Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (8 page)

 

 

Geerlings designed a novel route chart -- an accordion folder with
eleven oblique views of landmarks en route to the target. There were
no place names on the folder. They could not be disclosed even to his
printer, the secure R.A.F. Intelligence center at Medmenham. At that
establishment model makers worked on another hush-hush project, scale
models of a nameless valley and an unknown industrial city. The miniature
of Ploesti was so accurate that Group Captain Lewis recognized his former
villa. They finished the models in record time, and an odd pair came with
strange devices, including a child's tricycle, and locked themselves
in the model room. They were the Ploesti avenger, Lord Forbes, and a
Texas-drawling New York newspaperman named John Reagan ("Tex") McCrary,
chief of the Photo & Newsreel Section of the Eighth U.S.A.A.F. They
produced a professional 45-minute sound film to brief the Ploesti ffiers;
this was the first use of movies to prepare men for a single battle. They
also turned out 8-mm. silent films showing how each refinery would look
from the air on a low-level approach and crossing. The camera dolly for
these trucking shots was the child's tricycle. Thus, more than a month
before the mission, the entire briefing panoply was designed for a low
attack, even though General Brereton in Cairo was still supposed to have
the final option between the low road and the high road.

 

 

Brereton was not closely involved with the operational preparations;
they were left to his bomber chief, Brigadier Uzal G. Ent, who had to
find the men and airplanes to do the job. Ent was a small, amiable
Pennsylvania Dutchman with a searching mind and remarkably varied
attainments. A graduate of Susquehanna University and the U.S. Military
Academy, he was a qualified specialist in chemical warfare, engineering,
meteorology, and aerial navigation and piloting. As a navigator in the
National Balloon Race in 1938, Ent won the Distinguished Flying Cross
for landing the bag after his pilot had been killed by lightning.
He had served in diplomatic posts and was an ordained Lutheran minister.
He was married to an ex-Ziegfeld Follies girl.

 

 

Ent was not enthusiastic about a low-level attack; he believed the losses
would be unbearable. He intended to fly to Ploesti himself. Then a
surprising and encouraging omen came, when an adventitious low-level
bombing experiment succeeded beyond all expectation. It began in the
restless, inventive mind of Norman Appold, who had become impatient with
the often ineffective high-level attempts on Rommel's Italian supply
ports. Appold asked his Liberando group commander, K.K. Compton, to let
him try the low road to a particularly resistant target at Messina,
Sicily. The flak there was almost interdictory. The veteran Halpro
lead navigator, Bernard Rang, had recently gone over Messina in a plane
rocking with flak hits, and had parachuted to his death among the bursts.

 

 

When he braced K.K. Compton, Appold had no inkling of the big low-level
mission being planned. Compton was secretly pleased to have a man volunteer
for a vitally needed experiment without knowing why it was important,
and he endorsed Appold's plan to Uzal Ent, who immediately approved.

 

 

Appold's Sicilian objective was a row of ferroconcrete train ferry sheds
protecting Rommel's supply trains from bombing after they were ferried
across the Messina Strait from Italy. Repeated high-level strikes had not
penetrated the roofs. Secretly, after dark on 29 March, Appold led three
Liberando ships to the Luqa fighter strip on Malta, the most forward base
for the novel target route he planned. As the planes were refueled, he
briefed the crews: "We are going around the top of Sicily, keeping under
radar all the way. The Initial Point, where we turn into our bomb run,
may be hard to find. It's just an unmarked spot of water between the
Lipari Islands and Messina. So let's all stick together. The alternate
target is Crotone." This was another familiar and defiant high-level
target, an important chemical and ammunition works on the boot sole of
Italy which had resisted nine high-formation bombings.

 

 

At midnight, Appold's research flight took off from Malta on a night
without moon or stars and settled into a wave-top swing around the west
and north coasts of Sicily, to attack Messina not only at an unexpected
altitude but from the opposite direction of previous missions. Appold's
navigator, Donald O'Dell, called off estimated height above the waves.
Bombardier John B. Hogan crouched on the central spar of the open bomb
bay, looking down at the sea, reporting white chop, which indicated
an altitude of twenty feet -- as low as Appold cared to go. Hogan was
soaked with spray during the all-night sweep over the Tyrrhenian Sea.
A gunner said, "It was just like water skiing."

