Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (28 page)

 

 

That Sunday she was lunching in her manor house under a cartouche of
the double-crowned eagle of Byzantium, the armorial bearings of her
family. Since early Christian martial history in Wallachia, generations of
Cantacuzene princes had ridden against the Saracens to win or die -- the
latter fate often produced by the axe of the Sultan's headsman. However,
the family fortunes had improved in recent times, and the arms could
have been brought up to date by perching the double eagle on an oil
derrick. The first engineered petroleum well in the world had gushed
forth on this domain of her grandfather, Prince George Cantacuzene.

 

 

Princess Caterina was a handsome, robust, blue-eyed woman of fifty with
a managerial ability equal to that of any man in the kingdom. She had
been educated in England. Her chosen occupation was the care of 3,000
war waifs and orphans in institutions and foster homes in the region.
At this Sunday lunch the princess had as her guest a thirteen-year-old
polylingual Polish countess whom she had rescued in 1939 from the
Nazi smash-up in Poland. They were chatting in English when the talk
was drowned by roaring engines. They ran out on the terrace and were
nearly bowled over by air blasts from Colonel Posey's force, bound for
Blue Target. "They looked like they were falling out of my attic," said
Caterina. She assumed they were Russian planes. That summer Romanian
insiders were in dread of a Soviet offensive striking through Romania
to climb the Transylvanian passes before the snows.

 

 

After Posey's ships disappeared, another roar came from the north --
the Sky Scorpions were coming off Red Target. They passed over, some
planes trailing smoke and flame. The princess saw one sinking toward her
with an engine smoking. It streamed silvery cascades across the fields,
like a crop duster. Caterina, who had lived aviation with two generations
of flying Cantacuzenes, said to the child, "The pilot is dropping petrol
so the fire will not be so bad when he lands. Now, my dear, you must go
inside and not come out until I return." She drove her 1939 Plymouth,
which had white-wall tires, through roundabout lanes toward the falling
B-24.

 

 

Pilot Robert O'Reilly was coming down in the luckiest spot in Romania;
the princess' farm hands and orphan boys were trained in fighting oil-well
fires. The plane crashed a mile from the house and bounced. The burning
motor came out of its seat and flew away. The B-24 stopped with its fore
section crushed and the tail in the air. Eight airmen emerged and ran.

 

 

The princess found a squad of orphans with foam bottles quenching the
fire in the engine casing. A farmer touched his forelock and said,
"Your Honor, the Russians have come." The crumpled flank of the plane
bore a large white star. He said, "There are two dead Russians in the
front." As she went to look she noticed in large lettering under the
pilot's window:
Shoot, Fritz, You're Faded.
A wide-eyed orphan clutched
her, crying, "One of the dead Russians is moving." The man farther back
in the fuselage was crushed to death under the fallen top turret. He was
the flight engineer, Frank Kees. As Shoot, Fritz was falling he had gone
into the bomb bay to parachute, found the plane too low, and could not
get out from under the turret before the crash.

 

 

The man entangled in the nose was soaked with gasoline trickling down
from the wing tanks. Caterina saw his eyes open and said, "Boy, are you
an American?" Navigator Richard Britt of Houston, Texas, replied, "yes,
ma'am." She addressed the crowd: "Lunt aviator Americani!" Farmers ran
for tools to extricate Britt. A woman handed the princess a bottle of
plum brandy. She passed it and a glass of water through the shattered
greenhouse to Britt. The farm hands plied axes and crowbars to free
him. The foreman said, "We'll have to cut off his shoe." Caterina said,
"Be careful! Don't ruin it. We'll never be able to find American shoes
for him." She kept the shorn G.I. boot to be repaired in the orphans'
shoe shop.

 

 

They lifted Britt out and he fainted on the ground. Two German soldiers
took his feet and began dragging him away. The princess grabbed his
shoulders and dug in, yelling in German, "Oh, no, you don't take him. He's
our prisoner." The large, unconscious American was the medium of a tug
of war between supposed Axis allies. The princess won. She put Britt in
the Plymouth, concealed him with a crowd of orphans, and drove him to a
clinic in the village of Fiipestii de Targ to treat him for skin burns
received in the gasoline bath.

