|
|
|
|
Ploesti 22 July, 1944 Part 2 By Major Marion M. Pruitt - 765th Bomb Squadron Group Navigator At the Dayton, Ohio reunion in 1982 I was telling Leonard Cole (he worked at Group Headquarters.) about our mission to Ploesti. Mayfield was listening and I was informed that he was the flight Engineer that had plugged the fuel line with a fifty caliber machine gun shell that enabled us to return to Torretta. I remember this mission as it was the hardest a plane had been hit while I was flying as Group Navigator of the 461st Bomb Group. This particular day was what I would call a routine start of a mission except it was a new airplane with the navigator seated behind the pilot. The radar operator, Lt. Gizelba was seated across at the radio operators position with his back to the co-pilot. We were leading the 461st group of the 49th wing as well as the Fifteenth Air Force against the Romana Americana Oil Refinery at Ploesti, Rumania. We arrived at our initial point a few miles Southeast of Bucharest, Rumania, and the Bombardier took over. A normal bomb run was two or three minutes long before bombs away. We usually dropped the bombs and took a standard rally of a 45 degree to the right loosing 1,000 feet in altitude as quickly as possible to confuse the anti-aircraft gunners. The planned route for the day was to go North of Ploesti and turn west and return to base. I cannot remember our altitude exactly on this mission but it was 19,000 to 21,000 feet. As we started the bomb run I was seated at a table that I used in the navigation of the plane. I turned around to look forward between the Pilot and Co-pilot and could see the flak was very heavy. As we approached the point where we were due to release the bombs, I saw four bursts of 88mm flak exactly in line at our altitude. I thought we were safe from that battery of anti-aircraft artillery, but where the 5th burst came from I do not know. This burst hit our no. 4 engine and set it on fire. It appeared that to feather no. 4, both no. 3 and no. 4 were feathered, which put us into a spin to the right. The spin threw me back in my seat as the bail out bell sounded. I can remember how hard I pulled on the table to get in a position to try to bail out. A drift meter against my leg would not let me get to the aisle and bail out through the bomb bay. Also, fire was all under the bomb bay. At 9,000 feet the pilot pulled us out of this spin over the town of Ploesti and immediately began calling for heading. I gave him one to Turkey as it was the closest neutral country. As we got on course to Turkey we found ourselves alone and quite crippled, just the type the meat marauding German fighters were looking for. The rest of our Group was going North or West back to our base. We were fortunate that day that the Luftwaffe did not follow us. It was at this point in our journey that Mayfield plugged the fuel line with a fifty caliber shell. South of Bucharest the pilot decided we could make it into Yugoslavia and asked for a heading back toward Torretta. After weighing the possibilities of bailing out over Yugoslavia, trying to make it to Turkey or ditching at sea, calculations showed we had enough fuel to make it back to the base. Approaching Torretta we found that the bomb dump was on fire with 50 knot cross wind from the west. All of the other planes of the 461st and 484th bomb groups were diverted to other bases with more of an East/West runway. But, Torretta was closer and our fuel supply by now was very low. We landed going to the North on the West side of the runway and came to a stop finally on the east side off in the dirt. The jar of the landing jarred something loose and opened a fuel line filling the flight deck with deadly fumes. My thought was to make it this far and then get caught on fire a second time was too much for all on the flight deck. That was one speedy evacuation. The following day the crew chief brought the fuse from the 88mm shell that was found stuck in the no. 4 engine. I in turn gave it to Col. Glantzberg as a souvenir of the mission. |
|
Send mail to
webmaster@461st.org with
questions or comments about this web site.
|
