Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (5 page)

 

 

In February 1941 Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Romania.
Two months later Hitler blitzed Yugoslavia and Greece. Outnumbered Royal
Air Force squadrons resisted with hopeless valor. In the fortnight left
to her in Greece, Britain proposed to hurl her remaining two-engine bombers
at Ploesti. The Greek cabinet forbade it because Greece was not at war with
Romania. The last chance to hit Ploesti from Europe was lost. Germany had
won the prize intact by a combined diplomatic and military offensive that
forced Britain a thousand miles from Ploesti, far beyond bombing range.

 

 

Among the R.A.F. escapees from Greece was a long-haired, histrionic
Anglo-Irish peer, Wing Commander Arthur Patrick Hastings Viscount Forbes,
formerly air attaché in the British Embassy at Bucharest. Lord Forbes
arrived in Cairo crying for vengeance upon Ploesti, but there was no
way now to bomb it.

 

 

Gerstenberg made use of the lull to obtain more men and arms from
Berlin. Hitler, preparing his onslaught on the U.S.S.R., was disinclined
to strengthen a region where enemy incursion was impossible. But
Gerstenberg's old comrade, Goering, helped him, and the Protector
came into good luck a few days after Hitler's attack on Russia in
June. During the first week, Red Air Force bombers came three times
to Ploesti in small numbers. The last raid, a twilight affair, left
some damage and a few parachuted airmen. Gerstenberg used it to get a
substantial reinforcement from Berlin. There was no follow-up by the Red
Air Force. Stalin, a leading proponent of massive long-range retaliatory
bombing, quickly dropped the whole idea. Many of his heavy bombers were
destroyed on the ground by the first Luftwaffe attacks; the Wehrmacht
rolled over his forward air bases, and Stalin lent every resource of
soviet aircraft production to ground-support craft for the Red Army,
and fighters to defend his cities. Gerstenberg gained another epoch of
calm for his preparations. He was promoted to Generalmajor (brigadier)
and was moving along briskly toward the unique result of his mission,
an autonomous theater command, not subject to
Oberkommando
politics or
Hitler intuition.

 

 

Antonescu drove a half-million unwilling, ill-trained and poorly
equipped peasants into the U.S.S.R. under the name of the Third Romanian
Army. Hitler sacrificed 50,000 of them to win Odessa. (During the war
Germany consumed about one-third of the able-bodied farmers of Romania,
a nation with an 80 percent agricultural population.) As a consequence,
Gerstenberg's new troops came to a land of lonely women. From hardship,
deprivation, blackout and bombing in Germany, they came to peace and
plenty. Werner Nass, who arrived with the 622nd Antiaircraft Battalion
from the Ruhr, said, "As an NCO I got fourteen thousand lei a month;
that bought ten pounds of bacon. You could buy anything -- things no
longer known in the Rubr -- eggs, sausages, ham, fruit and as much
wine as you wanted. From our first home leaves we brought old clothes
to sell to the Romanians. Our pockets were full of money. We were
everything but soldiers. It was like Feldmarschall von Mackensen said
when he went to Romania in 1916: 'I came with an army of soldiers and
returned with an army of salesmen.'" The only flaw in the good life
was the exacting Gerstenberg who fought obesity, alcoholism, venereal
disease and laziness with incessant drills. Every day the gunners in
their pale blue, short-sleeved shirts and mustard-colored shorts --
an Afrika Korps fashion -- ran through firing exercises. Russian POW's
in Red Army uniforms with insignia removed served up the shells, and on
some guns a "reindoctrinated" Red even pulled the firing cord.

 

 

Life became even sweeter when 1,200 Luftwaffe air-women and hundreds of
German civilian girls came as secretaries and technicians. Romanian women
also were kind to the rich soldiers. However, a German having relations
with Romanians or Russians outside the line of duty had to report each
contact to an Intelligence officer. There were a few Romanian antifascists
who would risk espionage work, but most of the information leaving the
country was carried by diplomats or commercial travelers going to neutral
Turkey. The United States and British embassies there received generalized
impressions and Bucharest café chatter but very little about Gerstenberg's
strength or dispositions. He allowed no one but German troops near the
flak batteries, airdromes and warning installations. He divested Ploesti
of occupants not holding essential refinery or commercial jobs. On the
ruling level, Gerstenberg had a singular strength; he spoke Romanian,
which his Anibassador Buch-Killinger did not, so that the General
controlled intimate communications between him and Antonescu.

