The last Circus plane to cross the target was Ready & Willing, piloted
by Packy Roche, a smart, lucky veteran of the high war in the west. He
stayed low at Ploesti. "If we'd have climbed more than fifty feet from
the ground, we'd have been shot to pieces," said his gunner William
Doerner. As it was, Roche came off with five wounded. Colonel Beightol,
the observer in Ready & Willing, watched sister ships go down and had an
"intense feeling that, even though we had reached and bombed the target,
the limited success scarcely compensated for the pasting we took." The
Circus was paying Gerstenberg's list price. Roche's flight engineer,
Fred Anderson, a "retired" volunteer, had his front teeth knocked out by
shrapnel. He continued his duties, transferring fuel and looking after
the ship.
As the Circus blundered across the city, Baetz, the German camp show
musician, heard "loud, roaring wings" and stuck his head out of a doorway.
He saw a monstrous green airplane coming toward him, its wing tips
stretching nearly the width of the boulevard. He saw a gunner in a
glass dome on the roof, one standing in an open window on the side, and
another in a bay window in the rear, exchanging streams of bullets with
a small pursuing plane, which he recognized as a Romanian IAR-81. The
fighter went into a half roll and sped under the bomber, upside down,
crashing bullets into its belly.
Baetz had the impression that the B-24 was out of control, "although it
continued to fly at a flat angle." The IAR-81 twisted out from under the
bomber and climbed. "I felt the street shake," said Baetz. "The bomber
crashed into a three-story brick building." He ran toward it. The Liberator
was buried inside the Ploesti Women's Prison. "Flaming petrol flowed
through the cell blocks and down the stairs," said the musician. In the
cells were about a hundred prisoners -- shoplifters, political opponents
of Antonescu, and farm girls serving short terms for watering milk. The
women screamed. In the street a man yelled, "Where's the turnkey? He has
the cell keys on his ring. Get the turnkey! Let's get them out." Another
bystander said, "I saw the turnkey climbing the outside staircase to
unlock the women, and the plane hit him."
Quick to the disaster came a unit from Gerstenberg's sole remaining
regiment of fire police. Most of them came from Magdeburg in Saxony.
They approached the burning prison with great valor, pried open window
bars on the ground floor, and brought out forty women before the flames
shut them out. The prison burned all the next night and cries were heard
from it until early morning.
As the young pilots of Thundermug left Ploesti, Longnecker said, "We were
doing two hundred forty miles an hour and planes were passing us like it
was the Cleveland Air Races. It looked like we had a chance to get home,
but we'd never make it on such power settings. I reduced power to save
gas and conserve the engines."
Tarfu came out flying, with pilot Hurd surveying his defunct oxygen and
electrical systems, a shell hole in a bomb bay tank, and severed control
cables. Not the smallest loss was the shattered portable toilet. He and
most of his men had dysentery.
The Mormon missionary, Stewart, swung across the chimney pots of Ploesti,
still sniffing gasoline fumes, although the crew had stoppered the holes
in the bomb bay tanks. His co-pilot pointed to No. 3 engine on Utah
Man. A thick stream of gas was pouring out of the wing tank. Stewart
kicked the rudder to swing the gusher away from the waist window, and
told his crew to assume crash-landing positions. "Don't set 'er down
now, Walt," said a small voice from the rear. "We've still got two
live thousand-pounders aboard." The bombs were armed to explode in an
hour. Apparently when Cummings was about to release them, a flak hit
had impaired his controls and they did not fall.
Utah Man, near to mechanical failure, full of explosive fumes and
streaming gas, faced sudden death from a flak or fighter strike. If that
didn't finish the expedition, in about fifty minutes the big bombs would.
Stewart steered toward some oil derricks, calling on Cummings to drop
the live bombs to "do some good." The bombardier tripped them again,
but they did not fall. "Now we've got to get them out of here, Ralph,"
said the pilot, "or we'll never get this thing down. Let's try this
railroad bridge up ahead." Cummings tinkered with the gyro-gunsight
and reported, "Bombs away!" Stewart looked at his ad lib target and
cringed in horror. It was not a military objective but an ordinary
country bridge with cows trudging over it, driven by a small girl,
who was waving ecstatically at the oncoming Goliath.
The pilot did not feel the unburdening of bombs. The tail gunner phoned,
"Hey, there's a little girl back there waving at us!" The thousand-pounders
were still hanging in the slings, ruminating the acid in their nose
membranes that would soon blow them to smithereens. Cummings and the
engineer went into the bay to work the big ones out through the open
bomb doors.
