Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (4 page)

 

 

 

 

Thirty-seven Ploesti men were still interned in Turkey in a modern hotel
on Attaturk Boulevard, the main street of Ankara. They were paroled from
morning to midnight, dined in the best restaurants, drew full pay from
the U.S. military attaché, and enjoyed romantic flutters. A gunner lost
his head over an exquisite German refugee girl and mooned to his pilot,
"I'd marry her grandmother just to get in the family." The fliers became
acquainted with thirty interned Soviet pilots who taught them to play
chess. Navigator Harold ("Red") Wicklund was a superb swimmer and worked
out daily in a pool, beating Turkish natatorial champions with such
sprints as fifty meters in 25 seconds.

 

 

On the Fourth of July the internees dined with American Ambassador
Laurence Steinhardt at the embassy. Over cigars they heard a news
broadcast: "Today United States Air Force crews penetrated Europe for
the first time. In a joint raid with the R.A.F. to Holland . . ." *
The Ploesti men looked at each other in amazement and the ambassador
sent an aide to find out what the broadcast was all about. A dozen
R.A.F. Bostons, six carrying uniformed U.S.A.A.F. crews, had flown a
propaganda sortie from England on the American national holiday. The
Halpro men, who had bombed Europe three weeks before, were hurt and
puzzled. Five weeks later they were upset by a broadcast announcing that
"for the first time U.S. Air Force heavy bombers have attacked targets
in Europe." This was a mission of twelve British-based Flying Fortresses
to Rouen, France. The Halpro men had beaten them by two months, and had
gone far deeper into Europe with one more plane.

 

 

* An error taken up in later official histories. See the Army Air
Forces,
Target: Germany
(Simon and Schuster, 1943), p. 28, on
the 4 July 1942 raid: "for the first time in World War II American
airmen . . . fly American built bombers against the Germans."

 

 

The Turkish internees did not slump into the comfortable life. They wanted
back in the fight. Charles Davis met a Turk who offered to further this
ambition. On certain nights, after the day's parole was over, Davis
let pairs of airmen out of his hotel window on a knotted rope, into a
courtyard, from which the Turkish friend put them on the Taurus Express
for Allied Syria. In order not to embarrass Turkish border controls, the
escapees detrained short of the boundary and were escorted across it on
foot by another anonymous friend. Three who escaped in this fashion --
Red Wicklund, Lieutenant William Zimmerman and Sergeant John E. O'Conner
-- were destined to fly to Ploesti again on a terrible raid.

 

 

Pilot Eugene L. Ziesel often took his crew to Ankara airport to see that
the new owners of his Liberator were treating her well. Turkish airmen
gathered around Ziesel for lectures on the prodigious contrivance. Ziesel
said, "I'm worried about the engines. They'll deteriorate unless they
get regular warm-ups. And it helps to keep a little gas in the tanks
or they got raunchy." The Turks rationed out gas for Ziesel's frequent
warm-ups. The day after Christmas Ziesel's flight engineer said, "I think
we got enough." Ziesel took off and landed on Cyprus with one engine. The
Turkish Government protested the theft, and the United States solemnly
returned the airplane sans crew. Ziesel and two fellow escapees were
killed over Naples a week later.

 

 

The Turks asked some of the internees to teach Turkish pilots to handle
the Liberator. It was inevitable that, during one of the early lessons,
a monster flying machine buzzed Ankara from end to end, panicking people
in the streets.

 

 

During the winter Charles Davis continued to mete out prisoners on the
knotted rope until the Turkish Government tired of the charade and offered
Britain, Germany, the U.S.S.R. and the United States a clearance sale
of second-hand fliers. By April they were all back with their commands,
except the Russians, whose government would not treat for them. They
continued to play chess in their hotel on Attaturk Boulevard.

 

 

The Halpro men came back to Egypt and found the power of the Liberators
growing. Big plans for the adolescent force were shaping in Washington,
where the Joint Statistical Survey, a group of elderly sages who reported
to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was talking of Ploesti as "the most decisive
objective of the war." The Statistical Survey had studied enemy economics
and all known industrial targets whose destruction would hurt Hitler
most. Ploesti was number one.

