The Forgotten 500 (3 page)

“We’re going to get you out of here, boys,” Musulin said, a smile showing through his bushy black beard. “There’s going to be a rescue. There are already about two hundred Americans here. They’ve been assembling since January.”

A rescue! Finally some good news. Musgrove and the other airmen rejoiced, finding the energy to raise their arms and shout, clapping their Yugoslav escorts on the back and hugging one another. They would be rescued! They could go home!

But how?

“C-47s,” Musulin said, referring to the workhorse cargo planes that every airman knew well. “They’re going to land in a field right over there.” Musulin gestured off in the distance. “We’ve been working on a big plan that will get you boys out of here before long. Gotta build a landing strip, though.”

And with that, Musulin turned his horse and trotted off.

Musgrove and the others stood there in the road, joyous but a little puzzled too. To be sure they understood, one of their Yugoslav escorts raised his flat hand and moved it along like an airplane, making a buzzing sound. Musgrove and the other two Americans nodded at him. They understood the plan.

But it sounded a little crazy to them. Build a landing strip? They certainly wanted to be rescued, but how could planes land in this mountainous region where they couldn’t even walk down a country road without ducking into the bushes every time a vehicle passed, hoping they wouldn’t be found by the Germans?

 

 

 

The same questions were going
through the mind of George Vujnovich, the OSS control agent in Bari, Italy, with responsibility for sending secret agents on missions throughout much of Europe, including Yugoslavia. When Vujnovich heard that there were American fliers waiting for help in Yugoslavia, he knew they had to come up with a plan to get them out. He also knew right away that this would be no ordinary rescue.

Could they really pull this off? Could they go right into German territory and snatch these men out of harm’s way? He had discussed the risks at length with Musulin before sending him behind enemy lines, but even with Musulin on the ground in Yugoslavia the questions remained.

It was more than his job duties that motivated Vujnovich. He was driven by his own memories of being trapped behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia a few years earlier; he felt a kindred spirit with the Americans stranded in the country where his parents had grown up. The Pittsburgh native was attending college in Yugoslavia when his studies—and his fledgling relationship with a beautiful local girl—were interrupted by the rapidly advancing German army. Two years of running from the Nazis, trying to find a way out of Yugoslavia and back to freedom, gave him a real appreciation for what these young airmen were going through. Vujnovich was determined to get them out of their limbo.

Could he make it happen? It hadn’t been too difficult to send in Musulin and the rest of his team, but getting more than a hundred airmen out was a totally different matter. The plan, which the British were fighting vigorously, was to send in C-47 cargo planes to pick up the downed airmen and whisk them back to Italy. That was the plan: Just send in planes to pick them up. Allied planes flew over Yugoslavia all the time on the way to bomb targets in German territory, so it wasn’t farfetched to think that one could drop down and pick up a few airmen. It sounded simple until Vujnovich started trying to work out the details. Already Musulin’s team had radioed back that there were far more airmen to rescue than the one hundred and fifty that they’d expected when they parachuted in to coordinate the pickup. Musulin’s last message had informed Vujnovich that there were at least two hundred men there already, and more were coming in every day, sometimes a dozen or more at a time.

That meant the mission was growing exponentially harder every day, Vujnovich realized. It was not simply a matter of sending in a few planes to swoop down and snatch the men in a hurry; rescuing that many airmen would require a series of planes landing one after another. More planes meant more of a spectacle for the Germans to notice and much more time when the planes and the airmen would be easy targets for German fighters or ground troops. And the more he thought about it, the more Vujnovich worried that sending in any planes, even one, to this area was extremely risky. He knew the area was rugged and mountainous, with no airstrip nearby, and not even a clear field that could serve as a runway in a pinch. That was why all the bomber crews bailed out when their planes were dying in this area; there was nowhere to even attempt a crash landing. The best they could hope for was to jump out and hang under a parachute as they watched the plane crash into a mountainside.

