Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (30 page)

 

 

The Messerschmitts swooped again on the pair of cripples. Lieutenant
Peter Bochev gunned Prince Charming and saw Gunn turn over and fall
in flame. Several burning parachutes came out of the ship. The fighter
pass wounded four men in The Witch and fatally damaged her
mechanisms. Darlington nosed down, rang the emergency bell, and looked
for a place to crash-land. Three of his sergeants bailed out on the way
down. Darlington skidded The Witch into a mountain wheat field without
further injuring anyone. His conscientious bombardier, Lieutenant
Major R. Gillett,* destroyed his ten-cent bombsight, while the others
lifted the wounded engineer, Lloyd M. Brisbi, from the turret. Bulgarian
border guards seized Darlington and navigator Joseph N. Quigley while
they were assisting the wounded man. Darlington's other four men --
co-pilot Daryl Epp, bombardier Gillett, and gunners Dale G. Halsey and
Walter D. Hardiek -- ran for the woods. The Bulgars sent a corporals'
guard to chase them. Epp's bolters had little chance. They were in a
heavily patrolled border area; Hitler's Bulgarian ally claimed that part
of the woods from indomitable Yugoslavia.

 

 

* His Christian name was Major.

 

 

Darlington's trio was decently treated and taken to jail in Sofia, where
a surprise awaited them: three living men, the parachutists from their
plane -- Ned A. Howard, Anthony J. Rauba and Joseph J. Turley. Presuming
that co-pilot Epp and the other three runaways had not been slaughtered
in the forest, Julian Darlington's entire crew was alive!

 

 

In the morning the Bulgars brought in a burned man with bandaged head
and hands. He was Stanley Horine, the tail gunner from Prince Charming,
who had reported the plight of The Witch, bringing the gallant Captain
Gunn back to his doom. Somehow Horine had bailed out of a ship spiraling
down in flames. He was the only survivor. In the crew of many a crashed
plane there was this tithe of one living man.

 

 

In the meantime Daryl Epp's fugitives had outrun the Bulgarian guards
and were at large in the border region with many armed men looking
for them. Epp had one thing on his side. Three months before, British
Intelligence had had such misgivings about Mikhailovitch, the supposed
leader of Yugoslav resistance, that British agents were parachuted to
his adversary, Tito. Shortly before Tidal Wave, the British cabinet
decided to support Tito instead of Mikhailovitch. Consequently some of
the U.S. flers had been orally instructed to ask for Tito should they
land in Yugoslavia. *

 

 

* The printed escape instructions advised contacting "the Communists"
but did not mention Tito by name.

 

 

Epp's men scrambled over mountains, headed west for the land of the
mysterious Tito. They got up nerve to approach some mountain folk
and pronounced the password, "Tito." The peasants took in the sore,
half-starved airmen, fed them, and gave them a long sleep. Mountaineers
passed them along a chain of patriots to a man who spoke English. He
offered a toast in
raki
to Allied victory, and handed them a
photograph. It showed their plane belly down in the Bulgarian wheat field,
surrounded by German and Bulgarian officers. Tito's man, in the role of
an innocent bystander, had snapped it himself. He gave the picture to Epp.

 

 

Tito's man explained that it might be some time before he could arrange
to send Epp's rangers back to their outfit -- such movements were
difficult for the partisans. The Americans made themselves useful and
were absorbed into the underground. The Yugoslav partisans had no way
to report that Epp's men were safe, and the Bulgarian Red Cross did not
bother to advise Geneva on the Sofia prisoners, so that the survivors of
The Witch and Prince Charming were written off as dead by the U.S. War
Department. They were in limbo for more than a year.

 

 

The rear elements of the Tidal Wave retreat were still crossing Bulgaria
when two new Messerschmitt 110G's, on a ferry flight from Wiener
Neustadt to Sofia, picked up chatter on the radio about the bombing
of Ploesti. One of the pilots was Cadet Sergeant Zed,* a veteran of
sixty air battles, who was delivering aircraft while recuperating from
wounds. He phoned his wingman, Cadet Sergeant Richter: "Would you like
to go hunting bombers?" Richter said, "I'm for it. Let's go." Each of
the fast new fighters was full of ammunition for its four fixed machine
guns, two cannons and two swiveling machine guns in the radioman's rear
compartment. Near Vratsa, Bulgaria, the hunters sighted luscious prey,
a single B-24 with No. 4 engine dead and smoke issuing from No. 3. The
Messerschmitts fell on the tail of the bedraggled Liberator. The American
tail gunner was wide awake. He hit Zed's right wing tank. The fighter
pilot said, "I began losing gas and, for fear of fire, had to stop
my right engine." He pulled away on his remaining engine, leaving the
kill to Richter, but the U.S. tail and top turret gunners drove off the
second Messerschmitt.

