When Heroes Flew

by H W Buzz Bernard

  In short order, they reached the Danube and swept into Romania. As planned, they dropped back down to near three thousand feet as they streaked across the river. They continued to barrel northeastward at almost two hundred miles per hour. The Transylvanian Alps loomed to the distant north.

  Kalamaki, Greece

  August 1, 1943

  “Phone, sir. It’s Oberstleutnant Rödel.” In a corner of the sweltering alert hangar, a skinny sergeant who didn’t look much older than Egon’s daughter held a receiver aloft for Egon to see. He trotted to where the sergeant stood.

  “Yes, sir, Hauptmann Richter here.”

  “Just wanted to keep you updated. We received a report from one of our long-range radar units on a mountain near Sofia. They’re tracking ‘many wings’ heading northeastward over northern Bulgaria. That has to be the American bomber force. Almost certainly they’re bound for Ploesti, but we don’t have a visual on them yet. As soon as we confirm the target, I’ll let you know and we’ll go on hot standby. We’ll have a nice homecoming present waiting for the Americans.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll be ready.” They would be, of course. But Egon wondered how his young charges, as eager as they might be to fly and fight, would handle their first combat mission, especially flying against Liberators and their ramparts of fifty-caliber machine guns.

  It could get ugly.

  17

  Over Romania

  August 1, 1943

  The Liberandos and the Circus, now past the Danube, dropped even lower, thundering over the Wallachian Plain, a flat, tan and green patchwork of wheat and corn. Puffy, flat-based cumulus clouds, like scattered cotton balls, floated above the level landscape.

  “God, it looks like home,” Vivian said.

  Al tried to remember where she said she’d grown up . . . someplace on the Great Plains, he thought. Maybe Kansas or Nebraska.

  “It looks so peaceful,” he responded.

  Below them, groups of peasants, probably extended families, labored in the fields. A few women, some decked out in brightly colored skirts, took a moment to look up and wave handkerchiefs at the Liberators as they roared over.

  On narrow dirt roads crisscrossing the plain, hay wagons pulled by muscular draft horses trundled along, leaving long trails of suspended dust in their wakes.

  In short order, the bombers dropped to near tree-top level. Colonel Compton, in the lead group, increased the speed of the force even more. Al nudged Oregon Grinder’s throttles farther forward to keep pace.

  “What’s going on?” Vivian asked.

  “Compton’s pressing the assault. He’s going as low as he can, trying to stay beneath enemy radars, and he’s going as fast as he can, trying to reach the targets before the bad guys figure out exactly where we are.” As deep as the B-24s had penetrated into Romania, they’d seen no signs of enemy fighters. A glow worm of hope glimmered deep within Al’s psyche.

  Maybe, just maybe, we got lucky and can pull this off. But he knew whatever they might be able to pull off would be at the deadly expense of the second wave of bombers, now irretrievably separated from the Liberandos and the Circus.

  Al, looking down on the tranquil countryside that raced beneath him, wondered if he’d ever be able to share such serenity with Sarah and his newborn son. Or if he, husband and father, would be forced to pay the ultimate price. And if he did, would it have been worth it? Worth it so that Sarah and Al Junior might be able to enjoy such peacefulness in the future? He hoped above all, if he didn’t return from the raid, that his son might never have to go on one.

  His internal conflicts yanked him in multiple directions. He wanted desperately to see and hold his son and return to his wife. But he also wanted to successfully lead his crew on a mission deemed so important that one senior officer had said, “Coming back is secondary.” He’d do everything in his power to make sure his men, and one woman, did come back. But most of all, as a military officer, he understood the mission came first.

  He knew he’d broken a long-standing tradition of the armed forces by bringing a female on a combat operation. But dammit, she knows how to fly and she volunteered. If the mission comes first, then that’s my rationale. Without her, we wouldn’t be here.

  Oregon Grinder, shimmying and shaking with its engines at full throat and afternoon thermals boiling up from the heated farmland, continued to pound northeastward. Just ahead of the B-24s, on a dusty path, a loaded hay cart with large painted wheels sat crossways on the track. Beneath it, two men cowered. They stared wide-eyed as the bombers roared over, their prop washes lifting whirlwinds of hay from the wagon.

