Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (16 page)

 

 

The Bulgarians estimated that the Americans had come to bomb Sofia. Petrov
and Rusev were very hard put to maintain the air speed of the bombers
and arrived at the rendezvous barely in time to sight the rear echelons
of the last groups, the Scorpions and Eight Balls, driving northeast,
stepped up to 15,000 feet. The Bulgars could not climb to that altitude
without oxygen, and, without radios, could not confer on what to do. With
awed glances at the giants pulling away from them in the zenith, Petrov
and Rusev arrived independently at the same decision -- to return to base,
refuel and try to catch the Americans on the way out.

 

 

Several Liberator crews saw the fighters and concluded they were spotters.
Unaware that their mission had already been tracked most of the way,
these few Americans had a sinking feeling. The mission was betrayed. The
suspense was over. They wanted to tell the other ships, but could not. Up
ahead, Killer Kane's Pyramiders, and still farther ahead, K.K. Compton's
Liberandos and Addison Baker's Circus flew on in happy ignorance of the
"spotters." The Bulgarians had been sighted from Leon Johnson's plane
and he was the only group commander who now knew that the raid could
not be a surprise. But he was in fourth place in the bomber convoy,
sentenced to keep off the radio.

 

 

Pitcairn's operations room did not hear of the Bulgarian sighting for
some time -- that spent by the mute Avias on the return flight and in
translating phone calls. Before their news came, he got an alarming
report from the Würzburg station on Mount Cherin: "The devils have
vanished! We get no more traces of them in Zone Twenty-four East, Sector
Forty-four. Last bearing, thirty degrees." The bombers were descending
the eastern slopes, putting mountain tops between them and the radar on
the peak. Pitcairn said, "The blackout was terrible for us. The bombers
were still outside range of our radar units on the plain around Ploesti."

 

 

By now at the Ploesti flak site, Armament Warden Nowicki had discovered
what was wrong with Bertha, the big 88. "Okay, Becker," he said, "we can
start putting the panel back." Sergeant Aust ran into the gun pit yelling,
"We're on alert! Willi, give me that gun!" Nowicki did not take time to
look up or answer. He wasted no motion. The gun crew and the Russian
loaders watched the methodical artisan. The fate of the gun, perhaps
their lives, was passing through his swift, calloused fingers.

 

 

K.K. Compton's leading pilots reached the foot of the mountains and adjusted
their power to level off for the low onrush across the Danubian basin to
the three initial points northwest of the target city. A wonderful sight
spread before their dust-reddened eyes. In a light haze the ripe gold and
green Wallachian plain lay before them in the splendor of harvest. The
desert rats were in rich Romania. They looked at its beauty with perhaps
the same emotions as the invaders of the past who had plundered this
sumptuous earth since the Bronze Age -- the Scythians, Goths, and Huns,
Turks and Tartars, Russians and Germans. But this invasion was different:
there was not a man in the American armada who did not fervently hope
that he would never set foot on Romania.

 

 

As they crossed the Danube, the airman said, "Why it's not blue! It's like
a muddy old river at home." For the benefit of his crew members who had not
had the luck to be raised in Utah, Walter Stewart observed, "It looks just
like the Colorado River at Moab."

 

 

Below them stood a Romanian spotter, phoning, "Many big bombers!" Otopenii
asked, "What heading?" "Toward Bucharest!" cried the spotter.

 

 

Pitcairn paced the war room, deep in thought, wondering whether his sector
was definitely committed. The bombers still might turn back on Sofia.
There was no trace of the bombers on Pitcairn's nearby radar. He signaled
"Stand by" to his fighter bases. He sent an officer outside the windowless
room for a visual report on weather. "Hot and humid," the scout reported.
"There are rain squalls in the mountains to the north. Overhead are high
strato-clouds, with wind blowing holes through them." Pitcairn went to
the Würzburg Table. "If they are coming here, sir," said a radarman,
"they surely ought to be on our monitor by now." Compton was now well
within the radius of the radar unit near the Danube, but there were no
blips on the Würzburg. The B-24's were flying too low to register on
radar. Pitcairn ordered the pilots on "sit-in," puzzled and alarmed over
the "vanish" of the oncoming bombers.

 

 

Pitcairn told the Romanian liaison officer, "Your people may defend
Bucharest as they have expressed the wish to do." Protecting the capital
was distinctly secondary to saving the refineries and Pitcairn wanted
the fewest possible Romanian stunt artists fooling around in the Ploesti
sector. The Romanian groups climbed from Pepira and Taxeroul and went
roving over Bucharest. Pilot Treude, who was beginning six weeks'
confinement to quarters for buzzing the king's boat, bolted his room
and was in the air with the Second Romanian Flotilla.

