Charles Stenius Young—Bubba to family and friends back home in Liberty County, Texas, in the Lonestar State’s southeastern swamps—had been studying medicine at the University of Texas in the fall of 1941 when Britain’s brave stand against Hitler inspired him to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. After earning his pilot’s wings, Young had notched six months of combat with the RAF in England before transferring to the 93rd in April 1943. Since joining Ted’s Travelling Circus, Young had earned a new nickname: Five-by-Five, a reference to his stature—five-feet-five-inches, or a half inch shy of that, as some military records indicated. Young was slight of stature, but he was built like a football fullback, with a muscular 160 pounds packed onto his sixty-five-inch frame.1
Young had forged a close friendship with another Texan new to the 93rd. Ivan Canfield had dropped out of Brackenridge High School in San Antonio and, with the blessing of his mother and stepfather, an army sergeant, had enlisted in the Army Air Forces. Canfield had fudged his age to enter pilot training, and he had been among the youngest graduates in the Gulf Coast Training Center’s Class 43-A, earning his wings on January 14, 1943, in ceremonies at Ellington Field, on the outskirts of Houston—forty miles from Five-by-Five Young’s hometown.2
Canfield had been assigned to the 409th Squadron in June as copilot on a crew commanded by another newcomer, Nicholas Stampolis, the twenty-one-year-old son of Greek immigrants from Kalamazoo, Michigan. With his infectious gap-toothed grin and youthful appearance, Canfield was christened Junior by his 93rd comrades. Junior and Nick Stampolis had made their combat debut after the group’s reassignment to the Libyan desert, and the pair had logged eight missions together, including the Rome raid, at the controls of a bomber named Jose Carioca, after the dapper Brazilian parrot in a recent Disney film. Now, with Junior Canfield and Nick Stampolis assigned to Addison Baker’s third wave for the attack on White 2, Bubba Young would be able to keep an eye on his young friends from the right waist window of Tupelo Lass.
There was one more new addition to the Epting crew for the mission—a familiar face, just not in a combat role. As the officers and men of Tupelo Lass were heading out to the flight line, their chief mechanic, Master Sergeant Raymond Wierciszowski, had stopped the squadron commander. “Major Dessert, do you mind if I go with you?” he had asked. It was an unusual request, but no one knew Tupelo Lass and its engines better than Sergeant Wier, as everyone called him. “I’d love to have you, Sergeant Wier,” Dessert replied. And so, Ray Wierciszowski posed alongside the flying members of Tupelo Lass as someone used Sergeant Wier’s Kodak Brownie camera to snap a final photograph of the crew in the dawn light.
At 0400 GMT, Addison Baker guided Hell’s Wench down the Site 7 airstrip and into the brightening skies. A few minutes later, with K. O. Dessert at the controls and Jake Epting assisting from the copilot’s seat, Tupelo Lass lumbered down the runway. With more than four thousand pounds of bombs and 3,100 gallons of hundred-octane fuel, including four hundred gallons in a pair of auxiliary tanks bolted in the bomb bay, getting airborne this morning was the first of many perilous challenges the pilots faced. As Sergeant Wier stood behind the pilots and Ben lounged a few feet farther back, Dessert and Epting got their overloaded Liberator airborne. Tupelo Lass slowly climbed into the Mediterranean dawn.
It was 0435 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)—7:35 a.m. local time. TIDAL WAVE, as the low-level raid on Ploiesti had been recently codenamed, was underway.
THE 93RD’S THIRTY-SEVEN LIBERATORS got airborne without incident, but the spectacular split-screen of shimmering desert and sparkling sea that spread beneath Ben and his crewmates in the rising morning light revealed the smoldering fires of the day’s first casualties. The 93rd had contributed a spare crew, newly arrived from England, to their friends of the 98th Bomb Group. Those men had boarded a B-24 named Kickapoo and had taken off from an airfield about six miles east of Benghazi. The pilot was Lieutenant Robert Nespor, and, like many of the men assigned to the Ploiesti mission, he had completed his twenty-five-mission tour and was flying The Big One out of a sense of history and duty. Shortly after takeoff, three of Kickapoo’s engines cut out. Nespor’s bombardier dumped their bombs in the sea and the pilot circled back to their airfield for an emergency landing. As Nespor and copilot Lieutenant John Riley attempted to land, one wing clipped a concrete power pole. Kickapoo slammed into the ground and burst into flames. There were two survivors, both badly burned: Lieutenant Russell Polivka, the Wisconsin-born navigator, and Staff Sergeant Eugene Garner, a gunner.3
It took nearly an hour for the armada to get airborne and formed for the outbound flight, but finally the 376th Bomb Group aircraft wheeled to the north, followed by the aircraft of the 93rd, 98th, and 44th groups. Bringing up the rear was the 389th, which had only recently arrived in England as the third B-24 group assigned to the Eighth Air Force.
