To cope with the oppressive daytime heat, the men cut their hair short and lopped off khaki trousers above the knees. But there was nothing to be done about the swarming flies and locusts, and at every opportunity the men sought escape at the nearby beach. Officers and enlisted men alike stripped naked and splashed like children in the cool waters. “The sand is pure white and the water clear as crystal,” observed intelligence officer Brutus Hamilton.3
Nightfall brought a soothing breeze and pleasant temperatures, and as the men settled into their tents the desert came alive. Kangaroo rats and mice prowled about, scavenging for food in and around the tents. The local fauna also included side-winding desert vipers and scorpions. The men quickly learned to begin each day by shaking out their shoes and uniforms to avoid a painful sting by a scorpion that had taken up residence during the night.
More urgent concerns greeted the crews. In the week before their arrival, Italian commandos had struck their old friends of the 98th Bombardment Group, the Ninth Air Force B-24 outfit they had come to know at Gambut Main, now based at Benghazi’s main airport, less than ten miles from the 93rd’s camp. The enemy commandos killed two 98th men and blew up three aircraft before disappearing into the darkness.
The commandos had been captured a few days before the 93rd’s arrival, but the Allied air forces in the area braced for more sabotage and perhaps even a full-blown Italian invasion. The 93rd men joked about getting shot on nighttime trips to the latrine, but it was no laughing matter. Many of the 93rd officers kept revolvers or knives close at hand. One gunner who got lost while trying to find his tent in the dark fearfully crept through the camp before finding his way.
AFTER THREE RAIDS WERE ABORTED DUE TO bad weather over Italy, Ben returned to action with the Epting crew on July 2. The target was a German airfield at San Pancrazio, Italy, along the southeastern coast of the Italian mainland. It was Ben’s seventeenth mission and his first since the Epting crew’s near crash en route to La Pallice on May 29.
Weather caused another pause in the bombing, and it was July 7 before Ben flew again. His command pilot for this mission was the 409th Squadron commander, Major K. O. (Kayo) Dessert. Their target was a German airfield on Sicily known as Gerbini #6, part of a complex of Luftwaffe fighter bases scattered through the flat farm fields south and west of Mount Etna. One of the highlights of the raid for the crews was a spectacular view of the volcano.
On July 9, Ben notched his nineteenth mission. The target was another German airfield on Sicily, this one at Ponte Olivo, a mile inland from Gela Beach. The crews spotted a massive Allied convoy headed toward Sicily during the raid. What they didn’t know was that Gela Beach was the destination of the American soldiers aboard the troop transports.
Casualties had been exceptionally light on the Italian raids, and the reason was clear to Ben and other veterans of earlier raids in North Africa and Europe. Enemy fighter defenses had nearly collapsed. For more than three years, German and Italian fighter pilots had been locked in nonstop combat in North Africa and the Mediterranean rim, and scores had been killed in action. The survivors were increasingly unwilling to challenge the machine-gun fire of massed bombers.
The peril of fighter attacks had plummeted, but the 93rd men still faced mortal danger. Returning in the evening from the July 7 raid on Sicily, the crews were forced to circle while awaiting their turn to land on the lone lighted runway. A new crew flying a B-24 named El Lobo ran out of fuel and crashed within sight of the runway, killing four of the ten men. Two days later, a crew failed to find the 93rd’s airstrip in the darkness and flew three hundred miles into the desert before running out of fuel; the entire crew bailed out, but the pilot and three other men disappeared in the desert and were never seen again.
For the new crews, the mishaps were a shock. For Ben and other hardened veterans, they were a reminder that even if their Axis enemies were losing strength, death was never distant.
AT 4:00 A.M. ON THE MORNING OF July 10, General Patton’s Seventh Army soldiers stormed ashore at Gela Beach, and the thirty-eight-day battle for Sicily was on. Patton’s troops pushed inland along Sicily’s south shore while the British Eighth Army, commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, seized the island’s southeastern extremes.
The Sicily beachheads had been secured when the 93rd Liberators returned to action on July 12. Over an eight-day period, Ben logged another four missions as the 93rd bombed airfields and other targets on mainland Italy to suppress enemy air attacks and resupply efforts aimed at swaying the battle for Sicily.
The raids were lightly contested by the collapsing Axis air defenses, but they were occasions for mourning for Ben and his 409th comrades. During the July 12 attack on train ferries and railroad yards around San Giovanni, the squadron lost one of its best bombardiers. A piece of flak pierced the nose of the lead aircraft and mortally wounded Lieutenant Clinton P. Sipe, a twenty-eight-year-old Pennsylvanian who had been with the group from the beginning. On a July 13 mission to the Vibo Valentia Aerodrome in southern Italy, one of the 409th’s new crews crashed just after takeoff, killing all ten men in a fiery explosion.
