Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (34 page)

 

 

Those Americans able to walk were collected in the Bucharest city
jail. There Elmer Reinhart and his five parachutists met pilot Jerome
Savaria, who lay in shock from a heavy scalp wound. He had fallen among
country folk who had not observed Allied Intelligence advices that "the
peasants are honest, friendly, kindly and hospitable to strangers."
They had mobbed Savaria, one swinging an axe. He ducked the fatal stroke
but took a glancing blow on his head. The peasants put a rope around
his neck and marched him to a tree. A German patrol arrived and stopped
the lynching.

 

 

John Palm lay in a barrage balloon shack near Bratulesti, holding on to
his nearly severed leg. He pantomimed to his captors how to construct a
litter. They made one of saplings and carried him on it to a truck.
After a jolting, excruciating ride to a Bucharest gynecological hospital,
Palm was sent in a pushcart on another hard ride to Spital Shuler,
a first-class private clinic run by Dr. Georg Petrescu. Palm said,
"I could tell right away that Dr. Petrescu was a wheel and an Allied
sympathizer." The surgeon removed his dangling leg, sutured the stump,
and put Palm to bed.

 

 

That night the Texan was awakened by a crowd of thug-like types
in long leather overcoats, cradling machine guns in their arms.
In front of them stood a small fox-faced man wearing a black homburg,
a pin-striped Savile Row suit and suede shoes. In English he said,
"So you are an American?" Palm admitted it. The little man scowled and
walked out with the gunmen. Dr. Petrescu said, "Do you know who that
was? General Antonescu." The dictator of Romania had come to see one
of the creatures for himself, after a day of absurd frustration. At his
villa on Lake Znagov, he had heard the aerial noise and assumed that it
was merely Woldenga running another surprise mock attack on Ploesti.

 

 

In the morning Palm received friendly visitors, with an unarmed escort --
a slender, pleasant lady, her arm held by a hulking teen-aged boy. She
said, "I am Helen and this is the king." Palm said, "It's sure nice to
make your acquaintance," looking at the first king he'd ever laid eyes on.
Palm remembered a newspaper item about Michael running away with a tank
on army maneuvers, and engaged him in a discussion about planes, guns,
cars, tanks and motocycles, for such was their mutual passion. The queen
mother found a chance to whisper to Palm, out of earshot of her retinue,
"You know, we are not free to speak. Do the Americans understand that
our sympathies are with you?" Palm gave the queen a big secret wink and
a Lucky Strike. He was now American ambassador to Romania.

 

 

The queen bade Dr. Petrescu move Palm into a private room, where she could
come incognito without spying courtiers. She was the wife that Carol II
had put away in favor of his famous baggage, Magda Lupescu. On the days
that Helen did not come to the hospital Palm received anonymous perfumed
notes on crested writing paper. The Texan began to form the impression
that if one had to lose a leg and languish in foreign durance, this was
not a bad way to take it.

 

 

During the long hot afternoon and night after the raid Bernard Traudt, the
seventeen-year-old gunner who had bailed out of the flaming orange ship,
slept blissfully under a bush, undetected by search parties. He awoke
refreshed at dawn Monday and saw a farmer walking toward a privy. Traudt
selected from his escape kit a mimeographed form letter in Romanian
asking help for an American aviator. With an extra-sunny smile the lad
stepped out and presented it. The peasant studied it from all angles,
including upside down. He was illiterate. From behind, another rustic
came up stealthily and clouted Traudt on the head with a pitchfork
handle. The boy awakened in an oxcart on the way to captivity.

 

 

That Monday morning the Bucharest stock exchange opened for ten minutes,
then shut its doors to assess the economic impact of the bombing.

 

 

Princess Caradja had been very busy since the bombers crossed her house.
Hearing that American prisoners were being detained by her countrymen
instead of the Germans, she advised "her boys," as she had begun to call
O'Reilly's crew, to surrender to Romanians and arranged a discreet
rendezvous for them. Poulsen collected their dollars and gave them to the
princess to hold. She sent her field hands with a winch to the wrecked
plane to lift the turret off the dead flight engineer, Frank Kees, and
started the orphans' carpentry shop to constructing his coffin. Women
washed the body and repaired the ripped suntans in which he would be
buried next day.

