Little Lady’s navigator yelled “bombs away” and three thousand pounds of ordnance tumbled from the ravaged aircraft. A few seconds later, when K. O. Dessert turned Tupelo Lass on one wing to avoid the ruptured storage tank, Dick Wilkinson followed close behind, praying that the raw gas and fumes that now filled his bomb bay wouldn’t explode. They didn’t. “As we passed the heart of the explosions, it felt like passing a hot iron close to your face,” Edwin Baker recalled. “Suddenly we popped out of the hellhole of fire, flame, and smoke into the clear sky and green fields beyond. Wilkie and I looked at each other and smiled.”7
Off the right wing of Tupelo Lass, Hap Kendall had his own troubles in a B-24 named Lucky. He dodged the storage tank explosion and barely cleared a smokestack with his right wing, but the abrupt maneuvers forced the bombardier to hold their bombs. Kendall streaked across the city in search of another target, found another refinery, and the bombardier unleashed their ordnance. As Kendall steered his crew out of the fire, Lucky was barely airworthy: control wires severed, hydraulic lines ruptured, and at least one fuel tank riddled with shell holes, leaking gasoline. Kendall alerted his men to prepare to abandon ship.
One of the last B-24s to cross Ploiesti in Dessert’s fourth wave was Honky Tonk Gal, piloted by a lanky Texan, twenty-two-year-old Second Lieutenant Hubert Womble. By the time Womble emerged from Ploiesti’s deadly ring of fire, he had lost three engines to enemy fire and had been wounded when a shell exploded in the control pedestal beside him. His copilot had taken the controls and was struggling to remain airborne. Spotting a lush cornfield, Second Lieutenant Lawrence Lancashire executed an emergency landing that would have been perfect if not for a ditch on the far side. When Honky Tonk Gal hit the ditch, the landing gear collapsed and the B-24 came to a lurching halt. Womble tried to rise from his seat, only to discover that his left foot had been severed. “It was still in my boot near the rudder pedals,” he later recalled.8 Womble’s men helped him exit Honky Tonk Gal through the top hatch and tended to his wounds as they awaited the Romanian troops who would take them into custody.
Emerging from the enemy kill zone around Ploiesti, K. O. Dessert and Jake Epting proceeded to the prearranged rendezvous point to search for comrades with whom they could share the long journey back to Benghazi. Finding no other friendly aircraft, navigator Edward Weir set a course for the Greek coast, and Tupelo Lass set off alone. “It was the strangest feeling because we couldn’t see any of the planes we were supposed to be flying with,” Ben said. “We were all alone.”9
OF THE THIRTY-THREE 93RD BOMBERS that had reached the target area, six had been shot down and several others were in bad shape. As the four groups of B-24s that now trailed the 93rd approached Ploiesti, enemy fighters scoured the skies around the city to pick off crippled planes that had managed to survive the gauntlet of antiaircraft fire. Those that eluded the guns and the fighters headed south in search of refuge.
It was clear to Dick Wilkinson and Hap Kendall that their battered aircraft would never make it back to Benghazi. Turkey was the closest place of refuge—a neutral country where American airmen would hold the preferred legal status of internees rather than prisoners of war. In Tupelo Lass, K. O. Dessert and Jake Epting were amazed by their good fortune—their aircraft didn’t appear to have been hit, and so they were flying under full power and control. But navigator Edward Weir had prepared for all contingencies, and he had marked on his maps the location of airfields in Turkey, Crete, and Sicily that could be used in an emergency. For now, the goal was to get as far away from Ploiesti as possible and to get back over the mountains of Yugoslavia and Albania to more familiar territory.
The return trip was proceeding smoothly when Tupelo Lass encountered clouds over Yugoslavia. Dessert and Epting were skilled in the art of flying by instrument, and so the transition presented nothing they couldn’t handle. A few minutes ahead of Tupelo Lass, a cluster of 93rd aircraft from the first waves of Addison Baker’s force had encountered the same clouds, with tragic results.
Three B-24s had formed up in a protective V for the return journey: Exterminator, piloted by Hugh Roper; Let ’Er Rip, piloted by Victor Olliffe; and Thundermug, piloted by Russel Longnecker. Roper and Olliffe were best friends since the early days of the 93rd, and they were at the end of their combat tours. Roper had six men aboard Exterminator who were flying their final mission, as well as another veteran 93rd officer, Captain Jack Jones, who had flown the mission as a spare pilot and observer. Longnecker had been among a group of Americans who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force before America entered the war and had transferred into the Eighth Air Force in England only in April.
As they flew south from Ploiesti, the lead 93rd aircraft encountered clouds along the mountainous border between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Within each three-plane element, the pilots executed a standard maneuver to provide some distance from one another whenever flying into clouds. They would tighten up their formation when they emerged and found each other.
