Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (31 page)

 

 

McFarland ordered his men to clean out ship. They threw out oxygen
bottles, fire extinguishers, the aerial camera and ammunition boxes.
Although they were still well within range of fighters, out went ten
machine guns and all the remaining ammo. With fire axes they chopped off
and jettisoned everything in the fuselage which was not directly involved
with keeping them flying, and then they threw out the axes. Liberty Lad
continued to sink. From 15,000 feet the ship went down to 5,500. There,
with her lightened burden, she found some stability in the thicker air.

 

 

Straining against the rudder pedal, McFarland broke the pilot's seat.
Hayes and Sergeant John Brown, who was flying as an observer, got behind
and braced their backs against his, so he could maintain leverage on
the rudder. The two sergeants bolstered the pilot throughout the rest of
the journey, one of them at a time crawling around front and massaging
the pilots' legs.

 

 

The radioman, Oda A. Smathers, his head swathed in bloody bandages,
managed to repair the shot-up radio and exchanged fixes with the Ninth
Air Force station 75X in Libya. The rest of the crew sat in ditching
position, with their backs to the main bulkhead. Liberty Lad heaved on
across the sea in the fading light.

 

 

As the scattered Ploesti fleet droned over the Balkans, it was tracked
by the Wurzburg on Mount Cherin and the vigilant spotter was waiting on
Corfu. He reported, "They are turning south from Sector Zero Zero, Zone
Twenty-four East, into Sector Zero Nine, Zone Twenty-three East." The new
zone was controlled from Athens, where, since morning, Leutnant Werner
Stahl had been patiently plotting the progress of the B-24's. He had
noted that U.S. bombers usually returned on the same route they took
to the target. Now the Liberators were confirming that, and Stahl was
ready. Sitting on the flight line at Kalamaki near Mégara, Greece,
he had ten new Messerschmitts with auxiliary belly tanks, under the
command of Leutnant Burk. Stahl had calculated that extra petrol and
precise timing would give Burk a half hour of combat on the nearest
point of intersection with the bomber course. He plotted the point in
the Ionian Sea, west of the Island of Kephallenia, one of the kingdoms
of Odysseus, the old sea rover. Up went the Messerschmitts, driving west
in the midafternoon sun. They crossed the interception point and turned
to get the blinding sun at their backs. Twelve Liberators walked across
the German leader's gunsights exactly on time.

 

 

The first American to spot the Messerschmitts was the sharp-eyed Owen
Coldiron, standing by his useless guns in the jammed top turret of Daisy
Mae. He phoned pilot Ellis, "Fighters at three o'clock, straight into
the sun."

 

 

"We tightened up the formation and waited," said Ellis. "Since my top
and tail guns were out, I dropped down a bit to uncover the guns of the
ship on my left."

 

 

Leutnant Burk did not attack immediately. He still had a minute of gas in
his auxiliary tanks and wanted to burn it and drop the tanks to streamline
himself before giving battle. He took up a parallel course to the bombers,
out of machine-gun range, and examined his riddled prey. Coldiron saw
the Messerschmitt leader hold up his hand and the fighters shed their
belly tanks. Five fighters turned in abreast in a shallow V and drove up
the flanks of the Liberators. Ellis said, "It was no surprise action. It
was a cool, well-planned attack. We knew the Germans would not frighten
as the Macchis [Bulgarian Avias] had. We had to shoot them down, be shot
down ourselves, or wait for them to run out of gas."

 

 

The American gunners waited professionally until the fighters were within
a thousand yards before opening the action. The fighters replied with
cannon and machine guns. An Me-109 passed through the bombers, shedding
parts, and exploded on the other side, leaving a yellow parachute tacked
on the sky. Leutnant Altnorthoff rained heavy blows on the Eight Ball
Liberator piloted by Fred H. Jones and Elbert Dukate, Jr. It fell behind,
sinking toward the sea, not far from where Flavelle had gone down nine
hours before. That was the last of the Jones-Dukate crew as far as the
others could see.*

 

 

* Two months later the tail gunner from Jones's ship, Michael Sigle,
reported for duty in Benghazi. He said that his entire crew of
nine had survived the ditching and were picked up from life rafts
by an Italian launch. Sigle had escaped from Italy with the help
of anti-Fascists. Ten months later, as General Mark Clark stood at
the gates of Rome, a picturesque Italian partisan leader sneaked
through the enemy lines with detailed information on the city's
defenses. His name was "Duke" and he spoke American with a New
Orleans accent. Co-pilot Elbert Dukate, Jr., had escaped from POW
camp, joined Italian guerrillas, and helped organize the underground
railway that delivered hundreds of downed Allied airmen from behind
enemy lines.

