Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (43 page)

 

 

The statistic is Gerstenberg's only note in the official military
history of World War II. By then the Protector was in O.G.P.U. H.Q.,
Moscow, chatting with secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, who passed on
praises of Gerstenberg from Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, who had been his
commander at the clandestine German air school in the U.S.S.R. fifteen
years ealier. Beria promised to use Gerstenberg again. Instead, the
Protector was sent to Lefort Prison to solitary confinement for two
years. He was to be in Soviet prisons for twelve years.

 

 

In Bucharest, Coombs's O.S.S. men found Gerstenberg's H.Q. untouched.
They sent two tons of his archives by air to Italy, and began looking
for the German espionage center for southeast Europe, which Coombs
had reason to believe was loacted in Bucharest. He could not find any
live Germans to help him, but he heard there were two dead ones in the
German Embassy. The Nazi ambassador, Baron von Buch-Killinger, who had
purchased Antonescu to begin the tragedy of Romania, and his counselor
had committed suicide. Coombs thought there might be some living Germans
in the building, which was guarded by Red Army men.

 

 

Coombs procured a hearse and two pick-up coffins. In one he placed
O.S.S. man Fred Burkhart, a philosophy professor in civilian life,
who spoke German. Coombs figured to get the hearse down a basement ramp
entry to the embassy on the pretext of removing the corpses, and smuggle
out a live German and Professor Burkhart in the boxes. Coombs drove
circumspectly behind the hearse. As it turned into the ramp, a Red Army
officer halted it. The driver explained his mission in Romanian, which
the Russian did not understand. Coombs showed himself in U.S. uniform and
tried English, but the Russian could not understand that either. The lid
of the pick-up coffin opened and Professor Burkhart joined the argument
in German. A second Red Army officer approached and said in English,
"What is it you wish?" Coombs said, "We have come to pick up the bodies
of the ambassador and the counselor." The Russian said, "There are no
Germans here, living or dead. We took them all away yesterday." Coombs
drew himself up and said sternly, "Don't you know that it is a violation
of international law to seize an embassy?" The Russian apotogetically
replied, "We only came for our furniture." Coombs began to understand
why Bowie had called it operation bughouse. The Russian explained,
"You see, when Germany attacked us in 1941, Buch-Killinger looted our
furniture from the Soviet Embassy here. We are only making an inventory
to get our state property back."

 

 

Coombs found the German espionage center through a tip by a Romanian:
"Why not look in at von Schenker?" The O.S.S. man said, "What's that?"
The informant said, "A German travel agency, the largest in the world,
bigger than Cook's or the American Express." In von Schenker's Bucharest
office Coombs found business going on as usual, as though German tourists
were still visiting the Acropolis and booking freight home from the Ukraine.
Von Schenker's was the spy center. A week after Bucharest was in Allied
hands, the clerks of the German espionage apparatus continued to process
reports.

 

 

From the high-level POW's, Coombs picked a German-speaking Jewish sergeant
and put him in charge at von Schenker's to sift its files for important
papers. The German clerks worked industriously for the new management
and completed the research in three days. The sergeant brought Coombs
the gem of finds: the paybook of Nazi secret agents in southeast Europe,
giving their real names and addresses.

 

 

Coombs and the spy archives were flown to Washington, where General Arnold
personally congratulated the sergeant. Afterward Coombs lunched at the
Cosmos Club with President James Baxter of Williams College, where he
had been an instructor. Hearing the tale of Ploesti, Dr. Baxter said,
"Our alumnus, Irv Fish, lost his son there." Coombs said, "Irving Fish,
Junior? He's alive! I saw him in Bucharest." Baxter hastened to phone
the father.

 

 

In the Romanian capital, young Fish and more than a thousand other
Allied airmen, many of whose kin did not know they were alive, were
drifting around the streets. In the midst of a monstrous war, they were
free far inside hostile territory, enjoying the fulsome hospitality of a
nation that had been their enemy the day before. Douglas Collins noted
"small bands of Romanian communists trudging through the streets with
banners proclaiming that the millennium had arrived, but there were more
Americans than Russians to puzzle over the slogans." Collins ran into a
few Royal Air Force men. Waiting, the occupational disease of soldiering,
settled on them all.

 

 

In Italy, the Fifteenth Air Force was now ready for the risky airlift of
the POW's from Romania. It would be a 1,100-mile round trip by Fortresses
virtually stripped of arms to make room for men. About 1,500 airmen,
including the B-17 crews, would be in the air -- a tempting target for
German fighters, of which quite a few were still operating. The rescue
force, therefore, could not broadcast any formal order to the POW's
that might be intercepted by the enemy. A courier went to Bucharest and
started the news by word of mouth among the POW's. Collins was approached
in the street by an American he had never seen before who muttered,
"Tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock at the airport. We're all getting out
of this sonofabitching country."

 

 

Next morning at Popestii airport the liberated men stood around the
perimeter in groups of twenty to board the planes quickly during the short
turnaround. The British Vanishers arrived promptly at the rendezvous of
their last escape. They, who had marveled at American military costume
when they first saw it a year before, now descried it in the bloom of
victory. The airmen were attired in rags and grimy bandages, wearing
German helmets and Russian caps and sagging under the weight of wine
bottles, captured dress swords, riding crops, balalaikas and cabinet
photos of Romanian beauties. Some had sewn upon their tatters the large,
resplendent insignia of the Royal Romanian Air Force and Parachute
Corps. The better-dressed element sported Army pants newly distributed
by the Red Cross. All the trousers in the shipment were size 40, and not
one of the emaciated men could fill such a waistband. They had gathered
them at the waist in pleats reaching the knee, and, to mock the current
"zoot-suit" style of boys at home, had draped their identity necklaces
across the belly like the watch chains the zoots wore there.