  Briefly, the Liberators flew parallel to a languid, blue-gray river. One of Oregon Grinder’s waist gunners—Al couldn’t tell if it was Chippy or Ned—hollered into the interphone, “Hey, let me bail out here. I could die a happy man.”

  Al saw why. A group of young ladies, some seductively slim, some curvaceously Rubenesque, all totally naked, bathed in the lazy waters of the river and smiled and waved at the planes as they rumbled over.

  “Sorry,” Al said to Vivian. “I apologize—”

  “Don’t be silly,” she shot back. “Might be their last chance to—” She halted abruptly, obviously not wanting to voice any fatalism.

  “You’re right,” he shouted at her over the bark of the engines. Into the interphone he said, “Jump! Do it now. We’ll pick you up on our way back.”

  Two quick clicks came in return. Transmission received and understood.

  “What’re we looking for next?” Vivian asked.

  “The first IP,” Al responded. “It’s a small town called Pitesti. Don’t worry about having to identify it though. It’s basically follow-the-leader through the IPs. The mission navigator is in Teggie Ann with Colonel Compton. They’re the trailblazers. All we have to do is hang on their tail.”

  “And I’m double-checking everything,” George interjected from his navigator’s position in Oregon Grinder. “So far, lookin’ great.”

  “Roger that,” Al said. “How far to Pitesti?”

  “ETA in twenty-one minutes.”

  “And after Pitesti?” Vivian asked, her question directed to Al.

  “We change course, get on a heading a bit north of due east. That’ll carry us directly over IPs two and three. Two is a place called Targoviste. We’re told it has a big ole monastery sitting on a hill overlooking the town, so it should be easy to identify.

  “IP three, a village named Floresti, is where we turn southeastward and go into our final bomb run. We’ll be down on the deck then, screaming in at over two hundred miles per hour to targets we’ve never seen, so things will happen in a confusing blur. But we made practice runs in the desert that worked out really well. Completely obliterated the mock-up refineries in two minutes. So if Colonel Compton is locked in on the target, I’m hoping we’ll be in and out of Ploesti in no more than two or three minutes.”

  He paused and studied Vivian. She seemed adept at absorbing the information, and that gave him a modicum of comfort.

  “But make no mistake,” he cautioned, “there’s going to be flak and, at least before we get away, Messerschmitts. Whether piloted by Germans or Romanians, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. People are going to try to kill us.”

  To that, Vivian did not respond. She merely stared straight ahead, gripping the control wheel even more tightly.

  They reached the piedmont, the rolling foothills separating the Transylvanian Alps and Wallachian Plain, and the character of the land changed. Orchards and vineyards appeared. Willow trees and poplars lined the banks of swift, clear rivers draining southward out of the Alps.

  Small herds of cattle and sheep dotted the countryside. As the bombers bellowed by overhead, their shadows sliding beneath them like great, black pterodactyls, some of the animals bolted and fled in terror. Their owners pursued them, shaking their fists at the airborne Americans who had dared disrupt their bucolic Sunday afternoon.

  “Here it comes,” Vivian exclai
med.

  A small town flashed beneath them, a textile mill squatting by a river, apparently the village’s claim to heavy industry.

  The bombers banked to the right, setting up a new course. They climbed over a shallow, forested ridge separating Pitesti from Targoviste, IP number two.

  “Minutes to Targoviste?” Al asked over the interphone, his question directed to George.

  “Eight and a half.”

  Al’s heart began to thump just a bit faster and his breaths came a bit more quickly as the Liberandos and Circus aircraft neared the threshold of battle. The two groups fanned out into a quasi-bombing front. In the engineer’s position of Oregon Grinder, Sergeant McGregor cranked open the bomb bay doors. The rushing air added to the ear-jarring reverberations already rippling through the plane.

  They crested the ridge and started down toward Targoviste, barely visible in the distance. The town, roughly the same size as Pitesti, perched astride another river draining southeastward out of the mountains. A set of railroad tracks paralleled the stream.

