Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (25 page)

 

 

On the dash for Ploesti, Killer Kane took Hail Columbia down, and his
first wave of nine planes spread into the bomb front to pick up the
target lanes in White Four. He had briefed his men: "It would take an
entire army a year to fight its way up here and smash this target. We
are going to do it in a couple of minutes with less than two thousand
men!" The Pyramider front was committed on a twelve-mile sprint at 225
miles an hour, with four waves following Kane. There were gaps in the
ranks. Eight pink ships had already fallen out with mechanical failures.

 

 

Kane said, "Toward Ploesti the sky was the ominous black of a threatening
thunderstorm. It would be our luck to arrive during a heavy rain, so that
we could not see ahead of us. A flight of B-24's [Liberandos] passed
under me. I thought I was low, but those planes were really low." Kane
looked at his oblique target drawing to pick out the two tall stacks of
White Four. Then "everything but the kitchen sink began to rise from the
ground at us," be said. "I dived behind a row of trees and told the men
in the nose to stand clear. We had to shoot our way in. I lifted over
the trees and opened up with the fixed front guns. My tracer streams
glanced off the ground a mile ahead. I saw natural-looking haystacks
unfold like daisies, with guns spouting fire at us. On our right a flak
train moved full speed down the track with guns belching black puffs at
us. They were shooting eighty-eights like shotguns, with shells set to
go off immediately after they left the gun barrels. A sprinkle of rain
spread a film of water over the windshield." The nose guns jammed. Kane
yelled at his navigator, Norman Whalen, "Clear the guns!" Whalen, who
was knee-deep in shell casings, replied, "You shot up all the ammo." Kane
had passed 2,400 rounds through the guns in a hundred seconds.

 

 

Now Kane came close enough to the shadow over Ploesti to see that it
was not rain but smoke. His target was burning from Ramsay Potts's
attack twenty minutes earlier. Group commanders had been instructed
before take-off that if they could not reach their objectives they
should radio the word "crabapple" to Benghazi, announcing that they
were turning away. Killer Kane would not send the signal. He sped on
toward the volcano. In Tagalong, a plane on his left flank, a shell
from the flak train killed radioman Paul Eshelman. The Q-train scored
a direct hit on Kane's wingman, Hadley's Harem, blowing off most of
the greenhouse, killing bombardier Leon Storms, and wounding navigator
Harold Tabacoff. Pilot Gilbert B. Hadley was unable to deliver his
bombs because of the death of his bombardier and the destruction of the
bombsight. Hadley ordered his engineer, a Rygate, Vermont, cattle buyer
named Russell Page, to release the bombs manually. The combination of
air currents through the open nose and a new strike from the flak train
on No. 2 engine almost spun Hadley's Harem into the ground, but Hadley
and co-pilot James R. Lindsey held the ship up.

 

 

Manfred Spenner, leading ten Me-109's of Yellow Wing over the northern
outskirts of Ploesti, happened upon Killer Kane's target run. It was
one of the few occasions in the battle on which the Germans were able to
locate bombers before they reached the target. "The bombers were about
seven hundred feet high," said Spenner. "I started to attack the lead
Liberator, closing at less than a right angle with a dive. I would not
say it was the lead of all the desert-colored planes, but it was at the
head of a wave. The bomber I intended to attack suddenly exploded and
disintegrated in front of me, hit by flak, not by me.*

 

 

* The sole Pyramider flight leader shot down was Wallace C. Taylor,
fronting the fifth wave.

 

 

The first wave of the Pyramiders dived into the smoke, Kane so low that
Hail Columbia was wrapped in flame that singed the hair off his left arm.
His co-pilot, John Young, called, "Number Four is hit." Kane feathered the
engine and stepped up power on the other three. The bombardiers delivered
their bombs into crackling flame. The cyclonic updrafts from White Four
wafted thirty-ton bombers like cinders of paper. Samuel R. Neeley's B-24
hit a balloon cable, which did not break. The bomber climbed the cable
until it struck a contact bomb which removed a wing. The plane fell and
the balloon soared.

