Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (41 page)

fin-de-siécle
attire would attract crowds in
no time. She took the stuff to the camp. When Locky saw the lighting
gear, he smiled covetously. "And now, dear boy," she said, "here are
some perfectly marvelous costumes for your show." Locky's smile faded,
and she knew they were tunneling.

 

 

It was no mean tunnel that Edward Lancaster had designed. It was an
eighty-foot subway, to pass beyond the wire and under the adjacent
highway. "It will certainly allow everyone involved to get quite clear
of the camp," pronounced Collins. With the princess' lighting system and
"air conditioning" -- forced ventilation devised by Larry Yates and James
Barker -- eager shifts of sandhogs drove the tunnel forward. Collins,
aching from his beatings, set pit props. "For me, time was of the
essence," he said. "I was due to be sent to Slobozia any day. I wanted
to look out of that magnificent tunnel, and felt absolutely confident
that when I did I was going to make Turkey."

 

 

After weeks of digging around the clock, the miners struck water.
They stopped up the irruption and started a detour six feet back.
More maddening water came from the sky, heavy rains that caved in the
tunnel, closing off thirty feet of it. The Romanians did not seem to
notice the depression in the prison yard and the POW's started a new
parallel shaft a few feet from the starting point. Lancaster. contracted
blood poisoning from handling pit props and was taken to a Bucharest
hospital, borne away from the major escape enterprise of his distinguished
career.

 

 

Collins took over as construction superintendent. One day, while on watch
at a barracks window, he noticed the Romanian guards rolling their eyes
and pantomiming to each other. The moles in the tunnel were making too much
noise and the guards were on to it. "The tunnel was hopeless now," said
Collins, "but we couldn't resist milking it for laughs." The prisoners
lined the windows and Collins sent men into the shaft to make noise.
When the guards began their miming, the barracks exploded with laughter
and catcalls. The game was broken up by the entrance of what looked like
a Romaman cavalry regiment. Major Matiescu formed the POW's for a roll
call and held them there while the cavalrymen shook down the camp and
found the tunnel. Matiescu lined up the prime suspects, Douglas Collins
at the head of the queue. "What do you know about the tunnel?" the Major
asked. Collins said, "What tunnel, sir?" The Romanian said, "You know
very well there is a tunnel under your barracks." Collins said, "Imagine
that, sir! Did you keep prisoners here in the First World War?" Matiescu
leaped up, kicked Collins, and stormed away. The commandant announced
the punishment for the Timisul subway: the camp was to be liquidated
and its inmates mixed in with the high-level captives in Bucharest,
imperiled by their own bombs.

 

 

This gave Collins the idea for a fake escape. He and Limey Huntley took
packs of food, climbed into the eaves of the barrack, and were boarded
up. They planned to stay up there until the camp was evacuated and then
move on. Garrett short-circuited the lights. The guards heard the dread
hubbub of the traditional Timisul jail break. Matiescu threw his full
force out to kill Collins on sight. Off-duty guards in their underwear
came out firing at anything. Officers ran up bill and down dale, cursing,
slapping and kicking their men. In the meantime a survey of the camp
turned up no tunnel or breach in the wire. Matiescu pitted his fevered
brain against the British Vanisher, searched the barrack three times,
and finally spotted Huntley's coat showing through a crack in the boards.

 

 

Collins said, "Huntley, poor brave fighter, was first out. They smashed
the hard-boiled eggs, our iron ration, on his head and rubbed them in
his hair. They dragged him outside and beat him up. My turn came next.
I got it badly and was knocked out. They shipped me to Slobozia that night."

 

 

The final raid on Ploesti was flown by 78 Wellingtons, Liberators and
Halifaxes of the Royal Air Force on the night of 17-18 August 1944. Once
again a dying bomber streaked across Princess Caradja's estate. In the
glow of the burning targets she saw two parachutes coming down. One of
the airmen was on fire. She ran toward him and found a middle-aged man,
terribly burned. She drove him to a physician. On the way the airman
held his peeling arms away from his body and blinded eyes and conversed
calmly. He had three children and was trying to win the war. The doctor
worked fifteen hours but could not save him. The princess buried him in
the family cemetery next to the low-level gunner from Kentucky. *

 

 

* There the warriors of the first and last strikes on Ploesti lay
until an Allied disinterment party sent them home. Coming upon
the open graves, the Red Army laid two of its fallen in them,
punched wooden stars into the mounds where crosses had once stood,
and hurried on toward Berlin.

