ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, SEVERAL PLANE loads of Ploiesti survivors boarded flights to Cairo for three days of rest and relaxation. In the 93rd camp that evening, a new replacement crew arrived with four bags of mail addressed to men in the 93rd. On most occasions, mail call was a joyous occasion, especially given the infrequency of deliveries during their temporary deployment to North Africa. But on this occasion, the joy was tinged with sadness as names were called and officers set aside the mail of the missing.9 The letters would be returned after being stamped with the heartbreaking words: “RETURN TO SENDER. MISSING IN ACTION.”
Later that evening, Ben and other men in the 93rd camp once again heard the drone of an approaching aircraft. This time, a B-24 landed in the darkness and out climbed Hap Kendall and his crew. Their escape from Ploiesti had been a stroke of serendipity.
Having been interned in Spain with the Epting crew, Kendall had ruled out landing in neutral Turkey and reliving the same experience. He asked his navigator to plot a course for Sicily. About two hours later they spotted Sicily’s Pachino Peninsula, recently liberated by British forces, and picked out a fighter airstrip as their salvation. With engines backfiring, control wires and hydraulic lines severed, and wing flaps shredded, Kendall and his copilot executed a white-knuckle landing. Without flaps, they ran off the end of the short runway and plowed into a pup-tent bivouac, barely missing British airmen who scrambled for their lives. Kendall hit a P-40 fighter before lurching to a stop in a vineyard. Emerging from their battered bomber to howls of protest from their ersatz British hosts, Kendall and his men, including his devout Mormon navigator, spent the rest of the night getting drunk on homemade Sicilian wine. When they finally got Lucky patched up enough to continue on their way, they made sure their cargo included a vat of the local vintage.10
Ben escaped the camp on an August 4 flight that transported several dozen Ploiesti survivors to Alexandria for three days of rest. For Ben and the others, the respite was a godsend. They lounged in big hotel rooms with servants at their summons, guzzled beer and whiskey, gorged themselves on gourmet cuisine, and danced with vivacious French and Greek girls.11
But no amount of creature comforts could heal the psychological wounds suffered by the men who had flown the Ploiesti raid, and their return instantly rekindled memories of lost comrades. In addition to the emotional toll, Ben and others still felt the physical effects—general soreness, insomnia, and nightmares being the most common manifestations.
If rumors swirling through the desert camp on their return from Egypt could be believed, Ben and others struggling with the physical and psychological shocks of the Ploiesti raid wouldn’t have long to recover. According to camp scuttlebutt, the 93rd was poised to undertake another momentous raid. Those who survived this next mission could expect a coveted reward: release from their desert purgatory and a return to England.
Chapter 29
LIMBO
Completing twenty-five combat missions had become an increasingly perilous quest for Eighth Air Force bomber crews by August 1943. As the summer weeks wore on and the bombers attempted bigger and bolder raids into Germany, or attacked high-value targets like Ploiesti, the twenty-five-mission requirement became ever more elusive.
As terrible as Ploiesti had been, the raid had brought Ben to the brink of number twenty-five. But now, on the verge of his ticket home, he found himself in a strange limbo. Ben returned from Egypt not knowing when he would fly his next mission, or with whom he would fly it. The only thing he knew with certainty was that he wouldn’t be flying with Jake Epting and the men who had become his brothers over the past eight months.
Epting and bombardier Al Naum had completed twenty-five missions before Ploiesti, and so they would be moving on as soon as orders were cut. That was also the case with Ben’s closest friends on the crew, radio operator Red Kettering and navigator Edward Weir. They had reached the coveted milestone the moment that Tupelo Lass rolled to a stop at the 93rd’s Site 7 airfield on their return from the low-level raid. Now, with his friends leaving and the 93rd camp awash in new faces, Ben searched for a worthy pilot whose crew he could join for one more mission.
The new crews had moved into the tents previously occupied by men who hadn’t returned from Ploiesti. Red Kettering was awaiting orders for his next move, so he still shared a tent with Ben and the four gunners that Epting had added after their return from Spain. There were a few other familiar faces among the enlisted men wandering around the camp: Bill Dawley, who had recovered from his head injury and was now Hap Kendall’s tail gunner; Ples Norwood, the young Red Ass mechanic who followed Ben’s path to a combat assignment and flew several missions with the Epting crew; and Dick Ryan, the married father from Massachusetts who had been an original member of the Epting crew and whose quest to complete twenty-five missions had been waylaid by his extended stay in Spain. Ryan had finally been released in June but hadn’t made it back to the 93rd before the group headed to North Africa. He had recently rejoined the 93rd in Libya as a replacement gunner.
