Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (2 page)

 

 

Without waiting for their commander the other pilots took off from Natal
and completed the first formation flight across the South Atlantic to
Africa. They landed on the Pan-American passenger base at Accra --
there were no military airdromes available. The pilots intended to
lay over a few days to service their overworked craft and wait for
Halverson, but the airport manager was nervous about German air raids,
so they gassed up and took off directly on the 2,400-mile flight to the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. They ran into an evening cyclone which scattered the
formation. Each plane continued on its own in the howling rain, unable to
take starsights, and, of course, without ground radio-direction. As they
groped across Africa in the stormy night, Kalberer took off from Brazil
to fly his overburdened bus across the Atlantic with the wheels down.

 

 

In the morning the forward element gazed down on solid African jungle
without landmarks. The navigators pored over the geological survey
charts, unable to relate them to anything below. The navigator of Babe
the Big Blue Ox was Lieutenant Walter L. Shea of the Bronx, New York,
who had been washed out of pilot training by the discovery that he was
nearly blind in the left eye from an air rifle accident as a boy.
He had concealed this handicap from pilot John Wilkinson. The pilot
said, "Come on, Shea boy, give us a fix." Shea handed up a chart with
a position vaguely outlined. John Wilcox, the co-pilot, said, "I can't
make out where we are from this." Shea said, "All right, you guys tell
me where we are." Wilcox cried, "I think I got it!" Shea said, "Okay,
see that you mark my chart correctly."

 

 

Further along in the voyage another Liberator was flying through cloud
when the pilot, Captain Robert Paullin, noticed dark patches passing
below his wings. "What's the highest mountain around here?" he phoned
his navigator, Thomas A. Shumaker. "Mount Marra," came the reply. "Three
thousand seventy." Paullin said, "Three thousand seventy what?" Shumaker
said, "This damn French map . . . Hey, it's three thousand meters!" That
was more than ten thousand feet. Paullin pushed up full throttle and
barely cleared the peak.

 

 

The fliers looked down at giraffes and elephants on the savannah. A few
weeks before, many of them had been sitting in humdrum offices, with no
more thought of traveling in Africa than of rocketing to the moon. In
the fuselage the sergeants breached canned peaches, played poker, and
wondered what the women would be like in China.

 

 

The main element landed intact at the Pan-American base at Wadi
Seidna, Khartoum. An R.A.F. officer asked Shea, "How close did you
come to your ETA [Estimated Time of Arrival]?" The one-eyed navigator
replied nonchalantly, "Two miles off the heading and one minute
early" -- improving his plotting by 75 minutes. The Briton pointed his
handle-bar mustaches in sheer admiration. Indeed, it was an extraordinary
flight. Halpro had come eight thousand miles on uncharted ways over sea,
jungle and desert, through storms and starless night, freighted with the
contents of a food warehouse, a supply depot and its ground personnel.
A British lorry driver gave Shea a lift, noting that the navigator was
packing a.45 automatic on each hip. "Where do you blokes think you are --
Africa?" asked the driver.

 

 

In the meantime Kalberer completed his precarious trudge across the ocean
and landed at Abidjan on the Ivory Coast with zero on his gas gauges. He
refueled and started across Africa, still dragging his wheels, and was
forced down at an R.A.F. base at El Fasher in the Sudanese desert. He
asked the station commander for 500 gallons of gas. Tears welled into
the Briton's eyes. "Lieutenant," he said, "every pint of petrol we've
got has to be carried here on camel back, eight hundred miles across
the desert." Nevertheless he gave Kalberer the gas, and the flagship
went on to Khartoum.

 

 

Meeting U. S. combat men for the first time, the British gave them a
cordial welcome, which Halverson quickly translated into a whopping
requisition on military stores. Each man drew a pair of suede desert
boots, drill shorts, bush jacket, cork topee, green cashmere knee
stockings and an ivory cigaret holder. Duked out in these costumes,
the airmen swarmed into a Khartoum night club that boasted three Viennese
did not faze the red-blooded American boy. The hostesses would accept only
officers as dance partners, so the sergeants formed their own conga line,
snaking around to the band leader's calls of "One, two, three -- kick!"
and breaking formation only to pull up their socks.