 

 

The aerial campaign at Ploesti and associated oil targets in Romania
came to a close as the Red Army stormed west in an irruption of men and
armor that flooded half the country in ten days.

 

 

At the end Gerstenberg's bill was 286 U.S. heavy bombers and 2,829 men
killed or captured. The Royal Air Force lost 38 heavy bombers on 924
sorties at night. Thirty-six R.A.F. men were prisoners of war.

 

 

Bucharest trembled with fear and hope as the Red Army clanked toward
the city in the summer heat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
-- Thomas Hardy, "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' "

 

 

 

 

16 "LIBERATION, GLORY BE!" *

 

 

* Gertrude Stein.

 

 

In Bucharest, hidden arms passed out of Romanian Army hoards to patriots
as the Army dissolved in apathy. Antonescu was out of touch with the front.
He did not know that the Red Army had placed the same value on Bucharest
as the Protector had -- not worth fighting for. Soviet tanks and motorized
columns were bypassing the fieshpots of Bucharest on the south, keeping
up momentum for a northern hook to cut off the German retreat through
the mountain passes above Ploesti.

 

 

Russian detachments came sniffing into Bucharest and contacted liberal
politicians who had escaped Iron Guard assassination. The Allied
sympathizer, Queen Helen, encouraged her son to treat with the liberals.
The king secretly appointed a new cabinet under General Senatescu
and summoned Antonescu to the city palace on Place Roi Carol. The
dictator left his befuddled G.H.Q. to attend what he expected would be
a council of war. But the young king was alone, talked only of his stamp
collection, and invited Antonescu into the large vault where he kept his
specimens. Michael stepped out, shut the ponderous door, and locked his
deposed Prime Minister in the vault.

 

 

Michael sent for Gerstenberg. The Protector knew what was up as soon as
he saw that Antonescu was not present and that the king was surrounded
by Romanian generals who he knew had been storing arms. The two parties
reached a
modus vivendi
: in return for respecting Bucharest as an
open city, the Romanians would permit Gerstenberg to remove his people,
unmolested, through certain mountain passes, including the Predeal route
past the Timisul POW camp. Michael accepted a Russian armistice offer
and called on his subjects to receive the Red Army without hostility.

 

 

 

 

To Douglas Collins, just settling into his third term in the punishment
camp at Slobozia, came "the moment I had waited on for four years!" The
Romanian sergeant major who had brought him from Timisul opened the cell
with a big smile, embraced Collins, and cried, "Comrade!" Collins said,
"Comrade, indeed! Yesterday you were booting me in the guts." But he
accepted the Romanian's offer to drive him back to Timisul.

 

 

The roads were choked with German convoys retreating to the north.
The sight gave Collins "a childish feeling of elation I have not been
able to match since." Sensible civilians kept to their shuttered houses
in those chaotic days, but not Princess Caterina. She roared around
the roads, hauling orphans out of harm's way, taking care to avoid
Russians. On one of her journeys her car trunk was full of bundles of
clothing she was distributing to the orphans. The clothing had been
looted in the Ukraine and bore tags in Russian. Unexpectedly a Red
Army officer popped out and halted her. He spoke the same fashionable
English-inflected Romanian that she used. She thought he was probably a
Romanian captive of the Russians who had defected to them. The officer
instructed her chauffeur to drive to his command post and got into the
car. At the command post a colonel came out beaming at the wonderful
Plymouth. With him was a booted Red Army woman, fingering a lacy peignoir
she wore over a grimy campaign uniform.

 

 

The colonel gestured for Caterina's party to come out. She yelled to the
Romanian-speaking officer, "Tell him this car is used on vital social
services!" The colonel reflected on the term, "social services," undecided
what to do. He grinned and said, "We'll simply trade cars." He indicated
a rusty 1926 Chrysler sitting in the courtyard. Caterina's chauffeur
wailed, " That for my Plymouth!" The princess snapped "Get in," and her
party piled into the wreck. She coolly opened the trunk of her car and
threw the looted Russian clothing in to the orphans. She went to the
glove compartment and palmed her papers. She was fishing in the trunk
for an inner tube when the colonel noticed it and cuffed her across the
face. With a wheedling smile, she said, "No harm in trying." The colonel
clumped her on the back in a pally fashion, one looter to another.