Colonel Brown, now in command of the Circus after Addison Baker's death,
picked up more of his ships on the outskirts of Ploesti and led them on
a southwest withdrawal heading. Brown saw that one of his wing tips was
crumpled. "It doesn't look like it hit a balloon cable," he said. Top
turret gunner Lloyd Treadway said, "Colonel, you hit a church steeple,
remember?" Brown wondered where the Circus was. That morning 39 planes
had taken off, and 34 reached the target area. Now he had fifteen in a
scratch formation. Only five were relatively undamaged. Others carried
dead and wounded. A feathered prop was their cockade and the marching
tune was air whistling through broken glass. The Circus formed a flying
hedgehog to save itself. In the shifting fortunes of battle it seemed
that Brown was getting lucky. There were no fighters in sight. It looked
as though the riddled Circus might slip through between the Romanians
at Bucharest and Gamecock Hahn on the north.
The Luftwaffe ace was still patrolling the northern air gates of Ploesti
at 6,000 feet, perplexed by the failure of the Americans to arrive
punctually on their predicted time and course. His radio appeals to the
controllers were lost in the yelling on the air waves.
Shouldered in with the Gamecock's H.Q. Schwarm was Black Wing, led by
industrial engineer Hans Schopper in a Messerschmitt called Hecht,
meaning a little fish that prowls and preys. Schopper had flown in the
Polish campaign in '39, and later, on patrol out of Trondheim, Norway,
had shot down into the freezing Atlantic a Blenheim, a Hurricane and
a Sunderland. He had destroyed a Fokker in Holland in 1940 and six
Soviet machines at Stalingrad in '42. Schopper was as puzzled as his
commander. The mishmash of voices on his open receiver indicated that
an air battle was taking place, but where was it?
The Gamecock picked a clue off the radio, an authoritative German voice
calling to him, "Fly to six thousand five hundred meters." Hahn replied,
"There are no furniture vans around here." Came a reply, "Then go under
the clouds." Hahn spiral-banked his 52 Messerschmitts through the bottom
cloud layers. Schopper hit his radio button. "Gamecock! Oh, Gamecock,
I see them! Green bombers, very deep." Under the clouds the Mizil
Messerschmitts saw the target drama spread before them. The south side
of Ploesti was burning. The American bombs were beginning to detonate,
flinging up dust through the black target smoke. The green bombers
had outwitted them and were scuttling away. The Gamecock elbowed his
radio-button. "Dive! Dive!" he shouted, and plunged full throttle. The
brooding youngster, Werner Gerhartz, held on to his leader's wing, facing
his first battle proof. He resolved that this time the Americans were not
going to evade him with any North Sea tricks. The power dive of the Mizil
force reached 550 miles an hour. Schopper had to throttle back quickly
"to keep from pulling my wings off."
Each experienced pilot chose one of the Circus ships to attack and did
not take his eyes from it during the swoop. Halfway down, the Gamecock,
with reflexes trained by many battles, reached blindly to his panel and
flipped on the switch that electrically armed his guns -- 20-mm. cannons
in each wing and one under the nose, and a fifteen-caliber machine gun
firing through the air screw. He shot a glance at the red light that
showed the guns were open. The light was not on. He called to the novice
Gerhartz, "Ben, my guns aren't working. You take over," and slid out of
the formation to climb and direct the battle by radiophone. (After it was
over, none of his pilots remembered hearing a single command from him.)
Gerhartz struck at the high rear of George Brown's pinch-hit formation.
The tail and top turret gunners sent up sheets of fire from their
superior position in the harvest fields and broke Gerhartz' battle array
on the first pass. A fighter pilot, who tried to level off and pursue,
was churned up in the American prop-wake and crash-landed. Another,
whose machine was full of burning B-24 bullets, ploughed the earth in
flames and came staggering out of the wreckage.
The fighter formation had been dispersed by a new kind of earth-bound
aerial warfare. The Mizil men went hunting in pairs and trios for lone
ships, crippled ships and those that were flying too high. Gerhartz and
his wingman, Hans Eder, caught on to a V-pattern of three Liberators
departing at an altitude of 300 feet. They ignored one that was dragging
and smoking, saving it for later. The Germans drove from behind on their
selected victims. Gerhartz said, "I got high on the tail of mine and
poured it into him. I don't know whether they were firing at me. It
happened too fast. Eder and I came around again, perhaps two minutes
later. The Liberators were scattering. One of the engines on mine was
smokbig, possibly the result of my first pass. As I dived I saw Eder
completing his second attack. I closed in and ripped up my bomber's
backbone.
