Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (26 page)

 

 

Anthony saw Wahoo's bombs drop out. His brother hurdled the refinery
stacks, pressed low and ran at top speed across the ground. Anthony
put on his headset and heard, "This is Killer Kane. Anybody that's
hurt, go to Turkey!" However, Thomas Fravega was not ready for that
remote decision. He merely wished to put Ploesti behind as rapidly as
possible. He drove Wahoo at 225 mph, so long that Anthony called to him,
"The engines are going to blow their heads off!" Thomas climbed to 3,000
feet and reduced his power settings. One of the slow German biplanes that
had been sent up to avoid being bombed on the ground had the misfortune
to be in his path. Wahoo's gunners shot the old crate down.

 

 

Fravega joined two other Liberators and asked his crew for an assessment
of their damages. Flight engineer Oscar McWhirter reported, "Lieutenant,
I can't find a dang thing wrong with this ship, except that we got four
hundred gallons of gas in a Tokyo tank that we can't get at. The fuel
transfer pump is out." The pilot said, "Well, we've got to have that
gas or we won't get back." Anthony Fravega and McWhirter tinkered with
the transfer pump but could not repair it. They disconnected the hose
and let the engine suck at the tank. This seemed to work. Wahoo took up
course for Corfu.

 

 

The bloody business at White Four was not over. The fourth Pyramider
wave passed out of the flickering night over the target into the sights
of Manfred Spenner's Yellow Wing of Messerschmitts. The German ace
saw "fighters and bombers flying in all directions, flak coming up,
balloons going down." He spotted a Liberator whose pilot had not yet
appreciated the security of the earth and was leaving the target at
an altitude of 1,300 feet. Spenner circled for his tail and attacked
through heavy fifty-caliber fire from its top and tail gunners and
those of another bomber. "I hit mine good," said the German. "As I passed
him I could plainly see the gunner at the right waist window. I looked
back and saw the plane settle down without wheels, bump along and explode."
Circumstantially, his victim would seem to have been a fourth wave
Pyramider piloted by John V. Ward, which left no survivors.

 

 

Pilot Robert W. Sternfels of the fourth wave plunged into the target
smoke yelling, "Here we go!" Gunner Harry Rifkin said, "We tore through
a balloon cable and skimmed through the flames so fast we had no time
to be scared." Their wingmate, a Colton, California, railway shopman
named Leroy B. Morgan, came out with part of a wing ripped off by a
cable. "The antiaircraft made good with six direct hits on my ship,"
said Morgan, "which left about two hundred fifty holes and knocked out
my hydraulics, oxygen, electricity and radio. I decided closest to the
ground was safest." Both of these p lanes returned to base.

 

 

The fifth and last of Kane's waves over Ploesti had a short history.
Six went in. One came out. It was the heaviest toll of any echelon
in the battle. Only Francis E. Weisler's Liberator got home. Edward
T. McGuire's wreck deposited three living men on the ground -- Clark
Fitzpatrick, James Waltman and Robert Rans. When James A. Deeds crashed,
his co-pilot, Clifton Foster, and radioman James Howie were left among
the living. Radio operator William Treichler was the only man delivered
of August W. Sulflow's demolished B-24. Pilot Wallace C. Taylor alone
survived his ship and the first question the Germans asked him was,
"Where is Killer Kane?"

 

 

The remaining victim of the fifth wave shambles was piloted by John
J. McGraw and Charles Deane Cavit, on their first combat flight. Like the
Fravega crew, they were Sky Scorpions who had hitchhiked from England by
Air Transport Command a few days before Tidal Wave and demanded a plane to
fly to Ploesti. The Pyramiders gave them "an old junk heap" called Jersey
Jackass. The proud fledglings removed old pieces of flak imbedded in her
and scrubbed away dried blood. A tall lad from Philadelphia, Jack Ross,
cleaned up the tail turret for his first war adventure and his last.

