Operation Tidal Wave: Ploesti August 1, 1943

v.1.0 June 3, 2001

Sources

• www.50missions.com/ploesti.html
• www.thehistorynet.com/AviationHistory/articles/2000/0300_site.html
• www.wpcfb.af.mil/museum/history/wwii/ce10-4.html

There are minor differences in details between various accounts. Any interested reader is welcome to expand on this account. We particularly need squadron numbers for the concerned bomb groups.

Ploesti

Ploesti is to the US Air Force (successor to the US Army Air Corps) what Tarawa is to the US Marine Corps. Because a third of Germany's oil came from the Rumanian fields at Ploesti, it was the most heavily defended target in the German Reich, even more than Berlin. The air attack hoped, but failed, to achieve surprise and the result was bloody for the attackers.

They pushed their attack with a blind determination and a complete disregard of their own lives unprecedented in air warfare. The Marines at Tarawa fought like madmen because they had no choice: stranded on the beach they either advanced or died where they lay. At Ploesti, however, each and every aircrew had a choice of proceeding or aborting, and the conditions were such that no one could have blamed them for aborting - in most armies, soldiers are not expected to commit suicide when the issue is not one of life and death.

Important as Ploesti was, had this raid failed utterly, more would have been launched, and again more till the job was done. The destruction of the refineries was critical to ending the war, but the impact lay many months down the road. What is difficult for a foreign student of World War II to understand is that the aircrew at Ploesti persevered even though the nation as a whole had no great passion against Germany. The war against Germany was, to most Americans, a distasteful job to be done so they could turn their full attention to Japan, the belligerent for whom Americans reserved their most visceral hatred. The aircrew at Ploesti continued on their path because of those most abstract of ideals: honor and a determination not to let down their comrades. We may suspect that today's Americans might be as baffled as the foreign student at the courage of the aircrews over Ploesti.

This first major attack against the Rumanian airfields of Ploesti was conducted by 177 B-24s operating under IX Bomber Command from Benghazi, Libya, though three of the groups were borrowed from the veteran 8^th Air Force. One hundred and fifty-four aircraft were targeted against seven installations; 23 spare aircraft also took off, though 178 is the official number given. The planned bomb-load consisted of 500-lb and 1000-lb bombs totaling 623,000 lbs., or 316 American tons. The exact tonnage carried and dropped cannot be known. The round-trip flight was 2,400 miles.

Operation Order 58, issued 48-hours before the take-off, set in motion this aerial task force. It was under command of Brig.-General Uzal G. Ent, who issued the order. He flew with the lead group.

The air Order of Battle was:

Because of battle casualties and the incessant expansion of the US Army Air Forces, it is well to remember that officers could jump three ranks in a year, and that the majority of men in the task force would have consisted of teen-aged crew and officers in their twenties. Twenty-five missions was the standard tour at this time for the 8^th Air Force, but the men of the 9^th had to fly 50, presumably because Mediterranean targets were easier to attack than those in Germany.

The danger arose from the need for lumbering bombers to fly straight and level for a significant part of their run over target, making an attacker a sitting duck. Though the B-24 carried ten 0.5 caliber machine-guns, a considerable defensive fire-power, they could not maneuver or take evasive action, and even during their run-in/run-out to target were limited in this respect. Further, the Americans were at this time pushing a doctrine of low-level daylight attacks as a way of increasing accuracy, something the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command lacked because it worked at night. Once a bomber was locked into its run, prayer was the only defensive measure available to the crew. On the first Ploesti attack, the run in extended to 60 miles at low-level. To achieve surprise, the B-24s, designed for high altitude attacks at 18,000-feet and above, attacked at 200-feet, with some formations ending up at 30 to 50 feet. The constructions at Ploesti rose much higher than that. We can only wonder at the flying skill and physical strength required to keep this huge, 60,000-lb gross load high altitude bomber to 200-feet.

The German defenses at Ploesti were the densest in the world: over 200 88mm guns, hundreds and perhaps thousands of smaller caliber weapons - these inflicted the major damage - and perhaps 300 interceptors. In the event, surprise was not achieved, and the Germans were waiting.

Of the 178 aircraft out, 163 made it over target. Of these 41 were lost in action, 8 in Turkey, and 5 due to miscellaneous causes. Three hundred aircrew were killed, 140 captured, and of the crew returning, over 440 were wounded. The B-24 carried a 10-man crew, so casualties ran to 55%. Only one in six bombers were in flyable condition with the mission complete. The 30% aircraft loss rate is appalling in terms of modern loss expectations, and was so even for those desperate days.

Five Medals of Honor were awarded for the first Ploesti raid, the most given by the US Army Air Corps/Air Force for any single operation; two more were given for subsequent raids. That makes seven of the 35 awarded through World War II, and may be compared to the four each given in World War I and Korea, and the 13 given for Vietnam. The medals went to:

• Lt. Col. Addison E. Baker (posthumous) 93 Bomb Group
• 2^nd Lt. Lloyd H. Hughes (posthumous)
• Major John Jerstad (posthumous)
• Col. Leon W. Johnson (44 Bomb Group)
• Col. John R. Kane

The high percentage of senior officer awards came about because, unlike the case with ground troops, senior officers flew bombing attacks with their units, usually leading. This was equivalent to a battalion or brigade commander acting as point for his attacking troops.

Readers might be inclined to assume that because five awards were made, some politics must have been behind the awards. In reality, however, the first Ploesti raid just happens to be one of those rare military actions where extraordinary bravery was displayed by large numbers of combatants.

2^nd Lt. Lloyd H. Hughes, for example, won his award in this manner: His aircraft, acting as lead for his formation, was hit before arriving over target, and was streaming fuel from a wing in so heavy a stream that the waist gunner could not see. Despite this, he continued on his course, because to deviate would risk sending the rest of the formation off target. He flew his aircraft through leaping flames - remember, the B-24s were attacking at 200 feet and even below. As surely the crew must have realized, this set the aircraft on fire, and he went down to a certain death.

Two of the colonels inadvertently went wide of their targets, and then returned to lead their bomb groups into a fully-altered defense. They were unable to see much as they flew through billowing smoke and flames, unable to save themselves should they approach a chimney or wire, and unable to save themselves should a dying bomber crash through their formations. They faced yet another hazard, an extraordinary one: the previous groups had dropped time-delayed bombs with their regular incendiary loads, and the late attackers had no way of knowing when they might be blown apart by one of those bombs.

These awards were dearly won and richly deserved.

Though 40% damage was reported, because of the lack of a follow-up, the Germans quickly repaired their installations, and before the war was done, Ploesti was to claim over 2900 crew as killed and missing. It is said a thousand men downed over Ploesti were liberated from POW camps at the end of the war. By contrast, today we can count on our fingers the number of world air forces that have a thousand combat pilots in total. In the spring and summer of 1944, US Fifteenth Air Force hammered Ploesti. A raid on June 23, 1944, sent 761 bombers against Rumanian oil targets. 60,000 airmen eventually flew against Ploesti, dropping 13,000 tons of bombs, eventually knocking out the oil fields and accelerating Germany's defeat.

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