Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (12 page)

 

 

On the eastern outskirts of Bucharest, at Pepira, there was an
all-Romanian base with domestically built fighters -- IAR-80's and
IAR-81's, heavy, low-winged machines, each armed with four light and
two heavy machine guns. On this Saturday before battle only 20 of the
34 IAR's at Pepira were serviceable, due to the Romanians' frolicsome
attitude toward flying. The Germans called them "Gypsies" behind their
backs, and had a low opinion of the IAR, although admitting that most
of the Gypsies were daring fliers.

 

 

On this particular Saturday in high summer, some of the Gypsies
were out joy riding, as though the war were just a super aeroclub
outing. Lieutenant Brancu Treude flew low over the bathers at
Lake Znagov, a popular resort north of Bucharest. He spied a tall
yacht. Buzzing sailboats was exquisite fun. You dived from the rear,
pulled over close, and sent the terrified yachtsman sailing backward
in your prop-wash. Dreamily, Treude dived on the boat. He clipped off
the topmast, shredded the mainsail, and staggered away fouled with
staylines, barely airborne. The skipper of the yacht, King Michael of
Romania, took Treude's number, and the joy rider came to the officers'
mess that evening to find himself confined to quarters for six weeks.

 

 

After dinner, Lieutenant Carol Anastasescu, a frustrated variety artist,
improvised a comedy sketch on Treude's bad luck. The young boyars shrieked
with laughter. Two older ones, the commandant, Captain Alexandru Serbanescu,
and Lieutenant Florian Budu, who sat together, merely smiled. They had seen
the laughter stopped in many such merry lads as these. They were veterans
of the eastern front. By the Romanian system of crediting enemy aircraft
destroyed, Budu had forty Russian kills.

 

 

Not far from Pepira, at Taxeroul, there was another Romanian group,
with 11 Junkers 88's and 23 Junkers 87 dive bombers ready for
action. One hundred fifty miles east, on the Black Sea, at a resort
called Mamaia, near Constanta, there was a mixed Romano-German base
under Major Gigi Iliescu. He had a mélange of about twenty IAR's,
Messerschmitts and oddments, which could intervene in action around
Ploesti. The modest strength of Mamaia was reinforced on weekends
by many "liaison," "technical" and "inspection" visits of fighters
from the inland bases. Mamaia was the one untouched seaside resort in
warring Europe. There were no tetrahedrons, mines, blockhouses, wire or
armed patrols on the beach, and above its golden sands stepped arcaded
terraces to the Rex Hotel, which had been built to rival the Elysian
establishments at Cannes and Nice. And the girls were there.

 

 

Such was Gerstenberg's inner fighter ring. The outer ring included
bases on Crete and Greece, with the pursuit quality centered at Kalamaki
airdrome at Mégara, where twenty Me-109's stood ready. There were also
fighter groups in southern Italy which could interfere briefly with a
Benghazi-Ploesti bomber stream, although these fighters were now heavily
engaged in the Battle of Sicily. The largest force in the outer ring
lay athwart the bomber route. It was the Sixth Royal Bulgarian Fighter
Regiment, under Polkovnik (Colonel) Vasil Vulkov. His
polk
(regiment),
which had never been in battle, had 124 fighters on three bases at
Sofia and Karlovo. The majority of Vulkov's machines were Avia 534's,
manufactured in Czechoslovakia in 1936 and captured there when Hitler
raped the republic in 1939. One of the Bulgarian groups at Karlovo was
being trained to fly the Me-l09, but only a handful of its pilots were
as yet competent to fight in the German machine.

 

 

Considering that Germany desperately needed interceptors in Atlantic
Europe to meet the multiplying Anglo-American round-the-clock bomber
offensive from Britain, the fact that Gerstenberg had so many fighters
standing by in a quiet theater was a noteworthy achievement. Its extent
was not fully appreciated by Allied Intelligence.

