Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 (9 page)

 

 

During the fluid land fighting, Senussi rangers, unbidden by the
Allies, stalked Axis movements and ieported them to the British. When
the Americans came, they too fell under the protection of the stealthy
Brotherhood. One night Italian saboteurs landed from a submarine, killed
two American guards, and blew up four airplanes. The Senussi fell on
the gumshoe men and cut them up sorely before the Italians could find
British antiaircraft men to take their surrender.

 

 

Life was elemental in the bomber encampment. "About dusk the desert
comes to life with all manner of animal and insect life," said
Captain Jack Preble. "The greatest pests are jerboa mice and desert
rats. Herodotus described the jumping rodents of the Libyan deserts as
being 'two-legged.'" The airmen tried to protect food by hanging it in
bags on lines between tent poles. The rats leaped six feet, clutched
the bags, and gnawed through to the delicacies. Captain Ernie Parker
sat up one night with a .45 gun to ambush rats. He spied one forcing its
way into his roommate's locker and killed the animal with one shot. The
bullet went on through his friend's dress uniform.

 

 

Captain Benjamin Klose, a Circus bombardier, was trudging through the rain
when he saw a sight that made him philosophical. "Out in the open," he said,
"there sat a lieutenant general on an oil drum privy. This desert is the
right place to fight a war. They ought to ship the generals and politicians
from both sides down here and let them slug it out." A muddy clerk put it
another way: "This war in Africa is being fought to see who doesn't have to
keep the place and the Eyetalians have us licked."

 

 

Mail from the States was months late, but the men had plenty of time
to write home. A mechanic, lacking anything better in the way of news,
wrote his girl, "Last night we licked the officers at softball." When she
opened the letter there was a postscript: "Like hell they did. Capt. Harry
Schilling, Squadron Censor."

 

 

The airmen had nothing to drink except boiled water and coffee,
although an enterprising sergeant found the only bottle of cola in
Egypt, scrounged a tot of Nelson's Blood, and advertised on his tent:
CUBA LIBRE, 250 EGYPTIAN POUNDS. However, a miracle was passed one day
in the officers' mess. Captain James A. Gunn, who was to be lost at
Ploesti, greeted a weatherbeaten visitor in South African naval uniform,
who introduced himself, "Peter Keeble. Working in the harbor." Gunn said,
"Sorry, Commander, I can't offer any refreshment." Keeble said, "Matter
of fact, I've got a flask in my car. Would you have your guards pass it
through the gate?"

 

 

A British lorry entered and discharged a hundred cases of Scotch. "Gift
of the Royal Navy," said Keeble. "Where the hell did you get it?" Gunn
asked. "Bottom of the harbor," Keeble replied. While clearing shipwrecks,
his divers had entered the S.S. Hannah Möller, sixty feet down, to
dynamite her, and had found an intact cargo of 1,000 cases of whiskey
and 200,000 quarts of Canadian beer.

 

 

Companionship was one of the few of life's pleasures available
to them. They were lucky in their chaplains and special service
officers. Captain Brutus K. Hamilton, the famous Olympic track coach,
was a much-loved morale officer for the Circus, as was its Protestant
chaplain, James Burris. Captain Gerald O. Beck of Cincinnati, Ohio,
was the picturesque white-haired Roman Catholic chaplain of the Sky
Scorpions. A Protestant, Philip Ardery, said of him: "If there was no
rabbi on hand, Father Beck would preach a Jewish funeral service with
perfect form and dignity. When no Protestant chaplain was available,
he would give all aid and comfort to Protestant boys, without pushing
his religion on them. He slept in various tents with the enlisted men,
carrying his cot and bedding from one group to the next, each anxiously
awaiting the visit. The crews superstitiously believed they would not
be shot down as long as he was sleeping in their quarters. Father Beck
also had a worldly side. He loved to gamble on cards and dice, was nearly
always a heavy winner, and gave the money to charity. I saw him make six
straight passes with the dice one night and break up the game. No one
dared fade him on the seventh roll. One time before we went on a rough
mission, I lay in my cot and heard him talking to the Catholics outside
the tent: 'I want to urge you now to prepare yourself for this dangerous
task. Go to confession before take-off. And, if you find a good priest,
let me know and I'll go with you.'"

