Most Honorable Son

Peering ahead through the Plexiglas top turret of Tupelo Lass, Ben clutched the hand controller of his twin .50-caliber machine guns as Ploiesti’s smokestacks took shape through the summer haze. More than a minute had passed since K. O. Dessert had followed the three waves of 93rd bombers ahead of him into the corrective left turn executed by Addison Baker, and yet there was still no sign of the formidable enemy defenses that supposedly awaited them.

Ben had sensed that the raid was going to be one of the biggest moments of his life, but his eagerness to make history had been tempered by his doubts about the low-level plan. In the forty-eight hours before takeoff, a couple of his buddies had asked British antiaircraft gunners protecting their desert airfield what they thought about the American strategy. The Tommies thought it was daft. “They said it would be just suicide to go in that [low],” Ben said. “That the smaller guns would really get you.”1 Now, as the American bombers closed within five minutes of Hitler’s prized oil refineries without encountering a single enemy gun or fighter plane, some of the 93rd men wondered whether the low-level plan had been a masterstroke after all.

And then, “all hell was breaking loose everywhere,” Ben recalled.

In an instant, the 93rd bombers found themselves trapped in a gauntlet of guns—an array of conventional ground emplacements, rooftop positions, and towers. Harmless-looking haystacks and railroad boxcars collapsed to reveal more guns. Now everything in the Ploiesti air defense arsenal—from machine guns and nimble 37-millimeter antiaircraft weapons to hulking 88-millimeter aircraft-killers that fired fifteen or more twenty-pound shells a minute—blasted away at the four-engine American bombers streaking past. Ben watched in fascination and horror as the landscape was suddenly transformed into a sea of pulsating lights.

In the cockpit, K. O. Dessert struggled to keep Tupelo Lass steady as prop wash from other B-24s and shell bursts made it feel like he was at the tiller of a small boat in a raging sea. Beside him, Jake Epting made himself useful by shouting out the location of enemy guns: “Eight o’clock! Twelve o’clock! Three o’clock!” And then: “Shoot all over!”² As Dessert tried to keep Tupelo Lass low to the ground without clipping a smokestack or refinery building, a new threat emerged: bus-size balloons bobbing from steel cables strung with contact explosives.

Inside the bombers, the noise was deafening: the clatter of machine guns, roaring engines, exploding shells, and the sound of shrapnel and enemy bullets spattering and piercing the thin aluminum skin of the B-24s. Clouds of shell fragments and shards of metal sheared from bombers by enemy fire fluttered in the prop-churned air. Sensory overload and fear overwhelmed some of the Americans. In a scene repeated in several bombers, a sobbing 328th Squadron gunner sank to the floor beneath his waist gun.³

As terrifying as it was being shot at from point-blank range, some of the 93rd men found they liked being able to see the faces of the gunners who were trying to kill them. For Ben, blasting away from the top turret, the free-for-all bore a vague resemblance to a Nebraska pheasant hunt: Spot a target, fire, spot a target, fire, spot, fire. The frenzied speed of the action gave the battle a surreal air. Jake Epting saw two enemy gunners fall at their weapons, only to be instantly shoved aside by two comrades who took their place and resumed firing.⁴

By now, Dessert had dropped Tupelo Lass below fifty feet to avoid the murderous enemy fire; Epting would later say they were even lower, crossing the target at twenty feet. All around them shells and bullets ripped into B-24s and flames streamed from crippled aircraft.

Ben’s vantage point in the final wave of the 93rd’s main force afforded him a commanding view of the horrific tableau. Dead ahead an 88-millimeter round exploded in the nose of Addison Baker’s Hell’s Wench, followed by other rounds that smashed into the wing and cockpit. Within seconds, the 93rd commander’s ship looked like a flying torch. Rather than attempt an emergency landing to save himself and his crew, Baker made good on his promise to lead his men to the target—even if it was an improvised target he had picked out of the haze.

To keep airborne as long as possible, the group commander dumped his bombs and flew on, a stream of flaming gasoline spanning the length of his ship. The flames became too much for one of Addison Baker’s men, and he leapt from the nose wheel hatch and tumbled through the air, “so close we could see his burned legs,” one pilot recalled.⁵ Another shell slammed into Hell’s Wench and Baker’s right wing sagged.