 

 

Denying oil to Hitler satisfied the Second Law of Strategy: to deprive
the foe of, or seize from him, the means of making war. It also conformed
to Frederick the Great's maxim, the Strategy of Accessories: When a
belligerent is unable to engage the main armies of his adversary, he
sends expeditions to destroy his communications and storehouses. It was
secondary, alternative thinking, but that was all that seemed possible
to the beleaguered free world at this period of the war. Another mission
to the deepest target, even more daring than Halpro, was in the making.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is an approved maxim of war never to do what the enemy wishes
you to do.
-- Napoleon

 

 

2 PLOESTI: THE TAPROOT OF GERMAN MIGHT

 

 

Ploesti was an oil boom city at the foot of the Transylvanian Alps,
35 miles north of Bucharest. Frequent showers account for its name,
which means "rainy town." Its 100,000 inhabitants lived far better than
the average lot of Romanians -- in acacia-shaded white villas with Roman
atriums, along colonnaded streeets redolent with lilacs and roses. The
Arcadian city was incongruously fenced by the source of its prosperity
-- the smoking stacks, cracking towers, pumping stations, tank farms
and noisy rail yards of eleven huge modern refineries, Romania's main
economic asset, providing 40 percent of her exports.

 

 

Ploesti (plô-yësht') was the first place in the world to refine
commercially the black blood of contemporary industrialism. That
was in 1857, two years before the petroleum strike at Titusville,
Pennsylvania. Within a half century the automobile arrived with its
croaking petrophilia, and British, French, Italian and Dutch capital
and technology came to Ploesti. By 1914 Ploesti was coveted as an
essential of machine warfare. In 1916 the Germans invaded Romania, and
British engineers dynamited the refineries. It was a trifling setback to
the city; the postwar motor car, Diesel ship and airplane drank vastly
greater draughts of oil, and Western companies were ready to build bigger
production capacity.

 

 

The country was ruled by one who knew how to cope with oilmen, Queen
Marie, née the Princess of Edinburgh, granddaughter of Queen Victoria,
out of the Russian ruling house of Romanoff on her father's side. She
was a tall, provocative, blue-eyed blonde with long mascaraed eyelashes,
who swayed about in a wardrobe of
violette-cardinale
. In 1920 she was
forty-five years old, but she had a sexual magnetism that lasted until
she was an old woman. Marie was all dealer and tough as a Tartar. While
English and American vulgar journals doted on her regal progresses abroad
and her romantic indiscretions, Queen Marie was striking hard bargains
for Ploesti.

 

 

At the Versailles peace conference and during the amputation of Romanoff
territory in the Russian civil war she got Bessarabia and part of Bukovina
from Russia, Transylvania from Hungary, and Dobruja from Bulgaria,
doubling the size of her country. She called this polyglot jailbouse of
nationalities Greater Romania.

 

 

Marie died in 1938, leaving orders that black was not to be used in
mourning her. Bucharest was draped in a non-oily shade of mauve.
As the cortege passed, Adolf Hitler was peering over the mountains at
Ploesti, which Marie had left to her errant, cork-popping son, Carol
II. The refineries produced ten million tons of oil annually, including
90-octane aviation fuel, the highest quality in Europe. Hitler's problem
was novel for him. The refineries could not be taken by the usual Nazi
smash-and-grab method. They were vulnerable to aerial attack and to
sabotage by resident British, French and American engineers. He needed
undisturbed production.

 

 

Instead of dive bombers, Hitler used a fifth column, the Legion of the
Archangel Michael for the Christian and Racial Renovation of Romania --
or the Iron Guard -- a fascist outfit covered with the blood of civilized
politicians and teachers. Romania's 5 percent Jewish population, which
after centuries had won civil equality, was subjected to window-smashings,
pillage and assault. The German ambassador to Romania, Baron Manfred
von Buch-Killinger, purchased the Iron Guard and its leader, General
Ion Antonescu, a small, pinch-nosed Transylvanian graduate of French
military schools who first came to notice in 1919 as the captain of a
band that looted shops, homes and hospitals in Bucharest.

 

 

Britain and France met Hitler's gambit with a staggering sum paid into
King Carol's privy purse for a mutual-assistance treaty guaranteeing
military aid for Romania and containing a secret clause providing that,
if Hitler tried to seize the refineries, Allied technicians might
destroy them.