Entering a cloud, Longnecker executed the maneuver and distanced himself from Roper and Olliffe. When he emerged, Olliffe and Roper were gone. Their remains were recovered in Yugoslavia after the war, and the two friends were buried with their crewmates in group graves only a few feet from each other at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. Olliffe and Roper prided themselves on the tight formations they flew, and they had collided in a cloud and fallen to their deaths. Nineteen souls aboard the two aircraft were killed: all eleven men aboard Roper’s Exterminator, and Olliffe and seven others aboard Let ’Er Rip. Three gunners toward the rear of Olliffe’s B-24 managed to unfurl their parachutes and landed in Bulgaria, where they were captured by Axis forces.
Flying alone through the mountains, Tupelo Lass avoided such perils. Reaching the Ionian coast near the Greek island of Corfu, Dessert and Epting made their final decision of the day: Their fuel situation seemed to be good and their aircraft was flying well; they would push on to their home field outside Benghazi, some 525 miles due south.
After the day’s trials, the flight across the Mediterranean was uneventful. The men were left alone with their thoughts and visions of the terrible things they had witnessed. Dusk was falling when they lined up the runway at Site 7 and landed. The time was 1740 GMT or 8:40 p.m. local time. They had been in the air thirteen hours and five minutes. It was Ben’s twenty-fourth mission, and the longest and bloodiest he would ever fly.
As Dessert taxied to the designated parking stand for Tupelo Lass, the men inside were struck by what they saw. The 409th Squadron parking spots that had been filled that morning when they taxied away for takeoff were now empty. The implication hit Ben: My God, they must not have made it.10 Only one more 409th Squadron aircraft would land that evening.
Climbing stiffly from Tupelo Lass, Ben and the others gave their aircraft a careful inspection. They were amazed: Tupelo Lass didn’t have a single bullet hole or shrapnel mark.
Among the men who turned out to welcome the first 409th Squadron crew home from Ploiesti was Colonel Jacob Smart, the Hap Arnold aide who had intended to sit in the copilot’s seat alongside K. O. Dessert before his last-minute grounding. Tears streamed down Smart’s face as he greeted Dessert. Smart knew a lot of men wouldn’t make it back, and, as architect of the low-level plan, he had wanted to put himself in harm’s way as an act of solidarity with those who were destined to die. It was already clear to Smart that his fears of heavy losses had been realized. Good men had been lost trying to execute his plan, and the least he could have done was share that danger with them. He would have to live with that haunting knowledge for the rest of his life. “He wanted so badly to go on that raid,” Dessert later said.11
Dessert walked away from Tupelo Lass alongside Ben and Sergeant Raymond Wierciszowski, the courageous mechanic who had risked his life to document many of the raid’s heartbreaking moments with his Kodak camera. Sergeant Wier summoned the nerve to ask a question that had nagged him during the flight back.
“Major Dessert, was that a rough raid?” Wier asked uncertainly.
“Sergeant Wier,” Dessert solemnly replied, “that’s the toughest raid you’ll ever be on in your life.”12
Chapter 28
THE LONGEST NIGHT
Numbed by the day’s horrors, Ben and his crewmates made their way to their tent in the gathering darkness. Behind them, smudge pots flickered along the 93rd’s desert airstrip to light the way for late arrivals. Few words were exchanged—the men struggled to process all they had seen and heard. Navigator Edward Weir had suffered stress headaches throughout the Epting crew’s months of combat, but nothing as severe as those of the past hours.1
The men who hadn’t flown the mission pressed the survivors with unwelcome questions. “Are you sure you went over the target?” a few curious onlookers asked after seeing the condition of Tupelo Lass. The men on the ground were oblivious to the anguish felt by the survivors. Ben and his crewmates weren’t in the mood for conversation. They were struck by how quiet and empty the camp felt. As they passed the tents of comrades who hadn’t made it back, some quietly called out their names—the first roll call of the dead or missing.
A shocking number still hadn’t made it back at that hour. By late evening at least seventeen 93rd bombers remained missing. That meant that nearly two hundred men from the 93rd alone were unaccounted for, including several of Ben’s best friends and longest acquaintances in the 409th Squadron. As midnight approached, hopes for a miracle faded. On some level Ben and the others fantasized that “somebody might stagger back.” But, in reality, “you knew they weren’t going to make it back at that late an hour because they didn’t have that much fuel,” Ben said.2
In the officers’ bivouac, Brutus Hamilton captured the sorrowful mood in a long diary entry. “This is written late at night and with a heavy heart and a bewildered, laggard pen,” he began. “It’s been the saddest day in the history of the 93rd Bomb Gp.”3 Hamilton listed the crews still missing at that hour and briefly noted what little he had learned about their disappearance.
The early pronouncements from headquarters had declared the raid a crippling blow to Hitler and the Axis war effort, but that was wishful thinking. Still, in this moment of shock and anguish, it helped men to imagine that the mission had been worth the terrible cost.