 

 

The voyage was too much for the other two B-24's, which became separated
from Appold and returned to Africa. At dawn, O'Dell found the Initial
Point and Appold turned south into his bomb run. The pilot saw thick
morning mist in the Strait and announced, "Well, we'll never be able to
see the sheds this morning. What say we go to Crotone?" Appold always
polled his crew on major decisions and they always agreed with his
suggestions. By now the little pilot had an awesome reputation for
attempting the weird and improbable and getting away with it. Appold
banked into a climbing turn for the Italian mainland.

 

 

Ahead, the Calabrian Mountains were covered with low rain-drenched
clouds. O'Dell had no accurate elevation charts. Nonetheless, Appold
undertook to fly the contours of these unknown mountains to keep under
radar and thus give fighters and flak the least opportunity to pot
him. Over hogbacks and peaks at 200 miles an hour, shaving ridges and
planing low in ravines, the solitary Liberator flew. The tail gunner
saw pigs running, chickens being plucked in the prop-wake, and sleepy
farmers coming out of stone huts to look and wave. The B-24 leaped the
last foggy mouiitain and slid into the plain leading to Crotone.

 

 

"There's a fighter base between us and the target," O'Dell warned. Appold
stormed across it at wind-sock level, noting unattended Messerschmitts
and Macchis lying about. O'Dell used the enemy base as a final course
correction, ten miles from Crotone. He and Appold called out terrain
features for Hogan, hunched over his bombsight: "Three chimneys coming
up. . . . Freight train moving across in front of target." Hogan interposed,
"Hey, boss, let me try one on the train." Appold said, "Okay." Hogan dropped
a yellow 500-pound bomb. Although it would not explode for 45 seconds,
the effect of the dead weight was startling. The bomb cracked the train
in two, tossed up cars, burrowed on, curling up rails, and disappeared
in a lumberyard. The tail gunner cried, "Timber going up like toothpicks
and she didn't go off yet!"

 

 

"I want a better line-up, Norm," said the bombardier. "Drop her lower."
Appold jacked the boisterous bomber a few feet deeper. Hogan crashed
the five remaining bombs into the factory. Not one of the fierce flak
guns at Crotone was awake. With the loss of bomb weight Appold went full
throttle, leaped the first smokestacks, and banked away from a higher
150-foot chimney. The bombs burst in a tremendous exhalation. The plant
went up, crumbling and swelling with dust, cordite fumes and vaporized
chemicals. Flames spurted out of the hanging debris.

 

 

Appold said, "Gunners! You want to paste it?" "Yeah, man!" they chorused.
Appold crossed back over an undamaged section and the sergeants shot it up.
Before the antiaircraft guns could go into action the Liberator was speeding
to Benghazi, unscratched.

 

 

Interrogation officers regarded Appold's report as a "snow job."
K.K. Compton sent a photo-reconnaissance plane to Crotone. Its pictures
fully bore out Appold's report. Intelligence estimated, "It will not
be necessary to return to Crotone for some time." One plane at minimum
altitude had accomplished what nine forces at high level had failed to do.

 

 

On the following day K.K. Compton was approached by another masterful
Liberando pilot, a tall, ruddy-complexioned, dark-haired youth named
Brian Woolley Flavelle, from Caldwell, New Jersey. Flavelle didn't open
his mouth much, except when men gathered to harmonize -- then his fine
baritone sounded deep into the desert night. He had interrupted forestry
studies at the University of Oregon to join the Air Force because he
hated fascism. Flavelle proposed to lead three ships on a twilight raid
on Messina to avoid the morning mists that had foiled Appold. Compton
and Ent approved.

 

 

Flavelle took his wave-skimming B-24's into the ferroconcrete train sheds
and "rammed the bombs right down their throats." The planes leaped overtop
into a formation of forty unarmed Junkers 52 transports flying toward them
at tree level. Jerome DuFour, Flavelle's wingman, said, "We decided to fly
straight ahead and the hell with them. With all our guns opened up,
we ploughed right into them. They all scattered, except one who came
at us head-on. We broke him up in the air, and he crashed." Now General
Ent had another successful low-level strike to consider.