 

 

The princess sped to Bucharest to pursue her main purpose, to hold the
Americans in Romania and not let them be sent to Germany. She persuaded
her social circle, which included several wives of cabinet ministers, to
exert conjugal politics on their husbands. Colonel Sarbu, an old family
friend, implored her to go to the ruins of the Women's Prison and try
to identify the body of his sister, Elena. He was a member of the Iron
Guard and Mademoiselle Sarbu had been sentenced to prison as a leftist
Allied sympathizer. The princess identified the charred body of Elena
Sarbu,* and drove to a café rendezvous to see how the campaign to hold the
Americans was coming. The cabinet ladies had good news. Their husbands had
bucked up Antonescu to go see Gerstenberg and claim the Americans. The
Iron Guard leader had approached the Protector with deep misgivings;
Hitler's captives, wherever apprehended, were always sent to German
stalags. Antonescu said, "The Americans have been captured in battle here,
therefore Romania should be the detaining power." Gerstenberg pondered the
question. It occurred to him that this was an elegant solution. Instead
of carting the rambunctious, high-calorie-consuming Americans off to tax
the rations and billets of the Reich, why not leave them in Romania and
win a point for his generosity? He said, "My dear General Antonescu,
they were shot down here. Of course they are your prisoners! I shall
hand over all those we have arrested and will give you the ones we have
sent to Frankfurt for interrogation." It was Antonescu's second victory
of the war, the other being his refusal to adopt Wehrmacht time.

 

 

* Today, on the rebuilt Women's Prison, according to Princess Caradja,
there is a memorial tablet to Elena Sarbu, saying that she was
"treacherously murdered." This perversion ignores the fact that
she died in the crash of a Liberator crippled by a Romanian pilot
who disobeyed orders not to fight over the city. The ten Americans
in the plane were as helpless as the women in the jail. The plane
was a prison too.

 

 

The princess heard the good news in a café which was otherwise buzzing
with talk about the fantastic accuracy of the bombing and the patent
fact that the Americans had tried to avoid hurting civilians. Except
for the tragedy in the prison, few Ploesti dwellers had been harmed.

 

 

She drove back home to conclude arrangements for burying O'Reilly's top
turret man. Her major-domo said, "The parish priest refuses to conduct
the funeral. He says this man bombed our people." The princess phoned a
bishop in Bucharest, "My fool of a priest won't bury one of the American
boys." The parish priest was on hand in the morning, leading a procession
of villagers and orphans behind Kees's body to the Cantacuzene private
cemetery on the estate. To the sound of chants in an alien tongue,
a boy from Kentucky was laid among the bones of princes who had fought
the Saracen. Women covered the grave with flowers. The priest said to
a grandmother, "You fools! They shoot your sons and you decorate their
graves." The old woman replied, "Our sons are falling in Russia. We hope
that other mothers are doing this for them."

 

 

King Michael drove to the princess' manor in his sports car to see
O'Reilly's Liberator, which was among the best preserved of the crashed
ships. Michael saw gasoline trickling out of the wing tanks and collected
several liters for his car. He leaped in and roared away. Down the road
a way, his motor failed. U. S. aviation gas was too rich for it.

 

 

Hitler telephoned congratulations to Gerstenberg, and then Goering thanked
the Protector for brilliantly justifying the arms and men he had sent
to the quiet theater, sometimes at the expense of the Reichsmarschal's
dwindling prestige in Berlin. Gerstenberg and Woldenga inspected the
damaged refineries with their petroleum production engineer and economist,
Frau Gramach, a feminine doctoral engineer from Hanover. She told
Gerstenberg that it would be only a matter of days before she could give
him full shipment quotas of oil. Ten thousand Slav captives were at work
clearing rubble and connecting by-pass pipelines in the quick recovery
system the Protector had devised.

 

 

Woldenga told Gerstenberg that he thought the American bombs were too
small for the job. Many had not exploded. But the fighter controller's
opinion was: "The deep-level attack was a good idea. I myself have seen
the effect of total surprise at zero altitude. In October 1940 I took
forty Messerschmitts over London at roof-top level. We took off from
the French coast, went up the Thames, and swept the city from end to
end without losing a plane.* It was only a forty-minute flight. One can
attain surprise on such short missions, but the American voyage was much
too long. The risk of detection is too great on a six-hour flight."

 

 

* This may have been the fighter bomber sweep of 7 October which
hit Lambeth Palace, or that of 10 October which destroyed the high
altar of St. Paul's Cathedral.

