Read Online Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 by James Dugan, Carroll Stewart - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James Dugan, Carroll Stewart
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done. The three
principal plotters of the I.P.'s, Ted Timberlake, Leander Schmid and
John Jerstad, were going to fly the mission.
In England, Timberlake started low-level rehearsals among the two Eighth
Air Force Liberator groups selected to go to Africa for Tidal Wave -- his
former command, the Traveling Circus, and the Eight Balls, led by Colonel
Leon Johnson. Johnson introduced his flying officers to a specialist
who would teach them how to use a low-level bombsight. Pilot Robert
Lehnhausen said, "This was right after a very mean and costly mission
we'd made against the submarine pens at Kiel where we lost seven out of
eighteen ships. And a few days before, a squadron of speedy B-26 medium
bombers had tried a low-level raid on Holland and none came back. There
was much murmuring and grumbling. Colonel Johnson told us in a calm,
positive voice that if it was the desire of the Air Force to fly low-level
missions we would fly those missions and he would lead us. There was
complete silence in the room. If he was leading, we were going to follow."
The English-based groups, together with the newly arrived Sky Scorpions
(389th Bomb Group), began beating up and down the foggy East Anglian
countryside in treetop practice flights. None of the crewmen knew why,
but they reveled in the sudden legalization of buzzing, heretofore
a highly illicit pleasure. English farmers were not as happy about
it. They complained of horses in shock, cows gone dry, and bees on strike
against May flowers. To satisfy speculations about the low-level target,
Timberlake's Intelligence chief, Michael G. Phipps, a former ten-goal
polo player, planted a rumor that it was the German battleship Tirpitz,
hiding in a Norwegian fjord beyond the range of R.A.F. bombers. Phipps
borrowed Norwegian Navy officers to walk around the B-24 bases and go
in and out of operations rooms. The Norwegians had no idea why, but they
enjoyed their post exchange privileges.
The planners dreaded one aspect of the low-level scheme -- mid-air
collisions caused by propeller turbulence or slight errors in judgment.
During the rehearsals two Liberators collided, killing eighteen men.
The survivors, pilot Harold L. James and Sergeant Earl Zimmerman,
returned to duty. They were to go to Ploesti.
Timberlake befriended an unemployed Intelligence officer whom he found
wandering around Eighth Air Force H.Q., vainly trying to sell an idea.
He was a slender, ingenious Connecticut architect named Gerald K. Geerlings,
a World War I infantryman, and his idea was: "Flat aerial maps do not
coordinate with ground features until the navigator is directly over them.
Why not use oblique drawings to show how places look as you approach them?"
Timberlake admitted Geerlings to the Tidal Wave secret and gave him
instructions to prepare perspective views of Ploesti and the overland
route to the target.
The Allies had no such aerial pictures of the Balkans or the refinery
city and were prohibited from photo-reconnaissance lest the defenses be
alerted. The only way to fulfill the orders was for Geerlings to comb a
large random picture bank without alerting the custodians to his regional
interest. He went to the Bodleian Library at Cambridge, where there was
a large picture deposit of foreign scenery, gathered by appeals to the
public for snapshots and postal cards from prewar travels. Geerlings asked
for files on ten widely separated parts of the world and photographed the
mountain to get the mouse he was after -- a slender folder on the Balkans.
Geerlings designed a novel route chart -- an accordion folder with
eleven oblique views of landmarks en route to the target. There were
no place names on the folder. They could not be disclosed even to his
printer, the secure R.A.F. Intelligence center at Medmenham. At that
establishment model makers worked on another hush-hush project, scale
models of a nameless valley and
principal plotters of the I.P.'s, Ted Timberlake, Leander Schmid and
John Jerstad, were going to fly the mission.
In England, Timberlake started low-level rehearsals among the two Eighth
Air Force Liberator groups selected to go to Africa for Tidal Wave -- his
former command, the Traveling Circus, and the Eight Balls, led by Colonel
Leon Johnson. Johnson introduced his flying officers to a specialist
who would teach them how to use a low-level bombsight. Pilot Robert
Lehnhausen said, "This was right after a very mean and costly mission
we'd made against the submarine pens at Kiel where we lost seven out of
eighteen ships. And a few days before, a squadron of speedy B-26 medium
bombers had tried a low-level raid on Holland and none came back. There
was much murmuring and grumbling. Colonel Johnson told us in a calm,
positive voice that if it was the desire of the Air Force to fly low-level
missions we would fly those missions and he would lead us. There was
complete silence in the room. If he was leading, we were going to follow."
The English-based groups, together with the newly arrived Sky Scorpions
(389th Bomb Group), began beating up and down the foggy East Anglian
countryside in treetop practice flights. None of the crewmen knew why,
but they reveled in the sudden legalization of buzzing, heretofore
a highly illicit pleasure. English farmers were not as happy about
it. They complained of horses in shock, cows gone dry, and bees on strike
against May flowers. To satisfy speculations about the low-level target,
Timberlake's Intelligence chief, Michael G. Phipps, a former ten-goal
polo player, planted a rumor that it was the German battleship Tirpitz,
hiding in a Norwegian fjord beyond the range of R.A.F. bombers. Phipps
borrowed Norwegian Navy officers to walk around the B-24 bases and go
in and out of operations rooms. The Norwegians had no idea why, but they
enjoyed their post exchange privileges.
The planners dreaded one aspect of the low-level scheme -- mid-air
collisions caused by propeller turbulence or slight errors in judgment.
During the rehearsals two Liberators collided, killing eighteen men.
The survivors, pilot Harold L. James and Sergeant Earl Zimmerman,
returned to duty. They were to go to Ploesti.
Timberlake befriended an unemployed Intelligence officer whom he found
wandering around Eighth Air Force H.Q., vainly trying to sell an idea.
He was a slender, ingenious Connecticut architect named Gerald K. Geerlings,
a World War I infantryman, and his idea was: "Flat aerial maps do not
coordinate with ground features until the navigator is directly over them.
Why not use oblique drawings to show how places look as you approach them?"
Timberlake admitted Geerlings to the Tidal Wave secret and gave him
instructions to prepare perspective views of Ploesti and the overland
route to the target.
The Allies had no such aerial pictures of the Balkans or the refinery
city and were prohibited from photo-reconnaissance lest the defenses be
alerted. The only way to fulfill the orders was for Geerlings to comb a
large random picture bank without alerting the custodians to his regional
interest. He went to the Bodleian Library at Cambridge, where there was
a large picture deposit of foreign scenery, gathered by appeals to the
public for snapshots and postal cards from prewar travels. Geerlings asked
for files on ten widely separated parts of the world and photographed the
mountain to get the mouse he was after -- a slender folder on the Balkans.
Geerlings designed a novel route chart -- an accordion folder with
eleven oblique views of landmarks en route to the target. There were
no place names on the folder. They could not be disclosed even to his
printer, the secure R.A.F. Intelligence center at Medmenham. At that
establishment model makers worked on another hush-hush project, scale
models of a nameless valley and
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