Disastrous Raid

PLOESTI (407 pp.)--James Dugan & Carroll Stewart -- Random House ($6.95).

A naked woman flashed on a motion-picture screen set up at an Army Air Forces base in the Libyan desert near Bengasi one baking July day in 1943. The assembled pilots, navigators, bombardiers and gunners roared their approval. Offscreen an announcer's voice intoned that the assembled airmen were about to strike a virgin target. Its name: Ploesti.

Set in the foothills of Rumania's Transylvanian Alps 35 miles from Bucharest, Ploesti was called by Winston Churchill "the taproot of German might." From its oil refineries came one-third of the aviation gasoline, benzine and lubricants that kept Adolf Hitler's military machine running. To protect Ploesti from air at tack, the Germans had made it into a colossal land battleship. A ring of heavy antiaircraft guns formed a perimeter around the refineries that circled the city; lighter flak guns were concealed in hay stacks and groves, mounted on factories, bridges, water towers and church steeples on the target approaches. Crack Luftwaffe squadrons, aided by Rumanian and Bulgarian air force units, gave Ploesti an aerial umbrella.

Heroic Snafu. To smash Festung Ploesti, U.S. air planners came up with a novel plan : a daring low-level attack that completely violated the high-level strategic bombing canons of most top Air Forces brass. The planners reasoned that a rooftop raid would give the striking B-24 Liberators an element of surprise, limit the effectiveness of the Luftwaffe, and throw off the accuracy of flak gunners primed for high-level raiders. How they miscalculated is the core of Authors Dugan and Stewart's taut and gripping tale of a disastrous yet heroic snafu -- pieced together from letters, diaries, interviews and correspondence with U.S., German, and Rumanian survivors of the Aug. 1, 1943 raid.

Many of the crewmen were nowhere near so sanguine as their leaders that they would make the full 2,300-mile, 16-hour round trip. Passed from hand to hand were a flood of paperback books about British escapes from World War I German prison camps. One pilot taped a hacksaw blade to the sole of his foot; he was convinced that there would be enough shot-down U.S. flyers wandering around the Rumanian countryside "to call a general election, vote the Germans out, and make peace with the Allies."

Almost from takeoff. Operation Tidal Wave lost the necessary ingredient of surprise ; the Germans had cracked the Allied code and tracked the planes all the way to the target. Over the Mediterranean, the lead Liberator carrying the mission navigator suddenly staggered out of formation and crashed into the ocean. It was a disastrous mishap: hours later the lead wave took a wrong heading just short of the target, and Operation Tidal Wave began to disintegrate into chaos.

Mouth of Hell. Some planes followed the first wave on its wrong course, others plunged on toward Ploesti. Over the target, there was utter confusion. Planes roared in over the city from all different directions, often had to swerve to avoid head-on collisions. German gunners laid a curtain of flak over the refineries; Liberators flying lower than factory smokestacks were buffeted by exploding oil storage tanks. Luftwaffe Messerschmitts buzzed around the sheets of flame to pick off the disorganized and wounded bombers. Said a survivor: "We were dragged through the mouth of hell."

Of the 166 Liberators that made it to Ploesti, 53 were shot down; more than one-fifth of the 1,600-man attacking force were killed. Actual damage to the refineries was relatively slight; many were back in operation in a matter of days. Nearly a year was to elapse before U.S. bombers would return to the city--this time at high level.

In all, U.S. flyers bombed Ploesti 20 more times in fleets of up to 485 aircraft. But at war's end, Festung Ploesti was still producing at 20% of capacity.

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