 

 

They got their bombs into the target, but the flak men knocked Jersey
Jackass to pieces. The pilots crash-landed the flaming heap and broke
free. Farmers with pitchforks drove them to a German field dressing
station. Cavit said, "Our uniforms hung in smoky tatters, and the medics
thought we were Germans or Romanians until we spoke." Then the doctor
in charge yelled in English, "You killed my wife and daughter on a raid
in Germany! I order my men to do nothing for you." He gave his people
a passionate speech in German about the bestiality of the two fainting
Americans. In the midst of it tail gunner Jack Ross was brought in,
hairless and seared black, but still on his feet. He held out his burned
hands to be treated. The doctor grabbed a knife and said, "I'll cut
them off." Ross jerked his hands behind his back and said to Cavit,
"What have we got into?"

 

 

The pilot fell unconscious. When the doctor turned, Cavit snatched a
bottle of ointment and treated McGraw's burns. A German sentry sidled
over and handed him a bottle of water. "He was scared of the doctor,"
said Cavit, "but he wanted to help us." McGraw died, perhaps, as Cavit
and Ross think, from lack of medical attention.

 

 

With one engine out, Killer Kane flew off target into the fighter battle,
feeling "like a crippled fish in a school fleeing from sharks. My eyes
burned from salty drops falling from my eyebrows." Co-pilot Young reduced
power. "Why?" yelled Kane. Young said, "We must save the engines." Kane
roared, "We'll save them after they save us!" He pushed his settings
up full, but could make only 185 mph. Kane's was the last plane in a
collection of about eighteen and he was falling farther behind. He could
not hear any noise from his turret gunner and asked why. The bombardier,
Raymond B. Hubbard, said, "He shot all his rounds. He's sitting up there
oiling his guns." The gunner, Harvey I. Treace, his features petulantly
contorted, was trying to pull a stuck oil can out of his pocket. "And
Hubbard and me laughing like crazy," said Kane. "It beats me how men
can laugh under those circumstances, but, by glory, they do!"

 

 

Kane's other gunners were busy with fighters. "We took everything they
had," said Kane " -- five hits on an inboard engine and the underside of
the right wing. The main spar was buckled." The Germans shot the tip off
one propeller and put a two-inch hole through the blade of another. "The
fighters were hanging on us like snails on a log," said the Pyramider
leader. Three corporals who rode with Kane passed through gunnery school
that day: Harry G. Deem, Jr., Yves J. Gouin and Thomas O'Leary.

 

 

Kane headed south, knowing that his afflicted machine could not get
back on the planned withdrawal course. The distance to Libya was too
great, the mountains too high. To the south there was a chance for Hail
Columbia, in the lower passes of the Balkan Mountains. Navigator Whalen
gave him the heading for Cyprus. Three other ships accepted Kane's radio
appeal to make for Cyprus and followed him. One was Hadley's Harem,
with nose shot off and a feathered engine. Another was The Squaw,
piloted by Royden L. LeBrecht, which had come through little damaged
from the flak devastation on the right column of the first wave,
but was short of fuel. The third craft, piloted by William D. Banks,
was in fairly good flying condition. Kane's Hail Columbia seemed the
worst damaged. He diminished his airspeed to 155 mph and ordered his
crew to unburden excess cargo. LeBrecht saw the air filled with objects
and radiophoned, "What is this -- spring housecleaning?" Kane was not
amused. He was facing a 6,600-foot climb over the southern hook of the
Balkans, and on the ascent could produce an airspeed of only 135 mph,
which was close to stalling speed for an aircraft as hard hit as Hail
Columbia. Kane told his men, "Throw everything out!" Into the slip stream
went ammunition belts and cans, rations and precision tools. "Dammit,
I said throw everything out!" roared Kane. The corporals ripped out
oxygen bottles and gun mounts and pantomimed grimly at the windows with
their parachute packs. Hail Columbia trudged up a mountain pass, clawing
for altitude, feeling for updrafts. She seemed unequal to the climb. The
plane heaved on, 200 feet lower than the top of the Balkan Mountains.

