Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (17 page)

Festung Ploesti
.

 

 

Baetz reflected on this strange, soft, white Mediterranean city under
the Carpathians, surrounded by plants that provided Hitler's clanking
panzers, roaring planes and stalking submarines with the lifeblood of
war. Fingers linked behind his back, the musician strolled through the
market place, where stood a soaring abstract sculpture by Brancusi,
a Ploesti native who had made a name in Parisian art. In leafy parks
Baetz saw soldiers fondling ripening thirteen-year-old girls in the
drowsy, carnal heat.
"Rosen auf den Weg gestreut/ Und des Harms
vergessen!" (Scatter roses in your path and forget your sorrows.)
The air raid sirens screamed.
The people paid no attention, thinking it was just another test by the
busy Germans. It was 1330 eastern European time, 1130 Greenwich time. The
Liberator horde was twenty minutes from Ploesti. The men in the bombers
saw many lovely streams flowing across their course, the waters of the
Alps draining southeast to the Danube. The navigators stared hard at
the streams and at their maps and kept running calculations of ground
speed. The three Initial Points that would set them upon the target
sweep were towns with rivers like these flowing through them.
The two lead groups were now aware that they were going across the target
without the three others. Far behind them, Killer Kane was about to
find that out. He came down the Balkan slope toward the Danube with
the impression that the group behind was the Circus. In order to let it
assume its proper place in front of him, Kane turned his ships back to the
west. Then he recognized the formation as the Eight Balls and the final
group as the Sky Scorpions. Kane returned to course and drove speedily to
the fore. All the pilots now knew that the great mission was hopelessly
split into two elements, neither knowing the other's location. Kane took
up the heading to the First I.P. at higher and higher power settings.
Near Craiova, 65 miles short of the First I.P., one of Johnson's pilots,
Lieutenant Charles Whitlock, lost his No. 1 engine when a fuel line clogged.
Unable to keep up, Whitlock turned south for Cyprus. Although his bombs
were a dangerous burden for a plane flying on three engines, the pilot did
not jettison them, not wishing to harm civilians or betray what he still
thought was a surprise raid. Whitlock toted them to the Danube and dropped
them in the river. Over Bulgaria he lost No. 4 engine by malfunction
and he was obliged to drop his incendiaries. He made it to Cyprus.
K.K. Compton passed Pitesti, the First Initial Point, which lay at
the mouth of a valley with a ganglion of river, road and rails passing
through it to the southeast. The leaders were now in the foothills of the
Transylvanian Alps. The Liberandos and the Circus dropped lower toward
the piney ridges and spread into a quasi-bombing front. The engineers
and radiomen cranked up the sliding bomb doors and particles of pink
African sand fell on the black soil of Europe. K.K. Compton and Uzal
Ent stood on the flight deck of Teggie Ann, riding on the right of the
thirteen-plane first element, slightly behind Brewery Wagon, piloted by
John Palm. Although no enemy had been sighted and navigation and timing
had been perfect to the first I.P., Compton and Ent were worried over
the absence of Killer Kane and the three trailing groups. They also had
a difficult recognition problem in the series of valleys below, all of
which ran southeast, all of which contained towns, and most of which
had parallel streams, rails and rivers. There were four similar-looking
valleys between the First and Second Initial Points.
As they approached Targoviste, the ancient capital of Romania, located in
still another valley, K.K. Compton resumed his seat beside Red Thompson
and said, "Now." Thompson slid Teggie Ann out to the right and took
up the briefed bomb-run heading of 127 degrees, parallel to the road,
railway and river. K.K. Compton was taking the lead to be the first to
bomb Ploesti. The others turned neatly behind, except for John Palm in
Brewery Wagon, who shot on over Targoviste.
Teggie Ann had made a wrong turn.
Targoviste was only the Second I.P.
The lead group was turning twenty miles short of the Initial Point that
led to Ploesti.
Red Thompson reflected later, "Who knows what bearing there was on it
from the mysterious loss of Flavelle and Wilson, the target-finding team,
and the lack of air discipline that moved Flavelle's wingman, carrying
the Number Two navigator, to go down and circle his oil slick and return
to base?"
Officers behind K.K. Compton were thunderstruck by the turn. Stanley
Wertz, the navigator of Utah Man, phoned his pilot, "We're turning too
soon!" Stewart said, "There's nothing we can do about it." Norman Appold
broke radio silence. He switched on the command channel and cried, "Not
here! Not here! This isn't it!" Ramsay Potts in Duchess simultaneously
went on the clear air with "Mistake! Mistake!" A dozen others joined the
protest on the open radio, but they had to turn. Potts's twelve planes,
for instance, were surrounded by others and could not wheel back on the
right course without causing air collisions.
Along the wrong route the Liberators passed through startling changes
of weather, the unpredictable midsummer humors of the Danubian basin --
mugginess, bright sunny patches and dark rain squalls. The main impression
was of a light violet haze, limiting visibility to about six miles.
K.K. Compton drilled on, keeping the heading which they had been briefed
to take after the Third I.P. This did not lead to Ploesti. It led to
Bucharest. In their path lay the heaviest flak concentration in Europe,
the wicked heart of Gerstenberg's surprise. His guns were packed into
the fields southeast of the oil city, ahead of Compton.
In the game of supposition between the defense and attack planners,
Gerstenberg calculated that bombers from Benghazi would be at the extreme
limit of their flying range to reach Ploesti at all. Therefore they would
have to come and depart on a straight line between the two points. So he
put the brunt of his guns on this line. Now the Liberators were marching
right into the ambuscade.
Near the Standard Block refinery (Target White Three) on the south side of
