“As a strategic bombing mission alone, this raid ranks up there as one of the worst defeats suffered by the Allies in the air war.”

By Luke Truxal

EIGHTY YEARS after the August 1, 1943, raid on the Ploiești oil refineries, the mission still captures the imagination of military historians and general public alike. How could it not? American air crews carried a daring and dangerous low-level attack with Consolidated B-24s on one of the most heavily fortified and important strategic targets on the continent of Europe.

I will admit when I first set out to write this piece it took me quite a while to think about the legacy of the raid and what it meant in 1943 and what it means today. After the raid much of the public attention has centered on the aircrews who flew the mission. That in many respects has become the legacy of the raid 80 years later. Yet for those who study the raid more deeply see the mission as one of the most disastrous air operations ever conducted.

The Allies gained little from the raid. American losses in equipment and combat crews set back Allied air and ground operations in both the European Theater and Mediterranean theaters of operations in 1943. In that context, the raid should be remembered as an absolute disaster.

However, there is another legacy to consider when examining the raid in the context of future air operations in the Second World War. Ploiești showed the Allies that any attempt to knock Romanian oil production out of the war required a greater commitment in time, materiel, and flexibility in operations to permanently remove the Ploiești refineries from the strategic picture. Those are the two legacies of this mission. A tactical disaster with grave operational consequences in 1943, but also that of a lesson that was learned and applied in 1944.

In March 1943 Colonel Jacob E. Smart, a staff officer for the commander of the United States Army Air Forces, General Henry H. Arnold, proposed a daring low-level raid against the vital Romanian oil refineries located at Ploiești, codenamed Operation Tidalwave. Smart believed that a single raid against the Ploiești oil refineries had the potential to cripple the Axis war effort crude oil refined by Germany by 30 per cent.[1]

The only air force with planes in range of the refineries was the Ninth Air Force based in Benghazi, under the command of Major General Lewis Brereton. Brereton had two B-24 groups (98th Bomb Group and 376th Bomb Group) that had enough range to reach the refineries and make a successful return. Since the B-24 was the only aircraft with enough range to complete the mission, Arnold ordered the commander of the Eighth Air Force, Major General Ira Eaker, to transfer his only three B-24 groups (44th Bomb Group, 93rd Bomb Group, and 389th Bomb Groups to the Ninth Air Force temporarily for the mission. This gave Brereton an impressive strike force of 177 B-24s for the raid.[2]  The Americans had assembled every B-24 in both the European and Mediterranean theaters for the mission.

For those interested in the intricated details of the raid Jay A. Stout wrote a great book on the raid and its aftermath, Fortress Ploesti: The Campaign to Destroy Hitler’s Oil. I encourage those who want to read up more on the Ploiești raid to go there. I am merely going to provide a short summary of the mission itself.

On August 1, the five B-24 groups assigned to the Ninth Air Force took off from Benghazi. The mission started poorly when one of the B-24s, “Wongo Wongo,” suddenly crashed into the Adriatic Sea on route to Romania. This and the decision by “Desert Lilly” to abort the mission after falling behind cost the 376th Bomb Group both its lead and deputy lead navigators. [3]

This caused a second problem during the approach to Ploiești. While making one of the final turns towards Ploiești, Colonel Keith Compton, who commanded the 376th Bomb Group made a navigational error. As a result, he turned towards Bucharest, which pulled both the 376th Bomb Group and Colonel Addison Baker’s 93rd Bomb Group off course and divided the attack force. Compton recognized his error when he caught sight of Bucharest and turned back towards the Ploiești refineries for his attack, but the damage had been done.[4]

Making matters worse the strike force had been spotted both occasionally on radar and on the ground causing the Axis to raise the alarm at Ploiești. Allied intelligence did not believe the refineries had been heavily fortified against air attacks. Instead of launching a surprise attack against the undefended refineries, the five B-24 groups ran into a hail of anti-aircraft fire and Axis fighters. By flying at a low altitude, the B-24s gave Romanian and German gunners on the ground the ability to concentrate both their short range and high-altitude anti air weapons on the formation.[5]

The raid itself was a complete catastrophe. While several refineries had been hit, the damage was not long lasting. Romanian workers repaired the refineries and in fact oil production increased after the raid. [6]

From the perspective of the Romanians, the raid hardly registered at all, but as a blip. Romanian troops were more concerned with the German offensive at Kursk, Operation Citadel. They were also worried about the Soviet attacks on the Kuban Bridgehead east of Crimea made.[7]

In terms of combat losses, the Americans lost 54 B-24s, 310 airmen were killed or missing, 108 were captured, and 78 interned in neutral Turkey. This does not include those who were wounded and aircraft that returned that either needed repairs or were scrap metal.[8] As a strategic bombing mission alone, this raid ranks up there as one of the worst defeats suffered by the Allies in the air war.

Yet the consequences of that failure were felt by the Allies in both the bomber offensive from the United Kingdom and the Italian Campaign. On August 3, two days after the raid, Eaker inquired about the status of his three B-24 groups. Brereton had yet to respond to his inquiries about the raid.[9]

Later on August 11, Smart arrived at Eaker’s headquarters to give brief Eaker in person on both the mission and the status of the B-24 groups. The next day Eaker made it clear to Arnold that he was not pleased. He warned Arnold that his ability to maintain pressure on the German aircraft industry had been crippled by the Ploiești raid.[10]