 

 

John Palm was there, stumping around on his loaded artificial leg,
exchanging adieux with sobbing lady friends. Fichman, the rich Palestinian
parachutist, tapped him on the back and asked for the balance of the
emergency fund he had lent the Americans. Palm returned a wad of lei
and the Palestinian and the Texan, on behalf of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer and the Secretary of the Treasury, traded penciled receipts
to square Anglo-American joint accounts for Romania.

 

 

It was a sultry morning on the Wallachian plain. Collins and Lancaster
took shade under the wing of an old Heinkel, lay down, and dozed. At noon
they were awakened by a "royal buzz" of P-51's, which swept up high and
circled to cover the B-17 landings. The first two Fortresses rolled up
to Collins, Lancaster, Caminada, Gukovsky, Johnson, Admiral Doorman,
Baron van Lyndon, and 36 men of 205 Group, Royal Air Force. "We took
off and circled," said Collins, "waited for the others to come into
formation, and then we headed west, over the Danube that had beaten us,
and over Yugoslavia where we had not been able to find Tito. Never had
we dreamed of such an end to our efforts to escape from Europe."

 

 

 

 

At Camp Choumen, in the wilds of Bulgaria, there were still 257 men who
had fallen along the low road and the high to Ploesti. They lived in lice,
mud, misery and abuse, licking their wounds, shut off from the jubilee at
Bucharest. On the eighth of September Soviet planes flew over Bulgaria,
dropping leaflets announcing that the Red Army was coming and calling
upon Bulgarians to lay down arms and release prisoners of war. Within a
day Julian Darlington, his nine Tidal Wave men and the rest were aboard
a train for Turkey. Six weeks later they arrived in an Army transport
ship at Newport News, Virginia.

 

 

The Ploesti men were the first of democracy's warriors to be redeemed
en masse from world fascism, which lived briefly by killing forty
million people.

 

 

The British Vanishers returned to England, where Edward Lancaster was
discharged as medically unfit. Douglas Collins rejoined his regiment and
led a platoon through the liberation of Belgium and Holland. He was in
Germany again, with a machine gun in his hand, at the end of Hitler's
Thousand-Year Reich.

 

 

As it fell, tanks of the U. S. Third Army liberated a prisoner-of-war
camp at Moosberg, near Munich. A tall U.S. Air Force officer greeted
the tankers with "Colonel Smart. Glad to see you." The planner of the
low-level attack on Ploesti, the possessor of the atomic bomb secret,
had survived nearly a year in Nazi hands.

 

 

The Allied chiefs, who had been living in dread that the secret had been
tortured from Jacob Smart, brought him immediately to Washington to report
on what had happened to him. "When my aircraft came apart in the air at
Wiener Neustadt," he said, "I found myself falling among the debris.
My parachute opened. I landed in a meadow and took cover in a woods.
I had body and face wounds that were not serious, but they were painful,
and I was losing considerable blood. I fell asleep and was awakened by
soldiers out looking for prisoners.

 

 

"I was in German hospitals for two months, wearing my dog tags and insignia,
and no doubt my right name on laundry marks. My co-pilot survived but
died later. The tail gunner is still living. The tail snapped off in
the explosion and he rode it to within a few hundred feet of the ground
before bailing out. I was at Stalag Three in eastern Germany until the
Russians came near it in January 1944. The Germans then marched us west
and put us on a train for Moosberg, where I was liberated."

 

 

Smart had been delivered from German hands four months before the first
atomic bomb was to fall on Hiroshima. Now, in Washington, he realized
what the anxious audience of generals and colonels wanted to know. He
concluded his report with it. He smiled and said, "At no time did the
Germans ever question me about nuclear fission."

 

 

IN ORDER to bring you this magnificent book at its very
low price, it has been necessary to omit a complete roster of
the American airmen on Tidal Wave, a list of the Axis
combatants, and a partial roster of Halverson Project No. 63.
These may be found in the original edition, published by
Random House, Inc.
"TREMENDOUSLY EXCITING ... THE WILDEST
U.S. AIR RAID OF WORLD WAR II."
-- Life Magazine
--------------------------------------------------------
On August 1, 1943, 178 Liberators left Africa to bomb
Ploesti, the Rumanian oil refineries -- the "Taproot" of
German Might." The air armada carried 1,250,000 rounds
of tracers and 311 tons of bombs -- more fire power than
two Gettysburgs.
--------------------------------------------------------
The planes skimmed so low over the field that corn-
stalks stuck in their bom-bay doors. American gunners
shot it out point-blank with flak towers and "Q-trains,"
and pilots maneuvered crazily between the refineries'
smoke stacks. In this maddening holocaust of explosions
and death, five men won the Medal of Honor.
--------------------------------------------------------
"The story of one of the major war efforts, on of great
heroism and daring."
-- Christian Science Monitor
--------------------------------------------------------
"Compelling, controlled excitement."
-- New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------