by A. J. Baime
—COLONEL WILLIAM R. CAMERON, Pilot, Operation Tidal Wave
25
Operation Tidal Wave
August 1, 1943
We flew through sheets of flame, and airplanes were everywhere, some of them on fire and others exploding. It’s indescribable to anyone who wasn’t there.
—COLONEL LEON JOHNSON, Commander of the 44th Bomb Group
THE DAY BEGAN AT 2:00 AM at the American airbase in Benghazi, Libya. Bomber crews were awoken from their tents by alarms and shouting voices. “Get up! Get up, you guys! Roll out of those sacks. This is the day!” They were fed a big breakfast of eggs and coffee, though many were too nervous to eat. Before sunrise, the crews were riding Jeeps through the desert to their bombers to go through their preflight checkouts.
There were 1,763 of them, army airmen from every state of the American union. All were volunteers, and a large number were under twenty years old, having come of age during the Great Depression. Spread out over five airfields across four miles, a force of 178 B-24 Liberators—commanded by Brigadier General Uzal Ent—stood on their tricycle landing gears, fueled up and ready to fly. It got so hot in those planes in the desert, even at sunrise, the airmen joked that they could bake bread in the cockpits. Minutes before 6:00 AM, the first Liberator sparked an engine. Soon the desert was alive with roaring thunder, 712 engines spewing acrid smoke, blowing up clouds of desert sand that hadn’t seen a raindrop in months.
Operation Tidal Wave—first conceived among the Allied military brass at the Casablanca Conference—targeted Ploesti, Romania, home of Hitler’s greatest wellspring of oil. Ploesti was an oil boomtown north of Bucharest in the Transylvanian Alps. Nine vital refineries ringed the city, huge tanks full of highly explosive liquid, along with their pipes, stacks, generators, and machinery of all kinds. To ensure maximum target precision and avoid enemy radar, Tidal Wave was planned with an unprecedented low-altitude approach. The bombers would make their attack runs at treetop level at nearly 250 miles per hour.
Each Liberator was loaded to 64,000 pounds, greater than the proscribed takeoff weights, with extra fuel tanks built into the bomb bays to make the 2,400-mile, thirteen-hour round trip. They carried aboard “more killing power than two Gettysburgs,” as one Air Corps journalist put it—1.25 million rounds of shells, 622,000 pounds of bombs, plus boxes upon boxes of smaller flammable-jelly-encased incendiaries that the airmen would throw out the windows.
The first plane to take off was the Wingo-Wango, piloted by one Brian Woolley Flavelle of Augusta, Georgia. Others followed in two-minute intervals. The crews aboard could communicate with one another by intercom, but to avoid enemy radio detection they had orders for strict radio silence. Without communication, Tidal Wave would require perfect execution of the mission plans.
Bomber pilot John R. “Killer” Kane remembered sitting in the cockpit of the Hail Columbia with engines throbbing that morning, staring down an open runway that led to hell. “I looked around in the peculiar reddish glare and saw billowing clouds of dust swirling into the sky to color the sun a bloody red,” he later wrote in his diary. “At 0710 sharp, we began our roll down the runway, on our way to Ploesti.”
For weeks, these men had lived in the Libyan desert training for Tidal Wave—not just the airmen, but an army of mechanics, engineers, mess tent operators, and commanders. It was hard living in the rat-infested desert airbase. The daylight heat sometimes hit 125 degrees. They had little drinking water, and none for bathing or washing their clothes. The only way to escape the heat was to hitch a ride a few miles to the African coast, where they could dive into the Mediterranean.
Even before they had arrived, the airmen had lived through ordeals more difficult than they ever could have imagined. When they had volunteered for the Air Corps, the government did not yet have the facilities to train them all. They had been shipped from base to base all over the United States, most having left home for the first time. The pilots had been subjected to rigorous psychological workups, as well as stringent physical exams. The eye tests weeded out the biggest number of them. Flight training itself—for the pilots, navigators, bombardiers, engineers, and gunners—was terribly dangerous. Thousands died in crashes before they ever reached overseas. The men who made it to active duty had accomplished 360 hours of flight training time, more than three times that of German airmen.
