The succeeding elements of A Force kept coming up the corridor of fire,
fighting for every foot of it. It was a massive tank ambuscade upon
unarmored planes racing at more than 200 mph. Tupelo Lass bombed,
flew out intact, and K.O. Dessert banked southwest into a broad Ploesti
boulevard, noting "ribbons of tracer bullets coming like an illusion of
railway tracks." He lowered Tupelo Lass to bus-top level and drove down
the street, "going through a million red lights" -- the muzzle blasts
of roof-top flak guns. In the top turret Ben Kuroki did not reply. They
had orders not to shoot up the city.
In the meantime, to the east, George Brown's column, partially screened
from flak guns by rows of lime trees along the Ploesti-Bucharest highway,
approached Bertha, the big flak gun that Willi Nowicki had just put back
in service. The roar of invisible bombers became louder, but the battery
was still on hold-fire orders. Suddenly, said Nowicki, "Four Liberators
swept across us at treetop level, shooting wildly." Sergeant Aust, the
fire controller, could not restrain himself any longer. Breaking orders,
he yelled, "Fire!"
Bertha scored a bull's-eye on the next plane to arrive. It crashed
beyond the battery. All the other 88's went into action. "The concert
started," said Nowicki. "It was bedlam. Our men were cheering and
screaming." The Russians (the K-3's, the firing-cord pullers) worked
smartly. The guns raised and lowered and turned, spouting death. The
sound of bells was added to the clangor of battle. The flak guns could
turn two and a half times on their bases before the electrical cables
would go no farther. Then a warning bell rang and the gunners would be
out of action until they traversed back to starting position.
"There was some fire power in those Liberators!" said Nowicki. "They
wanted to paralyze our flak. They outsmarted us. We couldn't see our
fighters anywhere." Brown's ships were felling men in the battery site,
but Bertha and her five companions were killing his men too. The B-24
piloted by William E. Meehan fell in a sliding, burning heap, leaving
a trail of burning wheat. Out of Meehan's plane ran gunner Larry Yates
through a universe of fire. He was the sole survivor.
Charles Merrill flew over in Thar She Blows with an armored deck under
his feet and got through the battery safely. The booming flak guns were
soon overworked. Nowicki put on his helmet and changed an overheated
20-mm. barrel in twenty seconds. The 88 named Friederich had a malfunction
in the automatic fuse setter and exploded, killing four antiaircraft
men. Adolf fired a shell that was fused too short. The explosion killed
several other Germans.
Gunners of a Romanian battery saw a hard-hit bomber sinking on a direct
line toward them. It salvoed its bombs in neat rows in a field and
staggered on. The B-24 crashed in the battery and exploded, killing ten
Americans and eight Romanians.
The most telling fire from the ground was coming from agile 37-mm. and
20-mm. guns. The Americans often mistook the 37's for 88's: they both
threw bursting shells. Many of the big 88's were silent for long stretches
of the battle. They were not maneuverable enough to hit low-flying
bombers flashing by in the tree-tops on the sides. But when they got at
the nose of an oncoming formation, the 88's were decisive. One such gun,
manned by a corporal, was lying crouched in silence with its breech open
when a B-24 flight came straight for it, fantastically low. There was no
time to compute a shot. The corporal put his eye to the breech. One of
the Liberators was neatly framed in the muzzle. Loading with fantastic
speed, he shot it down.
Colonel Brown reached Colombia Aquila and bombed it. Now came a peril
few of the Americans had anticipated. Buttoned around the refineries were
the tank farms. These oil stockpiles were strategic trivia. The mission
was not concerned with destroying a few days' product awaiting shipment,
but neither the air gunners nor the ground gunners could avoid lacing
into the storage tanks. And the airmen, as ordered, were throwing out
armloads of incendiary bombs on them.
The tanks began exploding in flame. A plane skimmed one just as it went
off. The bomber was tossed up like a flaming brand. Brown's following
echelons flew out of the flak beds into red-hot tank tops spinning like
coins, and girders blowing in the air like straws.
In the midst of his battle with the bomber column, Sergeant Aust received
a phone call from the flak battalion commander:
"Wer hat den Feuerbefehl
freigegeben?"
(Who gave the firing order?) Aust confessed. "I'm going
to court-martial you," said the commander. The fire controller went back
to work. The flak men were screaming maniacally at a sight in Colonel
Brown's third bomb wave. Coming toward them was a B-24 completely
enveloped in flame.
It was José Carioca, carrying ten young men on their first bombing
mission. The pilot was Nicholas Stampolis of Kalamazoo, Michigan.
