Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (35 page)

 

 

Axis Sally, in her English-language broadcasts from Berlin, said,
"Good show, Brereton, but you lost too many." Oddly enough, Goebbels
made little of the fact that the Americans had missed the Standard Oil
refinery, while destroying British and French-built plants. Café wits
in Bucharest did not overlook it. They were saying, "Now we may expect
British bombers to hit the American plant." The Germans sent inspired
rumors by neutral businessmen headed for Turkey, greatly exaggerating
the damage to the refineries -- a ploy wistfully designed to make
the Americans think they need not come back. However, Brereton soon
knew exactly what had happened to the White Targets. Two days after
Tidal Wave, a Mosquito photo-reconnaissance plane from Sixty Squadron,
South African Air Force, appeared 28,000 feet over Ploesti in perfect
weather. In it were Lieutenants A.M. Miller, pilot, and W.R. Allison,
navigator, busy photographing the refineries. The plywood Mosquito was
the only aircraft in the world, other than the Liberator, that could
duplicate the round trip from Benghazi. Amidst intense flak the bold
South Africans made stereo-pairs of the White Targets and returned
safely. They did not have the fuel to cover Red and Blue Targets, and
the damage dealt them was not known until two weeks later when another
Mosquito picked them off with a camera.

 

 

In a Bucharest hospital lay Charles I. Bridges, the only crewman alive from
Porky II in the last Eight Ball wave. The battered gunner was smarting
over an incident after the crash. As he had staggered away, half blind
and drenched with blood, a German sergeant seized his escape kit and
knocked him down. Bridges counterattacked and was knocked down again.
Now at his bedside there appeared a jovial Roman Catholic priest, who
said, "There you are, my son! I'm glad to see you're alive. You know,
after I pulled you out of the plane, you sent me to get help for the
others, and when I returned you were gone and they were dead."

 

 

Bridges said, "You pulled me out of the plane, Padre? Why, I crawled out
by myself. I don't remember seeing you at all. Some Jerries worked me
over, and a big Romanian soldier charged me, trying to throw the bolt
on his rifle. I yelled, 'Kamerad!' and he took me to a hut. Next day I
woke up here."

 

 

"Nevertheless, we are old friends, Sergeant," said the holy man. "After
I pulled you from the plane, you spoke to me in Latin." Bridges said,
"I haven't spoken Latin since high school. I doubt if I know ten words."
The priest said, "You asked me to send word to your mother in
Andersonville, Indiana, that you were all right." This was Bridges'
home town. The cleric said, "I sent her a cable through the Vatican."

 

 

Mrs. Bridges had received the cable via the Roman Catholic diocese in
Fort Wayne. Two days later she received a War Department telegram
announcing that her son was missing in action. The poor mother was
prostrated by these conflicting messages, but the diocese could furnish
no further information; it had simply forwarded the cable sent through
hierarchal channels. Nor could the War Department add anything. It was
going to be months before some of the folks at home knew whether their
men were alive or dead in Romania.

 

 

A week after the raid the wounded B-24 men were removed from Bucharest for
convalescence at the King's Hospital at Sinaia in the Transylvanian Alps
above Ploesti. Its quarters, food and medical care were excellent. One
day the Americans were taken to a huge white building near the hospital
and helped and carried up an imposing staircase into a great hall. A
well-dressed woman and a strapping teen-aged boy entered and a major-domo
yelled, "His Majesty, Mihai the First!" The G.I.'s were in the royal
summer palace at Peles. An airman remarked, "The kid looks like good
college football material." The king addressed them, "We say to you
American airmen that you will be well treated in our country. Our people
are favorably impressed by the fact that you did not bomb civilians. We
are personally writing letters to your families, saying that you are
safe." A voice from the back of the ball hollered, "How about cabling!"

 

 

The Archbishop of Bucharest visited the hospital and distributed gifts of
tsuica, or plum brandy. The livelier wounded began dicing on the beds and
romancing the nurses and female sightseers. The next time His Beatitude
came to the hospital he passed out New Testaments. Romanian society girls,
whose previous diversions had been tea-dancing with German officers at
the hotels in Mamaia, now flocked to Sinaia, bringing comforts for the
Americans, including books from the shuttered British Council Library
in Bucharest. The titles included
The Sheik
,
The Happy Prisoner
. However, patients Charles Bridges
and Donald Wright were not happy prisoners. One night they slipped
out of the hospital and struck out for the woods. Their hospital robes
attracted attention and the pair were apprehended and sent back. The
hospital staff was hurt. The chief physician lectured them: "You are
guests of this country and should behave yourselves accordingly."

