Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (15 page)

 

 

Cunningham, who wore the only adornment -- a headset and a throat mike --
reported to the master of Thundermug, "It was so damn hot before take-off,
we just sort of . . ." Longnecker strode forward, the first hair pigments
fading at his temples -- the mark of a seasoned first pilot.

 

 

An hour out, some of the dust-scoured cylinders began to fail. Captain
William Banks of Kane's Pyramiders noted, "Every once in a while I would
look off and see one or two Liberators feather a prop, wheel out of
formation, and start for home." Their crews gave thumbs-up signals as
they turned back for Africa, jettisoning bombs and gasoline into the
sea to lighten ship for emergency landings. Watching them pull out,
a gunner said, "Those guys look too happy about it." Seven of the ten
abortives came from the Pyramiders. There were 167 planes left.

 

 

The bombers passed into a light haze. The formation began to swell as the
pilots instinctively spaced farther away from each other. In the soft,
luminous air it was hard to distinguish the make-up of the group in front
or behind. The leaders had been instructed to maintain 500-yard visual
contact between groups at all times. Although the range of visibility was
still much greater than that, the outlines of other ships became blurred.

 

 

The situation brought out one of the inherent problems of inter-group
formation flying -- the varying styles of the leaders. Three of them,
Compton, Baker and Johnson, had been schooled in the Eighth Air Force's
tight combat box formation on raids out of Britain. Wood's people
had had these close formation practices drummed into them in recent
training in the States. But the tactic was not strictly followed in
Africa. Kane's crews had not met the prolonged, repeated and resolute
Luftwaffe attacks, fought over hundreds of miles of German territory,
experienced by the green ships from England. Moreover, Kane's aircraft
were the worse for wear; a group leader expecting battle will set his
speed to that of his slowest member to bunch his defensive strength. Two
and a half hours out, the distance between the second group, the Circus,
and Killer Kane's third group had widened to the extent that they could
barely see each other. From the vanguard K.K. Compton could not see Kane
at all. Johnson and Wood could do nothing but hang on Kane's tail as they
obediently kept to their fourth and fifth places in the bomber stream.

 

 

Young Longnecker in Thundermug had a difficult time holding formation
with his flight leader, Hugh Roper, in Exterminator. "I had no previous
experience in the left seat," he remarked. "I admired Vic Olliffe, who
was flying Let 'Er Rip left wing on Roper. Olliffe was a very muscular
man and could fly the B-24 like it was a Piper Cub. He was holding in
so close to Roper, the two planes seemed welded together."

 

 

Three hours out, the landfall was imminent -- Cape Asprókavos, the
southern tip of the Nazi-held island of Corfu. The anxious sea journey
was over; soon they would turn on a northeasterly heading into the
unknown continent, over forests and mountains to the deepest target
in Europe. Norman Appold, sitting at the bottom of the ladder in his
B Section of the Liberandos, looked in front at A Section and the
mission-leading aircraft, Flavelle's Wingo-Wango, in which the mission
navigator, Wilson, had brought them unerringly to Corfu. Then Appold
stared incredulously at the lead plane. "Wingo-Wango began to stagger,
dipping down and nosing up in ever-increasing movement, until its
nose rose higher and higher into the air," said Appold. "The section
scattered away from the wild gyrations. When virtually standing on its
tail, Wingo-Wango slid over on her back, and slowly gaining speed, planed
straight down and dove violently into the sea. I watched this episode with
considerable disbelief. Flavelle was gone in thirty seconds." No one knew
why Flavelle went down. Sergeant George K. ("Bud") Holroyd watched the
crash. The bombardier of Wingo-Wango, Lieutenant Jack Lanning, was his
closest friend.

 

 

Fiery waves radiated from the crash and a tower of dirty smoke rolled a
thousand feet high. Flavelle's wingman, Guy Iovine, turned down, hoping
to drop rafts to survivors, despite the fact that breaking formation,
even for compassionate reasons, was forbidden. Iovine found no trace of
men or plane. It was impossible for him to climb his overloaded craft
back into the formation. He turned back for Africa. With him went the
deputy route navigator. A Section reformed, with Lieutenant John Palm
in Brewery Wagon slipping into the empty lead positions. His navigator,
a young lieutenant named William Wright, was now suddenly the route
navigator of the Ploesti mission of 165 planes. The first two groups
turned inland, with Kane's three trailing groups lost from sight. Kane
and Compton dared not speak to each other on the radio to reunite the
mission. The radio-silence edict was now working against them.