Heading north across the Mediterranean, the groups began to gain altitude. About forty minutes from the Albanian coast, a 376th bomber named Wongo Wongo suddenly dropped from the lead group, fell sharply to the left, leveled out briefly, then corkscrewed downward, smoke streaming from one of its starboard engines, before smashing into the sea and exploding. Trailing behind, the 93rd Bombers witnessed the horrifying spectacle. Standing behind K. O. Dessert and Jake Epting on the flight deck of Tupelo Lass, Ray Wier snapped a photograph of the column of smoke rising from the spot where Wongo Wongo had disappeared beneath the waves. “Kind of a bad omen in a way to see something like that happen,” Ben later recalled.4
During the Mediterranean crossing, four 93rd aircraft dropped from the formation with mechanical problems and turned back to Benghazi. Around 0900, the 93rd passed over the Greek island of Corfu, and about five minutes later they crossed the Albanian coast. They climbed to ten thousand feet to clear the Pindus Mountains of southern Albania and the Balkan Mountains beyond, only to find an even more formidable obstacle in their path: a wall of cumulus clouds that rose to fifteen thousand feet. Addison Baker now faced a hard choice. He could burn fuel skirting the clouds, or plunge ahead and risk a midair collision. “A cold chill went down my spine,” 409th Squadron pilot Edwin Baker later wrote. “It was obvious that we were going to have to fly through.”5
Addison Baker made the command decision to forge ahead in a gradual ascent rather than waste precious fuel skirting the clouds. With the group maintaining strict radio silence, signals were flashed to the other 93rd aircraft to inform them of the plan. The formation loosened up and the men slipped on oxygen masks as they disappeared into the clouds. For several minutes, the bombers droned on in perilous solitude, with some men offering silent prayers that they would avoid a collision in the clouds. Finally, at fifteen thousand feet, flying over the mountainous border of Serbia and Bulgaria, Addison Baker and his crews broke through the clouds. The 93rd bombers leveled off and re-formed into three-plane Vs.
The bombers finally cleared the mountains about forty miles northwest of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Beneath them lay the Danube Basin and the Wallachian Plain. They had descended to fifteen hundred feet when they crossed the Danube River at a point about 130 miles southwest of Ploiesti and dropped to treetop level. As they crossed the great European river they had read about since they were schoolboys, Dessert and his men broke into a spirited vocal rendition of Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz. “We thought that was the greatest thing to get everybody’s spirits up again,” Dessert later recalled. As Tupelo Lass flashed over the Danube, Ben cracked, “Hey, that river’s not blue—it’s dirty brown!”6
Beyond the river, they dropped to 150 feet. After a month in the desert, the men marveled at the colorful mosaic of cross-hatched fields of ripening corn, wheat, and alfalfa, and copses of trees stitched with meandering streams and rivers. Scenes of bucolic rural life flashed beneath their feet like a film in fast-forward: girls bathing in a stream; wagonloads of hay rumbling along roads; villagers in their Sunday best peering up at the huge machines roaring overhead; women in colorful dresses smiling and waving handkerchiefs. “We could almost reach out and touch these people because we were flying low enough,” Ben said.
They roared across the Wallachian Plain at 240 miles an hour, hugging the terrain, desperately trying to avoid German radar. They needn’t have bothered. Enemy spotters had been tracking them for more than two hours, from the moment they crossed Albania’s coast. Hundreds of German and Romanian antiaircraft gunners and fighter pilots waited in ambush.
At Pitesti, in the foothills of the Southern Carpathian Mountains fifty-five miles west of Ploiesti, the 93rd bombers reached the first of three checkpoints leading to the final sprint to the target. About nine minutes later, they spotted the second checkpoint: the town of Targoviste. The pilots and navigators peered intently at the ground flashing beneath their feet, searching for a long railroad bridge, a road, and then a town—Floresti—which would be their cue to make a hard-right turn for Ploiesti. In the lead 376th Liberator, passing over Targoviste, the pilots saw a long railroad bridge, a power station, and a road, and began the turn—twenty miles too soon.