 

 

A friendly English-speaking Romanian lieutenant visited the forty airmen
in the Bucharest city jail and told them, "There are seventy of your men
in hospital. They are receiving the best medical attention. We have counted
thirty-two wrecked bombers. Here in Bucharest we have buried two hundred
fourteen of your men. Only sixty-five bodies could be identified."

 

 

The jailed men were removed to a schoolyard and left there without
explanation. A police van came and put in with them four men in ragged
civilian clothes. The Americans suspected they were spies and made
disparaging remarks about them. The newcomers said nothing. They had
never seen an American soldier before. They gaped at the wide selection
of uniforms permitted to the fliers -- fleece-lined leather jackets,
singlets, overalls, cotton shirts and woolen shirts of different colors,
British battle jackets, desert shorts, and, it seemed, ten styles of
long pants. They were shod in laced boots, ornamented Brazilian cowboy
boots, British hard-bashers, basketball shoes and Arab sandals. On
their heads they wore steel helmets, plastic helmet liners, peaked caps,
cork topees, unshorn sheepskins, brimmed dress caps with the top ring
removed, forage caps -- both olive drab and suntan -- and a jaunty Afrika
Korps bonnet. One of the strangers muttered under his voice to another,
"I never thought I'd live to see the day." The other said, "S-s-s-sh,
don't talk. Let's listen to them slanging us."

 

 

The strangers were Britons, captured three summers before during the
German transgression in western Europe. The ragged band consisted of a
courtly London
Times
correspondent named Jerome Caminada, trapped in
the fall of France; an eagle-beaked Yorkshireman named Robert Johnson,
bagged in Denmark while practicing as a swine veterinarian; a rugged
soldier from Nottinghamshire, Platoon Sergeant Edward Lancaster of
the Sherwood Foresters, taken at Narvik, Norway; and a tall, vivacious
youth with snapping brown eyes, Platoon Sergeant Douglas Collins of the
Gloucestershire Regiment, overrun at Dunkirk while holding the perimeter
as the last boats left for England. They were the British Vanishers, the
inner circle of the elite prison-camp escapers on the eastern front, with
a collective total of 21 departures from enemy cages, including stalags,
maximum security fortresses and secret police cells.

 

 

Collins and Lancaster had seen more of Hitler's Europe than one of
his inspectors general. The lion-hearted sergeants had left a trail of
empty cells, knotted ropes, teetering gangplanks and boot leather from
the Arctic Ocean to Poland, to Chetnik regions of Yugoslavia -- almost
to the Black Sea. They had spent several sybaritic months at large
in Budapest, maintained in luxury by Allied sympathizers, but had not
forgotten their burning goal -- to get back into the fight. They came
to Romania, where they had been taken while trying to cross the broad
Danube. While being questioned in the cellar of a Bucharest secret police
headquarters, they escaped through a sewer and emerged from a manhole
on Calea Victoriei, the main street of the capital. Amidst sirens and
street-corner loud-speaker announcements of the escape, they legged it
forty miles to the river again.

 

 

The Danube, which prospective American escapees had been instructed to
paddle across on a log, once again brooked the British Vanishers. This
time the captors put them in a cage manned by a battalion of guards
who had no other inmates to look after. Collins said their strolls in
the compound "followed by four hundred pairs of eyes, was rather like
playing in the center court at Wimbledon."

 

 

When the Americans dropped in, the Romanians decided to mix the bothersome
Britons in with them. Here they were in the schoolyard, temporarily
down on their luck, much intrigued with an ally they had never seen,
and listening to his scurrilous remarks in their mother tongue.

 

 

Buses arrived and took them all aboard. Collins and Lancaster selected
a seat behind radioman Russell Huntley, whom they had heard the others
calling "Limey." (The nickname was merely inspired by the fact that
Huntley had served in the Canadian Army before his own country went to
war.) Lancaster leaned over to Huntley and spoke the first words to come
from the unprepossessing quartet: "I say, give us a light, mate." Huntley
jumped. The allied parties began to talk. Collins' sharp eyes scanned
the Americans for potential escapee material.

