Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (33 page)

 

 

With brakes gone, Liberty Lad hit hard and bounced into an uncontrollable
run. The ship coasted more than a mile before it stopped, sixteen hours
after take-off, completing one of the most extraordinary flights in
aviation history. McFarland's bombardier, Master Sergeant Robert W. Slade,
grasped his hand and cried, "Landing this heap was really something! And,
man, the way you dodged those balloon cables over the target!" McFarland
said, "What balloon cables? I never saw any." The pilots' legs gave way,
and they were in bed several days suffering exhaustion.

 

 

During the night Joseph Tate's neighbors were awakened by yells from his
tent. He was stumbling around in his sleep, ripping up mosquito netting
and underwear, crying, "Bandages! Tourniquets! Take care of these men!"

 

 

 

 

A fortnight after the mission, the Ninth Air Force closed the casualty
books on Tidal Wave and President Roosevelt gave the figures to Congress,
saying that the losses may have seemed disastrously high, "but I am certain
that the German or Japanese High Commands would cheerfully sacrifice tens
of thousands of men to do the same amount of damage to us, if they could."

 

 

The price was 53 Liberators, including eight interned in Turkey.
Twenty-three ships reached Allied bases on Cyprus, Sicily and Malta.
Eighty-eight returned to Benghazi, including 55 with battle damage.

 

 

The official report said that 446 airmen were killed or missing, 79 were
interned in Turkey, and 54 were wounded.

 

 

At least one writer about Tidal Wave has alleged that the official
War Department casualties were minimized. The authors of this book,
on the basis of research among survivors, checked against "201" files
(the individual war records), found that 310 Americans were killed on
Tidal Wave, about one in five of the approximately 1,620 men who attained
the target area, including those lost on the Nespor-Riley take-off crash
and in Wingo-Wango's fall at Corfu.

 

 

However, many more than 54 men were wounded. The official report; coming
on 17 August, accounted for only the injured who had returned to Allied
or neutral bases. There were 70 more wounded in Romanian captivity,
whose condition was not then known, and a half dozen in Bulgarian hands,
making a total of 130.

 

 

Although the casualties were far lower than General Ent had feared,
he had lost the services of 579 effectives, plus 300 "retired" airmen,
who now had to be actually retired. The day after Tidal Wave he had
little more than half his men left and only 33 Liberators fit to fly,
out of the 178 he had dispatched to Ploesti. Killer Kane returned from
Cyprus that day and found 17 B-24's listed on the Pyramider strength,
but only three were in condition for a mission.

 

 

Tidal Wave was the end of the Ninth Air Force as a heavy bomber command,
although it participated minimally in several more joint raids with the
Twelfth Air Force, out of Tunisia. The Circus, Eight Ball and Scorpion
survivors flew back to their nests in England, and the desert rats and
their pink ships were absorbed into the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy,
where preparations were under way for a gigantic and prolonged bombing
campaign against Gerstenberg's fortress. As Sir Charles Portal had
guessed, the Protector was building up a greater furniture of arms to
meet it.

 

 

With a clatter of mimeograph machines, the Ninth Air Force, General
Brereton and his staff, were transmogrifled into a British-based
fighter-bomber and infantry support command for the coming invasion
of France.

 

 

Meanwhile, 108 Tidal Wave men were alive in Romania, entering one of the
most extraordinary experiences that befell captured soldiers in World
War II.

 

 

 

 

 

13 BLACK SUNDAY

 

 

When the Liberators left Ploesti they had altered a landscape and begun
the transformation of a people. Around the Wallachian plain they left
pillars of smoke, the epitaphs of aircraft and men, of refineries and tank
farms. In the ripe fields they left smudges of burned haycocks and wheat
stooks and long skid smears of planes, like those of insects squashed
on a windshield. The hot ground guns were still, but the battle tympanum
was pounding to a crescendo of delayed explosions in the refineries.

 

 

In
der Mordkessel
(the cauldron of death), from Campina to the Danube,
the dead and wounded lay. The fields and woods abounded with hunting
parties of soldiery, litter bearers and sightseers. On the roads to
Ploesti marched battalions of slave laborers, the Russian
corvée
,
to begin salvage and reconstruction. A hundred Americans were dying
and another hundred, staggering with pain, with red-blind eyes from the
shock of crashes and parachute falls -- many to be deaf for days from
the overwhelming sound of battle -- were dispersing from the wrecks in
the hope of getting away.

