Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (37 page)

 

 

Jacobson took from his pocket two easel snapshots of young women and
placed them on his bedside table. He got into bed and began knitting a
sweater. His roommates waited expectantly for him to begin prying into
military secrets, but he remained silent, sticking to his knitting. Clay
Ferguson happened into the room and glanced at the snapshots. He left
quickly for the game room and announced to the officers, "Jacobson's
got a picture of my wife beside his bed." Nobody believed it. Ferguson
said, "I'm absolutely sure of it. Why, I left the picture behind in
Benghazi. Some of you guys saw it there." Suddenly there was a stream
of visitors passing the bedside of the pariah. It was Mrs. Ferguson all
right. A bombardier recognized his sister in the other photograph. They
confronted the R.A.F. man.

 

 

Jacobson said, "I have never met these beautiful ladies. These pictures
were my visas to come to Romania and find you." He took off his mask
and told them who he was. His real name was Lyova Gukovsky. He was a
native of Bessarabia, the province that Queen Marie had mulcted for
Greater Romania in 1920. Her rule was hard on Jews. Gukovsky emigrated
to Palestine and became a goatherd and schoolteacher in a large communal
farm, Kibbutz Yagour, where he found peace until the new war came.

 

 

British Intelligence asked the Jewish Agency in Palestine for former
Romanians to be parachuted into their native land to organize escape
systems for Jews, politicals, and Allied airmen who would be raining
down on the country when the next big bombing offensive came on Ploesti.
Gukovsky volunteered and took parachute training. One night, carrying
a bag of gold, he stepped into the air from a black plane over Romania
and had the bad luck to land on the roof of a police station and break
his leg.

 

 

He ditched the gold before the police seized him. Because of his correct
uniform and credentials they did not suspect the nature of his mission
and passed him routinely into Timisul, sentenced to a life of ease
instead of death in a Gestapo torture chamber, which was the fate of
other Palestinian parachute agents. Thus did Antonescu, leader of the
Legion of the Archangel Michael for the Christian and Racial Renovation
of Romania, roll out the red carpet for a runaway Romanian Jew.

 

 

The parachutist was fortunate in having a stout uniform. Most of the
Americans had lost theirs in crackups and hospitals and were wearing
parts of castoff Romanian uniforms and canvas underwear. The Red Cross
shipped in some U.S. Army pants and blouses and an assortment of gaudy
checkered shirts, which restored the individuality of costume essential
to the morale of the American fighting man.

 

 

With no camp labors to be performed, the captives amused themselves with
bridge, poker, cribbage, torturing musical instruments, exercising in the
gym, playing volleyball, and making fudge and wine. They taught their
guards the game of craps and cleaned them out. A Bucharest professor
came and offered Romanian language lessons. He opened his first class
with a nostalgic description of Boston, Massachusetts, where he had
spent some time as a young man. "I wish I had never come back here,"
he said. The pupils chorused, "You can say that again, Doc!"

 

 

There was a farmhouse next to the camp. The men spent patient hours
coaching a chicken to stick its neck through the wire. All evidence of the
bird disappeared in prestidigious time. Lawrence Lancashire found a book
on butchering and the boys went after big game outside the wire. During
the weekly church parade to a chapel outside the camp the neat column
passed close to a pig. When it was gone the pig was too. They were great
churchgoers; Catholics and Protestants used the chapel on alternate
Sundays. Many POW's professed to both creeds in order to march outside
each week.

 

 

The enlisted men did not fare as well as the officers in procuring spirits.
They remedied the situation by stealing the gun of a guard and locking him
in a room until he promised to deliver plum brandy.

 

 

As their vigor returned the airmen related themselves to the war as best
they could. On the railroad just outside the wire they saw long strings
of tank cars running north from Ploesti and knew their work at the
refineries had not succeeded. They longed for the bombers to come again.