 

 

It was a little comic gleam in a tragic period for the Allies.
The Liberators were deep inland at Khartoum because German planes were
raiding Egyptian air bases almost as they pleased. Everywhere the Axis was
winning the war. Bataan was falling and Corregidor would soon go. General
Joseph Stilwell was retreating from Burma. In Russia the Germans had
taken Kerch, were besieging Sevastopol, and the road seemed open to a
great prize -- the Russian oil fields at Baku. General Erwin Rommel's
Afrika Korps was threatening Egypt. U-boats were killing ships off the
U.S. Atlantic seaboard. There was only one Allied gain. The battered
U.S. Navy had turned back the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

 

 

Halpro's Chinese expedition was held at Khartoum, awaiting orders.
Halverson ran practice missions to keep the crews on the ball. That took
more life out of the planes. The best maintenance man in the air force,
Captain Ulysses S. ("Sam") Nero, fought the scouring desert dust, without
replacement parts and with too few mechanics. In 1921, as a sergeant,
Sam Nero had flown with Colonel William Mitchell to sink the 27,000-ton
war-prize battleship Ostfriesland in the historic assertion of the
airplane's supremacy over warships. Now Nero declared one plane after
another unserviceable until Halpro was down to half its original strength.

 

 

In June Halpro's destiny changed overnight. The Japanese captured Chekiang,
from which Halpro was supposed to bomb Japan. On 5 June the U.S. Congress
declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Oddly enough, Hitler's
puppet dictator of Romania, Ion Antonescu, had declared war on the United
States nine months before, but not until now had he been honored with
a counter-declaration. Washington's belated response was to legalize
an invasion of Romania by Halverson. Hap Arnold ordered Hurry-Up to
strike Europe's greatest oil refinery, the Astro Romana plant, located
at Ploesti, with an annual productive capacity of two million metric tons.

 

 

The airmen asked each other, "Where is this Ploesti? How come?"
Their top commanders knew the name well; capturing or destroying Ploesti
had long been a classic problem in the world's war colleges. The name
was being used frequently in the secure rooms in Washington, London,
Berlin, Moscow and Cairo. Ploesti's refineries produced one-third of
Adolf Hitler's high-octane aviation gasoline, panzer fuel, benzine and
lubricants. From Ploesti came half of the oil that kept Rommel's armor
running on the sand seas of Mediterranean Africa. At that bitter moment,
destroying Astro Romana seemed the only move that could stop Rommel
in deltaic Egypt and the smashing German drive to take Baku. If Hitler
seized the Baku oil, it would quench the thirst of the Nazi machine for
a long time to come, and it was far beyond bombing range of any Allied
base in prospect or any bomber in production. In the airman's thinking,
Ploesti was the key to many doors.

 

 

President Roosevelt's bright friend Harry Hopkins had been urging a blow
at Ploesti. Royal Air Force Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder offered petrol
and bombs from his meager African stores to hit Ploesti. The U.S. military
attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner F. Fellers, declared that the Ploesti
refineries were "by far the most decisive objective," in fact, "the
strategic target of the war," and they were "within striking distance of
American heavies." In ordering it to be bombed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
overruled the misgivings of some airmen who said that Ploesti was too far
for planes to carry an effective bomb load. They would have to trade bombs
for extra gas to bring them back. A Liberator could not carry much more
than a ton of bombs that distance and Halpro was down to thirteen planes.

 

 

But the time was now or never, in view of Rommel's rapid progress
toward the Nile. Sam Nero painted fake insignia on the B-24's and moved
them to the take-off base, the R.A.F. training school at Fayid on the
Great Bitter Lake. It had been raided four times by the Luftwaffe in
the past fortnight. Halverson was jeopardizing his force merely to
reach the forward base. Halpro landed at Fayid the day the gallant Free
French garrison was forced out at Bir Hacheim and the Afrika Korps was
laagering up for the victory march to Egypt. There was a rumor in Cairo
that Hitler had reserved two floors in Shepheard's Hotel to accept the
surrender of Africa.

 

 

Washington asked Moscow to permit Halpro to land behind the Russian lines,
to shorten the flight over Ploesti. The Kremlin was silent. The American
privateers faced the longest bombing flight in history. None of them
had ever been in combat, dropped a live bomb, or seen an enemy pursuit
plane. They were going to fly over unknown blacked-out lands at night,
without proper charts, flouting the U.S. daylight bombing doctrine for
which they had been trained and the Liberator designed.