In many of the 93rd bombers, the error was immediately obvious. Pilots and navigators shouted in dismay over their internal intercom: “Not here!” “Too soon!” “Mistake! Mistake!”7 But they were under strict orders to maintain radio silence to preserve the element of surprise—unaware that they had been tracked for hours. At the vanguard of the 93rd formation, Addison Baker followed the lead of the 376th bombers and turned to the right rather than forge on alone.
A sinking feeling swept the 93rd men. Instead of Ploiesti, they were now closing on the Romanian capital of Bucharest.
AS ADDISON BAKER PONDERED HIS unpalatable choices, the 93rd Liberators fanned out into their two attack forces, wingtip-to-wingtip: four waves in Baker’s group, and two waves in the smaller group led by Ramsay Potts. Tupelo Lass occupied the lead position in the fourth wave, with Ben’s old friend Dick Wilkinson and his copilot Edwin Baker off their left wing and Hap Kendall off their right. Edwin Baker peered out of his right window at Dessert to see if the 409th Squadron command could signal some explanation for the change of plans. Dessert looked back at Edwin Baker, shrugged, and threw up his hands.
Six minutes into the wrong turn, some of the 93rd men spotted smokestacks and a large town visible through the summer haze off to their left. It was Ploiesti, fifteen miles distant. As if on cue, Addison Baker smoothly executed a ninety-degree turn to the north. The other 93rd pilots had been waiting for just such a move, and they pivoted as if they had rehearsed it. The 376th was nearing the outskirts of Bucharest, a target with little military significance, but at least Addison Baker had the 93rd headed in the right direction.
In reality, all the hours spent studying maps and scale models had been for nothing. The 93rd crews would be attacking Ploiesti from the opposite direction to the one they’d practiced, flying headlong into some of the most diabolical air defenses ever devised. Earlier that morning, Addison Baker had promised his men that he would get them to the target, whatever it took. Now the target that had been the subject of so much speculation and secrecy lay four minutes ahead.
Those who survived would forever remember these as the most terrifying minutes of their lives. For many, the terror would culminate in a horrific death.
Chapter 27
A HELLHOLE OF FIRE, FLAME, AND SMOKE
Peering ahead through the Plexiglas top turret of Tupelo Lass, Ben clutched the hand controller of his twin .50-caliber machine guns as Ploiesti’s smokestacks took shape through the summer haze. More than a minute had passed since K. O. Dessert had followed the three waves of 93rd bombers ahead of him into the corrective left turn executed by Addison Baker, and yet there was still no sign of the formidable enemy defenses that supposedly awaited them.
Ben had sensed that the raid was going to be one of the biggest moments of his life, but his eagerness to make history had been tempered by his doubts about the low-level plan. In the forty-eight hours before takeoff, a couple of his buddies had asked British antiaircraft gunners protecting their desert airfield what they thought about the American strategy. The Tommies thought it was daft. “They said it would be just suicide to go in that [low],” Ben said. “That the smaller guns would really get you.”1 Now, as the American bombers closed within five minutes of Hitler’s prized oil refineries without encountering a single enemy gun or fighter plane, some of the 93rd men wondered whether the low-level plan had been a masterstroke after all.
And then, “all hell was breaking loose everywhere,” Ben recalled.
In an instant, the 93rd bombers found themselves trapped in a gauntlet of guns—an array of conventional ground emplacements, rooftop positions, and towers. Harmless-looking haystacks and railroad boxcars collapsed to reveal more guns. Now everything in the Ploiesti air defense arsenal—from machine guns and nimble 37-millimeter antiaircraft weapons to hulking 88-millimeter aircraft-killers that fired fifteen or more twenty-pound shells a minute—blasted away at the four-engine American bombers streaking past. Ben watched in fascination and horror as the landscape was suddenly transformed into a sea of pulsating lights.
In the cockpit, K. O. Dessert struggled to keep Tupelo Lass steady as prop wash from other B-24s and shell bursts made it feel like he was at the tiller of a small boat in a raging sea. Beside him, Jake Epting made himself useful by shouting out the location of enemy guns: “Eight o’clock! Twelve o’clock! Three o’clock!” And then: “Shoot all over!”2 As Dessert tried to keep Tupelo Lass low to the ground without clipping a smokestack or refinery building, a new threat emerged: bus-size balloons bobbing from steel cables strung with contact explosives.