Only hours after Ben and other Ploiesti survivors returned from Alexandria, another rumor swept the camp: Dick Wilkinson and his missing crew were alive and well. The news was confirmed: Wilkie and his men had made it to neutral Turkey, where they were now interned.
The good news about Wilkie had lifted Ben’s spirits, but that evening came the ominous news alerting combat crews to expect a mission on Sunday, August 8. There was no word about what the target would be, or who would fly the raid, but speculation swirled. Some of the men noted that the auxiliary fuel tanks installed in their bomb bay for the long flight to Ploiesti hadn’t been removed. At the very least that suggested a long mission. The men tried to steel themselves for whatever awaited them.
IN FACT, THE MISSION THAT AWAITED THE 93rd would be the longest bombing raid of the war to date—even longer than Ploiesti.
The target had been in the crosshairs of American and British strategic planners for years: an industrial complex, twenty miles south of Vienna, Austria, that produced one-third of the Luftwaffe’s current monthly output of Messerschmitt Me-109 fighters. The Wiener Neustädter Flugzeugwerke had been organized by Herman Göring’s Air Ministry in 1938, following Hitler’s annexation of Austria, and the factory’s first Me-109 was delivered in March 1939.
After the installation of conveyor belts in early 1942, Wiener Neustadt production soared to 130 planes a month. By year’s end, plant workers had turned out 1,303 fighters—49 percent of total Me-109 deliveries in 1942. By the following summer, Wiener Neustadt workers had nearly doubled their monthly output from the previous year, yet Göring’s Air Ministry pushed for even more. The plant had been assigned a new monthly target of 330 fighters.1
For Hap Arnold, the soaring German fighter production posed a threat to his January promises at the Casablanca war conference. Patience had never been one of Arnold’s virtues, and he had recently sharpened his criticism of his Eighth Air Force commander, General Ira Eaker.
The pressure on Arnold and Eaker only intensified in May following the TRIDENT war conference in Washington, DC. The most significant decision reached at the conference was an Anglo-American agreement on a date for Operation OVERLORD, the cross-channel invasion of northwest France. The invasion was set for May 1, 1944, but the timetable hinged on the ability of the American and British air forces to achieve air superiority over Western Europe.
The plan to achieve that air superiority was officially known as the Eaker Plan, but it just as easily could have been called the Arnold Plan, for it originated with a target list drawn up by the air chief’s advisers. In any event, the Combined Chiefs fine tuned the plan in their Washington discussions and set it in motion in June under the codename POINTBLANK. The initial directive set the first priority for American and British bomber forces as “the destruction of the German Air Force, its factories and supporting installations and its ball-bearing plants.”2
With Arnold’s pressure mounting, Eaker complained bitterly about the diversion of his entire force of B-24 bombers to North Africa to carry out the raid on the Ploiesti oil complex—one of seventy-six priority targets enumerated in the POINTBLANK directive. Even before the raid was carried out, Eaker was focused on destroying the Luftwaffe’s two prized single-engine fighter factories: the Wiener Neustädter Flugzeugwerke and a factory in Regensburg, Germany. In mid-July, a plan had been drawn up for American bombers to attack these two facilities in one coordinated raid. Eighth Air Force B-17s would attack the Regensburg factory from bases in England. The five North Africa–based B-24 groups, including the 93rd and two other groups wrested from Eaker for the Ploiesti raid, would attack the Wiener Neustadt complex.
As the attack loomed, Eaker’s forces were recovering from the loss of ninety-four aircraft on nine strikes during July. In the final week of July alone, Eaker lost seventy-three aircraft—nearly all of them B-17 Flying Fortresses—on four raids into Germany. It had been a bloody stretch, but the POINTBLANK timetable required Eaker to keep pushing his men hard through the final weeks of the European summer. After a year of American raids against German targets, the outcome of what Hap Arnold had sold as a game-changing air campaign remained in doubt. But the coming days could change all that. A successful double-strike raid on the factories that manufactured more than half of Hitler’s single-engine fighters could be the long-sought turning point in the air campaign against Nazi Germany.
Once again, Ben and his 93rd comrades were poised to make history.
AS THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 6 WOULD REVEAL, the struggle to process the psychological trauma of the Ploiesti raid wasn’t limited to citizen-soldiers like Ben. Twenty-five-year-old Major Joseph Scranton Tate, Jr., had graduated alongside the 93rd’s K. O. Dessert and George S. Brown in the West Point Class of 1941, fulfilling a destiny set for him since birth.
