Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (39 page)

 

 

It was Norman Appold over Ploesti again, not to bomb, but to take radar
photos from 24,000 feet in a lone special Liberator, the APS-15, out
of Italy. He was making radar plots of the refineries to use later for
high-altitude bombing through clouds. While Appold flew back and forth,
methodically bounding the city, Colonel Woldenga sent three M-110's into
their own flak to destroy the impudent B-24. Appold spent an hour over
the deadly target, eluding the night fighters, and completed his maps
before he put his nose down and dived out of the mess.

 

 

One day Captain Taylor ordered all the POW's to smarten up and make a
formation in the officers' compound, where the sergeants were admitted on
special occasions. Six limousines entered the gate, and two small figures,
surrounded by a swarm of pluguglies in long leather coats, approached
the men. Dictator Antonescu and his wife were calling. The general walked
down the ranks asking if anyone had any complaints. Douglas Collins gave
him an exaggerated salute and said, "Why aren't the other ranks permitted
contact with the officers? We're all in the same camp." Antonescu said,
"I will look into the matter." Soon afterward the barriers between the
two compounds were removed.

 

 

Collins had made the dictator an unwitting accomplice of the new escape
operation he was planning. In the officers' camp there was a lot of
Romanian money, and Caminada and Johnson were secreting an ample stock
of compasses and maps. The four British Vanishers were now reunited and
could start a full-scale escape academy of officers and men.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Skyward in air a sudden muffled
sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in
space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a
living, fierce, gyrating wheel . . .
-- Walt Whitman, "The Dalliance of the Eagles," 1881

 

 

 

 

15 THE HIGH ROAD TO PLOESTI

 

 

During the long peace after Tidal Wave, General Gerstenberg obtained
more guns, more radar, and thousands of smoke generators to conceal the
refineries. He barely held his fighter strength, but his antiaircraft
became the heaviest concentration in the world. The build-up in Romania
was matched by the swelling power of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force.
The Fifteenth U.S.A.A.F. in Italy was stacking up hundreds of gleaming
Liberators and Fortresses with new smartly trained crews. Officer
discipline was improved; gone was the individualist of the Libyan
period. The new leaders were formation keepers, and they carried bigger
bombs that exploded more often than those carried on Tidal Wave.

 

 

Norman Appold, who had rehearsed them to cope with fighter attacks,
attended a briefing, on 4 April 1944 in which the new men faced the
opening stroke of the final offensive on Romanian oil. He offered to
check out the gunners as they left for the real thing. "Today we have
complete radio silence," said Appold. "You will not hear me announcing
attacks. I'm going in without warning. So, all you flexible gunners and
turret gunners -- on your toes!"

 

 

As 230 four-engined bombers assembled in the sky, little Bon-Bon darted
through, stitching them up tight. The silvery school set out across the
Adriatic for the second round with Alfred Gerstenberg. Appold waggled
his wings for bon voyage, and dropped back to Bari. The bomber force
carried a blizzard of metalized paper strips to confuse the German radar.

 

 

The force bombed Bucharest. In one of the target areas, the railway
marshaling yards, there happened to be several trainloads of Romanian
refugees from the east. Many were killed and wounded. At Timisul,
peasants shook their fists at the Tidal Wave men behind the wire.
The ugly atmosphere was offset, however, by the arrival of a new camp
commandant, a plump, affable colonel named Saulescu, who was openly an
Allied sympathizer. At each new setback for Hitler he brought a case of
champagne to the American officers and joined them in toasting Allied
victory. Their eyes popped when the colonel brought his daughter,
Carma, to the compound. She was a beautiful twenty-two-year-old who
spoke excellent English. A sergeant cut out the officers and won the
maiden's favor.

 

 

Carma and her mother made pastries and sweets and gave them to the POW's.
To the canteen directors, Minnie the Moocher and Red the Thief,
interfering with Romanian business enterprise was worse than fraternizing
with the enemy. They began pulling strings to remove Colonel Saulescu
and his shocking womenfolk.