 

 

Saturday night Hauptmann Spenner returned from the dentist's and favored
his stinging gums with a glass of brandy in the officers' casino. His
fellow pilots, in contrast to the brooding air in the American camp,
were at cards, drink and song. Spenner noticed two who stayed apart from
the others. The first was the matchless leader of Fighter Group Four,
Hauptmann Hans Hahn, who was spelling out one
fine a l'eau
to last the
evening. He was a straw-haired ace, six feet five inches tall, who had
been fighting in the skies of tortured Europe since 1939. His hands and
face were covered with scar tissue from a flaming crash at Stalingrad the
winter before. He led his airmen with the same virtues as a Timberlake
or Leon Johnson -- by personal example of calm boldness in battle and
respect for their fears and egos on the ground. Hahn's men called him
Gockel, or Gamecock.

 

 

The Gamecock slanted his long skeleton against a bar stool and
discreetly watched the other pilot in the casino who was not mixing in,
a twenty-year-old named Werner Gerhartz, who sat under a model Liberator
drinking his way into another sulk. Gerhartz' father was a professor
at Bonn University and his mother was a physician with the German Red
Cross. The youth had been schooled in England. Although the Luftwaffe
spent the lives of his class by the score every day on its wide air
front, Gerhartz reproached himself for having flown fighters for a year
without a proper crack at the enemy. A month before, he had complained to
the Gamecock, "Seven months here without action! I want to have battle
too, and not always drink." Hahn, using the English nickname that the
youth preferred, said, "Ben, suppose I send you on temporary duty to
Jever-Wilhelmshaven? It's the hottest corner on earth. Day and night
our fellows go up to meet bombers from England."

 

 

Gerhartz went to Wilhelmshaven and returned even lower in spirit, to
report to the Gamecock, "Seventeen days without an enemy alert! Finally
we went over the North Sea to meet Flying Fortresses. I made two passes
and did not hit a thing. I was determined to make a successful attack
before my petrol warning. I dived again. The Americans turned tail and
went back to England. Just my rotten luck." Hahn recognized the turnback
as an Eighth Air Force feint to draw fighters from a raid elsewhere. He
said, "Well, Ben, at least you stopped them from bombing."

 

 

This Saturday night the Gamecock watched the youngster downing plum
brandy and wondered if he would survive his first battle. An orderly
called Hahn to the phone. He came back and announced, "You fellows go
to bed now. It is possible that tomorrow we'll have a fight." The phone
call was a checkup on combat preparedness. Nobody knew what was coming,
or where or when, but something was. For eleven days the Ninth Air Force
had not been seen over southern Europe.

 

 

In Bucharest, General Gerstenberg was concluding his regular Saturday
staff meeting, going over familiar precautions and reminders. Although he
would not admit satisfaction to his staff, or to Goering, he must have
felt that his three-year labor to defend Ploesti was going well. He had
decided to take one of his rare holidays the next day at the mountain
resort of Timisul. People were leaving the sullen heat of Bucharest for
the sea and the mountains. General Antonescu and several cabinet members
were headed for Lake Znagov.

 

 

A thousand miles away, in the desert heat, the American airmen were
watching a movie for the third or fourth time. Of all the special briefing
materials they were impressed most by Soapsuds*, the talking picture
made especially for them. It opened with a shot of a nude woman.
Tex McCrary's confident newsreel announcer's voice said that Ploesti was
a virgin target. He assured them that "The defenses are nothing like as
strong here as they are on the western front. The fighter defenses at
Ploesti are not strong, and the majority of the fighters will be flown
by Romanian pilots who are thoroughly bored by the war. The heavy ack-ack
should not trouble you at low altitude. All the antiaircraft guns are
manned by Romanians, so there is a pretty good chance there might be
incidents like there were in Italy at the beginning of the war, when
civilians could not get into shelters because they were filled with
antiaircraft gunners. The defenses of Ploesti may look formidable on
paper, but remember: they are manned by Romanians." The narrator depended
on Allied Intelligence estimates of a month before.

 

 

* A discarded code name for the Ploesti mission.

 

 

The movie audience did not know of a thunderbolt hurled into their camp
that afternoon which was already altering the fate of the mission. From
Washington, General Arnold had sent a signal forbidding General Brereton
to fly to Ploesti. The order also grounded Jacob Smart, who knew too many
high Allied secrets to be risked to Nazi captivity. Brereton, moreover,
had passed his own version of the order to both Smart and Timberlake:
"You are not to fly and I cannot see you." Geerlings was with the two
colonels when the order reached them. "Timberlake's face became grim,"
he said, "and he cursed softly but vehemently. He handed the message
to Smart. Jake's hands trembled as he read it. There were tears in
Timberlake's eyes. 'God, my men will think I'm chicken,' he said."