 

 

The buses went north on the Ploesti highway, on a route that happened
to provide a sight-seeing tour of the stricken refineries. As the buses
neared Blue Target at Brazi, the guards primly drew the blinds, which
tipped off the airmen that there was something worth looking at.
They rolled up the blinds and saw Creditul Minier in total and
desolate ruin. The guards ran back and forth in the aisles jerking
down the blinds. At Ploesti the airmen saw the Russian corvée toiling
in the wreckage of White Four and White Five, which had cost them many
comrades and their own freedom. Passing Red Target at Câmpina, there
was an approving hum and elbows in neighboring ribs: "Boy, that one is
hammered but good!"

 

 

The convoy climbed the winding Predeal Pass from the heat of the valley to
cool breezes scented with balsams. Halfway up the Transylvanian spur of
the Carpathians, the buses stopped at Sinaia and took aboard the walking
wounded from the King's Hospital. The journey took up again, higher and
higher, toward the domain of Count Dracula and the werewolves. Near the
summit, at a resort called Timisul de Jos, where Gerstenberg had taken his
ease on the morning of Tidal Wave, Lancaster spotted barbed wire across
the parallel railroad and said to Collins and Huntley, "This is it."

 

 

The buses turned across the tracks into Prisonaire de Lagurel No. 18,
as it was called. Nothing like it befell other captives in World War
II. The officers' new home was a three-story resort hotel. The enlisted
men drew two buildings of a neighboring private school for girls. The
gunners inspected the girls' dorms, scowling at the tiled wood-burning
stoves, the ample washroom and kitchen, and the outside toilets which had
French-style footprint offices. A sergeant moaned, "Jeez, are these people
ever behind the times!" Collins said, "This is absolutely marvelous. You
should see what you get in Germany." He recognized the compound at Timisul
as by far the best prisoner-of-war establishment in Axis territory. It
resembled the princely aviation-officer detention centers of the First
World War. The Liberator gunners had no basis of comparison, and, in the
fashion of traveling Americans, proceeded to knock the foreign plumbing.

 

 

The officers' hotel was superior to air base quarters in the States.
It had a spacious dining room, two baths, four lavatories and fourteen
bedrooms, each with a hot-water basin, individual lockers and goose-down
mattresses. On the pleasant grounds there were graveled walks, a fine
view of the Alps, a small gymnasium with showers, and tennis courts. The
officers had nothing to cavil about, so patently luxurious was their
lot. They found some empty fish pools which a co-pilot promptly learned
to fill from a mountain stream, and they began to amuse themselves by
flooding and emptying the ponds.

 

 

Both compounds had Russian prisoner cooks, kitchen hands, cleaners and
orderlies. The officers had a hearty Ukrainian cook named Ivan. There was
no kitchen police or any sort of work detail for the prisoners. Romania
was doing well by its uninvited guests. However, the barbed wire was
serious. The adjoining camps of the officers and men were separated by
guarded gates and a wire-lined connecting track. The whole was surrounded
by double lines of wire interconnected by barbed entanglements, and in
some places there were four outer strands.

 

 

The British Vanishers were delighted with the food. They had nearly starved
in the stalags, while "here there was always enough to eat," said Collins.
"True, it was beans, bread, bits of meat, cabbage and potatoes, but there
was no hunger." The Americans did not like the fare, although it was no
worse than the grub at Benghazi. Their culinary comparison overlooked that
and went back to steaks and ice cream in the Big PX across the Atlantic.

 

 

Red Cross parcels arrived in the gunners' compound and the men crowded
around Master Sergeant Frank Garrett, who called off the lucky recipients:
"Sergeant Edward Lancaster. [Three cheers for the Limey.] Sergeant Douglas
Collins. [That a boy, Doug.] Sergeant Douglas Collins. [Lucky bastard.]
Sergeant Douglas Collins. [Hey, what goes on?] Sergeant Edward Lancaster.
[He gets two?] Sergeant Edward Lancaster . . ." All thirty parcels from
the British Red Cross were for the embarrassed British decampers. They
had never received any before, due to their unavailability at mail call
much of the time. Now three years' accumulation of parcels had caught
up with them. Lancaster said, "Just a minute there, Yanks. This lot is
for all of us." Collins recalled, "We pooled the loot. It would have
been unthinkable to sit apart and nibble at our parcels. In POW camps
nothing leads to strife quicker than having a favored few around."