 

 

The episode was witnessed from a tall stand of corn by two sergeants from
O'Reilly's crew, Troy McCray and a wounded shipmate, Clell Riffle, whom
McCrary had dragged there and covered with pumpkin leaves. The stunned
men looked out through an American harvest scene at an English-speaking
woman driving away in a Detroit automobile. McCrary said, "Looks like
we're home." The illusion was dispelled by German soldiers, coming
toward them, firing into the corn. McCrary tried to carry Riffle away,
but escape was impossible. They gave themselves up.

 

 

The retainers took O'Reilly and three crewmates to the manor house. (The
remaining three crewmen were at large three days, eating turnips, before
they were bagged.) The princess came back from the clinic and found
O'Reilly's party was gone. Her major-domo said, "People took them to
Nedelea." She said, "Idiots!" and drove into the village, where an elder
lamely told her, "For safety's sake we hid the Americans in a cellar." She
called down into the dark, "Boys, there are only friends here. Now come up
and let us help you." O'Reilly emerged with his co-pilot, Ernest Poulsen,
bombardier Albert A. Romano and gunner Louis Medeiros.

 

 

In Romania arrivals are festive occasions. This extraordinary visit
of friends of the princess brought the villagers out with pitchers
of fresh milk, peaches, cheese and apples, and two things rarely seen
on wartime tables -- white bread and sugar. The ravenous airmen tore
into their finest meal since the States. O'Reilly said to Caterina,
"We have just been shooting this place up and yet they give us this
wonderful food." She snorted, "My boy, we Romanians never hit a man when
he is down, and besides, we like Americans very much. Your chaps used
to work here in the refineries." She had already decided to keep these
young men out of German hands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1300 hours

 

 

ODYSSEUS: It is time that I told you of the disastrous voyage Zeus
gave me when I started back from Troy.
-- The Odyssey , Book IX

 

 

 

12 THE STORMY RETURN

 

 

The battle of the target ended when the Liberators passed beyond the
outer flak ring and the fighters turned away with fuel warnings. The
Tidal Wave plan called for orderly withdrawal in massed formation on a
course paralleling the inbound journey. But now a general formation was
out of the question, after the divisive fates of the mission in which
the groups had been parted from each other in the Balkan clouds, further
split by the unplanned target turns, and subdivided in the witches'
Sabbath around the burning refineries. Instead of hitting the objectives
simultaneously, as had been demonstrated in the desert rehearsal the day
before, the attack had taken 27 minutes from Walter Stewart's first bomb
on White Five to John McCormick's last on Red Target

 

 

The retreating Liberators were flung out for a hundred miles over the
Danubian plain. More than half of them were seriously damaged. The situation
had aspects of a rout, one that was very likely to be followed by deadly
pursuit along the thousand weary miles to Benghazi. Half the planes had
expended their ammunition, had too little left to fight long, or carried
dead and incapacitated gunners, wrecked turrets and weapons. The crews
were surveying airworthiness, counting their remaining gas and bullets,
and estimating the chances of wounded comrades to remain alive six or
seven hours more. Their pilots were weighing these factors to decide
what course to take.

 

 

The shortest way out of Gerstenberg's web was to Chorlu on the European
tail of Turkey. The next escape possibility was the Turkish mainland in
Asia Minor. This southerly direction offered the possibility that a ship
could stay in the air across Turkey and reach British bases in Cyprus,
thereby avoiding internment in the neutral country. On the briefed
southwestern route home, the first possible haven was in partisan-held
regions of Yugoslavia. Beyond Corfu there were five hundred miles of
sea. From that island, if a plane did not have enough gas to reach Libya,
it had two slightly shorter refuges, Malta and the southern tier of
Sicily recently conquered by the Allies.

 

 

The majority of pilots followed the planned route. The two least-damaged
groups, the Liberandos and Sky Scorpions, resumed formation for Corfu,
but they were seventy miles apart. Most of the Pyramiders gathered behind
Julian Bleyer on this course; so did many of the 26 survivors of the
37 Eight Ball ships. George Brown rallied those Circus ships he could
find. Appold's raiders, parted from all the rest by their withdrawal in
the stream bed, flew home alone, as did five or six more bands made up
of ships from various groups.