 

 

* Name disguised by request. He now lives in East Berlin.

 

 

Zed was worried. New Me-110G's were jewels, and for a ferry pilot to lose
one meant a court-martial. "The American pilot was resourceful," he said.
"As Richter made his second pass, the American headed as fast as he
could for a cloud. Richter did not get him. The cloud swallowed him."
Zed called his comrade and the two chastened ferry pilots made for Sofia.

 

 

Colonel Brown of the Circus led his homing "Romanian remains" into
a mountain valley with antiaircraft ranged along the ridges. The deep
ravines they had feared before the raid were now their best friends. The
flak crews faced a problem not in the books. They had been trained to
compute, track and pick away at tiny black stars inching across the
zenith. Now these same targets, suddenly grown to seventy-foot green
monsters, reeled past beneath them faster than they could traverse the
guns. And the planes spouted something the ground gunners had never
dreamed of -- flails of machine-gun fire ripping along the hillside,
chipping up cement, and hurling men down in splatters of blood. Rustling
the treetops, the Circus ships passed up the valley. Joe Tate, the mild,
green-eyed West Pointer, who had come off the target without damage,
sat in his cockpit in his British battle jacket, smoking his pipe, and
looked up at the rippling surface of tracers. He took his plane up a
hundred feet, like a submarine raising a periscope through bright waves,
and then submerged again to his place in the Pratt & Whitney riptide.

 

 

Many miles behind, in ramshackle Utah Man, Stewart heard his gunners
cheering. "Hugh Roper, my old and dear friend, passed under us in
Exterminator, doing about a hundred seventy," said Stewart. "We tried to
catch up and fly with him, but it was no use. Then we saw Thundermug and
Let 'Er Rip closing up to Exterminator. The three of them left us and
flew a beautiful tight formation into the clouds over the mountains. We
were immensely happy for Roper. Six of the men in his plane were on their
twenty-fifth mission: Hugh, John White, Walter Zablocki, Earl LeMoine,
William Defreese and Hank Lloyd. Also headed home for a rest was Captain
Jack Jones, who was flying as an observer with Roper. As soon as they
got over a few miles of enemy territory and the sea, they'd all have a
ticket to the land of the free."

 

 

From Let 'Er Rip, waist gunner Clifford E. Koen, Jr., looked over at
Roper's plane. "Wires were hanging from the vertical stabilizers," he
said. "They must have been guy wires from refinery stacks. The gunners
in the other ship kept pointing to different spots on our plane that we
couldn't see from the inside. We never learned the extent of this damage."

 

 

The three ships caught up with Brown's main Circus formation and sat
on top of the flying slum. Clouds soon forced the planes to space out,
but Hugh Roper and Vic Olliffe remained close together. They had flown
the whole mission tight as a team of aerobats. Russell Longnecker was
not as confident as they. As they entered a cloud top he would hold on
Roper until the lead ship became invisible, then make a fifteen-degree
turn away from him, hold it for a half minute, and resume the original
heading. When they got out of the cloud Longnecker would slide Thundermug
back on Roper's wing. "We passed through a lot of clouds," said Longnecker,
"then I came out of one and glanced to the right for Roper and Olliffe.
They were not there. I never saw them again."

 

 

Below them, men in the main formation saw two B-24's falling out of the
cloud. A tail turret fell separately. After surviving Ploesti, the good
comrades, Roper and Olliffe, were lost in a banal cloud collision. But the
great adventure was not over for three sergeants in Let 'Er Rip. Harold
Murray had seen the badly damaged Exterminator floating in on top of
them, and the collision cut off her tail. "We broke away and went into
a steep dive," said Murray. "In the fuselage we hardly knew what was
happening. It was full of red dust 'and floating ammo boxes. We could
scarcely move because of the force of the dive."