For survivors of the day’s ordeal, nothing could ease their pain. Too upset to sleep, Ben tossed and turned on his cot all night. A few times he heard the sound of airplane engines in the distance and his heart leapt with hope. Oh God, they’re coming back to base, he imagined, if only briefly. “But they never did,” Ben said. As the sound of some lone aircraft faded in the distance, a haunting silence again settled over the camp.
Many of the men lay awake reliving the day’s terrors, their mind’s eye a horror film running in an endless loop. “I don’t think anybody slept,” K. O. Dessert later recalled. “Everybody’s tent had somebody missing in it, or right next to your tent a guy was gone or something.” Those sleepless hours of August 1–2, 1943, would be forever remembered by Dessert and other Ploiesti survivors as “probably the longest night of our lives.”4
DAWN OF MONDAY MORNING, AUGUST 2, brought no relief. Ben was still in his tent when a familiar voice shattered the stillness. “Junior!” the voice plaintively wailed. “Junior! Junior!”
It was Ben’s copilot, Charles Young, searching for his friend Junior Canfield. From his turret, Ben had witnessed Junior’s final moments as copilot of Jose Carioca. Five-by-Five Young had a similar vantage point from the right waist window, where he had taken over gunnery duties for the day’s mission. There was no doubting Junior was gone—no one could have survived the fiery crash that consumed Jose Carioca and the Stampolis crew. But the twenty-three-year-old Young couldn’t accept the fact that his best friend was gone forever at the age of nineteen, and so he continued to search the desert camp and the nearby flight line.
The log of missing crews had grown overnight. In addition to the spectacular end of the Stampolis crew, nearly everyone had watched the final seconds of Addison Baker and his crew in Hell’s Wench. But the fate of other comrades remained murky. Several aircraft had taken hits and fallen behind the rest of the group, and so hopes of their eventual return lingered.
Such was the case with the pair of 409th Squadron Liberators flying off either wing of Tupelo Lass as they approached Ploiesti. One was piloted by Dick Wilkinson, the other by Hap Kendall. Now both were missing.
Also missing was the 409th Squadron pilot Lew Brown, the courageous Arkansan who had nearly been shot down twice during the previous months and had lost six men along the way. Through all that, Lew Brown had somehow held it together and finished his twenty-five missions on July 19. Now he, too, was missing.
As the day wore on, the men couldn’t escape reminders of their missing comrades—the empty tents, short mess lines, and absence of familiar faces and voices. Some of the 93rd men sorted and boxed the personal effects of lost comrades. Among those assigned that grim duty was twenty-two-year-old Donald Hudspeth, a 328th Squadron gunner from Yadkinville, North Carolina. He was a member of the crew that had flown Hell’s Wench down from England only a few days earlier. Addison Baker had pulled rank and appropriated the aircraft for the Ploiesti raid, handpicking a crew of 93rd veterans to accompany him. Baker’s action had allowed Hudspeth to live at least one more day, although it also put him in the painful position of boxing up the personal effects of the enlisted men who had died in his place.5
The day’s only bright spot came in the afternoon with the arrival of two crews that had made emergency landings on Sicily. One of them was a 328th Squadron crew; the other was a 409th Squadron aircraft, Queenie, piloted by Lew Brown and South Dakotan Homer Moran, who had shared the Spain adventure with Ben’s crew.6
Brown and his men had sweated out a harrowing return flight from Ploiesti after being shot up over the target. Struggling to gain altitude as they approached the mountains south of the Danube, Brown ordered his men to throw out everything they didn’t need, to lighten their load. Disappearing into a wall of clouds, they flew blindly for about an hour before reaching clear skies along the Ionian coast of Albania and Greece. Quick calculations convinced Brown and his navigator and flight engineer that their best bet was to find a landing spot on Sicily rather than risk running out of fuel over the Mediterranean. They made it to Sicily, and after patching up their battered bomber as best they could, they set off for their desert base with nine five-gallon gasoline cans filled with Sicilian wine. They shared forty gallons with their comrades and kept five gallons for themselves, but no one was in the mood to celebrate.7
Brutus Hamilton had spent a good part of the day piecing together what the men had experienced at Ploiesti, and a dark portrait had emerged. He captured the bleak mood among the officers and men at the conclusion of his lengthy diary entry, in a coda that recounted fragments of what he had learned during his conversations of August 2. “All men are agreed that [the raid] was the worst experience they had ever undergone,” Hamilton concluded.
Ben moved through the day as if he were in a fog. He had no energy and no appetite. His body ached, as if he had been punched in a boxing match.8 His wretched mental and physical state mirrored that of most of the men who had flown the Ploiesti raid.
Ninth Air Force headquarters in Cairo was in contact with 93rd officers on the ground and knew well the dark mood that had settled over the camp. The men had lost their beloved group leader, Addison Baker, and one of the group’s most popular original members, John Jerstad. They all had lost friends and brothers-in-arms, and there was no place to turn in the camp without being reminded of those who were no longer with them. It was clear to the ranking 93rd officers and Ninth Air Force brass that they needed to get the Ploiesti survivors away from the camp as soon as possible.