Now Vujnovich was trying to organize not just one but a whole series of cargo planes to land in that rugged countryside, right under the Germans’ noses. It was an audacious plan, and some in the office weren’t shy about telling Vujnovich that it was more than that, that it was just plain crazy. But Vujnovich kept thinking about all the young men trapped in Nazi territory, struggling to get through another day without being captured and hoping that someone was working on a way to get them out. He could identify with them. He could remember the cold terror that gripped his whole body as he held his breath and hoped a German patrol would pass by the young American and the girl he loved, the desperation of wanting to just get out of danger, to just get over the border, to get back home.

Clare Musgrove ended up in Yugoslavia in the same
way hundreds of other Allied airmen had in the few years before him and as many more would after him: He climbed into a bomber in Italy, flew into Nazi territory to bomb critical oil refineries and other targets, and never made it back to the safety of his home base. Every time a fleet of bombers went out, some were heavily damaged by German defenses and either went down immediately or limped back toward Italy, trying to make it as far as they could.

By 1944 downed American airmen were piling up quickly in Yugoslavia as bombing raids on Nazi targets, especially the oil refineries of Ploesti, Romania, resulted in many planes making it only that far on their return journey before the crews had to bail out and try to survive behind enemy lines. The quest to destroy Ploesti would leave hundreds of airmen stranded in the hills of Yugoslavia.

To get to Romania, the Allied bomber crews had to fly westward, usually from bases in the recently liberated Italy, across the Adriatic Sea, then across Yugoslavia to their targets in Romania. Then they had to get back again, often limping home with planes and crew injured from the intense fighting at the target site. Romania was a top target because it represented one of the westward strongholds of the German military, and particularly because it was the major source of fuel for the German war machine. The country was smaller than the state of Oregon and had little chance of resisting the Germans, though it took a shot at staying neutral. Hitler, of course, saw pleas for neutrality as a sign of weakness and rolled into the country.

Romania was in an untenable situation, perched between German advances in Poland and Hungary and Soviet advances from the Ukraine. In June 1941 Romania officially joined the Axis, primarily in hopes of regaining some provinces that it had previously been forced to give up. Though Romania had fought Germany in the first World War, the country allied itself with the Nazis strictly as a desperate measure for self-preservation. Romania’s pact with the devil would be costly, however. It was no surprise that once the country joined the German rampage across Europe, Britain declared war on Romania on December 5, 1941.

On June 5, 1942, the United States extended its declaration of war on Germany and Italy to include Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Before long, the same resource that had made Romania so desirable to the German war machine—massive oil fields and high-capacity refineries—made it a prime target for the Allies. American bomber crews who had barely heard of Romania months before soon learned all about a Romanian city called Ploesti, an oil boom city in the plains below the Transylvanian Alps in northern Romania and thirty-five miles north of Bucharest, the national capital. Ploesti was a massive complex consisting of seven major refineries, storage tanks, and related structures covering nineteen square miles.

Oil refining had been big business in Ploesti since 1857, which means the city was one of the first to build riches on the resource that would dominate the world’s economy within decades. By 1942 the refineries at Ploesti were producing nearly a million tons of oil a month, accounting for 40 percent of Romania’s total exports. Most of that oil, as well as the highest-quality 90-octane aviation fuel in Europe, went to the Axis war effort. Ploesti, a prosperous but otherwise little-known city in a quiet country before the war, suddenly became a central component of the Nazi military, key to everything Hitler wanted to accomplish. The refineries of Ploesti provided nearly a third of the petroleum products that fueled Hitler’s tanks, battleships, submarines, and aircraft.

The Allies had to put Ploesti out of the oil refining business and they were willing to risk as many lives as necessary to do it. The Germans were just as determined to protect this vital supply of oil, and they installed an astonishing array of antiaircraft guns all around the refineries for miles and miles. Some of the best German fighter pilots were stationed at airfields around Ploesti, with orders to protect the refineries from Allied bombers.