 

 

Exterminator crashed, killing everyone on board. Let 'Er Rip grazed a
mountaintop and went into a flatter glide. Koen snapped on his chest chute
and went out the window amidst falling debris. Gunners Edgar J. Pearson,
Eugene Engdahl and Murray followed him. Pearson's parachute collapsed
and he died in the fall. The other three parachutists landed alive,
not far from the burning wreckage of their plane. Bulgarian border
police trussed their arms behind their backs and took them to a field
into which peasants were bringing bodies and paraphernalia from the
crash. The sergeants were unable to identify the bodies. They were
marched 25 miles to the nearest road.

 

 

After the cloud collision the orphaned Thundermug continued on alone.
Her pilots, Longnecker and Jones, glimpsed ships far ahead. Longnecker
said, "Deacon, if we pour it on to catch up with them, we might not
have the gas to get home." Jones said, "I'm for saving gas, even if
we have to fly it alone, Russ. We haven't been hit. There's plenty of
ammo." Longnecker called on navigator Stanley Valcik to give a heading
and prediction on a landfall at Benghazi. The navigator handed him a
chart and said, "Just follow this course exactly and it'll take us to
Benghazi." With that Valcik sat down on the flight deck, yawned, and
opened a magazine. In this relaxed atmosphere the gunners came forward
to tell the pilots how it had gone with them. Pinson, the top turret
man, said, "There I was with the guns turned to the rear, expecting
to get shot any minute. There was a crash behind my head. I wheeled
around. The plexiglass was cracked and covered with blood. I thought,
'Boy, I've had it!' I felt the back of my head. It was still there. Then
I saw feathers in the blood. A bird had crashed into the turret."

 

 

Longnecker now had time to return to his main worry -- whether he
could hold his new first pilot's job. Yesterday the CO had told him,
"Any pilot who fails to keep tight formation on this mission will
be a co-pilot the day after tomorrow." "Now," reflected Longnecker,
"I have my big opportunity to prove I can handle a plane of my own,
and here I am all alone and probably going to get in much later than
the others. That is, if I make it at all."

 

 

Pilot Kenton D. McFarland, a 31-mission veteran of the Circus, was trying
to bring Liberty Lad home with a No. 3 engine "sick" from a flak hit.
He called his flight engineer, John J. Hayes: "The wing tanks ought to be
plenty low. Let's begin transferring gas from the bomb bay tanks." Hayes
reported, "I can't pump into Number One or Number Two. The fuel lines
are cut or clogged."

 

 

McFarland was confronted with the imminent failure of two engines,
both on the same side, On the other wing, No. 3 was in bad shape.
He wondered whether to turn back while he still had power, and bail out to
become a POW, or take a chance and continue out over the Mediterranean,
where bailing out was usually fatal. He decided he did not want to be
a prisoner of war. He would try to make it to base.

 

 

McFarland's reasoning was bolstered by the presence beside him of the
pilot with the most combat experience of any man in the air at the battle
of Ploesti, Flight Officer Henry A. Podgurski, an American transferee
from the Royal Canadian Air Forces. Podgurski had flown 127 raids with
the R.C.A.F. He did not like the Liberator because the book said you
should not try to fly it upside down.

 

 

The No. 1 engine in Liberty Lad sputtered out. Podgurski feathered it
and he and McFarland pressed more heavily on the left rudder pedals to
hold on course. The distorted rudder position dragged Liberty Lad out
of the formation into a slow and steady descent. The pilots dared not
waggle their wings to signal distress lest they lose airworthiness.
They watched the formation disappear ahead.

 

 

Fifteen minutes later No. 2 engine went dry and out. McFarland and
Podgurski stiffened their legs on the left rudders to keep the ship
in the air and pushed the throttle on the two remaining left-wing
engines. They were alone at sea, 500 miles from base. Liberty Lad kept
on sinking. All the pull was on the left side, and to counteract that,
the twin tail rudders were swung left twenty degrees, as far as they
would go, and held there only by the pilots' constant pedal pressure.
If McFarland and Podgurski eased off their strained legs for an instant,
Liberty Lad would twist sharply right on the live side. If she should
fall off on the dead side just a fraction too much, airworthiness would
vanish and the plane would fall into the Mediterranean.