The flurry of raids culminated on July 19 with the biggest American strike to that point in the war, a five-hundred-plane attack led by the celebrated General James (Jimmy) Doolittle on rail chokepoints and airfields around Rome. The 93rd contributed twenty-five planes to the effort, striking a vital cluster of tracks and sidings that formed the freight gateway to Rome’s northern fringe.
En route to the target, Tupelo Lass and the other 93rd bombers crossed Sicily and traversed the Tyrrhenian Sea to a point some thirty miles northwest of Rome before wheeling to the east. As the Americans crossed the coast, the sky blossomed with black puffs of fire from enemy antiaircraft batteries. The 93rd bombers streaked eastward across a pastoral landscape of dormant volcanoes and crater lakes ringed by medieval castles and villages. The blue waters of Lago di Bracciano glittered below, and then the smaller Lago di Martignano. The bombers pivoted again, angling south-southeast on a 148-degree heading over a picturesque landscape of castles, villages, and farms threaded by ancient Roman roads. Five miles out, the bombers drew a bead on the Littorio rail yards.
As the 93rd crews began their bomb run, antiaircraft shells pocked the sky. The aim of the Italian gunners was poor and did little damage. Some crews would describe the enemy barrage as “white flak bursts breaking like silver hail, sleet, pieces of white paper or confetti.”4 At 12:18 p.m. (10:18 a.m. GMT), from an altitude of 21,500 feet, each of the 93rd bombardiers unleashed nine 500-pound bombs on the Littorio marshaling yards. As they pulled away from the target, members of the crew observed the rail yards erupting in flames and explosions that engulfed trains and track. The 93rd Liberators roared past the eastern fringe of Rome on a southeast vector, stalked by cautious German and Italian fighters, then turned to the west. They passed over the town of Castel Gandolfo, on Lago Albano, the summer residence of the Pope during more peaceful times, then encountered a parting flurry of antiaircraft fire as they crossed the coast. A few miles out to sea, the Liberators set a southward course for Benghazi.
The damage to Rome’s rail yards and airfields was extensive. More problematic for the Americans was the destruction of part of the seven-hundred-year-old papal Basilica of San Lorenzo, which had been overlooked in the mission planning because of its location well outside the Vatican walls. Other bombs damaged an area known as University City, where the German Air Force had its headquarters. Civilian casualties were officially reported at 717 killed and 1,599 wounded. On Rome’s southern outskirts, the Ciampino military airport was rendered unusable and about two hundred planes on the ground were destroyed.5
Out of more than five hundred aircraft participating in the raid, only two were shot down: one B-25 and one B-26, both lost in the attack on the Ciampino military airfield. Not a single B-17 or B-24 was lost. Seven 93rd bombers had sustained minor flak damage, with only two gunners scratched.
The only 93rd death was a New York City native whose parents had immigrated from Sicily. Sergeant Gelorme Musco’s B-24, Blasted Event, had come under attack by enemy fighters during the outbound flight after his pilot dropped out of the formation because of engine problems over Mount Etna. An enemy cannon shell exploded near Musco’s tail turret, mortally wounding the Blasted Event gunner. Pilot Raymond A. Walker of New Haven, Connecticut, landed at a recently liberated airfield eight miles south of Catania, Sicily, so his beloved tail gunner could be buried in his ancestral soil.6
Ben and his comrades had written another notable chapter in history’s most terrible war. They had flown eight hundred miles into enemy territory and bombed an Axis capital in Europe—the first Americans to do so during the war. And they had done it with ease.
For Ben, Rome was mission number 23.
FOLLOWING THE ROME RAID, THE 93RD crews resumed the low-level practice missions that had stoked so much speculation before their departure from England. The target remained a mystery to all but a few senior officers. To keep their minds off the rumors, men swam in the sea, wrote letters, played poker, and watched movies and live shows under the stars. The officers had the additional diversion of a casino built by one enterprising pilot in a spacious military tent.
On the afternoon of July 24, Jake Epting and the other commissioned officers were summoned to a briefing where they were finally informed of their target: the massive complex of oil refineries around Ploiesti, Romania, a primary source of Hitler’s oil. The officers were shown a photograph that mapped their route to the target, two thousand miles out and back, reachable only by installing auxiliary fuel tanks in the bomb bay of each B-24. “I watched the men carefully as the target was announced,” intelligence officer Brutus Hamilton recorded. “No one flickered.”7
To shore up morale, a USO troupe was trucked out from Benghazi on July 24 to entertain the 93rd. The performers sang and danced and cracked jokes on a stage built of sandbags and marble slabs. Later in the evening, an air raid warning was issued, but no attack ever came.
