Hitler and the Nazis controlled Romania at the time, and Ploesti was one of the Axis powers top oil suppliers.
Operation Tidal Wave remains the second-deadliest air raid in American history.
Only 88 aircraft returned to base in Libya. At least 300 American airmen were killed or missing.
The B-24D named, Old Baldy, was assigned to the 9th Air Force, the 98th Bomb Group, and the 345th Bomb Squadron. The aircraft was shot down and lost near it's bombing target, the Astra Romano refinery complex.
As Lt. Dore's B-24, Old Baldy, approached White IV, at 200 miles an hour and at a very low altitude, he took a direct hit by a Romanian manned 88mm flak gun directly in front of him and about thirty feet below him, and caught on fire.
As he continued into the smoke and fires, hopelessly on fire from the wings back, Lt. Dore emergency toggled his bombs into the fire below, and pitched his plane upward in a bid to gain some altitude. The plane started to fall off on the right wing, hit the ground, and slid into the 88 flak gun beyond the refinery fence in a huge ball of flames, killing the entire airplane's, and the flak gun's crews.
In Roger Freeman’s “The Ploesti Raid: Through the Lens” book, page 128, the author states: “…flown by 1st Lieutenant John J. Dore, Jr. and crew of 10, briefed to fly slot No. 5 on the left side of Flight 4, Dore started being hit by flak, and took a direct hit from an 88mm flak gun directly in his path, and caught fire.
In Roger Freeman’s “The Ploesti Raid: Through the Lens” book, page 128, the author states: “…flown by 1st Lieutenant John J. Dore, Jr. and crew of 10, briefed to fly slot No. 5 on the left side of Flight 4, Dore started being hit by flak, and took a direct hit from an 88mm flak gun directly in his path, and caught fire.
Lt. Dore, knowing his situation was hopeless, deliberately crashed his doomed bomber into the 88mm gun emplacement ahead of him that had made the kill shot into his B-24, Old Baldy, a few miles beyond the refinery.
Six members of the enemy gun crew, Lt. Dore, and all nine airmen in Dore's bomber were killed in the crash. Only four bodies were identified at the time, 1 August, 1944.
Tech Sgt Max Lower, radio operator of Old Baldy
After the raid, the Romanian government recovered 216 bodies of fallen B-24 crewmembers, but only 27 could be identified.
Those who weren’t identified were buried by monks from a local monastery moved the remains of the crew to a cemetery, the Bolovan Cemetery at Ploiesti, about a mile away from the crash site. However, later, after the war, the remains were exhumed and transported to the American Military Cemetery at Neuville-en-Condroz, Belgium.
In 2015, the Army believed it might have a lead on some of the missing crew members locations, and asked Frank Norris', and Max Lower’s siblings for DNA samples.
The American military mantra of “no man left behind” and advancing technology in utilizing DNA to identify remains have been implimented to resolve the mystery of MIAs whereabout.
Representatives of the office of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency when possible seek DNA samples, to positively identify whether skeletal remains in Belgium, in this case, belong to lilkely relatives.
A dedicated staff of genealogists, forensic anthropologists, and specialists in the science of DNA are frequently successful in completing their sacred task.
Of note another member of Old Baldy was identified by DPAA three months ago, the bombardier, 1st Lt. Joseph E. Finneran, who enlisted in the Army, but was quickly made an officer
last month I learned of, and posted about the B24 Hells Wench, that was shot down during the Ploesti raid
http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-defense-powmia-accounting-agency.html
Good post! This particular bomb raid was a fascination of mine for a while. My Dad had a book called Ploesti, by James Dugan and Carrol Stewart, that details the whole thing from start to finish. It gets more interesting when you read about the POWs in various countries and their stories—one crew interned in Turkey tricked the guards into filling the tanks on one of their planes with just enough gas to lift off and fly to an Allied base.
ReplyDeleteThe Freeman book is good, and there's another by one of the pilots, Robert Sternfels, that's worth reading—his plane is the one in the second photo of your Hell's Wench post, flying through the smoke.
I think you may have written about Hadley's Harem, another bomber from this mission, that crashed off the coast of Turkey—if not, check it out; they raised it and it's in a museum in Istanbul.