Even still, nothing could prepare them for Tidal Wave. It was Colonel Jacob Smart of Ridgeland, South Carolina, who had come up with the plan to attack Ploesti’s oil refineries at treetop level. Smart was adamant that surprise was key to this top-secret mission and that the low-level approach could avoid radar. So positive was Smart that the mission would work that he had asked to fly it himself. (He was pulled from it at the last minute by his superiors.)
Military brass agreed that only the B-24 Liberator had the power, range, and striking capacity for Tidal Wave. It would be the ultimate test for the airplane, which was at that time being built by four companies in the United States, most notably at Willow Run.
Training required hours of low-altitude formation flying in Liberators. “For days,” Killer Kane wrote in his diary, “you could look around almost anywhere on the desert and see formations of B-24s skimming along the ground, just missing what few palm trees there still were. . . . The sheep herders on the desert really had a rough time!” At such low altitude, the sensation of speed could be overwhelming. “When you go 200 miles per hour, at an altitude of eight feet, you really know you’re going 200 miles per hour,” remembered Tidal Wave pilot Captain Philip Ardery.
The crews were given “the most complete and detailed briefing of any air raid in history,” Kane remembered. A Connecticut architect named Gerald Geerlings was brought in to build a small-scale model of Ploesti, using photographs of Romania he found in a library in Cambridge, England. British intelligence summoned the public to donate postcards and pictures of vacations in Europe (no specific location could be mentioned, for it was top-secret). Office jockeys spent interminable hours hunting through these pictures for any shot of Ploesti. Having never been to the Romanian city, Geerlings was able to build a model of Ploesti to such detail that an Allied officer who had once lived there could find his old apartment building.
A British aristocrat named Lord Forbes and a New York newspaperman named “Tex” McCrary teamed up to create a forty-five-minute film with sound that instructed the crews on how to find Ploesti and where the strategic targets were located. The military had never made a training film like this before. The filmmakers placed an 8-millimeter camera on a child’s tricycle, which panned around the three-dimensional model of Ploesti that Geerlings had built. To make sure the film got everyone’s attention, it started out with a shot of a smiling, fully naked female.
“Now the object of this operation,” the film’s narrator said as the airmen sat listening, “is to choke off that flow of Romanian oil to the Nazis. . . . You men have been selected to do this job.”
Outside of the Ploesti model, the attacking crews had no idea what they were about to fly into. Aerial reconnaissance flights, the brass figured, would give away the target. So none were flown.
Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering understood the strategic importance of Ploesti. He assigned the Nazis’ military attaché in Bucharest, forty-eight-year-old Alfred Gerstenberg, to defend it. A highly intelligent and refined patriot, Gerstenberg had worked for months to turn Ploesti into the most heavily armed anti-aircraft fortress on the planet. As one of his staff officers recalled: “[Gerstenberg] was a dedicated man. To better fulfill his duties he learned to speak Polish, Russian, and Romanian. He worked 16 hours a day with one goal in mind: to make Ploesti too costly for the enemy to attack.”
Church towers, ridges, bridges, rooftops of all kinds, even hay bales in fields were armed with the now-famous German 88-millimeter anti-aircraft gun. Gerstenberg had over 100 barrage balloons armed with bombs attached to the refineries. At the moment of alarm, his men would winch these balloons att
ached to cables into the sky so that the cables would entangle attacking planes, setting off the balloons’ explosives. Fleets of Messerschmitt fighters were parked at airfields in the surrounding areas, ready to take flight. Gerstenberg even built a special train he called Die Raupe—the Caterpillar—that would run along tracks through the Ploesti Valley with 88s sticking out of each rail car so that the train could move in pursuit of warplanes.
For Gerstenberg, it wasn’t a matter of whether Ploesti would be targeted; it was a matter of when.