 

 

The first one to touch Romanian soil, Jack Warner, out of Enoch Porter's
Euroclydon, awakened in a shallow creek with a shattered collarbone, and
ladled water over his burns with his good hand. German soldiers hauled
him out, stripped him "naked as a jay bird," and marched him away. Farm
women and children pointed to Warner and shrieked, "Amerikani!" The
Germans took him to a room full of injured comrades, lying on parachute
packs and moaning for water. Warner heard a voice say in broken English,
"Put those in the dead corner." He fainted into sleep and awakened in
a hospital ward of wounded Germans. One, with a fifty-caliber shell
through his neck, gave Warner a cigaret. Two Germans died and their
beds were taken by more wounded, one of whom yelled at the American,
"Get up, you gangster! I'll wipe the floor with you." The German tried
to get out of bed and fell back dead.

 

 

The young flak gunner, Erich Hanfland, got down from the hot seat of his
20-mm. battery. He had passed 1,450 rounds through the gun and burned out
two barrels while shooting down two bombers. Battery Sergeant Bichler
threatened to punish him for ruining the gun. Hanfland took off across
the fields to see the wrecks of the B-24's he had destroyed. He came
upon a tall, thin American in a leather flying jacket, who was badly
burned. The American said to him in "perfect" German, "What is the
damage to the refineries? You know, I worked here in Ploesti before the
war." Hanfland took his escape kit and began examining the curiosities
inside. The American said, "Give me back the gold piece. I can use
it." Hanfland returned it. Sergeant Bichler arrived and pummeled the
American. Hanfland cried to his sergeant, "You hate yourself! You hate
life!" Bichler turned from the airman and said to the young gunner, "That
finishes you, Hanfland." * The thin American who spoke perfect German
and claimed to have worked at Ploesti was taken off to the hospital. **

 

 

* Hanfland was sent to Germany and punished with parachute training.
That autumn he was dropped behind Allied lines in Italy and
was captured unhurt by Americans. Battery Sergeant Bichler and
most of Hanfland's Ploesti comrades were killed in Romania the
following year.

 

 

** The authors have not been able to identify this intriguing thin man.
Charles Cavit remembers an American sergeant in the Bucharest
jail who asked the guards to let the pilot go to the toilet.
"The sergeant spoke real good German," said Cavit. "They told us
later that he died from a piece of flak, but some of the boys saw
him in Germany." The latter were eight POW's sent to Frankfurt
for interrogation. One of them remembered a ninth man who spoke
both American and German idiomatically. They had never seen him
before. The ninth man had special privileges, including parole
from the interrogation center, and did not return with them to
Romania. Was he a German spy? If so, he was a very thorough worker
to have himself "badly burned" or struck with flak before taking up
his masquerade. Ninth Air Force Intelligence officers doubt very
much that anyone who had lived in Ploesti flew the great mission;
Tidal Wave planners had scoured Britain and the United States
for people with prewar experience there, and it is unlikely that
they would have overlooked one on the air bases. Was the thin man
a defector? Did he invent a story for Hanfland about working in
Ploesti, thinking it would get him preferred treatment, or even
a trip to Germany?

 

 

Elmer Reinhart, the last man to jump from his failing Liberator, was
alone in a cornfield eighty miles southwest of Ploesti. He fitted his
compass buttons together and set off along a creek, on the theory that it
emptied into the Danube. His escape instructions favored two routes out
of Romania. If the downed man was loose considerably west of the target,
he was to search for Yugoslav partisan areas. If he was too deep inside
Romania, as was the case with Reinhart, the breezy advice was to "hop
a log or a raft across the Danube" and "jump" a Turkish ship at Constanta.

