Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (24 page)

Leon Johnson lost nine of his sixteen Liberators in the battle. He left
behind a full measure of destruction. The combined weight of his and
Addison Baker's earlier bombs on White Five totaled "the most destruction"
of any Tidal Wave objective, according to later surveys. Although not
totally erased, Colombia Aquila refinery was out of production for
eleven months.
Bombs Away: 1210 hours
I Carried a Gun for
Al Capone , and

Vous avez mis le doigt dessus, mon Commandant.

 

 

 

 

9 THE COUP DE MAIN

 

 

The Eight Balls were assigned two separate objectives that day. As Leon
Johnson struck White Five, B Force, a larger column of his 44th Bomb Group,
was to bit Blue Target -- the isolated Creditul Minier refinery at Brazi,
five miles south of Ploesti on the highway to Bucharest. This formation of
21 ships was led by a West Pointer, Colonel James I. Posey of Henderson,
Kentucky. His target was the most modern high-octane aviation fuel producer
in Europe.

 

 

Posey's experienced detachment was called upon to place its bombs
with utmost refinement on eleven aiming points. The target plot of
a single plane, for instance, reduced its task to hitting "the near
wall of Building G." No more meticulous bombing task had been given
since Stalingrad, where Russian youngsters in tiny, slow biplanes were
sent into the city to throw bombs into certain rooms of buildings that
contained Germans, without hitting Russian soldiers in adjacent rooms.

 

 

Posey's bombing course lay three miles west of Ploesti, so that he did
not have to fly into the furnaces Johnson and Kane were going through on
his left. Strangely enough, twenty minutes earlier many Circus ships had
flown past Posey's refinery without dropping a single bomb on it. Thus
the attack on Blue Target was what the planners had envisioned for all
the strikes: every aircraft that had been dispatched running on a virgin
target, with flak and the element of surprise the only unknowns. The flak
was the same resolute stuff that had savaged the Circus, and surprise
had been lost. Nonetheless, what James Posey and his men did to Blue
Target was a justification of Jacob Smart's heretical low-level plan.

 

 

Posey's lead ship, V for Victory, was piloted by a 29-mission man,
John H. Diehl. The first wave of five planes was formed like a spread
"M." Following them were three more M-shaped waves of Liberators. Drumming
closer to the target, Posey saw ribbons of artificial smoke dribbling
across the refinery, but this was trivial compared to the inferno
he could glimpse over at White Five. Alongside the speeding column a
37-mm. gun knocked off part of Posey's tail and killed a waist gunner,
Truitt Williams.

 

 

In the greenhouse the target-finding bombardier, Howard R. Klekar,
peered into the converted gunsight he had been given to aim the bombs and
wondered if he would ever be a married man. He was engaged to a member
of the Women's Royal Air Force in Britain and he and his fiancée were in
the four-month cooling-off period imposed by the U.S. command to stem a
wave of impulsive Anglo-American unions. Next to the preoccupied Klekar,
the navigator, Robert J. Stine, was fighting the battle of his life --
his twin fifties against two batteries of Bofors crouched low on a tower
dead ahead and hurling destruction into B Force. The flak men had dealt
with the Traveling Circus and their blood was up. Stine and the top
turret man of V for Victory "swept those eight guns clear," according to
Posey. "If the Bofors had continued, a lot more men following us would
not have come through."

 

 

The ship on Posey's right, piloted by Eunice M. Shannon and Robert
Lehnhausen, joined the barrage the lead planes were laying down ahead.
"A heavy burst pitched some flak gunners from a platform," said Lehnhausen.
He triggered two fixed guns in the nose. One shell came out and the guns
jammed. "It was the only round I had the opportunity to fire at the enemy
during the war," he said.

 

 

The first wave was now on target. Diehl climbed V for Victory to 250 feet
to clear refinery stacks, and Klekar released his bombs into the aiming
point. On the other side, Diehl dived back to the earth. His wingman,
Flak Alley, piloted by David W. Alexander, dived with him, damaged by
small-arms fire. "We left at a very low level," said Alexander. "People
ask me what I mean by low level. I point out that on the antennas on
the bottom of my airplane I brought back sunflowers and something that
looked suspiciously like grass." Parallel to Posey, Captain W. T. Holmes,
the grounded operations officer who had assigned himself to the mission,
crossed Creditul Minier, carrying tail gunner Patrick McAtee in his
Sunday uniform. The sergeant got no opportunity to impress the Germans
with his costume. He went back to Benghazi without losing the crease in
his trousers.

