![]() Lieutenant Lloyd “Pete” Hughes was one of the five men to receive the Medal of Honor for his courage that day. To the very end he gave the battle every ounce he had.” Pete had given his life and the lives of his crew to carry out his assigned task. The heavy ship cartwheeled and a great shower of flame and smoke appeared. The flames had been too much and had literally burnt the wing off. Now it would touch down-but just before it did, the left wing came off. “But flames were spreading furiously all over the left side of the ship. Three of the 177 B-24s that began the raid fly in formation at treetop level, with a blazing refinery in the distance The lives of the crew were in Pete’s hands, and he gave it everything he had. ![]() Pete was too low for any of them to jump and there was no time for the airplane to climb to a sufficient altitude to permit a chute to open. With his mission accomplished, he was making a valiant attempt to kill his excess speed and set the ship down in a little river valley south of the town before the whole thing blew up. “His bombs were laid squarely on the target along with ours. We were through the impenetrable wall.”Īrdery then saw Hughes pull up and out of formation. We pulled back on the wheel and the Lib leveled out, almost clipping the tops off houses. As we passed over the boiler house, another explosion kicked our tail high and our nose down. We must have cleared the chimneys by inches. During those moments I didn’t think that I could possibly come out alive, and I knew Pete couldn’t. “As we were going into the furnace, I said a quick prayer. He was holding his ship in formation to drop his bombs on the target, knowing if he didn’t pull up he would have to fly through a solid mass of fire with gasoline gushing from his ship. “Poor Pete! Fine, religious, conscientious boy with a young wife waiting for him back in Texas. He must have known he was hard hit because the gas was coming out in such volume that it blinded the waist gunners in his ship from our view. He’s been hit hard in his left wing tank.’ I looked out to the right for a moment and saw a sheet of raw gasoline trailing Pete’s left wing. From the target grew flames, smoke, and explosions, and we were headed straight into it.”Īrdery recalled, “Suddenly, Sergeant WeIls, our radio operator, called out, ‘Lieutenant Hughes’s ship is leaking gas. The antiaircraft defenses were literally throwing up a curtain of steel. “At that moment, running a gauntlet of tracers and cannon fire of all types made me despair of ever covering those last few hundred yards to the point where we could let the bombs go. Now there was a mass of flame and black smoke reaching much higher, and there were intermittent explosions lighting up the black pall. “Already the fires were leaping higher than the level of our approach. Co-pilot Barney Jackson is standing next to Sternfels. The crew of Major Sternfels’ B-24, Sandman, photographed after the raid. The roof of the building blew up above the tall chimneys. The first ships dropped their bombs squarely on the boiler house and immediately boilers were blowing up and fires touching off the volatile gases of the cracking plant. We could see them flying through a mass of ground fire as thick as hail. In the center of the target area was the big boiler house, just as in the briefing pictures. “As their bombs were dropping, we began our run in. “We were very close behind the second flight of three ships,” Ardery said. Ardery’s B-24 was in the third flight of ships headed for Red Target, the air over which was studded with black puffs of flak: The “Sky Scorpions” were new to combat, having arrived in England only weeks before being sent to North Africa. And no one who lived through it will ever forget what they saw and heard that terrible day.Ĭaptain Philip Ardery was a pilot in the 389th Bombardment Group, led by Colonel Jack Wood. To this day there have been few military operations that engender more shock and awe than the accounts of the men who participated in that lone low-level mission to Ploesti. While it had been carefully planned and tirelessly practiced, Tidal Wave became a fiasco, and a deadly one, too. The targets were the Nazis’ vital oil refineries around the Romanian city of Ploesti north of Bucharest, near the western shore of the Black Sea. On that fateful day, 178 Consolidated B-24D Liberator bombers of five heavy bombardment groups, carrying more than 500 tons of bombs, left bases in Libya to undertake the longest and most audacious aerial raid in history, a raid codenamed “Tidal Wave.” So it is with the events of August 1, 1943, in the skies over the Mediterranean and the Balkans. History is almost never “chiseled into stone.” The fog of time can be blown away when new information emerges.
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