Ploesti was the first target in Europe bombed by American aircraft. Many more attacks would follow the first.

The honor of hitting Ploesti first went to Colonel Harry A. Halverson in May 1942. He led twenty-three factory-fresh B-24 bombers from Florida on a journey to bomb Tokyo in a follow-up to the Doolittle Raid, the daring assault on the Japanese homeland that was carried out as retribution for the attack on Pearl Harbor. But when the bombers reached Egypt, Halverson and his crews were informed that they had a new destination: Ploesti. The planes took off for their new target on the evening of June 11, arriving over the target at dawn the following day. The mission was a success: Ten of the bombers hit the Astra refinery at Ploesti, one B-24 attacked the port area of Constanta, and the remaining two B-24s struck unidentified targets. Damage to the planes was minimal.

The first bombing run caused substantial damage, but it was clear to the Allies that many more young men would have to risk their lives to keep the refineries off-line. Bombing runs continued, and then in August 1943 the Allies launched Operation Tidal Wave, intended as an all-out effort against Ploesti. Unlike previous attacks that had been made from thousands of feet in the air, Operation Tidal Wave called for striking the oil fields at very low levels—treetop level sometimes, so low that the exploding bombs and oil fires actually threatened the planes. And then, of course, there was the problem of a B-24 bomber making a very big, very easy target at that altitude.

The extreme risk required that the plan be approved all the way up the chain of command, with even President Franklin D. Roosevelt agonizing over whether the need to knock out Ploesti justified the extreme risk to the aircrews. He decided that it did, and the bomber crews were given terrifying orders.

The increased danger called for more than the usual mission preparation. The low-level raids on Ploesti were practiced on a full-scale replica of Ploesti built in the desert. The crews had to perfect their navigation skills and fly in strict radio silence if there was any hope of reaching their target without being shot down. Getting back home was even tougher, and more of an afterthought in the training.

One hundred and seventy-seven B-24s took off in Operation Tidal Wave on August 1, 1943, a huge wave of bombers that filled the sky but nevertheless intended to sneak into Ploesti. The extensive planning did not ensure success. Things went badly right from the start, as one B-24 crashed on takeoff. The strict radio silence caused the bomber groups to became separated on the long flight across the Adriatic, and then when the planes neared Corfu, Greece, the lead aircraft—the one carrying the route navigator that was to lead the whole group into Ploesti—suddenly dove into the water for no apparent reason. Another plane, this one carrying the backup route navigator, circled down to check for survivors but lost so much time doing so that it couldn’t catch up with the formation. So it turned back to base, leaving the lead bomber group with no expert navigators to lead it on this extremely dangerous low-level approach to Ploesti.

The planes continued on anyway, the importance of their mission having been drilled into them. They met thick cloud cover as they approached the mountains around Ploesti, and the various bomber groups making up the overall attack chose different paths through the clouds. The two lead bomber groups carefully made their way through or under the clouds, while the three other groups climbed over them. The high-flying bombers took a while to get back down and by then they were half an hour behind the others. The carefully choreographed mission was falling apart.

As they approached Ploesti, the crews were looking for waypoints to mark their path, especially other towns they could recognize from the air. One of the bomber grouşte for Floreşti, an error that went undiscovered until it led them to the outskirts of Bucharest, way off target. At that point, the crews realized there was little hope of carrying out the attack they had practiced for so long. They broke radio silence and turned north to attack the complex of refineries in Ploesti as best they could.
Hit anything you can
, they told one another.
Just find a target and drop your bombs
.

German fighters attacked the bombers, which did their best to pick out high-value targets and bomb them at very low altitude, as planned. The fighters pursued the bombers as they left Ploesti, shooting down fifty-four planes, each with a crew of ten or twelve men. Another fifty-three planes were heavily damaged. Though reconnaissance flights confirmed that the damage to Ploesti was significant, it was a costly victory. Allied bombers would continue hitting Ploesti over and over again until August 19, 1944.