 

 

In the summer sky there were nearly a dozen Liberators that could find
no one else to tack on to. Minutes after maneuvering to avoid collision
with many others over the target, these waifs were in empty air and
never found a friend during the thousand-mile adventure ahead.

 

 

Dramas of courage were taking place among the crews trying to save the
ships. A gunner severely wounded in the leg, arm and back had continued
to fire at fighters as his shipmates bound up the wounds. Another plane
took fire in the nose, and the pilot rang the bail-out gong. From the
nose the bombardier and navigator asked the men not to jump, while they
fought the fire. They could not get at it with an extinguisher, so they
ripped out fuselage padding to smother it. One took off his parachute
to get closer to the fire. They put it out and the ship got home. In a
Liberator whose Tokyo tank had been holed over the target, crewmen caught
the fauceting gasoline in their steel helmets. By another perforated
bomb bay tank a radioman lay on the catwalk and held his fingers in the
hole until the engineer could transfer the contents to a wing tank.*

 

 

* The men who did these things are not known. The incidents are
recorded in secret morale report to Washington by the Office of
Theater Censor, drawn from letters by survivors, none identified.
Other acts of heorism were lost to record or award by the deaths of
whole crews, the incredulity of base officers about what had taken
place, and the traumatic state of the airmen when interrogated. One
of the five Medals of Honor given for Tidal Wave, that of Lloyd
Hughes, was awarded only because of the persistence of a man from
the Office of War Information who took the trouble to collect
eye-witness evidence of Hughes's deed.

 

 

Old Buster Butt, completely undamaged, ran away from Ploesti across the
harvest fields. From the nose McClain called, "Smoke over the treetops at
eleven o'clock. Top turret and left waist get ready." As the plane jumped
the trees, the guns rattled. "Cease fire!" yelled pilot Wright. The
smoke was rising from a locomotive pulling a holiday passenger train
with people riding on top and clinging to the sides of cars.

 

 

The tail gunner reported, "There's a ship behind us with an engine
feathered." Wright said, "Maybe we ought to give him some help, hey?"
Co-pilot Fred E. Sayre said, "Why not?" Old Buster Butt circled back.
McClain said, "We had a lonely feeling as we saw the other planes in
our formation disappear in the southwest. We came up on the straggler's
wing. It was Frank McLaughlin from our group. We felt good that we
decided to go back. We slowed down and escorted Mac."

 

 

Racing across the fields, a shout went up on Colonel Posey's intercom,
"Hey, look on the ground at one o'clock!" A farmhouse door burst open
and a peasant in red flannel underwear ran out and fired a shotgun at
the bombers. None of the air gunners replied. They were laughing too
hard. Anyway, they were under orders not to harm civilians.

 

 

K.O. Dessert brought Tupelo Lass out with hardly a scratch. This was
the ship in which the grounded mission planner, Jacob Smart, was to have
flown. Tupelo Lass crossed a village in which the inhabitants were out
in their Sunday best, waving gaily to the planes. K.O. appreciated their
attitude and could not resist an acknowledgment in kind. He made a tight
180-degree turn and scribbled: "This food is from the United States
Army Air Forces who came to Romania to destroy German installations
and not to harm Romanians." The crew fastened the note to the plane's
K-rations and dropped them into the village square. Tupelo Lass resumed
the return voyage. K.O. had added his bit to the larder of the best-fed
people in Europe.

 

 

Winging away from Red Target, John Brooks saw a Liberator hit a haystack,
blow it "all over hell and gone," and continue its flight.

 

 

The first Tidal Wave bomber to escape Axis territory and land safely was
that of Hughes and Hunn from the last wave of the Eight Balls. They came
into a Turkish air base at Chorlu without hydraulic power. The pilots
landed nose-high to brake her by dragging the tail. The tail stayed
on but the runway collapsed under it. People ran along the furrow
of broken concrete to admire the monster that had made obsolete the
specifications of Turkish airdrome engineers. A Turkish general greeted
the pilots effusively with, "Soon I hope we can join you in an attack
on Bulgaria!" The exhausted Americans noted that he did not mention
accompanying them to nasty places like Ploesti.