 

 

The second high-level raid struck Brasov. The POW'S could see smoke
rising from a target set aflame by two hundred bombers. As yet Ploesti
had not been hit. However, when the sirens sounded there, the citizens
of the shelterless city no longer yawned. Thousands of shrewd ones ran
east to the Romana Americana refinery area, in the conceit that the
American bombers would deliberately spare the U.S.-built plant.

 

 

The spring thaw was working in the earth and escape weather was returning.
Caminada, Johnson, Gukovsky and three Americans, including Lawrence
Lancashire, holed the floor of the officers' hotel and started a short
shaft under the wire. A Romanian sergeant unexpectedly walked in and
caught Lancashire in the hole. The men were sent to Slobozia. There the
prisoner in the next room was a Russian girl paratrooper named Antonina,
who had just spent ten days stooped in the punishment box, where one
could not sit or stand. Through the barbed wire on an adjoining veranda
she relayed their messages to Russian officers in the cubicle on the
other side of hers. The Russian men sent the Americans bits of food and
tobacco by Antonina's hands. Two more Russian girl soldiers moved in
with her and the Timisul men heard some sort of machine running in their
cell. One morning the girls came out on the veranda transformed. Gone
were their uniforms and boots. They had scrounged a sewing machine and
cloth and made themselves pretty frocks.

 

 

Early in May 1944 the long-awaited high-level offensive on Ploesti began,
with 485 Liberators and Flying Fortresses smashing at the refineries
and railway yards. It was well-executed bombing. Few civilians were
harmed. Romanians took the Tidal Wave men back into favor. Nineteen
U.S. bombers were shot down, but none of the parachutists were brought
to Timisul. They were incarcerated in Bucharest.

 

 

A few days afterward the Fifteenth Air Force went in force to Wiener
Neustadt to bomb the Daimler-Messerschmitt factories. The lead Flying
Fortress of the 97th Bomb Group took a direct flak hit over the target
and exploded in the air. No parachutes were seen to open. The pilot was
Colonel Jacob E. Smart, the principal planner of Tidal Wave. His loss
was immediately classified top secret. In high Allied military circles it
laid an icy finger on many hearts. Smart was privy to world-wide Allied
strategy and capabilities, and he knew the biggest secret of the war --
that a nuclear chain reaction had been achieved and the Allies were
building an atomic bomb.

 

 

If Smart had somehow survived the mid-air explosion -- well, no sensible
person undervalued the talking inducements of Gestapo torture. Washington
made no public or private announcement that he was missing. A month later,
in an exchange of crippled prisoners of war, an American airman came home
from Austria with grave news. He had seen Colonel Smart alive in a German
hospital.

 

 

 

 

In mid-May the Italian-based bombers hit Bucharest three times in one day.
Soon they came to Ploesti again. The lead bombardier was Boyden Supiano,
who had been wounded over the target on Tidal Wave. After the raid Colonel
Saulescu shook hands with the Timisul men and gave them permission to
walk outside the compound for an hour a day. It proved to be his last
fraternization. He was replaced by a tough major named Matiescu, who
put a stop to Saulescu's coddling policies.

 

 

Captain Wallace Taylor, the POW commandant, sent for the British Vanishers
and said, "If you are planning another escape, I'd like to offer some
suggestions. We are now in touch with friends on the outside. They want
three of us to escape, including a radio operator. You will be taken
to a secure post in the mountains, where Romanians will bring the men
being shot down on these high-level jobs." Collins said, "We'll think
it over, sir."

 

 

Back in their billet, he said to Lancaster, "That's an odd request.
Why do they want POW's to run the show, when parachute agents would
be better? Maybe it's a blind and he has something else for us to
do when we get out." Lancaster said, "I've got the radioman. Did you
know Huntley was a radio operator in the Canadian Army?" Collins said,
"Fair enough. I'd go anywhere with old Limey." Lancaster reached under
his mattress and said, "Feast your eyes on this." It was a pair of wire
cutters. "Pinched 'em off the camp electrician," he explained. They
gathered up Huntley and went back to see Captain Taylor, who gave them
the pseudonym of his underground contact in a village near the camp.

