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

was pulled out of Germany

Christmas week and drawn nonstop to Ploesti in a double-locomotive

train. In civilian life Nowicki was a Brandenburg locksmith. He won a

master mechanic's certificate at the age of twenty-two, had worked before

the war constructing British air bases in the Suez, and, after the war

began, was a subcontractor in the German aircraft industry. Willi could

knock down and reassemble flak guns in astonishing time. His battery sat

on the southwest quadrant of Ploesti, through which Gerstenberg estimated

the American bombers would come, when they came. Battery Seven staked out

and dug in with six officers, 180 men and a hundred Russian prisoners

to do the heavy work. The battery implanted six 88-mm. rifles, the

versatile high-velocity artillery piece which served as an antiaircraft,

antitank, naval and general purpose gun. Waffenwart Nowicki's 88's were

named Adolf, Bertha, Caesar, Dora, Emile and Friederich. Bertha had four

white rings painted on her muzzle, one for each bomber she had shot down

in Germany. On the periphery of the battery there were four 37-mm. and

four 20-mm. guns.
     
     
Before long there were forty such batteries embracing the Anglo-American

salients of Festung Ploesti. Outside of them were lighter batteries

manned by Austrians and Romanians, and hundreds of machine-gun pits

and towers. More guns were mounted on factories, bridge approaches,

water towers, church steeples, and concealed in haystacks and groves.

To exercise the gunners, Colonel Woldenga sent old Heinkel 111 and

Junkers 52 bombers on unannounced mock attacks. In case the Americans

should actually be able to bomb through this awesome protection,

Gerstenberg secured from Germany a crack 500-man unit of fire police,

despite their urgent need at home in the mounting Anglo-American bombing

offensive. Corporal Werner Buchheim of Ulm, one of the fire fighters,

operated a mobile radio car with the call letters ICEBEAR, to link up

the active air defenses and the passive fire fighters and reconstruction

engineers. Gerstenberg was building the first air fortress in the world --

around an exposed industrial installation that could not go underground

or be dispersed. Ploesti was a colossal land battleship, armored and

gunned to withstand the heaviest aerial attack.
     
     
In addition to the massing of arms, Gerstenberg conceived a system

to restore production quickly if some of the bombers got through to

the refineries. He erected a trunk pipeline around Ploesti linking

all the refinery units. Refinery managers protested that they were

competing with each other and that a common circulation of oil would be

uncapitalistic. Gerstenberg paid no attention to them. His brilliant

scheme provided that if parts of several refineries were destroyed,

the pipeline would marry their surviving units to begin processing oil

immediately after a raid. The emergency pipeline stood exposed above

the ground so that bomb damage to it could be repaired quickly. Allied

Intelligence knew nothing about Gerstenberg's rapid recovery system.
     
     
In contrast to Gerstenberg's situation, his coming opponent's was most

uncomfortable. On the Libyan desert, crawling with scorpions, in dust

blowing shoulder-high, the Americans lay in a vast, unprepossessing

encampment, scattered forty miles north and south on the beach behind

the ruins of the Bronze Age city of Benghazi. Their threadbare tents were

patched with scraps of aluminum from neighboring junk yards of Axis air

wrecks. Around the tents bloomed "desert lilies," conical urinals made

from gas tins; oil drum privies; and cordons of fluttering rags marking

off old German mine fields and shell dumps, cunningly booby-trapped for

souvenir hunters.
     
     
In the morning the inhabitants of this unholy bivouac shuffled out,

fisting dust from their eyes, to a breakfast of pressed ham and dried

cabbage boiled in alkali water. Each man was rationed to one pint of