 

 

Neeley's companion ship, Tagalong, piloted by Ralph V. Hinch, plunged
on with its dead radio operator. As Stanley J. Samoski dropped his bombs,
German shells hit Tagalong. Waist gunner Delmar Schweigert said,
"They knocked out one motor, then got us in the tail, and another motor
was gone. We crashed in a cornfield." He and gunners Robert E. Coleman,
Harry G. Baughn, Robert Mead and Donald G. Wright left by the rear bottom
escape door. Schweigert found the co-pilot, Charles Barbour, on the
ground with his clothes completely burned off, and dragged him away before
Tagalong exploded. German soldiers marched the sergeants away. "I never
saw Lieutenant Barbour again," said Schweigert. The co-pilot died, along
with Lieutenant Hinch, bombardier Samoski, and navigator James G. Taylor.

 

 

Major Herbert Shingler led the second Pyramider wave over White Four, with
Robert Nicholson piloting the B-24 on his left. Nicholson's bomb-aimer,
Boyden Supiano, was hit in both legs as he dropped his bombs, and his
companion, navigator Oscie K. Parker, was wounded in the arm. Shattered
pipes showered hydraulic fluid into the forward compartment, and a fire
started. Supiano and Parker thrashed around in the slippery fluid and
their own blood to get the fire extinguisher working. They doused the
fire but could not stop the flow of CO2 and nearly smothered in rising
billows of foam.

 

 

Dwight Patch, on his third combat mission, flew Black Magic in the second
wave, with co-pilot John C. Park. They neared the burning refinery in
propeller-wash so turbulent that "it was all we could do to keep from
flying into the ground," said Patch. "We had full control cranked in,
everything shoved to the firewall." Black Magic had been ordered to bomb
from an altitude of 200 feet, but Patch saw planes at that height being
blasted to bits. He chose to go in at flame level instead. Black Magic
bombed and came out of the conflagration. Patch saw John B. Thomas'
plane directly ahead. The positions of the two ships exemplified the
buffeting that the formations took over the refineries. Thomas had gone
into the target two waves behind Patch and came off of it ahead of him.

 

 

Thomas received a direct hit in the cockpit and his craft began a
faltering climb, drifting back into Patch's flight path. It slid
by so close that Patch glimpsed "in the black, smoke-filled turret,
ammunition exploding like popcorn." Thomas' ship crashed left wing first
and disintegrated. Its co-pilot, David M. Lewis, was one of Patch's
closest friends. One man got out of the crash alive -- the navigator,
Robert D. Nash.

 

 

The flak men hit Black Magic heavily. Patch still had good control,
so he went as low as he dared. "I almost knocked a machine gunner
off a hay wagon," he said. From his fuselage three wounded gunners,
John A. Ditullio, Joseph J. McCune and Ellis J. Bonorden cried for
help. Navigator Philip G. Papish, who had been a veterinary surgeon in
peacetime, expertly treated them and administered morphine. Bombardier
William Reynolds took up a post between the waist guns, ready to defend
Black Magic from fighter attack on either side.

 

 

During the bomb run the Q-train knocked out an engine on Boilermaker II,
piloted by Theodore E. Helm and Charles E. Smith. Another motor caught
fire. On reduced power, with his heavy load, Helm realized he could never
clear the high stack of the cracking plant. He ordered the crew to throw
out a full bomb bay tank. Four hundred more gallons of gasoline entered
the conflagration. Helm's quick decision paid off in every way. He managed
to bomb and the lightened ship heaved over the chimney. Radioman Harry
C. Opp phoned the pilot. "Number Two and Number Three are shot out. I
believe another is running wild. The left wing tank is on fire." There
was no reply. The interphone was destroyed. Opp went forward and yelled
the news to the pilot. Without brakes, ailerons or nosewheel, Helm and
Smith put Boilermaker II down on two wheels in a cornfield. The wing
tank flames crackled toward the fuselage, but there was no longer a
full Tokyo tank there to turn the plane into a ball of fire. Every man
in Helm's ship got out alive, with only one wounded. The thing was done
so neatly that engineer Arthur W. White described his Ploesti experience
in full as "nothing remarkable."

 

 

However, another flier in the second wave went through a spate of
remarkable events that day. He was a good-looking, perceptive native of
Chattanooga, Tennessee, named Lewis N. Ellis, the pilot of Daisy Mae,
an old war horse with 56 missions by previous crews. As he neared the
ignited refinery looking for his aiming point, the left end of the boiler
house, Ellis heard his bombardier, Guido Gioana, say, in a matter-of-fact
fashion, "We're headed straight for our building. Be sure you pull up
in time." Ellis and co-pilot Callistus E. Fager drew back their control
columns, held the climb for a few seconds, and pushed forward, barely
clearing the chimneys. As Daisy Mae entered the smoke, Gioana bombed,
and Ellis felt things clutching at his wings. He was probably snapping
guy wires on refinery stacks. In a patch of better visibility he saw a
ship on his left smashing into a storage tank. It had waited too long to
pull up. Burning pieces of the plane flew around, and among them Ellis
saw men sailing through the air.