The cockpit of Hell’s Wench was now consumed by flames, yet Addison Baker and John Jerstad somehow remained in control of their aircraft. In one final act of extraordinary heroism, Baker and Jerstad willed Hell’s Wench to three hundred feet in a desperate attempt to allow their men to attempt a crazy-low parachute escape. Three or four men jumped from the waist windows only seconds before Hell’s Wench crashed into a field just beyond the refineries. None of the Hell’s Wench crew survived; Baker and Jerstad were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

With Hell’s Wench gone and several sister ships in flames, Tupelo Lass roared up a Ploiesti boulevard at treetop level. Ben watched as the wing of a nearby 93rd aircraft struck a smokestack and the aircraft “plummeted to the ground [and] absolutely disintegrated in a terrible explosion.” As other Liberators burst into flames or crashed, one of Ben’s crewmates broke down and had to be restrained. Ben watched another burning B-24 to his right sink to the ground and explode “into a million pieces.”⁶

Ben thought Tupelo Lass was doomed when a gasoline storage tank exploded in their path and the tank’s metal shell shot skyward like a tin can. But at the last second Dessert deftly turned Tupelo Lass nearly upright on one wing and somehow avoided the inferno. As they roared past the pillar of fire, Ben felt the intense heat as if a giant oven door had been opened.

Amid the carnage and chaos, K. O. Dessert kept his cool. Shells that seemed headed for his cockpit somehow kept missing on either side. Al Naum released his bombs on a refinery, and Dessert poured on the power to escape the enemy fire.

All around Tupelo Lass, other crews fought for their lives. To the left, Dick Wilkinson and Edwin Baker were flying low and fast in Little Lady, their gunners firing nearly nonstop at the enemy gunners trying to bring them down. Over the town, a church steeple suddenly loomed as the bombardier was about to release his bombs. Wilkie coolly raised his left wing and cleared the steeple. The time on the clock tower showed five minutes before three o’clock local time (1155 GMT). Without warning, a flurry of antiaircraft shells whooshed past them, unleashed by guns concealed in a row of eucalyptus trees ahead. Another shell hit the number three engine and still another slammed into their belly. Little Lady shuddered and momentarily felt like it “stopped cold in midair,” Edwin Baker said. Their number three engine was on fire and gasoline gushed from holes in an auxiliary tank. Baker and the crew’s spare pilot pulled the fire extinguisher on the flaming engine and feathered the prop, averting one crisis.

Little Lady’s navigator yelled “bombs away” and three thousand pounds of ordnance tumbled from the ravaged aircraft. A few seconds later, when K. O. Dessert turned Tupelo Lass on one wing to avoid the ruptured storage tank, Dick Wilkinson followed close behind, praying that the raw gas and fumes that now filled his bomb bay wouldn’t explode. They didn’t. “As we passed the heart of the explosions, it felt like passing a hot iron close to your face,” Edwin Baker recalled. “Suddenly we popped out of the hellhole of fire, flame, and smoke into the clear sky and green fields beyond. Wilkie and I looked at each other and smiled.”⁷

Off the right wing of Tupelo Lass, Hap Kendall had his own troubles in a B-24 named Lucky. He dodged the storage tank explosion and barely cleared a smokestack with his right wing, but the abrupt maneuvers forced the bombardier to hold their bombs. Kendall streaked across the city in search of another target, found another refinery, and the bombardier unleashed their ordnance. As Kendall steered his crew out of the fire, Lucky was barely airworthy: control wires severed, hydraulic lines ruptured, and at least one fuel tank riddled with shell holes, leaking gasoline. Kendall alerted his men to prepare to abandon ship.

One of the last B-24s to cross Ploiesti in Dessert’s fourth wave was Honky Tonk Gal, piloted by a lanky Texan, twenty-two-year-old Second Lieutenant Hubert Womble. By the time Womble emerged from Ploiesti’s deadly ring of fire, he had lost three engines to enemy fire and had been wounded when a shell exploded in the control pedestal beside him. His copilot had taken the controls and was struggling to remain airborne. Spotting a lush cornfield, Second Lieutenant Lawrence Lancashire executed an emergency landing that would have been perfect if not for a ditch on the far side. When Honky Tonk Gal hit the ditch, the landing gear collapsed and the B-24 came to a lurching halt. Womble tried to rise from his seat, only to discover that his left foot had been severed. “It was still in my boot near the rudder pedals,” he later recalled.⁸ Womble’s men helped him exit Honky Tonk Gal through the top hatch and tended to his wounds as they awaited the Romanian troops who would take them into custody.

Emerging from the enemy kill zone around Ploiesti, K. O. Dessert and Jake Epting proceeded to the prearranged rendezvous point to search for comrades with whom they could share the long journey back to Benghazi. Finding no other friendly aircraft, navigator Edward Weir set a course for the Greek coast, and Tupelo Lass set off alone. “It was the strangest feeling because we couldn’t see any of the planes we were supposed to be flying with,” Ben said. “We were all alone.”⁹

OF THE THIRTY-THREE 93RD BOMBERS that had reached the target area, six had been shot down and several others were in bad shape. As the four groups of B-24s that now trailed the 93rd approached Ploiesti, enemy fighters scoured the skies around the city to pick off crippled planes that had managed to survive the gauntlet of antiaircraft fire. Those that eluded the guns and the fighters headed south in search of refuge.