 

 

At Mizil, Gamecock Hahn, the day-fighter leader, tucked his long legs
into the cockpit. His adjutant in Headquarters Schwarm (flight of four
fighters), Leutnant Jack Rauch, got into his Messerschmitt, hoping
this alert was not like the one two weeks before. Rauch had come back
that day after buzzing Romanian antiaircraft guns south of Bucharest
to find his whole squadron sitting in. "The civilian alarm went off,"
said his crew chief. "Just stay where you are. I'll fuel you up." No
take-off order had come. That evening at dinner Gamecock said, "Jack,
you scared those Romanians so bad they turned in an alert." The other
pilots hazed Ranch, and Gamecock gave him an official reprimand.

 

 

In the third plane of H.Q. Schwarm, Lieutenant Werner Gerhartz, the
unlucky warrior, closed his cockpit canopy, then opened it again and
handed out his Berlin mongrel bitch, Peggi, which he often took on
flights. If this was real, it was no place for a dog. (There was a dog
in one of the Liberators.)

 

 

Two ground crewmen holding motor cranks stood on the right wing of each
Messerschmitt. The full alert came from Fighter Command Control Center.
The mechanics stuck the cranks in the motor cowling and heaved.
Three-bladed props kicked and spun. The mechanics dropped off behind and
scurried away in prop-wakes. Uncle Willie Steinmann watched Hahn's planes
bobbing along the grass in tandem. "They always reminded me of insects,"
he said.

 

 

Hans Schopper took off Black Wing. Manfred Spenner, a Battle of Britain
veteran with a hundred hours of front-line combat, went up leading Yellow
Wing. Captain Toma got his Romanian Messerschmitts off in creditable
fashion. Fifty-two fighters were airborne within five minutes. It would
have been done faster if Captain Steinmann of White Wing had not had
to taxi around chasing sheep off the runway. The Mizil medical officer,
Hans Arthur Wagner, watched them climbing into the clouds and went into
his surgery and began laying out instrument.

 

 

Sergeant Aust on the emplacement of Bertha yelled, "Second alert!" Nowicki
closed and bolted the panel. "Sergeant, give me some test signals from
the fire control box," he asked. The armament warden watched the lights
flickering on and off and said, "She's working all right."

 

 

"Full alarm!" shouted the battery sergeant. Nowicki rolled up his tools
and clipped them to his motorcycle. Russians bearers ran past him,
cradling shells. "Hold your fire!" said Aust. "Our fighters are going
up." The armament warden, having no further orders, stayed with Bertha of
Battery Four to see what would happen. He watched the fighters ascending
the sky and stretched his cramped fingers.

 

 

The battery jerked its eyes from the sky at an earthly phenomenon. Running
from the H.Q. hutment toward them was a wild figure in underwear. It wore a
steel helmet and carpet slippers. It was bawling orders. It was Oberleutnant
Hecht, the battery commander. The event had finally penetrated his big
hangover.

 

 

At Gerstenberg's H.Q., Major Kuchenbacker released the German night-fighter
wing at Zilistea and the controllers ordered it into the air with its
seventeen new twin-engined Messerschmitt 110's under Major Lutje.

 

 

Upstairs in the northern approaches to Ploesti, Gamecock Hahn swept
his tightly packed fighters on an east-west axis 6,750 feet up, under
the strato-cumulus. He was patrolling directly on the predicted bomber
course, right over the final I.P. When the enemy appeared, the pilots
had to remember two iron rules laid down by Gerstenberg: "Day fighters
must share the same airspace as the bombers, regardless of our own
flak. However, neither day nor night fighters must ever fly over the
inner ring of Ploesti flak or the city itself."

 

 

K.K. Compton took the bombers low for the 150-mile run across flat ground
to the First Initial Point. Roaring across the plain, the men saw the new
land like tourists passing in the Orient Express. Sergeant Bartlett said,
"Everything was clean and pretty. Just like in the movies." Fred Anderson
declared it "the prettiest country I've seen since the States." In several
planes there was a simultaneous shout: "This is where I bail out!" It was
the rueful joke they made over Germany when the Messerschmitts came
barrel-rolling at them with wing cannons winking yellow. There was a
different reason this time. The Liberators were passing over naked girls
bathing in a stream.

