Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 by James Dugan, Carroll Stewart Read Free Book Online

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