The night before Tidal Wave, at the Benghazi airbase, the American flight crews sat writing letters to their families. They were told by their superiors to write these farewell letters; if they didn’t return, the army would send the letters for them. The crewmen knew they were flying a highly dangerous mission. It was no secret among the ranks that the highest levels of command had worked out, in General Dwight Eisenhower’s words, “mathematical probabilities in great detail” as to the number of expected casualties compared to the amount of destruction the mission would inflict.
“We dreaded this mission,” Killer Kane wrote in his diary. “Tension was building up in the entire group. It was getting to where I couldn’t sleep [and] the knowledge that the mission might turn out to be a suicidal one with disastrous results turned my sleeping moments into nightmares.”
The final briefing, delivered by Major General Lewis Brereton, failed to lift the mood among the bomber crews.
“If you do your job right it is worth it,” Brereton said, “even if you lose every plane. You should consider yourself lucky to be on this mission.”
At 6:00 AM on Sunday, August 1, the Liberators took flight. The armada made its way across the Mediterranean in blue skies at 2,000 feet, flying in V-formations of three planes each, interlocking so that the planes spread out across five miles in the sky, their wings just twenty-five feet apart. Never before had the United States launched an armada of bombers bigger than this one.
Unbeknownst to the Allies, the Luftwaffe had launched a crack signal interception group in Athens. This crew picked up signals of the bombers in flight. The B-24s also tripped over radar in Yugoslavia. A chain of communication began. General Gerstenberg’s phone rang, alerting him of the armada flying fast, due north.
“It is unclear what is developing,” a Nazi commander told him. “But we think the objective might be Ploesti.”
Gerstenberg soon confirmed the bombers’ target. The Germans knew the Liberators were coming.
In the cockpits, the Liberator pilots saw the first sign that things were about to go horribly wrong hours before they reached Ploesti.
The armada was moving around 175 miles per hour in formation. Pilots and copilots were trading off on the controls. The engineers managed the ships’ awkward fuel system, eyeing the four glass tubes filled with liquid mounted behind the pilot. Each tube measured fuel in one of the main tanks, which had to be filled carefully from the other tanks (eighteen in all) while in flight. Machine gunners sat in the turrets, which were as tight as coffins when the airmen were wearing their flight suits and parachutes, or waited nearby for word of attack. The rattle inside the airplanes was deafening, and the vibration was a slow assault on the nerves.
Then it appeared: a virtual wall of cloud cover. The Liberators had ascended to 11,000 feet to clear the tops of northern Greece’s Pindus Mountains, but above those peaks the cloud cover reached thousands of feet higher. Pilot Edwin Baker remembered seeing that white wall: “A cold chill went down my spine. . . . It was obvious we were going to have to fly through there.”
In the clouds, with strict orders for radio silence, the bombardment groups lost each other. By the time they climbed out of it, they were spread out over sixty miles, out of sight from each other.
Meanwhile, at his headquarters in Ploesti, General Gerstenberg ordered all fighter planes into the air. At the oil refineries, men were slowly winching up cables, raising bomb-stacked barrage balloons into the sky. Gunners manned the 88s, ears open to the guttural tune of the big American engines.
The Liberators began to descend as they crossed the border over Romania, traveling now in random packs. Then disaster struck again. A lead plane in one of the bombardment groups made a wrong turn over a town called Targoviste. The Liberators behind that pilot followed him. Aboard a B-24 called Brewery Wagon, the navigator phoned the pilot over the intercom.
“If this is the correct turn, I’m lost. This heading is all wrong!”
But it was too late. The group continued for miles before they realized their mistake. The carefully synchronized attack approaches were now completely in disarray.
Aboard Hail Columbia, Killer Kane marveled over the beauty of the Romanian countryside, with its brightly painted homes and verdant summer fields. Behind him flew his group and another pilot’s group in formation, forty-five Liberators, nine planes wide and five rows deep. These pilots had no idea where the rest of the bombardment groups were located. Through the windshield, the target came into focus.