 

 

The second wave, led by Reginald Phillips and Walter Bunker, bombed
its aiming points in Blue Target. Holding the center of their rank
was an exceptional pilot, George R. Jansen, who had been accurately
hitting low-level targets long before Jacob Smart proposed the
tactic. Jansen was a former crop-dusting pilot from the Sacramento
Valley in California. Jansen's pinpoint was the southwest corner of the
boiler house. His bombardier was Technical Sergeant George Guilford,
one of the eight noncommissioned bomb-aimers on Tidal Wave. Guilford,
jarred by flak, toggled too soon. He groaned. The tail gunner phoned,
"Direct hit! The bombs skipped into the boiler house." Guilford's three
1,000-pounders knocked it completely out of the war.

 

 

Another second wave ship, D for Dog, piloted by William D. Hughes,
lined up on the U.S.-built Dubbs still, and bombardier George E. Hulpiau
placed his three 1,000-pounders directly on the aiming point. "We were
too low to miss," he said. "We were five feet above the target." He
glanced toward Ploesti. "A flight of desert rats went straight into a
cloud of fire and came out all in flames."

 

 

The third wave on Blue Target was led by W.H. Strong. He bowled a
thousand-pounder with a half-hour delayed fuse through the top of the
powerhouse, and also hit a large oil storage tank. The fourth wave leader,
James C. McAtee (no relation to Sergeant Patrick McAtee), had this same
powerhouse as his objective. The oil storage tank Strong had hit was
about to explode a few feet under McAtee's plane. Instead, McAtee noted,
"the top of the tank just peeled off like a sardine can." His tail gunner,
John R. Edwards saw the lidless cauldron boil over in flame after they
were safely over it.

 

 

As Posey's ships left Blue Target, some airmen were screwed up to
hallucinations. The radioman of Princess, Norman Kiefer, heard urgent
shouts in the interphone. "Go back, Mac! Mister Five-by-Five just
crash-landed back there! Go back and pick them up!" yelled the top
turret man. The tail gunner joined in: "We can land and pick them
up! The field is level. Go back, Mac!" McAtee hesitated and replied,
"Shut up. We're not going back." (When Princess landed at Benghazi,
her men found the entire crew of Mister Five-by-Five in the briefing
room. McAtee shook hands with the pilots, Frank O. Slough and Raymond
J. LaCombe, and confronted his two gunners with them. The sergeants
vehemently denied calling on him to turn back. McAtee said, "How do you
like that! You know, I almost turned around and went back.")

 

 

Posey's force did its work without losing a single plane on the target.
But on the other side it entered the general misery of fighters and
flak besetting Leon Johnson and Killer Kane's stricken and disoriented
planes. It was a grand mêlée of airplanes trying to survive or shoot each
other down or make formations or steer for favorable crash-landings. Hans
Schopper, leading Black Wing of the Mizil Messerschmitts, picked out
a sand-colored bomber flying southwest -- "deep, very deep, not more
than sixty feet from the ground" -- and closed in on her. Suddenly he
saw a black night fighter from Zilistea passing him, slamming bullets
into the B-24's tail. He said, "The Me-110 passed under the bomber and
turned up in front of him. He turned too soon. The Liberator filled
him with lead and set him afire. I said, 'Okay, bomber boy, now I catch
you.' I maneuvered into position behind the Liberator and improved my
position before attacking. We were coming toward Rosiorii-de-Vede, about
seventy-five miles from Ploesti. When he was nicely aligned, I pressed
and squeezed. Nothing happened. My ammunition was gone! At that instant my
red warning light came on. I was out of fuel -- I must land quickly. When
I got back to Mizil there wasn't enough petrol left to taxi."

 

 

Elmer H. Reinhart took the last plane away from Blue Target. With part of
a wing shot off, he came out into "a crazy crisscrossing of ships," unable
to catch up with any of the improvised formations. The Messerschmitts
leaped on him. They shot away most of the tail turret, but George Van
Son crawled out of it alive. The attackers incapacitated waist gunners
Alfred A. Mash and Robert Wolf. The radioman, Russell Huntley, gave them
first aid. The fighters left the bomber they had mangled but could not
down. Engineer Frank D. Garrett reported: "Gas is pouring out of a hole
near Number Three. The tunnel is a wreck. The tail turret is hanging by
a thread. The left vertical and horizontal stabilizers are almost shot
off. The left aileron is practically gone. There's a big hole behind
Number One and oil is streaming out."

