from Rome
undamaged. Timberlake asked Potts; "Where do you think we're going?"
The pilot had deduced that with squadron leader Joseph Tate in England
two months before. Potts went to the map and silently laid his finger
on Ploesti.

 

 

The day after Rome, Uzal Ent took Ninth Bomber Command off operations,
quarantined the sprawl of airfields, and began intensive low-level
rehearsals. South on the desert plateau British Army engineers laid out
a plat of the complex refineries, the front of each vital pinpoint target
marked with a furrow of lime mixed with engineers' urine. No water was
available. The Americans had to find these bomb-lines in a hurry near the
ground. Their flaunted high-altitude Norden computing bombsight could
not be used on Tidal Wave. The bombardiers were being equipped with
"ten-cent" converted gunsights to toggle and plough their explosives home.

 

 

Colonel Timberlake and target architect Geerlings examined the dummy
layout from an altitude of six miles to determine whether it could
be seen by German scout planes from Crete that often passed over that
high. The target was invisible. But it was also invisible to the first
test flights at zero altitude. The pilots said, "You come over the white
lines so fast, you can't see them. We have to get something upright. After
all, the refineries are tall." The engineers planted poles topped with
fluttering rags on the corners of the aiming points. Timberlake flew over
them at German reconnaissance altitude and could not see them. Then pilots
aimed for the poles at ground level and also failed to see them. Arabs
had stolen the rag pennants overnight. When the engineers topped the
poles with shredded petrol tins, the Senussi left them alone and the
ground-hugging test pilots found their aiming points.

 

 

One by one the five B-24 groups roared into the mock Ploesti, dropping
wooden practice bombs and having a wonderful time. Afterward, the men held
mock interrogations. "Sergeant, how many camels did you get today?"
"Well, sir, one certain and one probable." "Like hell you did. That
certain camel was mine." Two Liberators came back from the lowest buzzes
on record with paint scraped from their bellies.

 

 

The commander of the ambitious junior Sky Scorpion group, Colonel Jack
Wood, who remarkably resembled the playwright Eugene O'Neill, thought
beyond target marksmanship to navigational problems of the long flight to
Ploesti, in which bombing cohesion could be denied by errors in navigation
and formation-keeping. He instructed his deputy, Major John A. Brooks
III, to take the Scorpions six hundred miles into Africa, deliberately
try to trick the navigators into error and see if they could come back
and hit the dummy target. Brooks made some calculations and announced,
"Colonel, we'll be on target at 1603 hours."

 

 

After the planes flew off, Wood loaded his ground officers and dozens of
smoke pots in a truck and drove to the dummy to surprise Brooks with smoke
screens, which were expected to be a serious obstacle at Ploesti. Gasping
in the baking sun, the officers planted the pots around the effigy of Red
Target. One of them called, "Colonel, it's 1600, close to ETA." Wood said,
"Don't worry, they'll never make it on time." Exactly on the predicted
minute, Brooks brought the ear-shattering bomber front over the target
at a height of twenty feet. Below, the fliers saw a Mack Sennett episode
-- their superiors dodging the skipping bombs, piling into a jeep that
would not start, and taking to their heels again. At dinner, Brooks said
as evenly as possible, "Well, Colonel, you knew our ETA."

 

 

Despite the fun of buzzing, the prolonged practice missions and the
unfolding of still more special briefing material increased speculation
and foreboding about the real thing. The airmen thought that a target all
this important was bound to present machine-gun fire. Geerlings said,
"Probably the most discussed question among all ranks was what losses
would be due to small-arms fire." The architect joined volunteers
who lay in desert foxholes with broomstick machine guns which they
tried to train on dust-swirling bombers coming from unknown directions
at unannounced times. "It's something beyond belief," said Geerlings,
"when from nowhere there is a sound of power and fury, coming and going
before one's reflexes can do anything but duck. I swallowed a lot of
sand and never got a satisfactory shot." Meanwhile, other men with real
machine guns were crouching in pits around Ploesti tracking Woldenga's
surprise practice bombings of the refineries.

 

 

During the desert rehearsals a ground crew chief grew suspicious of
an officer in a clean uniform who was snooping around the base. The
G.I. challenged the stranger, who identified himself as a member of the
Psychological Warfare Division. The mechanic said, "Jeez, we can sure
use you to examine some of the screwballs driving these airplanes."

 

 

in the last week of July all the flying officers had passed through
the green hut, and then the secret was exposed to the sergeants. Not
since Bernard Montgomery revealed his plan for El Alamein to all ranks
before the battle had such a total briefing occurred. Walter Stewart,
who was holding nightly Bible readings with his Mormon comrades, said:
"As the days went by and the enlisted crews learned where we were going,
men of various religions decided to meet with us -- not a tough decision
when the alternative was cleaning your guns again at night. The meetings
became an anxiously looked-for pleasure. We knew the low-level mission
was to be no breeze. To add to our little fears, one day some men came
to the base and installed tanks in the outer section of each wing and
even took out the right front bomb-bay shackles and installed a tank there.
Now it was the
long
low-level mission. They also fitted armor plate
on the flight deck for extra protection. Our little meetings became more
precious to us."

 

 

The airmen, who had had virtually no reading matter, were suddenly inundated
with British paperback books bearing such odd titles as
Cage Birds
and
The Tunnelers of Holzminden. All were about British escapes from German
prison camps in World War I.

 

 

Killer Kane announced to the Pyramiders, "All available crews will go on
the mission regardless of completion of all their combat tours." Scores of
his men had logged thirty missions and were due to be repatriated. Worried
about the morale of the group, Jacob Smart went to an armament shop where
Kane was fixing extra machine guns into the nose perspexes of his lead
ships. Kane let the Washington man wait a while before inquiring coldly,
"What can I do for you, Colonel?" Smart said, "Do you think your men
will follow you on the big one?" Kane exploded. "Look," he said, "if
you have any doubt about it, you have the authority to remove me here
and now!" Smart left. General Ent came to the shop and said to Kane,
"If nobody comes back, the results will be worth the cost." Both he and
Kane were scheduled to go to Ploesti.