 

 

The new effort was to be a breakout through the wire from a privy a few
yards away. There were two sentry boxes near the spot, but the British
Vanishers intended to leave on a rainy night when the guards would be
taking shelter in them. Sergeant Garrett was in charge of the inside
arrangements. He had discovered how to short-circuit the lights and put
the camp in darkness. When Collins attacked the wire, Garrett would blow
the lights and the rest of the men would start yelling and singing in
the barracks. Some of them would be lookouts, to warn the escape party
of movements of guards during the uproar. The lookouts could yell in
plain English, which none of the sentries understood.

 

 

On the first rainy afternoon Collins set the break for dusk, and Garrett
extinguished the lights at 1845. While his two companions sheltered in
the privy, Collins dashed to the inner strand of barbed wire and began
snipping. The sound of the shears was muffled by the rain. He had to cut
through the inner double strand, a thick entanglement between it and the
outer wire, and go through four strands there before Lancaster and Huntley
could leave the privy and join him in the bolt for freedom. The camp guards
were confused by the darkness and the howling in the barracks and did not
spot Collins laboring in the open. He passed through the entanglement
and cut three of the outside wires. As he was attacking the last strand
a lookout yelled, "Keep quiet. The guard is moving up on you."

 

 

The sentry passed ten feet from Collins without seeing the silent,
unmoving escaper. Lancaster called, "Pull back, Doug. The lights are
going on any second and they're beginning a roll call in the main
barrack." Collins kept his head. He did not run for the barrack to get
there before the roll call. That would leave the gap in the wire, followed
by a major Romanian offensive to get the wire cutter. Methodically he
began twisting the severed wires together again, thinking, "There's some
compensation in getting your brains blown out on the way out of prison,
but I'm going to look funny if they pot me while I'm trying to get back
in." Praying the blackout would hold, he backed out, hooking up the
wires. When the lights went on in the barracks and the roll call began,
Collins was there, standing at rigid attention, panting somewhat.

 

 

The rain continued next day and the Romanians did not discover Collins'
wire hookup. In the evening the three escapers took positions as before,
and the lights went out. Collins parted the wires and was cutting the
last one when a voice called, "Come back, Doug! The guard is on top of
Ted and Limey and they can't make it out of the can." Collins decided
he was too far out to return, and there was not enough time to replace
the wires. He cut the last wire and took off alone. The decision was
sound. A moment later the floodlights came on and machine guns began
spraying the gap in the fence.

 

 

Collins prowled into a back yard in the underground man's village.
The populace was outdoors, talking about the prisoner's escape. Entering
the village would endanger both himself and the contact man. Collins
departed north through the rainy forests.

 

 

He was caught near Brasov six days later. "It was a sad sort of balls-up,"
said he, "but we had showed willing." He told his interrogators that
he was an American Air Force officer shot down a few days before, a
ruse designed to get himself sent to Bucharest to join the high-level
prisoners. He figured his chances for the next escape were better in
Bucharest. The tale was going over well when Major Matiescu arrived from
Timisul and claimed his runaway. He dragged Collins back to the camp and
turned him over to the guards for a thorough beating. Admiral Doorman
and Captain Taylor vigorously protested, and Matiescu gave Collins a
week in isolation, after which he would be sent to the Slobozia punishment
camp for a month.

 

 

 

 

The sixth of June the POW's saw a strange and exciting new type of plane
in the battle sky, a fork-tailed speedster that flew big arcs around the
Messerschmitts. The twin-engine Lightning (P-38) had entered the Ploesti
campaign. The new American fighter-bomber was now escorting the heavies
all the way, and it sometimes swooped down and strafed the refineries.

 

 

As the offensive grew in power and intensity, Gerstenberg sent Colonel
Woldenga to Belgrade to manage fighter interception on the bomber streams
going to and fro. The lethal game wore on -- bombers up from Italy,
fighters up from the Balkans, flak most of the way. The adversaries got
to know each other. As they attacked, German pilots radiophoned greetings
to U.S. commanders by name. The Ploesti campaign became gladiatorial. The
contesting airmen felt a queer sort of comradeship, like slaves of a mad
emperor sent forth in the accursed arena to slay each other with swords
versus nets and tridents.