Read Online Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 by James Dugan, Carroll Stewart - Free Book Online

make

their writ known to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the theater commander.

He agreed to the mission and its time of execution, but did not give an

opinion on whether it should be executed high or low. Jacob Smart was

accorded a private audience with Mr. Churchill to describe the low-level

scheme. The imaginative Churchill, a lifelong lover of surprise raids,

responded enthusiastically. He offered four crack Royal Air Force

Lancaster crews to lead the Americans to the target.
     
     
Smart replied that the Lancaster bomber and the Liberator had differing

characteristics of range, load, altitude and speed, and that it would

be impossible for the two types to maintain close formation on the long

journey to Romania. Mr. Churchill yielded. Smart did not have to bring

up the additional consideration that American airmen would resent the

implication that they could not find the target themselves.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
The whole art of war consists of getting at what is on the other
side of the hill.
-- The Duke of Wellington
     
     
3 ZERO RAIDERS
     
     
While the inner circle of the U. S. Army Air Forces was buzzing with

Smart's daring low-level proposition, the R.A.F. furnished ostensible

proof that low strikes by heavy bombers were too costly. Twelve Lancasters

assailed U-boat engine works at Augsburg, Germany, and five returned. Wing

Commander Guy Gibson took nineteen hand-picked Lancaster crews to destroy

the Mohne and Eder hydroelectric dams and flood the industrial Ruhr. Three

planes aborted after take-off. Sixteen bombed from an altitude of sixty

feet, and eight returned. The gallant Gibson was awarded the Victoria

Cross, Britain's Medal of Honor. Bomber Harris remarked, "Any operation

that deserves the V.C. is in the nature of things unfit to be repeated

at frequent intervals." It was a matter of plain arithmetic. If you lost

half your sixteen planes on a mission, four raids afterward you would

have one plane. The U.S. Air Force in Europe demanded 25 missions of a

combat flier by day, and Bomber Harris insisted on 35 by night.
     
     
Jacob Smart flew to Britain to confer with the airman he wanted to

assume operational planning for Tidal Wave, Colonel Edward J. Timberlake,

dean of the Liberator combat school, who had just brought his Traveling

Circus back to England from the winter campaign in Africa. Timberlake had

promoted squadron leaders to commanding rank, including Group Colonel

K.K. Compton, who was to lead the force on Tidal Wave. As Jacob Smart

braced him, Timberlake was relinquishing command of the Circus to Addison

Baker, one of his squadron leaders, and moving up to command of the 201st

(Provisional) Combat Wing, a cadre charged with converting the onflow

of new B-24's and crews to a battle might. Timberlake accepted Smart's

challenge to take over the thousand and one details of Tidal Wave,

and began picking out the experts he needed.
     
     
As his operations officer, Timberlake selected one of his Circus squadron

leaders, a slight, sharp-witted youth from Racine, Wisconsin, named John

Jerstad, who suffered the nickname "Jerk." Major Jerstad had flown so many

more missions than his quota that he had stopped counting them. He had

come far since his first raid, after which he reported to interrogations,

"I never saw so much flak!" Jerstad kept a notebook of lessons learned

in combat; he had brought his men through many a dire sky engagement,

including a 105-minute running battle with the "Yellownoses," Goering's

smartest fighter group. Jerstad wrote his parents, "I'm the youngest kid

on the staff and it's quite an honor to work with Colonels and Generals."
     
     
The navigation officer of Timberlake's planning wing was a New York State

school teacher, Captain Leander F. Schmid, retired from combat but

prepared to fly to Ploesti as the target finder. Two outstanding Britons

joined the wing, Group Captain D.G. Lewis, R.A.F., an expert on