His co-pilot was nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Ivan Canfield from San
Antonio, Texas, whom even the sergeants called "Junior." The German
gunners simply watched it fly over without trying to hit it. The plane
continued on evenly in hopeless flame and disappeared in the target smoke.
On the other side it came out still flying steadily. José Carioca went
toward a refinery building from which a flak unit was firing into the
onrushing bomber stream. The plane drove through the wall of the building
as though it were made of confectioners' sugar. Gasoline squirted and ran
in licking flamelets across the refinery grounds. From the other side
of the building came José Carioca, in level flight, without wings. The
fuselage penetrated another refinery building, where it remained,
lifting a cloud of brick dust and new fires. Stampolis and Canfield had
taken flame in the bomb bay tanks five miles from the target, but they
reached it.
In the B-24 piloted by Roy C. Harms, the left waist gunner, Jack J. Reed,
was firing at the muzzle blinks of 20-mm. guns hidden in haystacks.
The flak men put a four-foot hole in Harms's left vertical stabilizer.
Top turret man Arnold Holden was hit. Shells shattered the nose and
tail. A fire broke out in the fuselage, sealing off the tail gunner,
Michael Doka. Reed's companion at the waist guns, John Shufritz, was
heavily wounded but continued to man his gun. Reed yelled to him,
"Bail out if we get any altitude," and went into the bomb bay. The
bombs were still in the racks and Harms was still trying to bring them
to Ploesti. The plane was approaching a stall. Harms tried to climb.
He reached 300 feet and Reed jumped. The plane fell with the other nine
men. Reed landed with heavy injuries in the refinery grounds. "I don't
know how I made it," he said. "I wish I had rode her to the ground and
died with the fine men who didn't have the guts to jump."
John J. Hayes, flight engineer of Liberty Lad, saw "great sheets of
gasoline ablaze, flowing down the roads and over the fields." The layer
of summer haze over Ploesti gave way to towering darkness, rooted in
flame. As yet no Circus bombs had exploded. Their detonation times
were graduated from one hour in the lead wave to forty-five seconds
in the rear, and Tailend Charlie was still coming. The last plane in
Brown's force was Valiant Virgin, piloted by Russell D. DeMont and
Robert C. Murray. Laying down a bristling fifty-caliber barrage into
the flak men, they got on top of the cracking plant and put their bombs
into it. DeMont immediately returned to the lowest possible altitude,
crossed the city and came upon Colonel Brown and one other plane in
the hills north of Ploesti. DeMont tried to shape up on his leader,
but one of his engines would not give full power. "Rather than waste
gas to keep up," said DeMont, "I decided I would throttle back and make
a lone withdrawal." *
* DeMont's fuel conservation policy proved sound. He flew all the
way to Benghazi alone and landed with an hour's gas in his tanks.
As the two main Circus columns, Baker's and Brown's, crossed their target,
out to their right were the twelve planes of B Force, led by the economics
professor, Ramsay Potts in Duchess. His was the smallest force of Tidal
Wave and carried the highest percentage of men overdue for retirement from
battle. Potts had deduced the low-level target three months before and the
long anticipation had taken twenty pounds off his normally trim body. With
white face, red eyes and yellow hair, his clothing hanging loosely from
his worry-worn frame, B Force Leader was a ghost pilot hanging on by raw
will power, as his ships ran the gauntlet of hot steel and tracers seeking
their petrol reservoirs. He watched the last oval rudders of A Force
plunge into the smoke, and looked for his target. Potts had been briefed
to bomb the intertwined Standard Petrol Block and Unirea Sperantza
refineries, small precise objectives worthy of his expert crews. They
had studied the models until they could see the target in their sleep,
but not from this unfamiliar angle. Ironically, their proper targets lay
in the corner of Ploesti they were approaching, but Potts steered toward a
nearer refinery. It was Astro Romana, the largest oil producer in Europe,
the first priority objective of the mission -- Killer Kane's target.
Potts's planes were sighted by gunlayer Erich Hanfland's battery. The
young German saw, right among the Liberators, "a storage tank leap five
hundred feet in the air, billowing smoke and flame." He thought, "How can
anybody fly through that?" Battery Sergeant Bichler bellowed through his
megaphone, "Fire! Fire freely in all directions!" Hanfland saw a dozen
"furniture vans" coming, hailing bullets into the battery. Obergefreiter
(Corporal) Deltester of Hamburg, who had just been married on home leave,
was at his field phone when a fifty-caliber shell struck his neck and
passed out under his arm on the other side, killing him instantly.