 

 

Gerstenberg disdained both of them. He permitted them to think they were
running Romania while having his own way on matters of importance. Colonel
Bernhard Woldenga, Gerstenberg's fighter controller, said, "He was
absolutely the key man. He knew everyone and all combinations in court
circles, the Romanian staff, businessmen, estate owners and people who
knew what the peasants were thinking." Only his immediate staff knew
what Gerstenberg was thinking. His plans for holding Ploesti were quite
un-Nazi. Berlin had no notion what to do about defeat or insurrection
until they occurred. The Protector, however, was cooly anticipating an
Allied bombing offensive, a Romanian rising and a Soviet roll-back of
the Wehrmacht three years before they in fact occurred.

 

 

To handle bombers Gerstenberg required the world's heaviest concentration
of flak guns and warning systems. He was defending a curious city;
it had a soft civilian center five miles in diameter and, close around
it, an almost solid belt of oil plants and transportation systems. The
Protector wanted an outer ring of powerful, highly mobile guns which
he could shift and concentrate quickly in the most likely tangents of
aerial assault. He demanded 250 first-line interceptor planes standing
by and 75,000 Luftwaffe troops, mostly technicians, to serve the planes,
guns, radar and communications systems.

 

 

On the second possibility -- the national rising -- Gerstenberg's
thinking was subtly realistic. Although the Iron Guard's anti-German
outbreak had been smothered in bullets, he was aware of a more tactful,
pro-Allied, or opportunistic, core in the Romanian general staff and
among the aristocracy and big landowners. He was surrounded by Romanian
toadies whose fortunes had improved under the German rule, but he did not
delude himself that they were any more than an ineffectual and expendable
minority when the patriotic war came.

 

 

The Protector held Saturday afternoon staff meetings in which he
elucidated his analyses and plans. He reminded his officers that
the Antonescu crowd would be broken quickly in a rising and it
would be entirely left to the Germans to save themselves and the
refineries. Ploesti was the key. It lay astride the main road and rail
routes from Germany to the southeastern front. If the Romanians rebelled,
Gerstenberg would pull his outer flak rings in tight against the oil
city and use the guns as artillery against the insurrectionists. He
called this concept
Festung Ploesti
, an unconquerable redoubt. At the
same time, he insured that a corridor would remain open to the Reich
by fortifying both sides of the Predeal Pass north of the city. As the
peasants threw themselves at his 88's, he would continue to receive
supplies from Germany and send oil to her through the armed corridor.

 

 

Gerstenberg considered Bucharest of no strategic importance and was
confident that a gun battery and a few squads could quell a revolution
in the capital.

 

 

Festung Ploesti also was the answer to the Red Army if it came through
the Danubian Plain. The fortress would bar the Soviets from crossing
the Transylvanian Alps into Central Europe and the city defenses could
be quickly and steadily enlarged through the bristling Predeal lifeline.

 

 

In the spring of 1942 the premature Halpro mission helped Gerstenberg's
Festung Ploesti project. He flaunted the daring attack before the
Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, which was Goering's shy
title, and Goering began to eke him air troops amounting to 50,000 people
by the end of the year. Gerstenberg had in addition about 70,000 Slav
prisoners and civilian slaves who had been driven out of the conquered
eastlands.

 

 

 

 

During the winter the British Eighth Army rolled back Rommel's threat to
Egypt and Brereton's bombers came back to Egyptian bases. Halverson's
successor, Mickey McGuire, received a dribble of Liberators. McGuire
jeeped to each arrival as though Washington was going to snatch it
back before he could put his unit symbol on the rudder. From the second
replacement ship came a small pilot, Norman Appold, a chemical engineer
recently graduated from the University of Michigan. He looked nothing like
the prognathous aviators in the comic strips. Instead of the standard
bulging jaw, Appold's could be held slightly recessive. In place of
eagle brows, his formed two quizzical circumflexes, and the eyes were
round instead of squinty. He wore a large grin and was full of gab and
gags instead of the Olympian silences of the classic birdmen. McGuire
thought for a moment that America was running out of manpower. What
stood before him, saluting casually, was the first of the college boys,
children of the Great Depression, who were about to take over air combat
from the prewar set.