 

 

In this brightening atmosphere the Circus, Eight Balls and Sky Scorpions
arrived from England, completing the five heavy bomb groups assigned
to Tidal Wave. Never before had there been gathered a more experienced
group of American airmen. The force commanders were, with one exception,
hardened survivors of the air war. The commander of the mission-leading
Liberandos, K.K. Compton, was a product of the early campaign in the west
under Timberlake, who placed him with Rickenbacker and Lindberg as "a
great instinctive pilot." The second bomb force was to be led by Addison
Baker, Timberlake's heir at the helm of the Traveling Circus. Baker's two
deputies were Colonel George Brown, who had led many high battle boxes
over western Europe, and an equally experienced ex-economics professor
named Ramsay Potts, set to lead a small echelon of his own. Next to
Potts in the battle front would be the largest force, the Pyramiders,
the old established desert firm, led by the salty Killer Kane. Beside
Kane on the simultaneous sweep there would be an efficient group of green
ships, the Eight Balls, led by a man of destiny, Leon Johnson, also an
alumnus of the East Anglian Liberator school. His deputy and leader of
another separate striking force was a cool, tight formation keeper, James
Posey. The remaining force, the inexperienced Sky Scorpions, were led by
Jack Wood, who maintained high technique and discipline among his crews.

 

 

When Colonel Wood arrived in Benghazi, he came up against the reality of
the desert war. He and his officers had to pitch their own tents. Major
Philip Ardery looked enviously at the dwellings of the pioneers. A tent
near him had a marble floor two feet deep and high sandbag revetments
above the ground, which made it cooler and kept out German strafing.

 

 

Jacob Smart flew to Benghazi carrying the invisible seals of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. He discovered that the low-level concept was by no
means sold to those who so far knew about it -- the top brass and
group leaders. Smart jeeped around the forty miles of dust, visiting
the colonels and arguing for his conception. He let them know that
he himself was going to fly the mission. He had secretly picked the
co-pilot's seat with an old reliable squadron leader of the Circus,
Major Kenneth 0. ("Kayo") Dessert, who was to lead the second wave over
Target White Two.

 

 

One of the Circus pilots who had come to the desert was Walter Stewart,
a big, ebullient blond from Utah. If you did not know this fact you could
read it in very large type on the side of his machine: Utah Man. Before
the war Stewart had been a Mormon missionary in England. When he returned
there in uniform he resumed his rapport with English crowds by speaking
at war bond rallies. One day, after selling a fortune in British bonds at
King's Lynn, Norfolk, he was introduced to two members of the audience
who had asked to meet him. Stewart shook hands with Queen Mary and her
fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth. He put the girl
at ease with a chat on literature. "I've just finished
The Robe
," he
said. "I'll bet you'd like it." The future queen averred she would. "I'll
lend you my copy," said Stewart. "Where are you putting up?" Elizabeth
said, "Sandringham."

 

 

Then next day Stewart borrowed Colonel Timberlake's cub, Fearless Fosdick,
flew low over the palace lawn, and dropped the book. When he got back,
Timberlake was waiting with a teletype from the Air Ministry.
"H.M. Government takes a dim view of aircraft dropping objects on
Sandringham Palace," said the CO. "A servant took your number." Stewart
received a series of reprimands, although the admonitory officers had
a hard time keeping straight faces.

 

 

 

 

Surrounding the American bases in Libya and filtering ubiquitously
through them, peddling melons and eggs and salvaging bits of loose gear,
was the indigenous population, mostly nomadic herdsmen belonging to the
Senussi Brotherhood of Islam, which believed that the next Prophet would
be born to a man. Senussi males wore tight trousers with incongruously
baggy seats in readiness for this event. The American security people
were not much concerned over them. Before departing their Libyan colony,
Italian forces had delivered Senussi allegiance to the Allies, free
of charge. The fascists punished petty thievery by cutting off Arab
noses. To teach respect for Mussolini, they seized the Great Mukhtar,
the spiritual head of the Brotherhood, trussed him up, and dropped him
from an airplane two miles over the Senussi village of Solluch.