 

 

Kane's force had destroyed half the productive capacity of the largest oil
refinery in Europe at the appalling cost of 22 heavy bombers. And a dozen
other Pyramiders were, like himself, struggling hard to remain airborne.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bombs Away: 1215 hours

 

 

Long, too long America,

 

 

Traveling roads all even and peaceful you
learn'd from joys and prosperity only,

 

 

But now, ah now, to learn from crises of
anguish, advancing, grappling with direst
fate and recoiling not,

 

 

And now to conceive and show to the world
what your children en-masse really are,

 

 

(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd
what your children en-masse really are?)
-- Walt Whitman, "Drum-Taps," 1865

 

 

11 RED TARGET IS DESTROYED

 

 

The last Tidal Wave group over the targets was the 389th -- the Sky
Scorpions, who had found their style in the stinging sands and clear skies
of Africa. They made up a fervent, close-hauled, confident organization.
New to battle, they were the second generation of U.S. bomber schools,
instructed by retired combat fliers from Europe. The Scorpions doted on
tight formations and equipment maintenance. Despite the fact that most
of their ground mechanics still languished in Britain, the air echelon,
in its half-dozen short raids in the Mediterranean prior to Tidal Wave,
had always put up more planes than were called for in the field order. For
Ploesti they lent nine crews to Kane for pink ships he could not man.

 

 

Their objective was the isolated Steaua Romana refinery, owned by the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and located at Câmpina, nestled in a valley of
the Transylvanian Alps, eighteen miles northwest of Ploesti. It was known
as Red Target. The assignment had drawn razzing from other groups. "You
guys get the soft one. . . . Away from the heavy flak . . . They must
think you can't find Ploesti." The fact was that Timberlake and Ent
had given the newcomers the separate target because the Scorpions were
flying new Liberators with a slightly greater range and Red Target was
the farthest objective of the seven. Some of Colonel Jack Wood's planes
carried ball turrets which set up a slight drag, so that if they could
not keep up with the simultaneous bombing front over Ploesti it did not
matter. He could bomb Red Target a few minutes later without affecting
the timing of Tidal Wave.

 

 

The ingenious Scorpions had devised their own bombing plan, which
Timberlake had approved. The critical part of Red Target was only 400
feet wide. Its four vital buildings -- boiler plant, power plant and two
still houses -- lay in a diamond pattern. Jack Wood proposed to cross in
three waves, hitting each objective three times with bombs graduated from
one-hour delay on the first wave to 45 seconds for Tailend Charlie. The
first wave would drive up over the diamond, hitting the lowest and side
aiming points and dumping overages into the top point. A second wave
would cross obliquely, hitting bottom and side AP's, and crash overages
into the remaining two. The third wave would repeat the tactic from the
opposite angle.

 

 

As the Scorpions descended to the Danube, Pilot Harold James, survivor of
the low-altitude training crash in England, asked his flight engineer,
Harold M. Thompson, for an estimate of remaining fuel. Thompson checked
the gauges and reported privately to the radioman, Earl L. Zimmerman,
the other man left from the training collision, "Even if we turn back
right now, we don't have enough gas to reach base." Zimmerman said, "Don't
tell the pilot until we get off the target. He has enough worries." The
plane went on, burning up its chances of return. James was flying with
a substitute co-pilot -- his customary seatmate was one of the three
men who had refused to fly to Ploesti.

 

 

The Scorpions trailed Johnson and Kane to the First Initial Point,
Pitesti, where they swung out a few degrees northeast, as briefed, to
climb the foothills above Red Target. Their turning point was going to
be extremely difficult to pick out in the washboard of wooded ridges and
ravines ahead. Wood's people had to lower into bombing altitude while
the foothills were rising under them, a tricky matter of pilotage. Small
mistakes in judgment of height could leave wrecks in the trees.

 

 

Wood's flagship was piloted by Captain Kenneth M. Caldwell, a senior
command pilot with ten years in the service, but only recently come to
war. Wood crouched behind him with a map spread on his knees, peering
intently ahead for recognition points. The group navigator called up,
"Can't see a single peak ahead, sir. There's a complete cloud cover on the
mountain tops." Wood said, "Look for the monastery." They had been briefed
thus: "When you pass north of Targoviste, the ancient capital of Romania,
look for Monasterea Dealului [The Monastery on the Hill], a landmark
that can be seen for miles around in clear skies." The navigator said,
"Yeah, if we only had clear skies."

 

 

The miles were fleeting by. The monastery was nowhere in sight. Wood
could not delay decision any further. In fear that he was overshooting
the I.P., he decided to turn into a ravine that had to be the right one
according to his time computations. As he turned into the valley he saw
with relief that it extended along the correct target heading and that
near the mouth there was a huge plant and town.