 

 

Appold's vivacity was deceptive. He was deadly serious. He resented the
war for interrupting his engineering career and he was resolved to get
the damn thing over with as soon as possible. To him that meant absolute
application to the bomber business, preserving his life by laying it
on the line at every opportunity. He held iconoclastic views on air
tactics. Even in training, Appold had tossed the book out the window by
practicing low-level attacks with the cumbersome Liberator.

 

 

The bombers blasted ahead of Montgomery's army, reducing Tobruk and
Benghazi and gaining them as bases. When Appold arrived in Benghazi --
a "weather-beaten wasp's nest fallen to pieces," as the war correspondent
Ivan Dmitri put it -- he found the Ninth Bomber Command moving into
one of the few surviving structures, a hotel compound south of the
city. Since 1940 it had housed, in order, war staffs of Italy, Britain,
Germany, Britain, Germany, and now the U.S.A. In barren battlegrounds,
opposing generals sometimes leave each other suitable headquarters in
their wills. Appold leafed through the guest book, noting such previous
registrants as Marshal Graziani, Vittorio Mussolini, Erwin Rommel, Sir
Arthur Tedder, Sir Archibald Wavell, and a recent hasty German scrawl:
"Keep this book in order. We'll be back." Appold signed in and drove
off to inspect the city and its important deep-water port. The ruins of
Benghazi were clinically interesting; he had helped considerably to put
them in this condition by breaching the flak defenses when the Germans
last held them.

 

 

The R.A.F. had opened up the final offensive on Benghazi with night
pathfinders, dropping flares for following bombers. The Germans dispersed
them with jungles of flak and lured them to bomb phony target flares ten
miles away on a barren beach. Next time the pathfinders dropped flares in
the flak sites to guide oncoming B-24 trains with Norden bombsights. The
glare was too intense for the U.S. bombardiers, who once again hit the
false Benghazi. During a subsequent night raid Appold decided to pull
a counter-ambush on the flak men. He went over at 20,000 feet. Shells
ranged toward him and the Germans lighted the mock target. But Appold
dropped no flares. He crossed Benghazi, turned and deliberately flew
back over it, bringing more ground guns into action. On the third
pass every muzzle on the grounds was belching brightly, revealing the
complete geography of the antiaircraft positions, nicely picked out in
the dark. Appold flipped into a steep dive to 12,000 feet, throwing off
the fuse settings of the German shells, and distributed three tons of
high explosive and antipersonnel bombs on the exposed flak guns. After
that the Germans could not break the bomber array. The Allies took the
upper hand and systematicaily reduced the defenses.

 

 

 

 

From Bucharest, General Gerstenberg watched the enemy bomber bases
marching west in Africa. At Benghazi the Liberators were nearly 200 miles
closer to Ploesti than they had been in Egypt. The Protector also noted
Italian reports of higher, faster B-24's, whose markings revealed a new
bomb group operating from Benghazi. This was the 98th, the Pyramiders,
led by a sulphurous Texan, John Riley Kane, whose name began appearing in
Luftwaffe intelligence summaries as "Killer" Kane. He had come to fight,
loud on the intercom and hard on the power settings. "Every bomb on the
Axis!" Kane preached to his troops. Once he took the Pyramiders over
an Afrika Korps objective with his tail and top turret guns jammed.
He missed the bomb heading during spirited Messerschmitt attacks, and
went back over the target, calling on the open radio for his planes
to follow. The German pilots got on his frequency and drowned Kane's
commands with taunts. Kane yelled, "Get the goddamn hell off the air,
you bastards!" The Messerschmitt boys shut up, Kane bombed, and dodged
through them to get home safely.

 

 

Then Gerstenberg noted still another new group of Liberators entering
Mediterranean combat. Unlike Mickey McGuire's and Killer Kane's tawny
desert-camouflaged ships, these planes wore green and loam colors,
and they flew tight formation with well-disciplined gunners. This was
the 93rd Bomb Group out of England on temporary loan to the desert
forces. It was called Ted's Traveling Circus, after its commander,
Colonel Edward J. Timberlake, a West Pointer with a nose bent playing
football on the Plain. Timberlake was a ruggedly built, easygoing blond,
a style setter and an elegant manager of men. He spoke his own argot;
if he called a man "a good Joe," that man was in. "A joker" was out.