 

 

The Messerschmitts gathered again and Burk waved six machines in for
another flank attack. A Viennese cadet sergeant named Phillip picked
a bomber with two engines smoking and knocked Ned McCarty's mangled
Liberator out of the convoy. It shed five parachutes before it hit
the sea. The jumpers didn't have a chance. They were going into the
water far offshore and the running battle had now moved south of the
operational grounds of Italian boats. It happened that the Royal Navy was
bombarding Crotone that day and the next zone on the south was unhealthy
for Italians. The fighters lost no craft on the second pass.

 

 

The sounds of the Ionian Sea engagement were heard by ships far out of
sight. The radio was thick with calls: "Fighters everywhere! . . .
All the ships are gone but us -- don't see how we can last through these
attacks. . . . Bailing out -- ship on fire." Philip Ardery, leading
seven B-24's home, said, "These words we heard would wrench the heart
of a man of stone."

 

 

As the third assault shaped up, the bombardier of Daisy Mae, Guido Gioana,
yielded his forward gun to the more experienced radioman, Carl A. Alfredson.
The German leader changed his tactics. The Messerschmitts dissolved and
came in singly from various directions. Leutnant Flor destroyed a
Circus Liberator, Here's to Ya, piloted by Ralph McBride. No parachutes
came out of it. After this assault, Gioana and flight engineer James
W. Ayers lay wounded in Daisy Mae, and the tail gunner, Nick Hunt,
was picking himself up and looking at a cracked armor glass and jammed
turret tracks. Hunt took over a waist gun. Daisy Mae now had only her
waist weapons in action. The other gunners passed their unused ammunition
belts to these positions.

 

 

The Messerschmitt leader figured that individual attack was paying off.
More work could be squeezed out of the petrol that way. The fighters did
not reassemble, but drove in from many angles. Two fell upon Daisy Mae,
holing the left rudder and tearing strips off the elevator surfaces. Two
20-mm. shells exploded in the flight deck, wounding Gioana again. The
shells cut inner control cables and Daisy Mae's nose went down, turning
into a shallow bank to the left. Co-pilot Fager said, "Let's move back
up to the formation. We're wide open to them." Ellis said, "Can't do it,
Cal. The controls are gone." He demonstrated it by pulling the unresisting
control column back into his lap. He reached for the elevator trim. It
was completely loose, revolving freely, out of contact with the tab.

 

 

"Then I remembered the automatic pilot," said Ellis. "Fortunately,
I always kept it warmed up. I flipped to 'ON' and it was working. We
were six hundred feet below the formation, drawing Messerschmitts like
honey. I adjusted the elevator settings and the autopilot and the nose
came up slowly."

 

 

A Messerschmitt exploded and its pilot, Sergeant Graf, fell out.
The battle had now rolled along for about eighty miles and the Germans
were close to fuel warnings. Some broke off and departed for base. On the
last pass of the engagement, Sergeant Hackl cannoned his Messerschmitt
through the B-24's and destroyed a second engine on the ship piloted by
Reginald L. Carpenter.

 

 

Carpenter continued on two engines, his craft receding from the others.
When she was down to 5,000 feet, west of Crete, Carpenter called his crew
to ditching positions in the front of the plane. Just above the water he
feathered all the propellers. His replacement navigator, John E. Powell,*
was completely unfamiliar with water-landing procedure. He chose the
most perilous position he could, his feet dangling in the bomb bay and
hands grasping the ladder to the top turret. The turret usually came
unshipped and fell in crash-landings, and water impacts were much heavier.

 

 

* Powell's regular crew died at the target.