Bored with their desolate surroundings and bland diet, the 93rd veterans drew on their Gambut Main experience and befriended Bedouin peddlers who lived in a tent settlement near the American camp. Riding donkeys, camels, and the occasional bicycle, the Bedouins struck up a brisk trade in fresh eggs, grapes, and melons, which they sold or traded for American cigarettes. The 93rd men welcomed the addition of real scrambled eggs and fresh fruit to their diet, until bouts of dysentery and diarrhea swept the camp.
On July 25, 93rd intelligence officers set up a carefully guarded tent with Ploiesti target folders and maps for the pilots and navigators to peruse. The crews continued to fly low-level practice missions, but the enlisted men remained oblivious. Finally, on Thursday, July 29, Ben and the other gunners and radio operators were briefed and shown photographs and models of their respective targets. A flurry of briefings and pep talks followed.
Saturday, July 31, was consumed by final preparations. Mission commanders scrambled to replace ill officers and enlisted men too weak to fly. The commander of the Ninth Air Force, General Lewis Brereton, and General Uzal Ent, commander of the Ninth Bomber Command, arrived from Cairo to deliver a final pep talk. After lunch, Ben was among the throng of men who gathered for another review of the plan conducted by their group commander, Lieutenant Colonel Addison Baker. The men were paid and given the rest of the day off.
As evening fell, some wrote final letters and jotted their hopes and fears in diaries. “We take off in [the] morning early to bomb Rumanian oil fields from low level,” scribbled one 93rd gunner. “Everyone all keyed up about it. Very big.”8
Chapter 26
TIDAL WAVE
It had been a sleepless night for many of the 93rd men when whistles and horns sounded across the desert camp at 0200 Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday morning, August 1, 1943. It was 4:00 a.m. local time. In the predawn darkness bleary-eyed airmen dressed and made their way to the mess tent to sip coffee and pick at powdered eggs and pancakes. After two months of preparation and speculation, the mystery mission was a go.
A flurry of last-minute activity had swept the camp over the previous twelve hours. Urgent cables from Washington and Cairo grounded several senior officers who had planned to fly today’s raid. These and other scratches from the mission manifest due to illness now set off a last-minute scramble to finalize crew assignments.
In one of the previous day’s briefings, General Brereton, the Ninth Air Force commander, had characterized the low-level raid as the most important air mission to this point in the war. A successful strike on Hitler’s vital Romanian oil refineries could end the war by Christmas, he said. But casualties could run as high as 50 percent. Even if that proved true, the damage to the Axis cause would be worth it, Brereton declared.
In the coolness of the desert morning, the men were spared the scourge of swarming flies that tormented their daylight hours. They finished their coffee and what breakfast they could eat before shuffling off to the final briefing. The veil of mystery gone, the men now quietly pondered what they were being asked to do. Whether it was a brilliant stroke or a suicide mission would be revealed in the hours ahead.
The plan called for 180 aircraft from five B-24 groups scattered around the desert airfields outside Benghazi to cross the Mediterranean and Ionian seas to the north and the mountainous Balkans of southeastern Europe before converging at Ploiesti. The 93rd would contribute thirty-seven bombers in two attack groups. The Epting crew would be among twenty-two planes led by the 93rd group commander, Addison Baker. A second fifteen-plane force of 93rd bombers would be commanded by Major Ramsay Potts.
The 93rd bombers would proceed to their final checkpoint thirteen miles northwest of Ploiesti, then wheel to the southeast for the sprint to their target: the Concordia Vega Refinery, third largest of Ploiesti’s refineries, designated by mission planners as White 2. Each refinery complex featured a cluster of buildings where crude oil was refined into various products, including high-octane aviation fuel and engine lubricants devoured by Axis military vehicles and aircraft. In addition to the smokestack-level final approach, the attack would be distinguished by another unusual tactic: The B-24s would form into waves, six to twelve bombers abreast, and sweep across the enemy refineries like an old-style cavalry charge.
With the briefing complete, the men climbed into trucks for the short ride to their parked aircraft. Ben and his crewmates arrived at Tupelo Lass to find their lineup still in flux. Major K. O. Dessert had exercised his privilege as 409th Squadron commander by assigning himself to pilot Tupelo Lass; Dessert had originally picked Colonel Jacob Smart, a top Arnold aide, to occupy the copilot’s seat, relegating Jake Epting to the role of a spare pilot. But orders from Washington had grounded Smart, whose vast knowledge of secrets included the Manhattan Project. Epting took the copilot’s seat and Charles Young, the Texan that Epting had taken on as copilot after Hap Kendall got his own crew, would serve as a waist gunner and spare pilot.