"By now the two Liberators were very down, running hard for their lives,
deep to the ground. As I came in I could see Eder making the third pass
at his. But there was no longer an airplane in front of me. The B-24
was behind me, crushed flat. Eder's bomber was burning on the ground
two miles away."
The Circus went to earth and passed out of the fighter zone.
The Messerschmitts turned back to Ploesti. The controllers were yelling
that new waves of bombers were coming toward the refineries.
Utah Man, the first ship to bomb, was far in the wake of the Circus
hegira. The big Mormon pilot could not exceed 150 mph air speed lest
his wreck fall apart. The live thousand-pounders sucked closer to their
fuse settings. The engineer and the bombardier were in the bomb bay,
clawing and hammering to release the ton-weight of death, their labors
muffled by a screeching of wind from the torn and dangling left bomb
door. Stewart's men, who had prepared for life everlasting at his prayer
meeting the night before, sailed on toward that almost certain port. They
counted 367 flak holes in the fuselage and wings. One hole was three
feet wide. Yet the shells had missed them all, except the radioman,
who fingered a crease in his hand dealt by spent flak. "Look at Steiner
trying to open the cut so he can get the Purple Heart!" said a comrade.
The screeching stopped. The hanging left bay door had torn away in
the wind. Now they could hear tools banging in the bay as Cummings and
Bartlett worked on the bombs. There was a mighty yelp from the flight
deck. Bartlett was hammering the pilot's shoulder. "Walt! They're
gone!" The two thousand-pounders were tumbling into a field.
Stewart said, "Get back to crash-landing positions." Now he had a chance
to save his men by skidding in. The fuselage men sat in tandem, backs
to the bulkhead, nestled between each other's legs like a rowing crew,
and padded themselves with their parachute packs. Stewart said, "Hey,
I don't smell gas any more!" Koon said, "We're probably out of gas. Let's
set down now." The pilot said, "No, let's not. Maybe the engines don't
know they're out of gas. Watch them like a hawk, Larry, and we'll try
to make Yugoslavia, where we have a chance of ducking the Germans." The
gunners arose from the crash-landing positions and looked out. There
were no other planes in the sky. The feeling came over them that no one
else had come through. Shedding fragments of metal, Utah Man plodded on.
Bombs Away: 1200 hours
Il n'y a cheval si bien ferré qu'il ne glisse.
--Proverb
7 TARGETS OF OPPORTUNITY
When K. K. Compton and General Ent took the Liberandos on the wrong turn
at Targoviste, their mission flagship was on the right flank, a few
planes behind the substitute route leader, John Palm, driving Brewery
Wagon. The others turned southeast and knit onto the flagship, except
for Palm. He kept on going straight. His tail gunner phoned, "They're all
turning right!" Palm and his co-pilot, William Love, executed a tight turn
and tacked onto the errant formation. Their navigator, William Wright,
phoned, "If this is the correct turn, I'm lost. This heading is all wrong!"
Palm thought, "Little Willie Wright always knows where he is."
The navigator's protest was underscored by outcries on the command channel:
"Mistake!" "Wrong turn!" "Not here!" Wright calmly said, "I'm going to
try to salvage a course to the left." Palm had such confidence in his
navigator that he complied. He turned off and Brewery Wagon headed east,
all alone.
In a moment the other planes were lost from view behind trees. Brewery
Wagon was engulfed in a blinding rain squall. For long, nervous seconds
Palm ran through the murk, then shot out into dazzling sunlight, headed
straight for a hill. He kicked up over it and saw spread before him a
vista of glistening green and golden fields. In the distance, framed in a
rainbow, were the stacks and stills of Ploesti. Palm selected the nearest
refinery and drove toward it at an altitude of twenty feet. From the
greenhouse Wright called off trees and power poles and Palm hurdled them.
Soon Palm was standing in the sights of the professional German gunners
in the inner flak ring. John Palm was a husky, magnetic youngster
who had fled his father's shoe store in El Paso, Texas, to fly
big bombers. Serving with the Liberandos, he had caught the eye
of K.K. Compton, who encouraged him to think of the Air Force as a
career. Palm had made a good record, although he was sometimes assigned
a hexed ship which was often shot up, the same Brewery Wagon he was now
piloting. Her nominal captain was Robert H. Storz, a brewer's son from
Omaha, Nebraska. That morning Storz had drawn a B-24 named Per Diem II,
and Palm got the hoodoo plane. Before getting in to take her off, Palm
threw stones at Brewery Wagon.