 

 

Woldenga remarked on the high proportion of Liberators with Eighth Air
Force colors and markings. Gerstenberg said, "Yes, we have punished two
American air forces." Woldenga gave him one of Geerlings' perspective
route charts found in one of the wrecks. ** "Extraordinary," said the
general. "It shows a very special effort. Excellent planning." He added,
"I am certain the Americans will come again, despite what happened to
them. Their bases are moving closer. They have a foothold in Sicily;
southern Italy may be next. I reminded Goering of the Me-110's he
promised. We must have more aircraft, more guns, more troops. We lost
about a hundred flak people yesterday."

 

 

** German Intelligence assumed that the prewar postcards and snapshots
were photographs from a recent Allied reconnaissance flight.
The Luftwaffe warning system was reprimanded for not detecting it.
Of course there had been no photo-reconnaissance prior to Tidal Wave.

 

 

Woldenga said, "That is unfortunate, sir. I have the pleasure to report
that we lost only two German pilots.* I believe three Romanians were
killed."

 

 

 

 

* The authors received this same remarkable assertion in separate
interviews with eleven Luftwaffe officers in the battle, including
four fighter pilots of I-JG 4 at Mizil. The Air Ministry in London
opened its captured Luftwaffe documents for southeastern Europe,
which bore out Woldenga. They state that IV-NJG 6, the night-fighter
group at Zilistea, lost two Me-110's and five were damaged, while
two Mizil Me-109's were destroyed and two damaged. Presumably the
Mizil fatalities were from Captain Toma's integrated Romanian
wing. The Air Ministry documents do not include Royal Romanian
Air Force figures, which the writers were unable to find. The
Athenian Me-109's lost two planes of record in the Kephallenia
ambush. Apparently the Bulgarian Air Force lost none of the fighters
that attacked the B-24's during the withdrawal. The ascertainable
facts shed a revealing light on wartime allowances for enemy
aircraft destroyed. Tidal Wave gunners were credited with 51. A
cautious estimate of German evidence would scarcely show two dozen
fighters actually downed in the general melee around Ploesti, the
Bulgarian border fray, and the Ionian Sea ambuscade. The Luftwaffe
officially credited eighteen Liberators to Romanian-based fighters,
after examining the crashes. Two B-24's were definitely shot down in
Bulgaria and four in the battle of the Ionian Sea. Human losses in
the intra-aerial engagements of Tidal Wave would appear to total
approximately: Americans -- 150; Axis -- 15.

 

 

Ever since he had made his fortunate guess on which threaded part disarmed
the American bombs, Armament Inspector Egon Schantz had been continuously
rendering them harmless. In the first 24 hours his men dealt with "more
than a hundred," according to Adjutant Scheiffele. Of course many of them
were duds to begin with, but some of the sleeping monsters, with tardy
detonators, were still exploding on the second day.

 

 

There was an unexploded 500-pounder hanging in the top of a fractionating
column, and the defenders wanted to save this vital unit. Fireman Schütz
volunteered to climb the column and disarm the bomb. Trailing a phone
cable to Schantz in a bomb shelter, the fireman went up the tower. He
phoned to the ground, "The first screw is bent and I can't get it
off with my bare hands. I'm going to use a wrench." Schantz replied,
"I don't think you should. If there is too much force, it might turn the
second screw." Schütz said, "No, I think it will work." A huge explosion
rocked the shelter. They didn't even find Schütz's belt buckle.

 

 

Gerstenberg ordered that the American dead be buried with full military
honors. There were several mass funerals of Americans and Germans together,
with trumpets, parade standards and honor guards firing the final volleys.

 

 

The Protector analyzed the event for which he had prepared for three
years. He was clearly the victor of the day, but he did not warm himself
with that or the encomiums from Berlin. The American wrecks around the
target and a projection of that figure for damage, death and wounds,
in the bombers that got away, convinced him that the Ninth Air Force
would be unable to send a follow-up mission. Perhaps it had effectively
lost its bomber command. Yet the enemy's great daring, the evidence of
long and shrewd planning, and the combining of two air forces for the
raid, told Gerstenberg that the Americans valued Ploesti as highly as
he did. Never one to underestimate the enemy, the Protector imagined
himself in Brereton's brown study: What could he do, without planes,
to try to finish the destruction of the refineries? While the fires were
still burning and the bombs exploding -- sabotage! Gerstenberg thought
that if hundreds of Americans had come suicidally as bomber crews, others
could parachute in to finish the job. He ordered his entire command on
alert against parachutists.