Potts and his wingmen, Jersey Bounce and Lucky, passed over as Hanfland
lined up on the furniture vans and tramped the trigger of the four-barreled
20-mm. gun, loaded with armor-piercing and incendiary shells. The first
fifty rounds nearly sheared the tail off a Liberator in Potts's second
rank. It crashed 200 feet past the battery in a cornfield and began to burn.
It was Pudgy, piloted by Milton W. Teltser and Wilmer H.C. Bassett. They
brought the crumpled, burning ship into a crash-landing, from which they
and three others -- observer Willard R. Beaumont and waist gunners Robert
Locky and Francis Doll -- got away before it exploded. A mob of peasants
closed in, thinking the men were Russians. A man in a horse cart rode
into the crowd and drove the farmers away with a whip.
The seared and blistered survivors walked to a shuttered village.
A middle-aged inhabitant ventured out and said, "'Are you chaps Americans
by any chance?" Bassett said, "That is correct." The man cried, "How nice
to see you! I was with the Royal Flying Corps in England in the last war."
The village poured out in gay Sunday dress, led by the burgomaster wearing
a red embroidered shirt. Through the crowd came a beautiful young woman,
who looked at the burned men and made way for them to a spotless infirmary.
She was the village doctor. The villagers watched her strip their smoldering
rags and dress the burns. She laid the shocked men on straw in the village
pub, and the burgomaster admitted orderly queues of people to look at
the Americans.
Alongside Potts flew Jersey Bounce, carrying the first man killed in
action. Shortly after Sergeant Havens had died, the ship's nose was
removed by shrapnel, wounding bombardier Norman C. Adams and navigator
David Lipton. The bleeding Lipton continued to assail the flak pits
with his machine gun. With air whistling through the open nose and tail,
Jersey Bounce raced through hose streams of steel.
From the ground, Hanfland, who had knocked out the engine, saw the plane
lurch. "It was flying too deep for anybody to jump," said the German.
Hanfland exploded a shell in Jersey Bounce's control pedestal. Long and
Lockhart flew on between two flak towers, which removed the rest of the
greenhouse and shattered half of the instrument panel. Number One engine
was struck and caught fire. With two engines gone and Jersey Bounce fading
into a stall, the pilots saw a refinery cooling tower looming ahead. They
used the last energy of the engines to pull over the tower. Long called
on Adams to bomb. There was no answer on the intercom -- it had been
shot away.
But Jersey Bounce did not die. Over the cooling tower the pilots got
her leveled out and walked her on treetops and telegraph poles into a
fairly open field, where she went into a long slide, still without taking
fire. The plane dismantled a fence, ground across a railway in a shower
of sparks, and sledded to a stop. Only then did her bomb bay tanks burst
and flames spring from the gas sluicing through the interior. Lockhart
squirmed out through a rent in the side and ran with his head and hands
aflame. Long was caught in his collapsed seat, with the catch on his
safety belt pinned beneath him. He wrenched himself free.
Adams, the wounded bombardier, plunged back into the fire and hauled
Sergeant Maurice Peterson out of the waist. The two officers ripped the
clothing off the badly burned gunner, and Adams went back to the wreck
again to help others. The fire could no longer be approached. Four of
his comrades died in the pyre of the dead tail gunner. Long watched his
ship burn. Germans marched them to a schoolhouse aid station in Ploesti,
where they found their mortally hurt waist gunner, Marion J. Szaras, lying
naked with heavy burns and his back and legs riddled with sharpnel. There
were thirty other B-24 men there, most of them burned and others with
fractures and internal injuries incurred in low parachute jumps.
Beyond the target, Honky-Tonk Gal, flown by Hubert K. Womble, was
mortally hit by aroused flak gunners north of Ploesti, who killed an
officer in the greenhouse. Womble lowered his landing gear as soon as
he felt the strike. A wheat field providentially spread before him and
he made a tricycle landing. A wing clipped the earth, and, as the plane
ground-looped, a control cable parted and whipped off Womble's foot. His
men were lifting him out as Russell Longnecker and Deacon Jones roared
over in Thundermug, recognized Honky-Tonk Gal, and thanked God for the
eight men waving wildly on the ground. The young pilots of Thundermug
located their indomitable companions, Hugh Roper and Vic Olliffe, who
brought their three ships together "real tight as before" to begin the
thousand-mile voyage home. Longnecker said, "We had come through, but
there was no sight of the three others in our wing. As I moved back into
my old position on Hugh Roper, I could see the display of big boles on
his right wing and side that he got on the target run."