open to the Reich
by fortifying both sides of the Predeal Pass north of the city. As the
peasants threw themselves at his 88's, he would continue to receive
supplies from Germany and send oil to her through the armed corridor.
Gerstenberg considered Bucharest of no strategic importance and was
confident that a gun battery and a few squads could quell a revolution
in the capital.
Festung Ploesti also was the answer to the Red Army if it came through
the Danubian Plain. The fortress would bar the Soviets from crossing
the Transylvanian Alps into Central Europe and the city defenses could
be quickly and steadily enlarged through the bristling Predeal lifeline.
In the spring of 1942 the premature Halpro mission helped Gerstenberg's
Festung Ploesti project. He flaunted the daring attack before the
Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, which was Goering's shy
title, and Goering began to eke him air troops amounting to 50,000 people
by the end of the year. Gerstenberg had in addition about 70,000 Slav
prisoners and civilian slaves who had been driven out of the conquered
eastlands.
During the winter the British Eighth Army rolled back Rommel's threat to
Egypt and Brereton's bombers came back to Egyptian bases. Halverson's
successor, Mickey McGuire, received a dribble of Liberators. McGuire
jeeped to each arrival as though Washington was going to snatch it
back before he could put his unit symbol on the rudder. From the second
replacement ship came a small pilot, Norman Appold, a chemical engineer
recently graduated from the University of Michigan. He looked nothing like
the prognathous aviators in the comic strips. Instead of the standard
bulging jaw, Appold's could be held slightly recessive. In place of
eagle brows, his formed two quizzical circumflexes, and the eyes were
round instead of squinty. He wore a large grin and was full of gab and
gags instead of the Olympian silences of the classic birdmen. McGuire
thought for a moment that America was running out of manpower. What
stood before him, saluting casually, was the first of the college boys,
children of the Great Depression, who were about to take over air combat
from the prewar set.
Appold's vivacity was deceptive. He was deadly serious. He resented the
war for interrupting his engineering career and he was resolved to get
the damn thing over with as soon as possible. To him that meant absolute
application to the bomber business, preserving his life by laying it
on the line at every opportunity. He held iconoclastic views on air
tactics. Even in training, Appold had tossed the book out the window by
practicing low-level attacks with the cumbersome Liberator.
The bombers blasted ahead of Montgomery's army, reducing Tobruk and
Benghazi and gaining them as bases. When Appold arrived in Benghazi --
a "weather-beaten wasp's nest fallen to pieces," as the war correspondent
Ivan Dmitri put it -- he found the Ninth Bomber Command moving into
one of the few surviving structures, a hotel compound south of the
city. Since 1940 it had housed, in order, war staffs of Italy, Britain,
Germany, Britain, Germany, and now the U.S.A. In barren battlegrounds,
opposing generals sometimes leave each other suitable headquarters in
their wills. Appold leafed through the guest book, noting such previous
registrants as Marshal Graziani, Vittorio Mussolini, Erwin Rommel, Sir
Arthur Tedder, Sir Archibald Wavell, and a recent hasty German scrawl:
"Keep this book in order. We'll be back." Appold signed in and drove
off to inspect the city and its important deep-water port. The ruins of
Benghazi were clinically interesting; he had helped considerably to put
them in this condition by breaching the flak defenses when the Germans
last held them.
The R.A.F. had opened up the final offensive on Benghazi with night
pathfinders, dropping flares for following bombers. The Germans