  “Lotta little villages around here,” Vivian noted. “Kinda all look the same.” They’d passed over a number of postage-stamp-sized settlements.

  Al concurred. “Sometimes difficult to tell one from another when you’re blowing by as fast as we are. Except the IP markers are slightly bigger towns.”

  “We’re still on the beam,” George said. “Two minutes out.”

  “Think I got the monastery,” Vivian said, “about forty-five degrees off our nose to the left.” She pointed.

  “I see it,” Al said. A cluster of brownish-white structures, likely relics of the Middle Ages, crowned a low hill northeast of Targoviste. One of the buildings, larger than the rest, displayed several steeples topped by crucifixes.

  “Two down, one to go,” Al announced, referring to the IPs. They pressed on, still apparently unnoticed by the German or Romanian military. The glow worm of hope deep within Al brightened, just a smidgen.

  “Should be a little under six minutes to number three,” George said.

  Ahead, Teggie Ann and the Liberando force rolled sharply to the right. Turning.

  “What the hell,” Al shouted over the interphone. “George, George, this isn’t where we turn, is it? What the fuck is Compton doing?” Whatever tiny flicker of hope Al might have harbored sputtered out.

  “This isn’t it,” George screamed back. “This isn’t where we turn!”

  Al whipped his gaze toward Hell’s Wench off his left wing. Its copilot, Major John Jerstad, stared back, wide-eyed, brow furrowed. He gave an exaggerated shrug. He harbored the same confusion as Al.

  Colonel K.K. Compton in the command aircraft had just set a course southeast from Targoviste, following a river and set of railroad tracks toward Bucharest, not Ploesti. Had he and his navigator miscounted, mistaking one of the mini-villages on a river for an IP? Al had no idea. He knew only that a huge mistake had just been made.

  “No, no, no, this can’t be,” he barked over the interphone. The mission seemed to be suddenly in tatters. It had been in big trouble already with the two waves of bombers getting separated. But now the lead element of the daring raid had gone off course, turning at the wrong IP, roaring toward the wrong city.

  “Call Compton, goddamnit, call him,” George yelled. “Forget radio silence. He’s wrong.”

  Al didn’t hesitate. He broke radio silence, bellowing over the command channel. “Wrong turn, wrong turn!”

  A chorus of other voices joined in. “Not here! Not here!” And, “Mistake! Mistake!”

  The reprimands came not just from aircraft commanders in the Circus but from Compton’s own Liberandos as well.

  Yet Compton didn’t budge. Al guessed he’d switched off his radio.

  The other Liberators, now in bombing formation, had no choice but to stick on the tail of their leader, K.K. Compton in Teggie Ann. With very little separation between aircraft, and radio silence still technically mandated, the lumbering bombers could not unilaterally turn and correct their courses, not without the risk of triggering a chain of deadly midair collisions.

  Operation Tidal Wave had just come apart at the seams without a single bomb being dropped. Al realized the American force had just sprung a trap on itself. With the Liberators roaring toward the wrong city, every German in Romania had to know the US Army Air Force had arrived.

  He pounded the control wheel of Oregon Grinder in furious rage. Vivian leaned across the center console and laid a restraining hand on his bruised fist.

  18

  Near Ploesti, Romania

  August 1, 1943

  The Circus, following the Liberandos on their errant course, raced southeastward toward Bucharest. Only a single plane ignored the mass turn, the wrong turn, at Targoviste and continued straight, barreling toward the final, and correct, IP at Floresti.

  Al cranked his head around and looked back over his left shoulder, trying to identify the lone aircraft. A patchwork quilt of sunshine and shadow, stitched here and there with a stray rain shower, lay on the plains northwest of Ploesti and made recognition difficult.

  “Hey, Rhett,” Al said, addressing his tail gunner, “can you make out who that is that didn’t turn with us?”

  “Looks like Brewery Wagon, sir.”

  Vivian glanced at Al. “Isn’t that the old warhorse the guy was tossing stones at this morning?”