 

 

Souls were one thing and serviceable airplanes were another. In the bomber
domain the omnipresent, indispensable man was a short, big-chested,
swarthy individual with graying hair who drove a jeep day in, day out,
coming in a pillar of dust or a fountain of mud to the far-flung aircraft.
He was the legendary Ulysses S. Nero, Billy Mitchell's sergeant, now a
colonel charged with providing an impossible number of airplanes for the
missions. At breakfast General Ent might say, "I want a hundred planes
tomorrow," and Sam Nero would say, "There are only eighty-seven fit to
fly." The general would say, "I want a hundred." The next dawn would
find dogged mechanics putting the last touches to No. 100 as the mission
warmed up. Nero slept adequately only when the three-day khamseen blew,
and he never took a leave.

 

 

The men wore any sort of uniform they could find. One day in the chow
line, a G.I. noticed an elderly, unshaven individual in a U.S. leather
flight jacket without insignia. He looked again and ran for Colonel
Timberlake. The colonel arrived on the double and said, "Sir, we had
no idea you were here or . . ." It was General Sir Harold Alexander,
the British commander in chief for Africa. He grinned at Timberlake's
costume -- British Army battle dress.

 

 

The greatest pleasure was bathing naked in the warm blue Mediterranean,
generals and privates stripped to the same rank. A thousand miles away
their coming adversaries went swimming too. Colonel Woldenga, on an
unannounced inspection of the Mizil fighter base near Ploesti, found
a large swimming pool that had not been there two weeks before. His
fighter pilots were vying in fancy dives before a throng of Romanian
and German girls. They had scrounged the cement from Gerstenberg's
blast-wall construction.

 

 

 

 

As Tidal Wave came nearer, the Liberator men were ordered on missions to
Italy to soften Rommel's rear for the Sicilian invasion. Over Naples,
bombardier Alfred Pezzella made a quip that immortalized him in the
force. He was glued to his bombsight when a hunk of flak entered between
his feet and ripped out a hole over his head. Without taking his eyes
from the crosswire, Pezzella flung up an arm and called, "Ball one!"
He was to die at Ploesti.

 

 

The desert air war got little attention from war correspondents. They were
in England, helping put over daylight, high-level, precision bombing.
Few noticed the absence of all of Eaker's Liberator groups, which had
gone to Africa for Tidal Wave. The occasional visitor from the States
who ventured into the inhospitable desert came with the impression that
the Ninth Air Force had an easier war than the embattled Eighth. Alfred
Kalberer, the Halpro holdover, said: "A War Department wheel and two
big air force doctors happened to be visiting Benghazi when a plane
came in firing flares for wounded aboard. We took the V.I.P.'s with
the ambulance to meet the ship. The inside looked like somebody had
been sloshing buckets of red paint around. It was frozen to the metal
during the high altitude flight. The top turret gunner's head had been
blown off, and he became a fountain of blood before his fingers, half
frozen to the grips, came loose and let the body fall to the deck. One
of the doctors fainted. An old crew chief dismissed the retching men,
lifted the body out, and cleaned the airplane."

 

 

A few weeks before Tidal Wave a disturbing personality came to Benghazi.
He was a short, fair-haired Royal Air Force squadron leader named George
C. Barwell, the world's leading air-gunnery theoretician. Barwell, a
masterful mathematician, was the son of a Cockney officer of the London
Machine Gun Regiment who had died in the Great War. Barwell had been
washed out of R.A.F. pilot training because of his annoying habit of
questioning the instructors' dogmas. Training Command had to grind out
pilots by the book and would not slow down classes to deal with Barwell's
challenges. He was shunted into bombers as a gunner. After several night
missions Barwell announced to one and all that gunnery training was
unrealistic. "The gunner's limited practice firing at towed targets has
no relation to the ultimate problem of defending his aircraft against
fighters traveling at great speed in three dimensions," he said. "In
combat, the ill-trained men blaze away at multiple simultaneous attacks
and self-infficted damage is a terrifying by-product of their training."