 

 

The airplane had never been tested in combat by Americans. The first
production run of the B-24 had gone to Britain, where it had been dubbed
the Liberator. It was a fat, slab-sided machine with a radically thin,
high-set wing that looked incapable of bearing the ship's weight. It
had twin oval rudders and a low-slung tricycle undercarriage. Yet the
"pregnant cow," as airmen called her, could fly faster and farther at
20,000-25,000 feet than the vaunted B-17 Flying Fortress, and with a
greater bomb load.

 

 

Before take-off Kalberer ran into an Australian mechanic who was familiar
with the LB-30, the Royal Air Force designation for the Liberator.
"Would you have a look at my right wheel?" asked the pilot. "It won't
retract." The Aussie got under the machine and said, "No wonder, sir.
The strut you have on 'er was not made for the Liberator. I'll have a
look in stores." He came back and installed a proper Liberator strut.

 

 

An R.A.F. officer briefed Halverson's men for the mission. He warned
them about a fake Ploesti the Germans had erected ten miles east of the
target, and announced the course: they were to cross the Mediterranean
to a lighthouse on the Turkish coast. "However, gentlemen, you are
not -- and I repeat not -- to enter neutral Turkish territory," he
said. The fliers glanced at each other; the direct line to the target
was over Turkey. The briefing officer continued, "You will swing out
to the west and skirt Turkey in this fashion, then turn back northeast
across northern Greece [which was German-held] to the Romanian port of
Constanta on the Black Sea. Follow the pipeline west to the Danube. You
will follow the river inland until you come to a fork and a diamond-shaped
island. From that point take your northern heading direct to the Astro
Romana refinery." The fliers groaned. An American Intelligence officer
concluded the briefing. "This will be a momentous mission," he said,
"and can have a tremendous effect. You will bomb from thirty thousand
feet and land at Ramadi in Iraq."

 

 

Captain John Payne, one of the pilots, said, "To us the briefing was
straight out of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. Many of our ships could
never make thirty thousand feet with an extra bomb bay tank and six
five-hundred-pound bombs. And range! We calculated the round trip was
twenty-six hundred miles. Even if we stripped the bombs and put two gas
tanks in the bomb bay, we'd never make it back on the briefed route."

 

 

The mission navigator, Lieutenant Bernard Rang, a civil air transport
alumnus, called a navigators' meeting in his room without telling
Halverson. Rang pinned up a National Geographic Society map of the Middle
East and pointed out, "It can't be done. If we have to veer all around
Turkey, nobody will make Iraq. But, for God's sake, don't anybody land
in Turkey, or you'll be interned for the rest of the war. If your pilot
insists on it because you're about out of gas, try your damndest to talk
him into Aleppo, Syria. Or try to hit the Euphrates River and follow
it to Ramadi." Although the Kremlin was still silent on the request to
land in the U.S.S.R., Rang said, "Maybe you can land in Tiflis. They
got red-headed women there."

 

 

The rump briefing was interrupted by the dramatic entrance of Hurry-Up
Halverson. The navigators leaped to attention. The colonel drew his
finger down a well-worn crease in the map -- the line of 30 degrees east
longitude running from Egypt through Turkey to the Black Sea. He said,
"Can we help it if the National Geographic put this line through
Turkey? Furthermore, I suggest that we bomb at fourteen thousand
feet." Without another word he stalked out. The navigators roared
with relief.

 

 

The first U.S. mission to Ploesti -- indeed the first U.S. Air Force
mission to any target in Europe -- took off at 2230 hours, 11 June
1942. Each plane was on its own. The pilots could not keep formation
at night, although prowling fighters could spot the undampered engine
exhausts at a short distance. Babe the Big Blue Ox was the last ship
airborne at 2300 hours.

 

 

One-Eyed Shea felt hopeful of his navigation; the sky was transparent,
a diamond mine of stars. Shea hit the Turkish lighthouse "right on the
money" and the pilots pulled the giant bomber into the substratosphere
over sleeping Turkey. Another machine, Little Eva, co-piloted by
Wilber C. West of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, climbed into the freezing
heights. Her navigator, Charles T. Davis, the Pittsburgh newspaperman,
said, "The penetrating, almost unbearable forty-below zero cold sapped our
strength. It froze the oxygen mask on one of the gunners and West stumbled
back through the windy, frigid bomb bays in time to bring him a spare and
save his life. It thickened the machine oil on our bombsight until it
would hardly operate." The bombardiers were using a sight manufactured
by a cash register company, of which they said, "Maybe it's good for
ringing up sales, because you sure can't bomb with it."