Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 Read Online Free PDF Page A

walked three

miles across the desert to the operations shack and found nobody around

except a ground officer, staring into his fourth pink gin. "Ruddy show is

finished," said the reception committee. "Rommel's broken through. Army's

pulling out of Egypt." In came the R.A.F. officer who had briefed them on

the Italian fleet. He heard Kalberer's story with eyes shining. "Bloody

well done!" he said, running to Signals to spread the news.
     
     
Rang was interviewed by an American reporter. To convey the impression of

hitting a battleship, the bombardier said, "It was like shooting fish in

a barrel!" The British coninuniqué on the Mediterranean battle properly

acknowledged the contribution of "four-engined American Liberators." This

cracked Washington's silence on Halpro. The Air Force announced that

the Halverson Detachment was responsible and had earlier attacked "the

Balkans." It was Washington's combined birth and death notice for Halpro.
     
     
Harry Halverson, whose remarkable feats were thus meagerly acknowledged,

was down to a fraction of his task force; moreover, he was overloaded with

personal problems. He fell into a heated argument on bombing tactics with

a very senior and stuffy R.A.F. officer and was sent home and retired.
     
     
Mickey McGuire and Al Kalberer took over what was left and ran 63

short-range raids against Rommel. They were reinforced by a dozen

battle-weary flying Fortresses from the other side of the world, the

remnant of the U. S. Far East Air Force, under a chipper little general

named Lewis H. Brereton. Brereton was a 1911 graduate of the U.S. Naval

Academy who had switched to a second lieutenancy in the Army Coast

Artillery, then to the flying Corps. He was smarting with defeats; the

Japanese had chased his planes out of Indonesia and then out of Burma,

and now it looked as though those left were joining another losing

cause against Erwin Rommel. Brereton was immediately obliged to remove

his B-17's and the Halpro Liberators from Egypt to Lydda, Palestine,

to save them from destruction on the ground.
     
     
     
     
Thirty-seven Ploesti men were still interned in Turkey in a modern hotel

on Attaturk Boulevard, the main street of Ankara. They were paroled from

morning to midnight, dined in the best restaurants, drew full pay from

the U.S. military attaché, and enjoyed romantic flutters. A gunner lost

his head over an exquisite German refugee girl and mooned to his pilot,

"I'd marry her grandmother just to get in the family." The fliers became

acquainted with thirty interned Soviet pilots who taught them to play

chess. Navigator Harold ("Red") Wicklund was a superb swimmer and worked

out daily in a pool, beating Turkish natatorial champions with such

sprints as fifty meters in 25 seconds.
     
     
On the Fourth of July the internees dined with American Ambassador

Laurence Steinhardt at the embassy. Over cigars they heard a news

broadcast: "Today United States Air Force crews penetrated Europe for

the first time. In a joint raid with the R.A.F. to Holland . . ." *

The Ploesti men looked at each other in amazement and the ambassador

sent an aide to find out what the broadcast was all about. A dozen

R.A.F. Bostons, six carrying uniformed U.S.A.A.F. crews, had flown a

propaganda sortie from England on the American national holiday. The

Halpro men, who had bombed Europe three weeks before, were hurt and

puzzled. Five weeks later they were upset by a broadcast announcing that

"for the first time U.S. Air Force heavy bombers have attacked targets

in Europe." This was a mission of twelve British-based Flying Fortresses

to Rouen, France. The Halpro men had beaten them by two months, and had

gone far deeper into Europe with one more plane.
     
     
* An error taken up in later official histories. See the Army Air

Forces, Target: Germany (Simon and Schuster, 1943), p. 28, on

the 4 July 1942 raid: "for the first time in World War II American

airmen . . . fly