“In the distance toward Ploesti,” Kane remembered, “the sky was the ominous black of a threatening thunderstorm. It would be our luck to arrive there during a heavy rainstorm so that we could not see ahead of us. I tried to fit the steel helmet over my radio headphones but could not get it on. As I was looking toward Ploesti, I saw all hell break loose, the whole area just burst into flames. With that view of the target, a cold hand seemed to reach inside my breast and grip my heart.”
Kane realized that another bombardment group had already begun to hit its targets. He could see those huge birds swirling over the flames of the refineries, curling through the mushroom clouds of black smoke. The weird barrage balloons and concrete gunner towers made the scene appear otherworldly. Kane gunned the engines, his speed climbing to well over 200 miles per hour. As he descended to 200 feet, “everything but the kitchen sink began to rise from the ground at us.”
The deafening flak from the German 88s blew holes in planes, clipped off wings, sheered tails from the fuselages. The refineries of Ploesti had now erupted in balls of fire, with the long-winged Liberators shrieking in random arcs, diving in for attack runs at 245 miles per hour, some just twenty feet off the ground. Pilot Philip Ardery remembered “a bedlam of bombers flying in all directions, some on fire, many with smoking engines, some with gaping holes or huge chunks of wing or rudder gone; many so riddled their insides must have been stark pictures of the dead and dying or grievously wounded men who would bleed to death before they could be brought to land.”
Kane and his group approached their targets. They thundered over a rail track when the pilots saw a train moving under them. It appeared like a normal train with a locomotive pulling cars. Then the doors opened and out of every one of those cars gunners opened up, sending tracer bullets and flak across the sky like sheets of metal rain. It was General Gerstenberg’s Die Raupe—the Caterpillar.
The gunners in the Liberators let loose with everything they had. Aboard the Hail Columbia, Kane had a pair of .50 caliber machine guns that he aimed out the window of the cockpit. “We had to shoot our way in,” he remembered. He fired 2,500 rounds in a minute and a half. “On our right [the] flak train moved full speed down the track with guns belching black puffs at us. They were shooting 88s like shotguns, with shells set to go off immediately after they left the gun barrels. A sprinkle of light rain spread a film of rain water over the windshield.”
A gunner named Kozak remembered seeing a Liberator take a punch from an 88. He could see the pilot, a friend named Gooden, in the cockpit. “I could see Gooden working the controls,” remembered Kozak, “and power his plane into a refinery to shorten the war. The building, the plane and the crew exploded together.”
Aboard a Liberator called Euroclydon, a navigator named Warner felt the impact of the 88s. “Another shell exploded behind me,” he later remembered, “which shattered my shoulder blade and put shrapnel into my head. The concussion blasted me back through the [airplane] into the f
lames. My feet were in the fire and one of my arms was hanging out the open nose-wheel door. I was lying there kicking and screaming with my feet in the fire and my arms in the slipstream.”
One B-24 nosedived into a Ploesti street. A musician standing nearby remembered feeling the earth shake with the impact. “The bomber crashed into a three-story brick building,” he recalled. It was a women’s prison. “Flaming petrol flowed through the cell blocks and down the stairs,” the musician remembered. The petrol caught fire and spread through the building. Locked in cells, prisoners slowly died one by one. Their screaming could be heard outside the burning building for hours.
When the Liberators dropped the last of their bombs, the pilots still flying turned and headed for home. It was a grim scene—many hours of flight with the dead and dying aboard. Though the mission would take roughly thirteen hours total, the entire attack lasted twenty-seven minutes from the first bomb to the last. Gerstenberg’s Messerschmitt fighters chased the Liberators due south, picking off airplanes along the way. The bomber crews would get accustomed to these grim airborne hunting grounds. Remembered one airman: “Planes fell in flames, men fell in parachutes, some candlesticked [when their parachutes failed to open]. Pieces of men dropped through the hole.”
Flying over the Mediterranean hours later, pilots manning broken ships saw red flares firing into the sky in the distance, the Benghazi airbase beckoning them home. The sound of the rubber wheels touching down was one that none would ever forget. All night, Tidal Wave survivors went in search of their friends, to find out who had made it and who had not. One intelligence officer approached a pilot named Reginald Phillips, who was resting in a shack in the desert.