 

 

The mission had lost its three top men a few hours before take-off.
An urgent reshuffling of air assignments began. Brereton's place in the
command ship was taken by General Ent, who had been scheduled to fly with
Killer Kane. Kane had to find a co-pilot. Captain Ralph ("Red") Thompson,
skipper of the command ship, was bereft of his three familiar officers
and found himself with K.K. Compton, General Ent, a new bombardier and
the group navigator, Harold Wicklund. "The only people I knew were my
gunners," Thompson lamented. Jacob Smart's place with Major K.O. Dessert
was taken by a retired pilot named Jacob Epting.

 

 

Timberlake decided to do some ordering. He had always practiced crew
integrity -- keeping the interreliant men of each plane together. Now,
since K.K. Compton was going to use Wicklund, Timberlake pulled his
planning navigator, Leander F. Schmid, off the raid. Schmid had finished
his missions and had many dependents. Timberlake tried to induce his
young comrade, John Jerstad, not to go. The little major comforted
him. "Don't worry, sir. Bake and I will make it all right." All night the
operations officers played musical chairs as a result of the groundings,
the normal strain of manning a maximum effort, and the dysentery epidemic
in the camps.

 

 

Squadron Leader Barwell talked with General Ent that night and got the
impression that "He was flying as a sort of protest. He had opposed the
low-level plan from the beginning." Ent sent out the official mission
directive, Field Order 58, which contained the final Intelligence
appraisal of enemy defenses according to "information from sources
believed to be reliable." Intelligence said there were less than a hundred
antiaircraft guns in the refinery area, probably half of them manned
by Germans. At that moment at Gerstenberg's Pepira H.Q. an adjutant was
closing out the strength report for July. Around Ploesti, as of that day,
the Germans had 237 flak guns, 80 percent of them with German crews,
plus hundreds of machine guns.

 

 

The Intelligence annex continued: "It is estimated that the defense
has been calculated against attacks developing from the EAST and
NORTHEAST. The briefed course to the target has been devised to avoid all
antiaircraft defenses en route. Enemy radio-detection-finding stations
are believed to be located in the valley lying east of the Danube covering
the EASTERN approaches to the oilfields."

 

 

Now the only thing that could cancel the mission was an adverse weather
prediction for the target area. Some weeks before, Allied cryptographers
had cracked the German weather code, which was changed monthly. The first
of August had been selected as mission day because the last German
prediction of which the cryptographers could be sure would be that of
31 July. Then they would be faced with the next month's German code
which they could not guarantee to solve as quickly. They got a clear
intercept on the next day's forecast, which predicted overcast in the
Balkan mountains with general fair conditions in the Danubian basin
and some thundershowers. The weather was not perfect, but it was not
prohibitive. The mission was on.

 

 

The next day was the thirty-sixth anniversary of the United States
Army Air Forces, founded by three members of the Army Signal Corps and
now mustering two million men. The occasion was not announced to the
fliers. They had been provided enough inspiration already.

 

 

After midnight Colonel Kane walked about his camp at Lete. "There was
a quietness, quite unlike the usual buzz," said his diary entry. "Some
crews were quietly giving away their belongings. I sat on my favorite
perch on an old engine and stared for a long time at the stars. In my
short lifetime, the stars have stayed in their places as they have for
countless lifetimes before mine. They would remain unaffected whether I
and the men with me lived or died. Whether we died in the near future or
years later from senility mattered not in the great scheme of things. Yet
the manner of our dying could have far-reaching effects. I have a young
son I may never see again, yet I shall be content if I feel that his
freedom is assured and he is never forced to be humbled in spirit and
body before another man who proclaims himself master."

 

 

At 2:00 a.m. Philip Ardery heard "the racket of alarms going off, and
jeeps tearing from tent to tent, blowing horns, and men shouting, 'Get
up! Get up, you guys! Roll cut of those sacks. This is the day!'" The
airmen walked through the dark to the last briefings. Sergeant Patrick
McAtee, rear gunner, came to the Eight Ball meeting in a Class A uniform
with full decorations and polished silver wings. "The general said this
was going to be a rough mission," he explained. "If the Germans get me,
I want them to know they really have somebody."