 

 

Carpenter said, "We lit the sea easily, and skipped into the air, smacking
in harder the second time. The tail section was torn off, just after the
wing. Walter Brown, right waist gunner, and Frederick Durand, tail gunner,
were pinned and never came to the surface." The pilot and six others
swam out of the floating wreck and inflated their life vests. Inside,
still, was navigator Powell. Providentially, the turret had not fallen
upon him. Powell struggled under water and wriggled out of the swamping
plane. (He doesn't remember how.) On the surface he found that his life
vest was damaged and would not inflate. He swam back to the wreck and
pulled out two rubber dinghies just before the ship went down. Seven of
the crew got into the five-man dinghy and Powell helped the most heavily
injured of them, co-pilot Edward Rumsey, into the one-man boat, and
splinted his broken leg with the paddle. While the plane was falling,
Powell had had the presence of mind to stick a first-aid kit in his
shirt. He now produced it and gave morphine injections to Rumsey and
the radioman, Joseph Manquen, who had a flak wound in his knee. "Then,"
said Powell, "we settled down for a night without food or water."

 

 

At dawn the men in the dinghies heard airplane engines. The Royal Air
Force Air-Sea Rescue unit at Cyprus was out sweeping for ditched air
crews. A Wellington came over low and dropped fresh water, concentrated
food and cigarets to the raftsmen. It circled them for five hours,
protecting them from German search boats out of Crete. When the
Wellington's fuel gauges approached the point of no return, a sister
ship arrived and took up the picket. The following night, after they
had been adrift for thirty hours, an Air-Sea Rescue launch picked up the
Americans. Powell's Silver Star citation mentioned his cheerfulness as
well as his resourcefulness.

 

 

The Stahl-Burk Messerschmitt ambush in the Ionian Sea was the last
fighter engagement in the Battle of Ploesti. The. Germans claimed five
bombers destroyed. Actually they had shot down only McCarty, Jones and
McBride, although damaging Carpenter so that he was forced to ditch
later. Apparently the Me-109's claimed Ellis when he went out of control
temporarily. U.S. gunners were allowed five enemy aircraft destroyed,
when only two were actually downed. The death toll was two German pilots
and 22 Americans.

 

 

Ellis came out of the Battle of the Ionian Sea still flying tortured Daisy
Mae. The unconscious Gioana had 35 wounds. The three lacerated sergeants
bandaged themselves and helped look after him. As if refreshed by the
new flak hits on the top cylinders and dangling sparkplug wires, Daisy
Mae's No. 3 motor began to revive. The Canadian engineer, Blase Dillman,
spliced the severed control cables, measured the gas, and reported,
"I figure we have enough to last until seven o'clock." The navigator,
Julius K. Klenkbell said, "We'll never make land by then." The men in
the torn Liberator dwelt on their thoughts as night came.

 

 

One of them had found an extra measure of heroism. Several weeks before,
after taking off on his second mission, he had gone forward to Ellis
and said, "Take me back." The pilot said, "Are you sick?" The man said,
"No, just scared." Ellis said, "Hell, we're all scared. What difference
does that make? If I take you back we'll never catch up with the
formation." The frightened man said, "Well, I'm going to jump." Dillman
grabbed the man by the collar and announced, "I'll knock your teeth
in if you don't get back to your job." The flier resumed his post and
reported to Ellis every half hour. Now the quaking man was flying with
his comrades in complete acceptance and common praying fear.

 

 

Ellis placed his power at lowest setting to milk more miles out of Daisy
Mae. At the fuel-exhaustion deadline he was still airborne at 155 mph,
1700 rpm and 25 inches manifeld pressure. "I could not decide for sure
what was best to do," the pilot remembered. "I knew that ditching at night
was a very hazardous undertaking, even if we still had power. Bailing out
in individual dinghies would have been O.K. for everyone but Lieutenant
Gioana, who was still unconscious.

 

 

Over the Adriatic several planes found they were too low on fuel to
reach Benghazi. They turned off for Sicily or Malta. One of them, K for
King, with its electrical system shot out and all instruments dead, was
navigated to the Sicilian beachhead by Leroy B. Zaruba. Pilots Miller
and Hodge landed her safely without an altimeter. The Fravega brothers
landed on a fighter strip at Syracuse with three other planes, one of
which blew a tire and ground-looped. Anthony Fravega said, "Nobody would
believe us when we told them what we had done." The returning heroes
had to sleep in their planes that night. *

 

 

* Four months later the Fravega brothers were shot down over Solingen,
Germany. Anthony lived. Thomas died with engineer McWhirter
and tunnel gunner George Parramore, who had been with them over
Ploesti. After the war Anthony became the first sergeant of an
Army Engineer group building air bases, and the new youngsters
in Air Force blues did not understand how a muddy "dogface" could
wear the Distinguished Flying Cross.