 

 

Another pilot now learned for certain that he would not return to Africa.
Lindley P. Hussey, piloting an old B-24 called Lil Joe, discovered that
he had lost 800 galions of gas through a faulty hose connection to the
bomb bay tanks. "Unless we turned back and aborted then and there, we
would never make Benghazi," said Hussey. "They told us before take-off
that if none of us returned the mission would be well worth it if we
hit the target. On this basis I decided to go on to Ploesti."

 

 

A spotter on Corfu had some real news for Pitcairn: "They are turning
northeast in Sector Zero Zero! Air Zone Twenty-four East. New heading
thirty degrees." Pitcairn projected a line from Corfu on this bearing.
The line ran slightly north of Sofia and north of Bucharest. "It no
longer looks like Wiener Neustadt," said Pitcairn. "They are too far
east already." He ordered the second-stage alert, which went down to
squadron and flak battalion level.

 

 

Gamecock Hahn told his pilots, "We'd better have lunch early." They
ate soup, eggs and fried potatoes. As they finished, the third-stage
alert came and all Luftwaffe personnel in Zone 24 East went to duty
stations. Major Ernst Kuchenbacker in Gerstenberg's Bucharest H.Q. thought
it time to advise the commanding general. He rang up Gerstenberg at the
mountain resort. "It is unclear what is developing," he told the general,
"but we think the objective must be Ploesti." Gerstenberg said, "I am
returning immediately." It was a three-hour drive.

 

 

 

 

The Liberator pilots and navigators unfolded their special Geerlings
oblique drawings of the unfamiliar territory ahead. Up the folder,
through the views, ran the red line of the flight heading. The red line
ran over the northern tip of Greece and into Albania, passing along the
mountainous Greek border. The first geographical obstacle was the Pindus
Range, which swings southeast from Albania to form the spine of the
Greek archipelago. Its 9,000-foot summits demanded an 11,000-foot climb
to clear them prudently. "It seemed just minutes later," said Appold,
"before towering cumulus clouds began to show above the mountains." The
clouds stood to 17,000 feet. The mission leader, K. K. Compton, faced
a swift decision.

 

 

Formation flying of clumsy bombers through cloud was a dangerous matter.
In zero visibility, air turbulence or slight divergences from course
could bring planes into rending collisions, the doomed craft plunging in
pieces, perhaps taking lower planes with them. When passing through cloud
the Air Force practiced a maneuver called Frontal Penetration. Before
the cloud the mission leader began circling, and when all his ships were
turning on the carrousel, his three-plane wing peeled off, spread apart,
and drove into it. The others turned off three by three, and followed
him through in tandem. On the other side of the cloud they repeated the
circle, took up battle order, and continued on course. Frontal Penetration
took time and fuel during the circling and sorting out.

 

 

The mission leader did not like the idea of losing this time and gas.
Keith K. Compton was a short, dimple-chinned pilot proven in battle.
He had been deputy commander of the Traveling Circus in Britain, where he
caught the eye of the generals. He was sent to Africa in 1942 to command
the Liberandos, the 376th Group, the residue of Hurry-Up Halverson's
minutemen plus new people from the States. Compton sent some of Halpro's
guerrillas home, spread others in key jobs, and absorbed new crews in a
competent group of his own design. He made life miserable for pilots who
kept sloppy formation in the air, but indulged the men living miserably
in the desert. Once Washington had sent him an officer to "whip the men
into shape by push-ups and close-order drill." Compton exiled him to
Cairo, where the physical culturist wore out his war service appealing
from café terraces for people to keep fit.

 

 

K.K. Compton sat in the left-hand seat of the flagship beside co-pilot
Ralph P. Thompson. Red Thompson was a transfer from the Pyramiders. He had
served restlessly under Killer Kane until the day he saw his commanding
officer fist-fighting with a lieutenant, and then he had asked for
a transfer. On a stool between and behind the pilots sat Brigadier
Ent, wearing a crash helmet. He and the pilots could look down at the
navigator's desk, where sat Captain Harold A. Wicklund, who had flown
to Ploesti before on the Halpro raid.

 

 

Facing the Albanian cloud, the mission was up against the reality of what
had been theoretical problems in the long briefings. In the fortnight
past, the force leaders had intently absorbed information that would
help them journey to the target, bomb it truly, and bring back as many
men as possible. In the last days a serious difference over tactics,
verging on acrimony, arose between Killer Kane and K.K. Compton. Compton
argued that the entire mission should use normal cruise settings on its
engines during the first oversea leg, to keep good formation, and then
use increased power for the climb over the mountains. Then, at the Danube,
they would be together for the dash to target.