 

 

Harold Steiner, the radio operator of Utah Man, saw a woman driving a
wagonload of hay along a road. "As the planes approached she got off the
load and crawled under the wagon," Steiner said. "The horses ran off,
leaving her face down in the dust." So close were they to the peasants
below that they saw smiles on upturned faces and the brightly decorated
skirts of the women. "They were very nonchalant," said gunner Robert
Bochek. "They stopped working and reined up their horses hitched to carts
with big painted wheels. They waved handkerchiefs at us. We thought this
was going to be heaven."

 

 

The beautiful valley, the neat tree-lined roads and rivers, the friendly
gestures of the Romanians, the absence still of any note of opposition,
brought a holiday mood to many of the leading B-24's. The dire predictions
seemed to be turning out wrong. Tidal Wave was working great. A red-haired
radio operator of a Circus ship, William D. Staats, Jr., decided the
occasion was appropriate for his Franklin D. Roosevelt parody. "I hate
war. Eleanor hates war. Buzzy hates war, Fuzzy hates war," he chanted
on the intercom. Some crews sang "Don't Sit under the Apple Tree" and
"Amapola." In the middle of the thundering formation a bombardier led
his crew in the doxology.

 

 

The Protector of Ploesti was speeding south from the mountain resort
in a staff car, toward his headquarters. Gerstenberg's masterful plan
for holding Hitler's black gold had one glaring omission. There were
no civilian air raid shelters in Ploesti or Bucharest. The misled
citizenry had not demanded them and the military were preoccupied
preparing for battle. Civilians were too worried about the shocking
loss of men on the Russian front to bother with an abstraction like
an air raid. There had been no bombs on Ploesti since the scattered
Red Air Force explosions in the autumn of 1941. No citizen had heard
of the U.S. Halpro mission. Ploesti was bored with practice alerts, as
well. During the first ones people ran for the fields and woods. Later
they yawned when the test sirens blew. Ploesti's civil defense consisted
of Pitcairn's red button and the sound legs and lungs of its inhabitants.

 

 

A gentle German medical orderly, Corporal Ewald Wegener of the
Transport-Sicherungs Regiment, which trucked Ploesti oil to the Russian
front, spent that Sunday morning in a curious way. He sang high mass
in a Roman Catholic church in Ploesti. A member of the Salvatorian
missionary order, he had been grabbed by the Army while studying medicine
in Vienna. After mass Wegener walked back toward his barracks sick bay,
where he looked after fifty venereal, malarial and enteritic truckmen in
the shadow of the Colombia Aquila refinery. On the way, the priest-medic
passed citizens bound out of town with picnic baskets, and met this
commanding officer, a foul-mouthed Nazi known as "The Mad Prussian."

 

 

"Hey, Wegener," said the CO. "So, I find you in town. Sleeping with a
fat Romanian woman?" Wegener meekly protested his divine orders. "Watch
yourself," said his nemesis, "or I'll pack you off to the eastern front.
If you ever get back from there you'll appreciate the need for a woman."
He released the corporal, who continued on his way.

 

 

In the target city, a German camp show musician named Paul Baetz was
in the Luftwaffe command post to arrange his next week's concerts at
military installations. Baetz was a short, dark, animated pianist,
who toured with Else Schneider, a twenty-year-old coloratura, and Edith
Rath, twenty-three, an accordionist-comedienne. The act was popular with
the soldiers, and it was just as well that nobody wondered why Baetz,
a cousin by marriage to Richard Wagner, and a former conductor at the
Weimar State Theater, was giving troop shows in the Balkans. The little
musician was staying out of sight of the Nazis, who had marked him for
a concentration camp because he continued to perform "decadent Jewish
music." In his exile Baetz took pleasure in complying with soldiers'
requests for "Tea for Two" and "White Christmas," written by Jews,
and enemies to boot.

 

 

The duty officer said sotto voce to the pianist, "Paul, enemy bombers
are being tracked over the Mediterranean this morning. Life here may
not always be this quiet. I believe you should take the girls away from
here." Baetz thanked him and left. Outside it was extremely hot and humid
and the streets were thronged with promenaders. The town's picnic hampers
were full of plump roast geese and salamis, and countrybound private
automobiles honked through the streets in the only country in the wartime
world that had ineffectual gasoline rationing. The traffic policemen in
their choker tunics, heavy capes and fur hats sweated copiously. Near
one of them Baetz saw a gauzily dressed Gypsy beauty, cigaret dangling
from her lips, giving breast to an infant. Even Gerstenberg had been
unable to keep the "unessential" Romany tribe out of