Inside the bombers, the noise was deafening: the clatter of machine guns, roaring engines, exploding shells, and the sound of shrapnel and enemy bullets spattering and piercing the thin aluminum skin of the B-24s. Clouds of shell fragments and shards of metal sheared from bombers by enemy fire fluttered in the prop-churned air. Sensory overload and fear overwhelmed some of the Americans. In a scene repeated in several bombers, a sobbing 328th Squadron gunner sank to the floor beneath his waist gun.3
As terrifying as it was being shot at from point-blank range, some of the 93rd men found they liked being able to see the faces of the gunners who were trying to kill them. For Ben, blasting away from the top turret, the free-for-all bore a vague resemblance to a Nebraska pheasant hunt: Spot a target, fire, spot a target, fire, spot, fire. The frenzied speed of the action gave the battle a surreal air. Jake Epting saw two enemy gunners fall at their weapons, only to be instantly shoved aside by two comrades who took their place and resumed firing.4
By now, Dessert had dropped Tupelo Lass below fifty feet to avoid the murderous enemy fire; Epting would later say they were even lower, crossing the target at twenty feet. All around them shells and bullets ripped into B-24s and flames streamed from crippled aircraft.
Ben’s vantage point in the final wave of the 93rd’s main force afforded him a commanding view of the horrific tableau. Dead ahead an 88-millimeter round exploded in the nose of Addison Baker’s Hell’s Wench, followed by other rounds that smashed into the wing and cockpit. Within seconds, the 93rd commander’s ship looked like a flying torch. Rather than attempt an emergency landing to save himself and his crew, Baker made good on his promise to lead his men to the target—even if it was an improvised target he had picked out of the haze.
To keep airborne as long as possible, the group commander dumped his bombs and flew on, a stream of flaming gasoline spanning the length of his ship. The flames became too much for one of Addison Baker’s men, and he leapt from the nose wheel hatch and tumbled through the air, “so close we could see his burned legs,” one pilot recalled.5 Another shell slammed into Hell’s Wench and Baker’s right wing sagged.
The cockpit of Hell’s Wench was now consumed by flames, yet Addison Baker and John Jerstad somehow remained in control of their aircraft. In one final act of extraordinary heroism, Baker and Jerstad willed Hell’s Wench to three hundred feet in a desperate attempt to allow their men to attempt a crazy-low parachute escape. Three or four men jumped from the waist windows only seconds before Hell’s Wench crashed into a field just beyond the refineries. None of the Hell’s Wench crew survived; Baker and Jerstad were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
With Hell’s Wench gone and several sister ships in flames, Tupelo Lass roared up a Ploiesti boulevard at treetop level. Ben watched as the wing of a nearby 93rd aircraft struck a smokestack and the aircraft “plummeted to the ground [and] absolutely disintegrated in a terrible explosion.” As other Liberators burst into flames or crashed, one of Ben’s crewmates broke down and had to be restrained. Ben watched another burning B-24 to his right sink to the ground and explode “into a million pieces.”6
Ben thought Tupelo Lass was doomed when a gasoline storage tank exploded in their path and the tank’s metal shell shot skyward like a tin can. But at the last second Dessert deftly turned Tupelo Lass nearly upright on one wing and somehow avoided the inferno. As they roared past the pillar of fire, Ben felt the intense heat as if a giant oven door had been opened.
Amid the carnage and chaos, K. O. Dessert kept his cool. Shells that seemed headed for his cockpit somehow kept missing on either side. Al Naum released his bombs on a refinery, and Dessert poured on the power to escape the enemy fire.
All around Tupelo Lass, other crews fought for their lives. To the left, Dick Wilkinson and Edwin Baker were flying low and fast in Little Lady, their gunners firing nearly nonstop at the enemy gunners trying to bring them down. Over the town, a church steeple suddenly loomed as the bombardier was about to release his bombs. Wilkie coolly raised his left wing and cleared the steeple. The time on the clock tower showed five minutes before three o’clock local time (1155 GMT). Without warning, a flurry of antiaircraft shells whooshed past them, unleashed by guns concealed in a row of eucalyptus trees ahead. Another shell hit the number three engine and still another slammed into their belly. Little Lady shuddered and momentarily felt like it “stopped cold in midair,” Edwin Baker said. Their number three engine was on fire and gasoline gushed from holes in an auxiliary tank. Baker and the crew’s spare pilot pulled the fire extinguisher on the flaming engine and feathered the prop, averting one crisis.
