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

an unknown industrial city. The miniature

of Ploesti was so accurate that Group Captain Lewis recognized his former

villa. They finished the models in record time, and an odd pair came with

strange devices, including a child's tricycle, and locked themselves

in the model room. They were the Ploesti avenger, Lord Forbes, and a

Texas-drawling New York newspaperman named John Reagan ("Tex") McCrary,

chief of the Photo & Newsreel Section of the Eighth U.S.A.A.F. They

produced a professional 45-minute sound film to brief the Ploesti ffiers;

this was the first use of movies to prepare men for a single battle. They

also turned out 8-mm. silent films showing how each refinery would look

from the air on a low-level approach and crossing. The camera dolly for

these trucking shots was the child's tricycle. Thus, more than a month

before the mission, the entire briefing panoply was designed for a low

attack, even though General Brereton in Cairo was still supposed to have

the final option between the low road and the high road.
     
     
Brereton was not closely involved with the operational preparations;

they were left to his bomber chief, Brigadier Uzal G. Ent, who had to

find the men and airplanes to do the job. Ent was a small, amiable

Pennsylvania Dutchman with a searching mind and remarkably varied

attainments. A graduate of Susquehanna University and the U.S. Military

Academy, he was a qualified specialist in chemical warfare, engineering,

meteorology, and aerial navigation and piloting. As a navigator in the

National Balloon Race in 1938, Ent won the Distinguished Flying Cross

for landing the bag after his pilot had been killed by lightning.

He had served in diplomatic posts and was an ordained Lutheran minister.

He was married to an ex-Ziegfeld Follies girl.
     
     
Ent was not enthusiastic about a low-level attack; he believed the losses

would be unbearable. He intended to fly to Ploesti himself. Then a

surprising and encouraging omen came, when an adventitious low-level

bombing experiment succeeded beyond all expectation. It began in the

restless, inventive mind of Norman Appold, who had become impatient with

the often ineffective high-level attempts on Rommel's Italian supply

ports. Appold asked his Liberando group commander, K.K. Compton, to let

him try the low road to a particularly resistant target at Messina,

Sicily. The flak there was almost interdictory. The veteran Halpro

lead navigator, Bernard Rang, had recently gone over Messina in a plane

rocking with flak hits, and had parachuted to his death among the bursts.
     
     
When he braced K.K. Compton, Appold had no inkling of the big low-level

mission being planned. Compton was secretly pleased to have a man volunteer

for a vitally needed experiment without knowing why it was important,

and he endorsed Appold's plan to Uzal Ent, who immediately approved.
     
     
Appold's Sicilian objective was a row of ferroconcrete train ferry sheds

protecting Rommel's supply trains from bombing after they were ferried

across the Messina Strait from Italy. Repeated high-level strikes had not

penetrated the roofs. Secretly, after dark on 29 March, Appold led three

Liberando ships to the Luqa fighter strip on Malta, the most forward base

for the novel target route he planned. As the planes were refueled, he

briefed the crews: "We are going around the top of Sicily, keeping under

radar all the way. The Initial Point, where we turn into our bomb run,

may be hard to find. It's just an unmarked spot of water between the

Lipari Islands and Messina. So let's all stick together. The alternate

target is Crotone." This was another familiar and defiant high-level

target, an important chemical and ammunition works on the boot sole of

Italy which had resisted nine high-formation bombings.
     
     
At midnight, Appold's research flight took off from Malta on a night

without moon or stars and settled into a wave-top swing around the west

and north coasts