 

 

Reinhart trekked along the creek all afternoon, avoiding people. Toward
evening he saw an elderly shepherd on a hilltop and decided to take a
chance on him. The old man gazed at Reinhart with frightened eyes. The
pilot pantomimed that he was unarmed and handed over his pocket knife.
This won a timid smile. Reinhart gave him a dollar bill. The shepherd
studied George Washington's portrait and cried, "President Roosevelt!"
He led Reinhart to his cottage, left him there, and returned with
policemen. The populace followed Reinhart to a dirt-floored village jail
and gave him cheese, bread and melons.

 

 

The reception turned ugly. A Romanian officer arrived, chained Reinhart's
hands and feet, and threw him into a horse cart. The pilot was delivered
to a town police station, where a man questioned him in English. On a
desk Reinhart saw a hunting knife and pistol belonging to his co-pilot
Charles L. Starr. The interrogator could not tell him where Starr was.
Reinhart was taken in a 1929 Ford to Slatina, where he met five of his
parachuted sergeants. They had puffed eyes and bruises from beatings
by peasants. "They probably took us for Russians," said Sergeant Alfred
Mash. "Where is Lieutenant Starr?" Reinhart asked. Russell Huntley said,
"We never did hook up with any of the officers. The story is that the
peasants killed Lieutenant Starr. His chute didn't open and they put
him out of his misery."

 

 

Near burning and exploding White Five, the Catholic missioner, Corporal
Ewald Wegener, and a Dr. Kauter worked all Sunday afternoon on a gravely
burned Romanian soldier, who had been brought in naked wrapped in
newspapers. They sent him to the hospital, where, thanks to their early
work, his life was saved. As they removed their wrist watches to scrub
up, the medical men noticed the hour. It was five hours since the bombing.

 

 

"Wegener, there must be many other wounded," said the doctor. They went
seeking them through the smoke and came to a schoolhouse in the city,
where airmen were being carried. In the main hall, upon a straw-littered
floor, lay thirty Americans, burned and broken, naked and dying. Wegener
saw a man with "C" for Catholic on his identification tags and said in
clumsy English, "I am a priest." The airman looked up through his pain
at the sooty enemy, groaned and waved him away. The next man with a "C"
touched the corporal's hand and received the last rites in Latin before
he died. Wegener administered them to several others.

 

 

As Dr. Kauter began organizing the impromptu dressing station, there was
a clatter of boots and snarls; in came Wegener's CO, the Mad Prussian,
yelling,
"Sie sollten umgebracht werden, diese Mörder!"
(These murderers
should be killed.) Corporal Wegener said, "They are only soldiers,
mein Kommandant. They were only doing their duty." The CO shouted,
"You will go to the Russian front!" and clomped out of the schoolhouse.

 

 

Other wounded men were brought to Bucharest in carts and trucks, with
people peering in, the women bursting into tears, seeing in their mind's
eye their young men going to mound graves in Russia. Disaster-followers
thronged the amphitheater of the Queen's Hospital, watching masked
surgeons and their white-robed courtiers perform emergency operations
on the blackened airmen. When the doctors lost Maurice Peterson of
Jersey Bounce, women in a the gallery keened the
doina
, the ancient
Gypsy lament.

 

 

General Gerstenberg sent officers around the collecting points for
American wounded to see that they had proper medical care. Leutnant
Scheiffele found several B-24 crews laid out in a flak battery barracks
and phoned, "Herr General, none of them are conscious. They all have
heavy burns and dreadful wounds. They are beyond help, but the doctors
are administering morphine to ease their last hours." In a field dressing
station, Scheiffele found German medics picking flak splinters from the
heads of a dozen Americans. He reported, "It is hard to believe, Herr
General. They came here without helmets! Most are in severe shock. They
cannot believe what they have experienced. I find it hard to believe
myself. Our soldiers, to the last man, are astonished that anyone would
dare such a low-level attack. They do not understand how anyone could
underestimate our defenses so badly."

 

 

Only a dozen Americans were in condition to be interrogated.
An English-speaking Intelligence officer sat alone in a room and
the fliers were admitted one by one. The officer had orders to be
courteous and not try to force answers. He offered the men cigarets,
but they declined and smoked their own. The airmen gave only the minimum
personal identification required by the Geneva Convention on Prisoners
of War. However, many of them could not help unburdening themselves to
the sympathetic German on the great disillusion of Ploesti: "They told
us before the mission that the flak would never get us if we flew low!"