  “Yeah. John Palm.” Al shook his head. “I sure as hell hope he got rid of the bad juju, because he’s gonna need all the luck he can get now.” Lieutenant Palm had stayed on course, a courageous call, but maybe not the wisest, Al thought. As a lone bomber, every single antiaircraft battery and Messerschmitt defending Ploesti would be trained on him.

  But Al’s immediate concern centered on the huge mistake that had just been made by the main body of bombers. To his left, through the summertime haze, he could discern, just barely, the tall stacks and dark smoke that defined Ploesti’s oil refineries. That’s where they should have been headed.

  He glanced into the cockpit of Hell’s Wench, still on his left wing. The copilot, John Jerstad, appeared to be in earnest conversation with Colonel Baker, the Circus’s commander. John turned and looked at Al, nodded, then inclined his head toward Ploesti.

  Yes! They were going.

  “Hang on, guys,” Al hollered into the interphone, “we’re changing course. Get ready to fight.”

  Baker slowly banked Hell’s Wench into a ninety-degree turn and, as if performing an aerial ballet, his entire force followed. He remained off the command channel, not wanting to broadcast their immediate intentions to the Germans.

  “Where’s our target?” Vivian asked.

  “On the other side of the city,” Al answered. “But forget about it now. We’ll drop our bombs on the first refinery we reach. Coming in from this direction, I wouldn’t know how to identify ours anyhow.” The raid had become a free-for-all. The attack had been planned to come from the northwest with the entire force. Now it came from the southwest with only the Circus. Al counted twenty-two Liberators in Baker’s force as they made the turn. A far cry from the one hundred seventy-eight that had departed Benghazi. Totally fucked up.

  Flying parallel and to the right of Baker’s Liberators, Major Ramsey Potts led a separate echelon of Circus aircraft, about ten bombers, toward the other target assigned to the bomb group. Not that specific targets mattered any longer. They’d hammer the first facility they came to.

  Al spoke to his bombardier. “Kenny, first set of storage tanks or cracking towers we see, put the bombs inside the containment walls.”

  Click, click.

  Baker, leading the attack, dropped lower and lower, pushing his throttles forward. The Circus thundered toward Ploesti, so near the ground that fields of alfalfa and sunflowers flattened in their wakes. Corn stalks snapped. Bundles of hay flew apart.

  Oregon Grinder, pushed to its limits, shook and rattled like a runaway locomotive as it reacted to a multitude of forces. The Pratt
& Whitneys bellowed at maximum power. The plane bounced and vibrated in violent thermals and swirling wake turbulence. Al and Vivian strained to hold the bomber straight and level.

  Sweat drained into Al’s eyes, making the airspeed indicator hard to read. He thought he saw in excess of two hundred fifty miles per hour. They couldn’t be more than twenty feet off the ground.

  Ahead of them, not far away, he spotted Brewery Wagon, the lone B-24 that had remained on the correct course. Hugging the earth and racing southward just west of the city, it had come under vicious antiaircraft fire.

  “Jesus, look at that,” he yelled.

  A burst of orange and black flak blew apart Brewery Wagon’s nose. The explosion shattered an inboard engine and set two others on fire. The bomber rolled one way, then the other, but seemed to recover. The crew jettisoned its bombs. The Liberator continued to flounder.

  But Brewery Wagon never had a chance. The Luftwaffe had joined the battle. A Messerschmitt, a Bf 109, dove from above, stitching the crippled, staggering plane from tail to cockpit with twenty-millimeter cannon fire. The bomber plowed into the earth, but didn’t explode. Foam flooded its engines. Good work by the aviators. Several men scrambled from the smoking Liberator, two carrying a third. Al wondered if John Palm had survived.

  The thought didn’t last long. Black balls of death, flak, began erupting around the Circus aircraft as they knifed toward the city. Stacks, cracking towers, and storage tanks came into sudden focus through the haze. Something else, too.

  “My God, what are those?” Vivian yelled.

  “Barrage balloons. They’re tethered by steel cables. Hold us steady, Viv.” He didn’t have time to explain.

  His next word: “Christ!”