 

 

In June 1940 Hitler drew a lucky down card in the Ploesti game. During
the fall of Paris a German column stopped one of the last trains leaving
for Bordeaux and captured archives of the Deuxième Bureau, the French
counterintelligence agency. They contained the technicians' plans for
sabotaging the Romanian refineries. The next night Antonescu's gunmen
moved down the leafy streets of Ploesti taking Allied oilmen from their
villas to Iron Guard torture rooms. An American named Freeman was among
the 35 men kidnapped. Shortly afterward Antonescu became prime minister of
Romania. He appealed to Hitler for military aid. Der Führer's conditions
were the expulsion of "foreign" oil interests and German occupation of
strategic military positions in Romania. Antonescu accepted.

 

 

The German military assistance group arrived in Bucharest to take over
control. Its chief was a short, little-known forty-eight-year-old colonel
with red hair and an equable and scholarly air. Alfred Gerstenberg was
born on the Polish border and was imbued from childhood with German
xenophobia. Originally a cavalryman, Gerstenberg became an aviator
and flew with Hermann Goering in the First World War. When Germany was
forever denied an air force in the Treaty of Versailles, the Soviets
afforded her clandestine air training at Lipetsk, 230 miles southeast of
Moscow. Gerstenberg was among a secret group of German officer-instructors
who formally resigned their Reichswehr commissions in 1926 and went to
the U.S.S.R. as members of the Red Army. Gerstenberg reported to Marshal
Klimenti Voroshilov and remained in the Soviet until Hitler took power and
Stalin broke off the arrangement. Back in Germany, Gerstenberg resumed
his military commission but remained aloof from the Hitlerites. He was
not a member of the National Socialist Party and refused to wear the
swastika on his uniform.

 

 

In Romania, Gerstenberg was nominally air attaché to the embassy in
Bucharest, a modest pose which disguised his actual role as the executor
of German military designs in the Balkans. He was diplomatic, far-sighted,
realistic, and, as much as he stood apart from the actual party machinery,
was willing to accept responsibility for
Südostraum
, the Nazi concept
of a Balkan empire. Gerstenberg was a bachelor, a connoisseur of books
and paintings, and a host whose dinner invitations were soon coveted by
Bucharest society. General Otto Dessloch, who served with him, said,
"He was a dedicated man. To better fulfill his duties he learned to
speak Polish, Russian and Romanian. He worked sixteen hours a day
with one goal in mind -- to make Ploesti too costly for the enemy to
attack." Thus, a full year before the United States entered the war an
exceptionally able and resolute Protector was placed in charge of the
Romanian refineries. Indeed, in the person of the genial and adroit air
attaché there had come the actual war-time ruler of Romania.

 

 

Romanian nonbelligerence was Hitler's strongest shield for undisturbed oil
production. The Germans consolidated control by forming the Kontinentale
Oil Company, "nationalizing" the Allied-owned refineries and staffing them
with German technicians, setting up new boards of directors consisting of
pliant Romanian politicians and lawyers. This done, Gerstenberg turned
to a more serious endeavor, that of squeezing men, guns and planes
out of Goering to defend Ploesti. He bent his powers of persuasian and
scare propaganda on Berlin rather than Bucharest, which he dominated with
unobtrusive art. Gerstenberg thought little of the Antonescu mob. Romanian
fratricide served only to strengthen German rule. One night the Iron Guard
murdered 64 politicians of the Liberal party -- leaving fewer patriots
to annoy him. A few months later, however, Antonescu's crazed domestic
fascists gave Gerstenberg a start by rising against their own leader for
"selling out to the German!" Antonescu, however, controlled the Romanian
Army and squelched the berserkers with 6,000 deaths. It gave Gerstenberg
a period of domestic tranquillity in which to carry on his preparations.

 

 

For Romania the result of Antonescu's embrace of Hitler's protection was
immediate national humiliation. Other willing Nazi satellites waited
until 1945 for territorial disgorgement, but Romania was partitioned
immediately. Soviet Russia, accepting Antonescu's word that he was too
weak to protect the country, and not herself at war with Germany, served
an ultimatum for the return of Bessarabia and Bukovina and got them back
next day. Whereupon Antonescu's Axis neighbors, Bulgaria and Hungary,
twisted his arm and regained southern Dobruja and most of Transylvania,
respectively. Queen Marie's Greater Romania vanished overnight. Soon
King Carol II was in flight to Switzerland with Iron Guard assassins
at his heels, and his seventeen-year-old son, Michael, was placed on a
powerless throne.