 

 

Kane had disagreed. "Why not save power so we can pour it on, getting away
from the target?" was his plea. There was also another difference between
African and European practices. The Eighth Air Force always carried oxygen
breathing units for the high thin air from which it bombed. The Ninth
often flew lower and did not always need oxygen. Today, many of Kane's
planes had none aboard. They had not expected to fly higher than 12,000
feet.

 

 

Now, confronted with the high cumulus, K.K. Compton decided definitely
what to do. He waggled his wings and climbed in straight battle formation
without ringing around in front of the clouds. Compton was going to snake
through the cloud tops without breaking formation. Behind him, Colonel
Baker, leading the Circus, shot a flare to instruct his people to climb
straight. The two lead groups leveled off at 16,000 feet and the crews
donned oxygen masks. They droned through pinnacles of cumulus, spaced
far enough apart so that visual contact held the formation together.

 

 

Killer Kane got the Pyramiders, Eight Balls and Scorpions turned at
Corfu and faced the clouds. He signaled for Frontal Penetration and
began circling at 12,000 feet. The front and rear groups were already
dangerously separated. Now the gap was widening between Kane and Compton.

 

 

Bounced in pearly mists, the airmen took lunch, Kane's crews shivering
in their cotton clothing. Some of them were wearing sandals. They
clawed open wax boxes of K-rations, warmed up cans of bacon and eggs on
the heat vents, munched hard biscuits, and cursed the lemonade powder,
one of the nutritive fiascos of the Quartermaster Corps. They drank hot
coffee from big vacuum flasks. (At Luftwaffe Fighter Command, Pitcairn
ordered coffee for his tense staff, watching the red marks inch toward
them on the big glass map. But there was no coffee in the German stores.)

 

 

Soon Compton's Liberandos came on a far-ranging radar up ahead. Atop the
7,250-foot pinnacle of Mount Cherin, near Sofia, there was a German
Würzburg unit living in wretched boredom. Eight months before, they had
packed their tons of equipment a mile up the mountain on muleback and
carried it the rest of the way on their backs. All these weary months they
had monitored the air without a single trace of enemy aircraft. Suddenly
they were talking with soft-voiced airwomen in ops rooms from Vienna
to Salonika. "Many wings! Zone Twenty-four East. Sector Eleven. Bearing
thirty degrees."

 

 

K.K. Compton drove across the Yugoslavian mountains, through wells of
midday sun among the cloud tops. Kane was almost a mile below and sixty
miles behind as Compton crossed the last mountain barrier, the Osogovska
Range on the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. Compton passed Mount Cherin,
where the radar men were phoning ahead, "Big wings! Zone Twenty-four East,
Sector Twenty-two."

 

 

The last possibility that the force could reunite by visual contact
was now lost by a quirk of nature. At 16,000 feet Compton and Baker
were kicked along by a brisk tail wind. But it was not blowing at 12,000
feet. K.K. Compton was gaining ground speed and pulling farther away from
Kane. In Compton's rear, Circus pilots phoned tail gunners, "Any sight
of the guys behind?" The answer was always, "No, sir. Nobody in sight."

 

 

Appold said, "Compton began a snaking descent of the mountains to allow the
straggling groups to close in." The Liberators zigzagged down the slope,
losing time but spending gas.

 

 

As the mission entered Bulgarian airspace, Colonel Vulkov sent up
two squadrons of Avias from bases near the capital, Lieutenant Marlin
Petrov leading Squadron 612 from Wraschdebna, and Lieutenant Rusi Rusev
commanding Squadron 622 from Bozhurishte. Their old Czech fighters carried
two to four 7.92-mm. machine guns and were stripped of oxygen and radio
systems to get more speed. None of the pilots had ever been in battle or
had seen an enemy bomber. The Bulgarians took up an interception course
toward Berkovitsa, north of their capital, and Colonel Vulkov ordered
fighters up from his main base at Karlovo, east of Sofia, where he had
sixteen Avias and six Me-109's, the only fighters capable of battling
on good terms with the Liberators. Vulkov was angered to learn that the
Karlovo pilots were away from base on Sunday. He set off loudspeakers
and phones to get them back from café and brothel.