Ploesti, men of antiaircraft Battery Four were lined up by a horse-drawn
mess wagon, drawing goulash and potatoes in their mess tins. Gunners
Erich Hanfland, a locksmith's apprentice from Olsberg, and his friend,
Heinz Silberg, a woodcutter from the Westerwald, sat eating by the side
of the lane.
When Pitcairn of Perthshire pressed the red button at Otopenii for the
full alarm, Silberg exclaimed, "Always exercises! Alarms for a whole year
and nobody comes!" Hanfland agreed. "And in the middle of our meal. They
are crazy." Nevertheless, they abandoned their food and rushed to their
gun, a four-barreled 20-mm., which they took pride in manning seventeen
seconds after an alert. Hanfland, the gunlayer, put his left hand on
the traverse wheel and his right on the elevation wheel and poised his
foot lightly on the trigger button. Silberg stood by the electric view
finder. They heard heavy flak bursts. But the battery sergeant gave no
firing order. "I can't see any planes," said Silberg.
Sergeant Aust, in the center of Battery Four, received a signal from
Regiment. "They're flying very low. Change your fuse settings for
point-blank fire!" Aust put the Russians to work altering the 88-mm. shell
fuses.
Less than halfway to Bucharest the forward line of the Liberandos walked
into a massive ambuscade and the Battle of Ploesti began. The first salvo
was dazzling -- four enormous blue-white muzzle blasts from 88-mm. guns.
Major Appold, a mile behind K.K. Compton, was flying at 200 miles an hour,
fifty feet from the ground. He and his top turret gunner, Squadron Leader
Barwell, saw blue flashes and black clouds of shrapnel spreading among
the leaders. Barwell observed, "Bloody eighty-eights. They're fusing
point-blank to spread the stuff low." He raised his voice on the intercom:
"Gunners! I'm concentrating on Jerry personnel. Recommend trying to hit
men rather than guns. I say, Norm, drop the nose." Appold was folded
close to his left wingman, Lieutenant Lyle T. Ryan, but managed to
bank delicately to port. "The top turret began thumping away at the
emplacement," said Appold. "I saw those fifty-caliber slugs churning
up dust, spewing sparks off the gun barrels, and soldiers frantically
running. A man went down in a puff of dust, got up and started to walk,
then fell in a heap. That uncanny accuracy of Barwell's had literally
saved our necks."
The outer guns were manned by Gerstenberg's second-best. One gun site now
pitted against the likes of Barwell was in the hands of a unit of old men
from Vienna -- retired Austrian Army officers. They stood up against the
storm and worked their weapons. From his turret the Englishman peered
far beyond them toward another cluster of big ones, six 88's that were
planting a black forest of shrapnel among the leading Liberators. "All
right, old boy, let the left wing down a bit," Barwell directed. Five
thousand feet from the big guns, a range that would have got another
gunner Appold's reprimand for wasting bullets, Barwell began firing
five-second bursts. "I would crank her down and he'd squeeze short ones,"
said Appold. "We coordinated successfully and the blue flashes came less
and less."
It was a virtuoso duet against death. Appold banked and turned the
hurtling bomber, locked in low-level formation, so that Barwell could
clear the emplacements passing beneath at 200 miles an hour. Appold said,
"I believe George silenced three of the six guns on that spot. I am
convinced that we would not have survived and a lot more planes would
not have come through, save for the cool-headed gunnery of this English
officer." Behind them were forty B-24's. Many took hits in the first
ground fusillade, but no planes fell yet.
The opening of battle found General Gerstenberg speeding through Ploesti
toward his Bucharest post. Gerstenberg said to his driver, "Turn here. I'm
going to the Ploesti command post instead." The master defense architect
had decided to experience the siege in
Festung Ploesti
.
"Where are the fighters?" Barwell asked Appold. "The flak was ready
for us, why not the Messerschmitts?" Gamecock Hahn was exactly where he
should be, had the bombers kept their projected line of invasion. But
now the Messerschmitts were forty miles from the Liberators, due to
the erroneous turn at the Second I.P. Battles are composed of caprice
and error, and this error had some luck for the Americans. It kept the
German fighters off them during the opening of the battle.
Coming down from the heights over Bucharest, George Barwell saw low-wing
fighters that were not in his mental gallery of enemy aircraft. They were
Romanian IAR-80's. The Gypsies were beating Gamecock Hahn to the first
encounter. Ground spotters phoned the control centers, "They're attacking
Bucharest very deep!" The fighter controllers started calling Gamecock
Hahn south to meet the B-24's. Amidst the nervous babble on the fighter
channels he did not hear the order.
Fighter controller Schultz had an alarming thought. "If they are making
a heavy attack in Bucharest it will be a catastrophe. Feelings against
the war are bad enough now. This could turn the Romanians against
us." Then he thought of the possibility that the bombers would attack
the German airdromes. He phoned the bases, "Send up every machine that
will fly! Nothing must be left on the ground." The American gunners began
seeing big Heinkel 111 bombers, Junkers 52 transports, liaison Storchs,
and other chore planes such as Buckers, Stieglitzes and Weihes. There
was even an ancient Gloster Gladiator that Britain had sold to Romania
before the war. The B-24 men could not understand why these old and often
unarmed types should be up, and some jumped to the hasty conclusion
that this ragtag was all the Germans had to defend Ploesti. If so, it
was going to be a big day for B-24 gunners. However, these planes were
in the sky not to give battle, but to avoid it.
The bombers drove on blindly toward Bucharest. Some of the IAR-80's had
now gotten high behind them and were diving on the Liberator tails. Worthy
A. Long, piloting Jersey Bounce, got a call from his rear gunner,
Leycester D. Havens. There was a thump.
A few seconds later Long heard Havens' weak and surprised voice. He was
the first American to die by the enemy's hand in the great ground-air
battle.
Bombs Away: 1150 hours