 

 

Ellis burst from the black clouds into the light. "It's a miracle!" he
thought. Tail gunner Nick Hunt had a more mundane reaction. "Look at that
oil burning!" he phoned. "And to think this time last year I was working
a gas station!" The crew reported the damage to Daisy Mae: No. 3 engine
smoking, nosewheel destroyed, hydraulic fluid pouring into the bomb bay,
top and tail turrets wrecked, and flak holes spread over her. Yet no
one had been seriously injured and the plane was still flying.

 

 

Ellis looked around for his sister ships. "The Cornhusker is gone,"
he said. "Lil Joe isn't here, or Sem per Felix. I don't see Old Baldy
or Air Lobe. Where's Vulgar Virgin?" He could guess their dispositions
from planes falling before his eyes. One climbed, stalled, and spun
in. Another erased itself in a long flaming skid. A twin-engine fighter
dropped in flames.

 

 

Major Julian Bleyer took the third wave into the smoke, carrying the
only trained motion picture cameraman to fly Tidal Wave, Sergeant Jerry
J. Joswick. Other members of his combat camera unit had been ordered from
the ships before take-off. Many planes carried automatic cameras, which
were started, if at all, by busy untrained gunners, so that professional
annotation of places and events in the pictures was not brought back
except by Joswick. As Bleyer's ship vaulted through the target smoke, his
right waist gunner, Frank B. Kozak, dimly saw Clarence W. Gooden's plane
lurch toward him. "I could see Gooden working the controls," said Kozak,
"and power his plane into a refinery building to shorten the war. The
building, the plane and the crew exploded together."

 

 

A moment later Kozak saw Lawrence E. Murphy's Liberator crash into a
cracking plant; All three right-hand ships in Bleyer's blinded wave
were wiped out. The last was the extreme wing ship, piloted by Lawrence
Hadcock, which plunged into a refinery building, raising fresh flame and
showers of rubble. A top turret gunner of third wave, James E. Callier,
left the target unable to see out of his dome for smoke. "It took some
time before it cleared," he said. Air pouring through the shell holes
cleared the fuselage. The gunners stared at each other. Their faces
were blackened like minstrel men and the tawny planes were painted with
oil smoke.

 

 

The fourth wave, led by Delbert H. Hahn, flew into the black boil over
White Four and again the three right-flank aircraft were destroyed --
the machines piloted by John J. Dore, Jr., John B. Thomas and Lindley
P. Hussey.

 

 

Hussey's men of Lil Joe had gone to the target aware that they would
not get back to Africa because of the gas leak during the sea leg of
the journey. They had tried to get rid of the fume-filled tank, but it
was too big for the smaller bomb doors of the old model B-24 they were
flying. A German shell hit the perverse tank and Lil Joe burst into
flame. Hussey climbed steeply to let men parachute. Lil Joe got up
to 75 feet and stalled. Eight men bailed out at that altitude. Three
landed alive with many fractures: Sergeants Ray Heisner, Joseph Brown
and James Turner. Pilot Hussey and his radioman, Edmond Terry, a former
golf professional from California, remained in the falling plane. After
two days of unconsciousness Hussey awakened in a hospital. He had a
fractured skull, seven broken ribs, a broken shoulder, flak wounds in his
legs, and one side of his face was caved in. Sergeant Terry was almost
as badly battered, but also alive. Hussey was told that Romanians had
marched him and Terry three miles to an aid station in this condition,
but he remembered nothing of the walk.

 

 

The plane next to the three right-flank victims was an old pink one named
Wahoo, manned by novices from the Sky Scorpion group who had arrived at
Benghazi by Air Transport Command and begged for a plane. On the target
run, radio operator Anthony I. Fravega of Memphis, Tennessee, stood in
the open bay to see that the bombs fell. He climbed up behind the pilots
for a moment to see what was ahead. He said to himself, "We can never
get through this." He wordlessly touched the pilot's shoulder and got
back down. The pilot was his brother, Thomas P. Fravega. Since enlistment
they had insisted on going to war together.