 

 

The Chrysler had no starter. Caterina pantomimed, "Push" to the Russian
onlookers. Still the motor would not fire. The colonel lent mechanical
assistance with his prize trade-in and the Chrysler took off.

 

 

Down the road she came upon the rear of a plodding Russian supply
column. "Bad news," she thought. "It means their armor is up ahead,
nearing the orphanages and the American camp." The Red Army rear
consisted of horse-drawn victorias and farm wagons laden with happy souls
drinking brandy. Some wore opera hats. "Make this car sound like hell,"
she ordered her chauffeur. He did, without half trying, and holding
their noses and gesturing toward their clattering car, they passed the
supply train. The Russians laughed so hard they forgot to seize the
Chrysler. She detoured the tank column on country lanes, beat it to a
village of foster homes, and hid the girls in the woods. The princess
pushed the old car up the pass for the Timisul camp.

 

 

She found the G.I.'s in full charge. Although the gates were open and
the guards gone, Captain Taylor had decided to keep the POW's together
until some reasonable move materialized. Two days before, a German armored
train had enfiladed the camp while passing north. Perhaps there were men
on the train who remembered a prisoner mocking them as they rode south
in the days of their glory. No one was hit in the spiteful volley.

 

 

The princess told Taylor, "We've got to get you out before the Russians
come." It is doubtful whether the Russians would have done worse than
leave them with hangovers, but the POW's were restless. They scrounged
seven farm trucks, covered themselves with blankets, and Romanians drove
them west across forest tracks to a valley that Gerstenberg had agreed not
to use for evacuation. In a downpour of rain they arrived in Pietrosita,
a hamlet spared the cruelty of war, and were billeted in private homes,
where they found refugee girls from Bucharest. Morale took a leap. They
awakened to sunlight and joyful stirrings: a peace festival in the town
park, to which they were conducted by smiling people. They sat down at
tables with corn on the cob, roast meats, melons, milk, fresh loaves and
kegs of wine. A year before they had fallen in Hitler's black harvest.
Now the victory yield was in.

 

 

Maidens with whirling skirts danced the hora to strumming balalaikas
and guitars. A fallen Sky Scorpion, Sergeant James Sedlak, took to
the band pavilion with his trumpet and lined out a screaming chorus of
"Flat-Foot Floogey." Village strings and faltering voices of youths who
had heard the tune on the illegal radio took up the nonsense words of
Pietrosita's liberation paean. Princess Caradja said, "Those boys had
all the fun there is in this world." In the middle of it a bleak convoy
of disarmed Germans passed through, clutching their ears.

 

 

Collins returned to Timisul and found the camp deserted. A peasant told
him his friends were in Pietrosita. Collins joined them there. "Those
were riotous days," said the escaper, "but Captain Taylor did not let
it get out of hand. He was the kind of officer no one wanted to let down."

 

 

Into the victory gala came an old acquaintance, the bully, Major Matiescu,
now a most humble and sincere friend of the Americans. Huntley and Collins
started for the camp commandant to pay him back for the whippings he had
given them. Captain Taylor said, "Hold on, you guys! Be sensible. You don't
want to lower yourself to the level of a Romanian officer, do you?"
Collins hesitated and said, "Limey, he's right. There's too much at stake
here for petty revenge." Huntley said, "I'd like to take just one crack
at him, but what the hell." They turned away from Matiescu.

 

 

In Bucharest, the American high-level officers were holding on in their
compound. They had heard the news of the Romano-Russian armistice late
at night, and awakened the Romanian commandant, their spokesman saying,
"What happens now?" He replied angrily, "What is the meaning of this?"
The American said, "Your outfit is out of the war. Kaputt." The commandant
made a phone call. He dropped the phone in the cradle. Without further
remark he belted on his dress sword over his pajamas, saluted them,
and handed over the blade in ceremonial surrender.