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

modern refineries, Romania's main

economic asset, providing 40 percent of her exports.
     
     
Ploesti (plô-yësht') was the first place in the world to refine

commercially the black blood of contemporary industrialism. That

was in 1857, two years before the petroleum strike at Titusville,

Pennsylvania. Within a half century the automobile arrived with its

croaking petrophilia, and British, French, Italian and Dutch capital

and technology came to Ploesti. By 1914 Ploesti was coveted as an

essential of machine warfare. In 1916 the Germans invaded Romania, and

British engineers dynamited the refineries. It was a trifling setback to

the city; the postwar motor car, Diesel ship and airplane drank vastly

greater draughts of oil, and Western companies were ready to build bigger

production capacity.
     
     
The country was ruled by one who knew how to cope with oilmen, Queen

Marie, née the Princess of Edinburgh, granddaughter of Queen Victoria,

out of the Russian ruling house of Romanoff on her father's side. She

was a tall, provocative, blue-eyed blonde with long mascaraed eyelashes,

who swayed about in a wardrobe of violette-cardinale . In 1920 she was

forty-five years old, but she had a sexual magnetism that lasted until

she was an old woman. Marie was all dealer and tough as a Tartar. While

English and American vulgar journals doted on her regal progresses abroad

and her romantic indiscretions, Queen Marie was striking hard bargains

for Ploesti.
     
     
At the Versailles peace conference and during the amputation of Romanoff

territory in the Russian civil war she got Bessarabia and part of Bukovina

from Russia, Transylvania from Hungary, and Dobruja from Bulgaria,

doubling the size of her country. She called this polyglot jailbouse of

nationalities Greater Romania.
     
     
Marie died in 1938, leaving orders that black was not to be used in

mourning her. Bucharest was draped in a non-oily shade of mauve.

As the cortege passed, Adolf Hitler was peering over the mountains at

Ploesti, which Marie had left to her errant, cork-popping son, Carol

II. The refineries produced ten million tons of oil annually, including

90-octane aviation fuel, the highest quality in Europe. Hitler's problem

was novel for him. The refineries could not be taken by the usual Nazi

smash-and-grab method. They were vulnerable to aerial attack and to

sabotage by resident British, French and American engineers. He needed

undisturbed production.
     
     
Instead of dive bombers, Hitler used a fifth column, the Legion of the

Archangel Michael for the Christian and Racial Renovation of Romania --

or the Iron Guard -- a fascist outfit covered with the blood of civilized

politicians and teachers. Romania's 5 percent Jewish population, which

after centuries had won civil equality, was subjected to window-smashings,

pillage and assault. The German ambassador to Romania, Baron Manfred

von Buch-Killinger, purchased the Iron Guard and its leader, General

Ion Antonescu, a small, pinch-nosed Transylvanian graduate of French

military schools who first came to notice in 1919 as the captain of a

band that looted shops, homes and hospitals in Bucharest.
     
     
Britain and France met Hitler's gambit with a staggering sum paid into

King Carol's privy purse for a mutual-assistance treaty guaranteeing

military aid for Romania and containing a secret clause providing that,

if Hitler tried to seize the refineries, Allied technicians might

destroy them.
     
     
In June 1940 Hitler drew a lucky down card in the Ploesti game. During

the fall of Paris a German column stopped one of the last trains leaving

for Bordeaux and captured archives of the Deuxième Bureau, the French

counterintelligence agency. They contained the technicians' plans for

sabotaging the Romanian refineries. The next night Antonescu's gunmen

moved down the leafy streets of Ploesti taking Allied oilmen from their

villas to Iron Guard torture rooms. An American named