 

 

The railroad ran through the Predeal Pass over the Transylvanian Alps,
and over it passed most of the German troops and supplies for the
Ukrainian front and the Ploesti oil moving north. A spy could not have
picked a better place to observe enemy movements. One of the caged birdmen
professed a keen love of nature and sat long days by the wire counting
troop, freight and tanker trains and German road convoys. He noted
that Germans rode coaches and Romanian troops rode cattle cars. From
Bucharest came a man in a green coat -- the identification Antonescu
forced Jews to wear -- and gained admission to the compound as a dentist,
volunteering to look after the prisoners' teeth. He brought a jar of
powdered porcelain manufactured in Philadelphia, which gave a twinge of
homesickness to the co-pilot of Pudgy, Wilmer Bassett, who came from
there. (Bassett still has a stout front tooth of this material.) The
man in the green coat actually was a dentist -- and more. He regularly
collected the nature lover's tallies of German traffic and passed them
on to a British Intelligence contact. It was probably the only instance
in the history of espionage in which a prisoner of war continuously
transmitted top-rated logistical reports.

 

 

One day the guards announced, "No prisoner must go near the wire on pain
of being shot by the Germans." The nature lover made himself small,
until an American officer induced the commandant to give the reason: "The
Germans complain of a prisoner who shouts terrible things at their troop
carriages." It was Douglas Collins, humoring himself by yelling in German,
"Bad luck for you! The Russians will kill you all.
Auf Wiedersehen.
"
Collins was induced to stop taunting the foe. The heat died down and
nature loving and dentistry resumed.

 

 

The wealthy American market attracted two thieving Romanian officers,
who opened a canteen in the camp, chased the farm women away, and doubled
prices down the line. The Americans called them "Minnie the Moocher"
and "Red the Thief." The pair levied rent on the POW billets and forced
payment for firewood. They even charged for gasoline used in a wheezy
chore truck. It was a rather galling note for men who came to destroy
Romanian gasoline, not to purchase it.

 

 

Princess Caterina Caradja visited the camp to look after "her boys."
She was not a Red Cross official and had no claim to enter, but she
persuaded the commandant to admit her to indoctrinate the Americans
against the Russians. This was not a subterfuge: she brain-washed them
constantly while looking after their comfort. She brought in a console
radio and the fliers put up a map beflagged with the latest war fronts
according to the British Broadcasting System's Overseas Service. Romanian
officers dropped in to study and discuss the daily situation. Sometimes
they heatedly disputed eastern front positions. A navigator caught on.
He told his comrades, "Don't argue with them. They're getting the
front-line situation from secret enemy reports. Don't ask for proof,
just milk it out of them." After that, when differences arose, the
prisoners let the Romanians move the pins. Timisul de Jos became one of
the most accurately informed war rooms in Europe, although its generals
commanded nothing.

 

 

Prominent Romanians visited Timisul from mixed motives of sympathy,
curiosity and a desire to court the nationals of what could be the winning
side. They spoke to the Americans as though the Soviet were a common
foe. Most of the prisoners remembered that the United States was at war
with Romania and allied with the Soviet Union. The split concept of the
war at Timisul was typified by a colloquy between a Romanian officer and
a naughty U.S. sergeant. The jailor said, "If you are not a good boy,
the Russians will get you." The prisoner replied, "Watch how you're
talkin', you grafter, or we'll send you to the Russian front."

 

 

As the months passed with no Allied raids on Ploesti the prisoners began
to wonder if their sacrifices had gone for nothing. They did not know
what was happening in Italy. The Allies had captured the Puglia Valley,
under the spur of the Italian boot, and were laying out bomber bases
500 miles nearer to Ploesti than were the plains of Benghazi.

 

 

Norman Appold and the Liberators were based at San Pancrazio near Bari.
Again the low-level experimentalist became bored with routine high-level
missions and began solo depredations in a weird fighter assembled by
his service squadron from wrecks of five aircraft. It was nominally a
Curtiss Warhawk (P-40), a type that had given its best service with the
American Volunteer Group in China four years earlier. The name of the
private Appold air force was Bon-Bon. Without putting himself on record,
he began racing across the Adriatic on the wave tops and shooting up
German road convoys in Yugoslavia.