ODYSSEUS: Curse you, Atriedês! I wish you had some other army to
command, some contemptible army instead of us! Zeus it seems has
given us from youth to old age a nice ball of wool to wind --
nothing but wars upon wars until we shall perish, every one.
-- The Iliad , Book XIV

6 THE CIRCUS IN HELL
Addison Baker had led the Traveling Circus into the wrong turn at
Targoviste, following the mission leader up front. As he hurtled on in the
haze toward Bucharest many of his pilots passionately called the error
on the radio, but Baker continued to maintain formation. Halfway down
the errant road Circus crews saw a dark blur in the mist on their left --
the smoke of Ploesti refineries. Russell Longnecker was anxiously watching
Baker's plane, when suddenly "Colonel Baker made a decision." The young
flight officer said, "There was no doubt about his decision. He maneuvered
our group more eloquently than if he had radio contact with each of us.
He turned left ninety degrees. We all turned, with him. Ploesti was off
there to the left and we were going straight into it and we were going fast."
Baker and co-pilot Jerstad, the mission planner, drove Hell's Wench
hard and low for the target city at the head of the left file of the
Circus. Lieutenant Colonel George S. Brown, in Queenie, threw the right
file into the improvised turn and took up a parallel course to Baker.
On the other side of Brown, Ramsay Potts, leading B Force of the Circus,
swung his ships into the new heading. Addison Baker's swift decision
split the Circus completely away from K.K. Compton's Liberandos, which
continued toward Bucharest. Now the grand plan for a simultaneous frontal
assault on the White Targets by four groups was down to two groups,
parting at right angles to each other, and the whereabouts of the rest
of the force was unknown to them.
Ground spotters phoned the German fighter controllers, "They're attacking
Bucharest and Ploesti very deep! It's a simultaneous attack on Bucharest
and Ploesti!" Controller Zahn said, "Damned cleverly done. They send planes
to tie up fighters at Bucharest while the main force hits Ploesti."