 

 

"I realized that we could never get back to base," said Reinhart,
"so I tried to gain altitude." The crew put on their parachutes. The
plane heaved and quivered from nose to tail. Reinhart managed to climb
to 3,500 feet. Disintegration was at hand. Eighty miles from Ploesti,
he turned on the automatic pilot and rang the bail-out gong. He stayed
in his seat until the others had jumped, then went into the bomb bay
and hurled himself out.

 

 

Reinhart floated down through an empty, sunny sky. The roars, the shouts,
the explosions were over. The silence was emphasized by the drone of his
plane, flying on, dipping its crippled wing. He saw no other chutes.
He landed in a field of six-foot corn and hid his parachute. The ground
trembled and a black column of smoke climbed over the corn tassels. His
ship was in. He heard shouts in an unfamiliar tongue and ran several
miles, thinking "how closely the corn, wheat and alfalfa resembled that
of the United States." He ate some concentrated food and assembled a
compass from two disguised suspender buttons.

 

 

In the disorder beyond the target, collisions were possible all over the
sky, yet only one occurred among the 200-odd bombers and fighters milling
around south of Ploesti. Carol Anastasescu, the debonair Romanian
lieutenant, accidentally crashed into a B-24 and parachuted safely.
The bomber evidently fell with a total loss of life, for none of the
Americans who survived mentioned colliding with a fighter.

 

 

Rowland Houston, from the first wave over Blue Target, joined the end
of an assembling formation. Willie Steinmann, who had shot down John
Palm at the opening of the battle, was flying one of the Messerschmitts
that pursued him. "The American machine guns were spatting all around,"
said Steinmann. The German ace picked out Houston's ship which was
"about a hundred fifty feet from the ground. I attacked from the rear,"
said Steinmann. "I cut back on the throttle, slowed her with flaps,
and gave the Liberator a good raking from wing tip to wing tip. I could
see tracers walking across the width of the plane and flames coming
out everywhere. The top gunner [Walter B. Schoer] and the tail gunner
[M.L. Spears], particularly the man in the tail, were shooting me up. I
closed to within seventy feet.

 

 

"My engine caught fire and there was a tremendous quivering. My speed
carried me under the left side of the bomber, which was going out of
control. The Liberator and the ground were coming together fast and
I was in between, with no control. I had an instant to consider what
would happen. The best chance seemed being thrown free in the crash.
I loosened my harness and opened the latch on my canopy. I don't remember
crashing. The first thing I knew I was seated on the ground with my pants
torn and cuts on my legs. Near me the two planes burned. I got up from
the ground and walked away."

 

 

No one escaped from Houston's ship.

 

 

Posey's perfect strike destroyed Creditul Minier. The refinery was out
of business for the rest of the war. It cost only two of his twenty-one
planes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bombs Away: 1211 hours

 

 

The Trojans worried Odysseus all around like a pack of grimy jackals
round a wounded stag. You have seen such a thing in the mountains.
A huntsman has hit the stag with an arrow: the stag gets away, and keeps
good pace as long as the blood is warm and his knees are nimble:
but when the arrow is too much for him, the carrion jackals tear
and crunch him.
-- The Iliad , Book XI

 

 

10 KANE AT WHITE FOUR

 

 

The Pyramiders, the largest attacking force in Tidal Wave, reached
the final Initial Point, turned it correctly, and began the run toward
the biggest target -- White Four, or Astro Romana, the most productive
refinery in Europe. At the controls of the flagship Hail Columbia sat
the beefy force leader, wearing a World War I doughboy helmet and an
automatic, "to shoot my way out if I go down." John Riley Kane was the
son of a Baptist parson at Eagle Springs, Texas. He had been reared
on a farm, over which passed primitive planes flying air mail between
Austin and Dallas. He had vacillated between careers in aviation and
medicine. The smell of dissection rooms had finally decided him, and
he entered Army aviation in 1931 at Brooks Field. Kane had a dissonant
personality. His tough-hombre manner covered a sensitive, almost poetic
core. He had a manner like General George Patton's. It has a place in war,
which is not entirely waged by nice guys.