It was clear to Dick Wilkinson and Hap Kendall that their battered aircraft would never make it back to Benghazi. Turkey was the closest place of refuge—a neutral country where American airmen would hold the preferred legal status of internees rather than prisoners of war. In Tupelo Lass, K. O. Dessert and Jake Epting were amazed by their good fortune—their aircraft didn’t appear to have been hit, and so they were flying under full power and control. But navigator Edward Weir had prepared for all contingencies, and he had marked on his maps the location of airfields in Turkey, Crete, and Sicily that could be used in an emergency. For now, the goal was to get as far away from Ploiesti as possible and to get back over the mountains of Yugoslavia and Albania to more familiar territory.

The return trip was proceeding smoothly when Tupelo Lass encountered clouds over Yugoslavia. Dessert and Epting were skilled in the art of flying by instrument, and so the transition presented nothing they couldn’t handle. A few minutes ahead of Tupelo Lass, a cluster of 93rd aircraft from the first waves of Addison Baker’s force had encountered the same clouds, with tragic results.

Three B-24s had formed up in a protective V for the return journey: Exterminator, piloted by Hugh Roper; Let ’Er Rip, piloted by Victor Olliffe; and Thundermug, piloted by Russel Longnecker. Roper and Olliffe were best friends since the early days of the 93rd, and they were at the end of their combat tours. Roper had six men aboard Exterminator who were flying their final mission, as well as another veteran 93rd officer, Captain Jack Jones, who had flown the mission as a spare pilot and observer. Longnecker had been among a group of Americans who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force before America entered the war and had transferred into the Eighth Air Force in England only in April.

As they flew south from Ploiesti, the lead 93rd aircraft encountered clouds along the mountainous border between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Within each three-plane element, the pilots executed a standard maneuver to provide some distance from one another whenever flying into clouds. They would tighten up their formation when they emerged and found each other.

Entering a cloud, Longnecker executed the maneuver and distanced himself from Roper and Olliffe. When he emerged, Olliffe and Roper were gone. Their remains were recovered in Yugoslavia after the war, and the two friends were buried with their crewmates in group graves only a few feet from each other at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. Olliffe and Roper prided themselves on the tight formations they flew, and they had collided in a cloud and fallen to their deaths. Nineteen souls aboard the two aircraft were killed: all eleven men aboard Roper’s Exterminator, and Olliffe and seven others aboard Let ’Er Rip. Three gunners toward the rear of Olliffe’s B-24 managed to unfurl their parachutes and landed in Bulgaria, where they were captured by Axis forces.

Flying alone through the mountains, Tupelo Lass avoided such perils. Reaching the Ionian coast near the Greek island of Corfu, Dessert and Epting made their final decision of the day: Their fuel situation seemed to be good and their aircraft was flying well; they would push on to their home field outside Benghazi, some 525 miles due south.

After the day’s trials, the flight across the Mediterranean was uneventful. The men were left alone with their thoughts and visions of the terrible things they had witnessed. Dusk was falling when they lined up the runway at Site 7 and landed. The time was 1740 GMT or 8:40 p.m. local time. They had been in the air thirteen hours and five minutes. It was Ben’s twenty-fourth mission, and the longest and bloodiest he would ever fly.

As Dessert taxied to the designated parking stand for Tupelo Lass, the men inside were struck by what they saw. The 409th Squadron parking spots that had been filled that morning when they taxied away for takeoff were now empty. The implication hit Ben: My God, they must not have made it.¹⁰ Only one more 409th Squadron aircraft would land that evening.

Climbing stiffly from Tupelo Lass, Ben and the others gave their aircraft a careful inspection. They were amazed: Tupelo Lass didn’t have a single bullet hole or shrapnel mark.

Among the men who turned out to welcome the first 409th Squadron crew home from Ploiesti was Colonel Jacob Smart, the Hap Arnold aide who had intended to sit in the copilot’s seat alongside K. O. Dessert before his last-minute grounding. Tears streamed down Smart’s face as he greeted Dessert. Smart knew a lot of men wouldn’t make it back, and, as architect of the low-level plan, he had wanted to put himself in harm’s way as an act of solidarity with those who were destined to die. It was already clear to Smart that his fears of heavy losses had been realized. Good men had been lost trying to execute his plan, and the least he could have done was share that danger with them. He would have to live with that haunting knowledge for the rest of his life. “He wanted so badly to go on that raid,” Dessert later said.¹¹

Dessert walked away from Tupelo Lass alongside Ben and Sergeant Raymond Wierciszowski, the courageous mechanic who had risked his life to document many of the raid’s heartbreaking moments with his Kodak camera. Sergeant Wier summoned the nerve to ask a question that had nagged him during the flight back.

“Major Dessert, was that a rough raid?” Wier asked uncertainly.

“Sergeant Wier,” Dessert solemnly replied, “that’s the toughest raid you’ll ever be on in your life.”¹²