 

 

Barwell proved his own theories in fifty night battles over Germany,
during which he shot down several opponents. Once, when his pilot turned
back from flak over the target, Barwell berated him on the intercom:
"Your job is to put it straight through the letter box." Back in England
the pilot so couched his flight report that he received a decoration,
so Barwell denounced him again in the officers' mess. Soon thereafter
"flak-happy" Barwell found himself assigned to Berka Two, the R.A.F. base
at Benghazi, as a gunnery instructor. The field was surrounded by five
Liberator bases building up for Ploesti. Barwell was drawn to the
bristling guns of the B-24's like a politician to so many baby carriages.

 

 

He met General Uzal Ent, "a charming man, who liked to talk gunnery."
The American knew there was plenty wrong with U.S. aerial marksmanship
and borrowed the incisive Britisher from the R.A.F. as a gunnery lecturer
to help his airmen through the coming Ploesti ordeal. Next day they were
enticed from their tents by an earnest Englishman who drew pictures in
the sand and angled his hands, talking big air battles. "Now, you chaps
are doing it all wrong," said Barwell. "Here's Jerry coming at you from
ten o'clock high at three hundred fifty miles an hour. And you make the
mistake of leading him." They treated him with scoffing tolerance.
For Barwell's first formal lecture Uzal Ent had to drive them into the
briefing hut. The Briton began, "The gunner's problem of calculating
relative air speeds, altitude, temperature and a dozen other variables,
is beyond the ability of most mathematicians, let alone a hurriedly
trained air gunner." That brought an American groan comparable to the
parliamentary cry of "Oh, sir!" The gunners reassured themselves by
looking down at the silver wings on their chests that proclaimed them
qualified marksmen.

 

 

The pest continued, "Fighters are shot down largely by accident,
at tremendous cost to your own planes." The crowd growled. "You have
wonderful computing gunsights," Barwell ploughed on, "but they are so
complicated that it is impossible to use them properly in combat. For
example, take your gyro gunsight . . ." Laughs broke out from men who
had decided Barwell was a Limey double-talk comedian masquerading as a
flier. He continued, "The system of gunnery that has proven itself in
combat is called position firing." It was his own theory, at variance
with British and U.S. doctrine. "Position firing is based on the fact
that the attacking fighter's problem is equal and opposite to that
of the gunner in the bomber. This applies, of course, only during the
curve of the pursuit fighter attack." Snores were heard, and laughter
in growing volume, despite the British Distinguished Flying Cross on
the lecturer's tunic. But there was also a puzzled element, whose minds
turned over during this upsetting talk. After the lecture they surrounded
Barwell. "Look, if you know so much about it, how about coming up with
us and showing how it works?"

 

 

Barwell was a grounded instructor, and besides, foreigners needed
special permission to fly U.S. missions. He said nothing about this.
Some Americans muttered, "The Limey is yellow." Barwell turned up
uninvited at the first briefing of the freshmen Sky Scorpions. Their
leader, Colonel Jack Wood, said Bomber Command had offered a choice among
four relatively shallow targets for their initiation. Sentiment veered
toward the nearest one, a German air base at Maleme, Crete. Barwell said,
"That one won't be easy. It hasn't been bit for a fortnight and Jerry will
be quite eager." The Americans voted defiantly for Maleme. Barwell said,
"Very well, I volunteer for top turret in Tailend Charlie." The last
plane in the formation was the most vulnerable to fighters.

 

 

He did not put his name down as a member of Philip Ardery's crew
in Tailend Charlie as they flew off to the target he had warned them
against. Worse was in store at Maleme than Barwell had anticipated. The
night before, British forces had staged a fake commando and paratroop
invasion of Crete in which they dropped thousands of plastic doll
parachutists with toy guns that sparked on the way down. The Germans
were kept up all night wasting shoe leather, ammunition and tempers and
were eager to sock back at somebody for the stunt. Wood's greenhorns
flew right into it. On the bomb run, three dozen hot Messerschmitts of
the latest mark climbed savagely into the B-24's.

 

 

The Liberator gunners freighted the sky with bullets, firing continuously
in all directions. Friendly shells crashed past a waist gunner's ear.
Furiously rattled, he was going to fire back at "the bastard," when his
buddy knocked his aim away from the other Liberator. During the bedlam
Barwell's twin fifties remained silent. He stood in the top turret
with a chronometer and note pad, recording incidents that would prove
instructive later.