 

 

One day three spray-walking Spitfires nearly potted Bon Bon, which had a
silhouette resembling the Me-109. U.S. Brigadier Charles ("Muzzle Blast")
Bourne "suggested" that Appold surrender Bon-Bon to a fighter outfit
at Foggia. Appold obediently delivered the Warhawk, but the fighter
people were getting racy new Mustangs and scorned the shopworn gift.
The little pilot parked Bon-Bon at Foggia until Muzzle Blast's attentions
were diverted elsewhere, and then sneaked her back to an inconspicuous
corner at San Pancrazio.

 

 

The third generation of air crews thronged in from the United States,
inculcated with realistic gunnery theory. At General Ent's behest Squadron
Leader George Barwell had been borrowed from the R.A.F. to instruct air
gunners in the United States. (In Colorado, Barwell won a half ton of
prizes in rodeo marksmanship contests.) The Italian bases were filling
up with silvery, unpainted B-24's and B-17's. Appold took over as master
of ceremonies on their practice missions. He would climb Bon-Bon over
the gathering fleet and radiophone, "Number Two, tuck in closer to your
lead man and I'll make a fighter pass at six o'clock high." The petrel
would dart through the frigate birds calling, "White Leader. Alert your
crews. I am making a low attack at three o'clock." The new gunners
silently tracked Bon-Bon. "Next will be a frontal attack on Red Leader
Two. Now, let's not accidentally fire your guns." Buzzing through Red
Force, Bon-Bon called, "Number Two and Number Three not tucked in. You
let me through. You should've got me." Appold was preparing them for
the next assault on the deadliest target in Europe.

 

 

In the mountain camp above the target the POW's felt homesick as the trees
turned red and gold against the blue Carpathians. Russell Huntley accosted
Collins and Lancaster. "Look," said he, "I figure you guys are planning a
getaway. I want in on it. Some of the other guys will come in too."
Collins said, "Okay, Limey, bring them to a meeting in the main barracks
after lights out."

 

 

Thirty Americans came. Collins put it to them bluntly: "There is precious
little chance of getting clean away. We are deep in enemy territory.
The Russian front is five hundred miles away, and patrols from both sides
will be looking for strangers mucking about in no man's land. Another
direction is Yugoslavia. Now, Teddy and I were in Yugoslavia and the
people nearly had heart attacks when they learned we were British.
They were as scared of Mikhailovitch and the Chetniks as they were of
the Germans. The third route is cross-country through Bulgaria, trying
to make the European part of Turkey. It's a long way, but I think it's
the best." Fourteen airmen volunteered. Afterward Lancaster opined that
sixteen men were enough for a tunneling operation. Collins said, "Yes,
I give the Yanks good marks. We got one out of five men in the ruddy
compound. Not bad at all."

 

 

They started tunneling through the floor of main barracks, aiming to
clear the wire after digging forty feet. Getting rid of the dirt was the
hardest part. They carried it upstairs in pillow cases and hid it in nooks
and crannies. They used bed boards for pit props and a home-made oil lamp
that gave off poisonous fumes. After fifteen feet of excavation the lamp
would go out from lack of oxygen, and some of the diggers blacked out.

 

 

Collins wanted candles. One Sunday he marched out to the Roman Catholic
service and braced the priest. "I'm not a Catholic," he said, "but we
Anglicans have a custom of burning tapers on Saint George's Day." Tears
sprang to the cleric's eyes and he thrust an armload of candles on the
pious soldier. "The priest never checked up on that Saint George's Day
rot," said Collins.

 

 

Soon tunneling had to stop again. The barracks were sagging from the earth
hidden upstairs. Lancaster had been surveying the heavy, padlocked outside
door to the barracks basement and noted that nobody went in and out of it.
He started another hole through the barracks floor in to the disused cellar
to use it as a dump. It took him a week to breach the foot-thick foundation
slab. Then tunneling resumed at a great rate. Occasionally men dropped into
the cellar to spread out the mound of dirt.

 

 

Jack Ross and a friend were down there one day shoveling when a pair of
guards entered through the outside door. The Romanians had sneaked in to
steal potatoes from a storage bin. Their flashlight happened to shine on
the two frozen Americans. The guards and the prisoners looked at each
other without saying a word. The guards went out the door and locked
it. "They didn't squeal on us and we didn't squeal on them," said Ross.