Tate had entered the world in February 1918 on a dusty army post in West Texas, where his father was a young lieutenant who had graduated from West Point the previous spring. Much of Joseph Jr.’s early life revolved around the army: living on army posts or visiting them, waiting on his father to return from overseas deployments, or hearing stories about the army from his grandfathers, both retired army colonels with whom Joseph spent much time. One of his great-grandfathers was a retired army general.
He was steeped not only in the ways of America’s military aristocracy, but also the upper echelons of politics, business, and high society. His maternal great-grandfather, Joseph Augustine Scranton—born in Connecticut and educated at Phillips Academy and Yale—had received his first political appointment from Abraham Lincoln in 1862, a job as internal revenue collector in the Pennsylvania city that bore the Scranton family name. Joseph Augustine Scranton would go on to become a Republican power broker, five-term member of Congress, and prominent newspaper publisher and editor.
Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, Joe Tate, Jr., was raised in a world of elite prep schools, masquerade parties, formal dinners, and debutante balls. He underwent adolescent polishing at Kent School in Connecticut, and then followed family tradition by entering West Point in the summer of 1937. At the academy, he was a decent student and outstanding athlete, playing football and lettering in ice hockey and lacrosse. After graduation in 1941, he entered the Army Air Forces. A younger brother, Frederic, would graduate a year behind Joe at West Point and also enter the army air service. Joe ended up flying four-engine bombers, while Frederic became a fighter pilot.
On the 93rd’s debut mission to Lille, France, in October 1942, Joe Tate and his crew, flying a ship they had christened Ball of Fire, survived fighter attacks coming and going. With oxygen, gasoline, and hydraulic lines cut and the aircraft filling with explosive fumes and trailing a plume of gasoline, Tate and his copilot executed an emergency landing on an RAF landing strip just beyond the Cliffs of Dover. Courage in combat, like so many other things, seemed to come easily for Joe Tate. When Addison Baker was promoted to command the 93rd in May 1943, Tate was elevated to Baker’s former position as 328th Squadron commander.
Baker’s loss over Ploiesti hit Tate especially hard. He had flown off to Egypt on leave with his comrades, but was still struggling to process the terrors of Ploiesti when he returned. On the night of August 6, Tate dreamed that he was attacking Ploiesti again—this time on a solo raid with his crew. In the terrifying mission that unfolded in his dream, Tate’s aircraft was riddled by enemy fire. He ran from the cockpit to the back of the plane, tearing his shirt into strips to make tourniquets he used to administer first aid to his grievously injured men. When his tentmates finally shook him awake, Tate discovered that he was being restrained by his comrades. He had ripped his pajama top and mosquito netting to shreds.3
With Ploiesti still weighing on Ben and many other 93rd men, Sunday, August 8, loomed as D-Day for another big mission. As the tension built, the crews were informed on Saturday evening that the mission was postponed to Monday because of weather. Tension built again throughout Sunday, but the mission was postponed once more because of weather. Late on Monday evening, the crews were put on notice: Be prepared to take off at first light.
For Ben, the on-again off-again agony of what loomed as his twenty-fifth mission ended that Monday evening when the list of men scheduled to fly the raid was issued. His name wasn’t on it. He was a man without a crew once again, with all the uncertainty that entailed. Whenever the big raid finally happened, Ben would still be anxiously awaiting his final mission.
THE 93RD’S AGONIZING PATTERN OF ALERTS, early wake-ups, and predawn briefings dragged on through midweek.
In England, Ira Eaker battled frustration as well. The first eleven days of August had come and gone without his B-17s dropping a single bomb on the enemy. Eaker couldn’t afford to let more summer days pass with nothing to show for it, and so the elaborate plan for a coordinated strike on Hitler’s two most important Me-109 plants was scrapped. Instead, Eaker seized a window of favorable weather over Western Europe on August 12 to dispatch 330 B-17s to bomb targets in western Germany’s Ruhr Valley and the city of Bonn. It was a costly day’s work for Eaker’s crews, with another twenty-five B-17s lost.
While the 93rd crews scheduled to strike the German Me-109 plant in Austria waited nervously for the green light, twenty-six officers and men celebrated the orders they had awaited since surviving the Ploiesti raid. They had officially been relieved from combat duties and were to depart for England that evening. The lucky souls included four of Ben’s longtime crewmates: Jake Epting, Al Naum, Edward Weir, and Red Kettering. The following day, Thursday, August 12, Ben and other 93rd men gave their departing comrades a rousing send-off as they boarded trucks for the short ride to the airfield to begin their journey back to England.
It was a bittersweet occasion for Ben. He was happy for friends who had survived their tours. And yet, he couldn’t help but feel sad as the men with whom he had shared eight months of combat disappeared into the distance.
