Sixty years ago today five Army Air Corps bomb groups flew what has been called the most daring air mission in World War II — an 18-hour flight of 178 B-24 Liberator bombers from Benghazi, Libya, to the enemy oil refineries at Ploesti, in what was then called Rumania.
It also was one of the most costly missions during the war, with nearly one-third of the air crews killed or wounded and 110 of them taken prisoner in one day. Nevertheless, the mission was a success, significantly destroying much of the German war machine's fuel capacity. The Allies estimated that one-third of the aviation gasoline and other fuels were produced at Ploesti.
Today, many of the survivors of that raid, called "Tidal Wave," are in Salt Lake City for a reunion. Some 96 former crewmen and their families attending represent air and ground crews from the 389th, 376th, 44th, 93rd and 98th bomb groups.
And for many of the men, this is the first time in 60 years they have seen each other.
Of the 1,726 men who flew the mission, 20 were from Utah, including six from Salt Lake City, five from Ogden and two from Provo.
One, Ernie L. Poulson, a co-pilot in the Chattanooga Choo Choo, was from Ephraim. Now a retired University of Utah history professor, he was reunited Thursday with his friend Bob Snyder. The two spent 13 months together in a Rumanian prisoner of war camp after their planes were shot down.
Blaine Huxbury, who organized the event, said the Ploesti raid has been compared to the 19th century's Charge of the Light Brigade by British forces in the Crimea and Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg because of the ferocity of the fighting and the heavy losses. Each of the men who flew the mission received the Distinguished Flying Cross and five officers received the Medal of Honor, making the raid the most highly decorated mission during World War II, he said.
By the end of the mission, 532 men had been killed. Only 30 aircraft were subsequently deemed airworthy.
Poulson, who lives in Salt Lake City, said his shot-up B-24 landed on the estate of a Rumanian princess. He said his group of 110 men were the first POWs to be released during World War II after the Russian army overran Bucharest.
He and his wife, Helen, visited present-day Romania in 1985 and saw what remained of the POW camp. "The main building was kind of a low-rent apartment house," he said, adding his POW comrades subsisted on wormy bread and soup. But all in all, conditions weren't so bad.
Poulson said 32 men of the 110 taken prisoner are still alive. Delbert Warner, Provo, was the only other Utahn in the camp.
Snyder, University Place, Wash., said he and the other crew members on his plane expected to be killed at any minute during the bombing run. "I saw the wings shot off planes around me and I saw several crash."
The Germans, knowing the strategic importance of the Ploesti refineries, fortified the area with more anti-aircraft guns than were even around Berlin.
"We flew through everything that could be fired, from pistols to the largest anti-aircraft cannons on the ground," Snyder said. "We flew as low as we could for the bombing, then flew as low as we could to prevent fighters from getting underneath us."
He described how German fighters would attack head-on, firing their guns, but still miss the B-24s. "You wonder how they could possibly miss. We'd just hunch our shoulders together and try to be as small as we could get."
After his plane was hit, Snyder and the pilot put it down wheels up in a field. Nine of the 10 crewmen got out safely. The plane was burning furiously as the top gunner, who was thrown into the fire, burned alive. "I'll never forget his screams. There's hardly a day that goes by that I don't relive that moment."
Poulson's shot-up plane lost rudder control and couldn't make a turn to attempt a return to its African base, so the pilots put it down in a river bed.
The reunion attendees are being hosted today by Hill Air Force Base and will have a memorial service in the base chapel. The service will include the base honor guard firing team, the playing of Taps and an F-16 fly-by in a missing man formation.
E-mail: lweist@desnews.com