We of the other services sometimes chide our Air Force brethren for not being \u201chardcore\u201d enough. And in some respects, that’s certainly true.\u00a0 The Air Force lifestyle is in general\u00a0 considered the least stressful of any of the military services.\u00a0 Ground combat it ain’t – by design.<\/p>\n
Still, some in the Air Force are certifiably hardcore at times.\u00a0 And seventy years ago today, “hardcore” doesn\u2019t even begin to describe the actions of a group of roughly 1650 Army Air Forces personnel.<\/p>\n
Today marks the seventieth anniversary of one of the most costly US operations in World War II:\u00a0 Operation Tidal Wave.\u00a0 This operation was a large-scale bombing raid on oil facilities near Ploesti, Romania.\u00a0 It was executed by elements of the 8th and 9th Army Air Forces.<\/p>\n
As in many wartime operations, politics played a part.\u00a0 The operation had been agreed to by the POTUS and British Prime Minister at their conference in Casablanca in January 1943.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t solely a political target, though.\u00a0 The Ploesti oil facilities were chosen as the operation’s target as they were believed to be a critical part of the \u201cAchillies heel\u201d for the Axis war effort:\u00a0 POL production.\u00a0 Postwar analysis was to show that this assessment regarding Axis POL production was correct – even if for many reasons Ploesti turned out not to be a single point of failure.<\/p>\n
Ploesti was too far away from bases in England to be reached by aircraft operating from bases there.\u00a0 The USSR would not permit US or British aircraft to operate from its territory; suitable bases in the eastern Mediterranean did not exist.<\/p>\n
The operational concept was to launch a bombing raid from airfields in North Africa.\u00a0 The planes would fly northward, skirt the Greek coast, cross inland over Albania, and then attack the Ploesti facilities from the west.\u00a0 They would then return to base.<\/p>\n
The closest suitable bases available to support the attack were austere facilities near Benghazi, in Libya.\u00a0 The operation was marginal due to range – a round-trip of approximately 2,300 miles.\u00a0 Due to a lack of available aircraft, the operation’s targets were to be attacked via low-level bombing.\u00a0 (Less than 200 B-24s were to be available for the operation; a minimum of 1,400 were estimated required if the targets were attacked using high-altitude bombing.)\u00a0 The additional speed and surprise provided by a low-level attack were assessed sufficient to negate much of the Axis air defenses in the target area.\u00a0 This – plus the additional damage due to the enhanced precision of low-level bombing – would therefore allow the Ploesti refinery complexes to be attacked successfully with the forces available. Even so, high casualties were foreseen – estimates ran as high as 50%.<\/p>\n
Yet the operation was nonetheless approved in spite of expected heavy casualties.\u00a0 The target was considered so critical that, in the words of then US Army Air Forces Brigadier General Uzal G.Ent<\/a>, \u201cIf nobody comes back, the results will be worth the cost.\u201d\u00a0 (Other sources attribute a similar quote to US Army Air Forces Major General Lewis Brereton.)\u00a0 For what it\u2019s worth:\u00a0 Brig. Gen. Ent was the not merely pontificating about sending others on what might be a potential suicide mission from the safety of some remote HQ.\u00a0 He personally flew over Ploesti during Operation Tidal Wave.<\/p>\n Operation Tidal Wave was executed on 1 August 1943.\u00a0\u00a0The operation depended on virtually everything going according to plan.<\/p>\n As is common in war, everything most decidedly did not<\/em> go as planned.<\/p>\n One B-24 crashed shortly after takeoff.\u00a0 In-flight difficulties caused the loss of another 12 aircraft:\u00a0 one that crashed at sea; one that searched for survivors from the crash and could not later catch up with and rejoin its formation; and another 10 aircraft forced for various reasons to abort.\u00a0 Technical and navigation errors further unhinged the mission’s timing \u2013 which had been designed to hit its targets near-simultaneously in order to confuse\/overwhelm air defenses and add to the chances of returning safely; a simultaneous attack was no longer possible.<\/p>\n Radio silence, imposed as a security measure, made in-flight coordination difficult to impossible (until abandoned out of necessity after a major navigational gaffe), and was in any case perhaps unnecessary.\u00a0 A previous small (13-plane) raid against Ploesti launched from airfields in Egypt nearly 14 months earlier had identified to Axis planners the vulnerability of this critical asset.\u00a0 From intercepted radio traffic, Axis intelligence correctly deduced that the Allies were planning some type of air operation in the Mediterranean and that the Ploesti refinery complex as the most likely target.\u00a0 As a result, air defenses near Ploesti were greatly improved, and were dramatically stronger than expected – including a locally-based “aerial welcoming committee” that by some accounts outnumbered the bombers participating in the raid.\u00a0 German radar tracked the mission as well, starting shortly after takeoff, passing this information to German air defense headquarters in Bucharest – about 35 miles south of Ploesti..<\/p>\n In short:\u00a0 the airmen in Operation Tidal Wave were flying into the teeth of serious trouble. Trouble knew they were coming.\u00a0 And when they got to Ploesti, trouble bit them.\u00a0 Hard.<\/p>\n Yet on arriving, the men executing the mission carried on.\u00a0 They fulfilled their orders to the best of their ability.<\/p>\n Several excellent and publicly-available articles give more detail concerning the events over Ploesti that day, as well as additional background on the operation’s planning and execution.\u00a0 A brief overview article from the USAF web site may be found here<\/a>.\u00a0 A longer article from Air Force Magazine<\/i> may be found here<\/a>; while a third, more detailed article from Doug Sterner\u2019s Home of Heroes<\/i> web site may be found here<\/a>.\u00a0 All three are worthwhile reading; there are many others.\u00a0 Even the Wikipedia article on Operation Tidal Wave is reasonably good.<\/p>\n I won’t attempt to present details here.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that reading the linked articles is IMO well worth the time.<\/p>\n After running the gauntlet of ground fire and aerial attack, the survivors limped home.\u00a0 More were lost during the return to base.<\/p>\n . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n Militarily, for the US Operation Tidal Wave was at best a Pyrrhic victory \u2013 and at worst a disaster.\u00a0 Although the operation did damage Romanian oil facilities near Ploesti, the damage was neither complete nor catastrophic.\u00a0 It was also repaired quickly by Axis authorities.\u00a0 A September assessment indicated that the operation appeared to have caused “no curtailment of overall product output”.<\/p>\n The cost to US forces making the attack was extreme.<\/p>\n A total of 178 aircraft and 1,764 aircrew embarked on Operation Tidal Wave.\u00a0 Due to losses and aborts enroute, only 165 of the aircraft\u00a0 made it to Ploesti.<\/p>\n Only 92 aircraft returned to their bases near Benghazi \u2013 and of these, only 33 were fit to fly the following day.\u00a0 Seventeen additional aircraft diverted safely to other Allied bases instead of returning home.<\/p>\n A total of 54 aircraft were lost during the operation.\u00a0 Another seven were interned in Turkey with their crews for the duration of the war.<\/p>\n A total of 532 aircrew were lost \u2013 KIA, MIA, taken POW, or interned in neutral Turkey for the duration of the war.\u00a0 Additionally, at least 440 aircrew were reportedly WIA.<\/p>\n The overall casualty rate for Operation Tidal Wave appears to have been in excess of 55%.\u00a0 (It’s unclear if any POWs or internees were included in the WIA total.\u00a0 The calculation assumes they were not.)<\/p>\n That’s a higher total casualty rate than was sustained by Confederate forces during Pickett\u2019s Charge<\/a>.<\/p>\n . . .<\/b><\/p>\n