In the Italian Campaign, Eisenhower’s ability to project air power beyond his tactical front had suffered a significant setback. Two staff officers in the Northwest African Strategic Air Forces, Colonel R. R. Walker and Captain L. T. Pankhurst, argued that medium and heavy bombers were essential for the ground war. In their report, entitled An Appreciation of the Ability of the Allies Air Forces to Ensure the Success of an Early Assault on the Italian Mainland, Exploiting the Rapid Success of the Husky Operation, they concluded that the Allies needed to use medium and heavy bombers the Northwest African Strategic Air Forces and the Ninth Air Force to shape the battlefield before the deployment of short ranged aircraft and later ground forces in Italy.^[11]

Eisenhower was not able assemble a B-24 strike force until August 13. This contributed to his inability to interdict the Straits of Messina between the Italian coast and the island of Sicily at the end of the Sicilian Campaign. On August 1, 1943, the German commander of all forces in Sicily, General Hans Hube, ordered the evacuation of the island. From August 1 to August 17, Hube was able to evacuate 60,000 troops, 14,100 vehicles, 94 guns, 47 tanks, 1,100 tons of ammunition, 1,000 tons of fuel, and 21,000 tons of other equipment.[12]

While the B-24s would not have prevented the evacuation on its own; the lack of a major interdiction effort against the straits themselves helped Hube redeploy a significant portion of his forces, supplies, and equipment to Italy for the Italian Campaign. As a result, both campaigns suffered from the absence of the B-24s in August 1943.

If there is one bright spot to take out of this raid, it was that the Allies realized that if they were going to go after Axis oil, then they needed to completely commit themselves to the effort and launch a campaign that had the flexibility, endurance, and foresight to succeed. A one-off raid was not going to do it. The refineries would have to be hammered again, but on a consistent basis to maintain the damage caused by the initial raid. Patchwork repairs do not hold up to repeated bombardment.

Along with a robust campaign against the refineries, the entire Axis oil network in Europe had to be targeted. This meant attacking both crude oil refineries in the Balkans and synthetic plants in central Europe. When the commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe, Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz, began his 1944 campaign against Axis oil his plan reflected the lessons learned from 1943. The days of a single raid against one set of refineries were over.

In addition to targeting the refineries themselves, Spaatz’s campaign targeted transportation networks that exported Romanian crude oil to Germany. The United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force 205 Group mined the Danube River starting in April 1944 and continued throughout the summer of 1944.[13] Railroads came under bombardment as well. Group Captain JCE Luard, an intelligence officer in the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF), in 1944 identified the Romanian rail network as particularly vulnerable due to the mountainous terrain.[14]

Along with the strategic bombing campaign against oil, air operations expanded to aid the Red Army’s ground forces to end Romanian oil exports to Germany permanently. As a result, the air campaign against Romania and its refineries did not resume until the Soviet Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts launched their own offensives towards Romania in the First Iași-Chișinău Offensive starting on began on April 8, 1944.[15] This also means that the MAAF and its air forces needed to coordinate its air operations with the Soviet ground forces.

Throughout the summer of 1944 coordination between the MAAF and the Red Army improved. For example, the head of the United States Eastern Command of the United States Strategic Air Forces, Major General Robert Walsh, informed Spaatz that the Red Army General Staff wanted Spaatz to strike Axis airfields in Romania in support of the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts’ upcoming Second Iași-Chișinău Offensive.

On August 2 — 18 days before the offensive — Walsh wrote Spaatz: “The Soviets requested that we concentrated our attacks on the following: enemy airdromes just south of the Iasi-Akkerman front.” In passing on the request Walsh provided Spaatz with a list of a dozen airfields near the front line that the Soviets wanted prioritized.[16] On August 20, the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts struck at the Axis forces defending Romania. By the end of the offensive, the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies had been destroyed along with the reconstituted German Sixth Army. This led Romania to defect to the Allies and the occupation of the Ploiești oil facilities by the Red Army by September 2. One year, one month, and one day after the ill-fated raid.[17]

The 1944 air and ground offensive to remove the Ploiești refineries from the strategic equation had evolved significantly since the August 1, 1943, disaster. The Allies struck aggressively on a number of key fronts to limit and eventually eliminate Romanian oil exportation to Germany.

Looking back 80 years later there are two legacies to the raid. The first is to examine the raid in the context of the war in 1943. Five American B-24 groups were shot to pieces over Romania with little to show for it at any level. Furthermore, the B-24 losses affected Eaker’s own air offensive against the German aircraft industry in August 1943 and limited Eisenhower’s ability to interdict the Straits of Messina effectively. If we look at the raid’s legacy in the broader spectrum of the Second World War, it taught the Allies that if they wanted to get serious about ending Romanian oil production then they needed to develop a more comprehensive air and ground strategy. As the Axis learned in April 1944, the Allies had learned their lesson and returned with a vengeance.

Dr. Luke Truxal is the author of the forthcoming book Uniting against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe, which comes out in fall 2023. He is also an assistant editor for the scholarly web journal Balloons to Drones. He received his PhD from the University of North Texas. He previously published Bombing the Romanian Rail Network, in the Spring 2018 issue of Air Power History.  He is currently researching the American air war against Romania.

[1] Jay A. Stout, Fortress Ploesti: The Campaign to Destroy Hitler’s Oil (Havertown, Pennsylvania: Casemate Publishers, 2011), 28-31.

[2] Ibid,  32-36, 76.

[3] Ibid, 42.

[4] Ibid, 48-50.

[5] Ibid, 51-52.

[6] Ibid, 76.

[7] Grant Harward, Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2021), 184-185.

[8] Jay A. Stout, Fortress Ploesti: The Campaign to Destroy Hitler’s Oil, 76.

[9] Ira Eaker to Carl Spaatz, 3 August 1943, Ira Eaker Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

[10] Eaker to Henry H. Arnold, 12 August 1943, Eaker Papers, Library of Congress.

[11] Colonel R. R. Walker and Captain L.T. Pankhurst, “An Appreciation of the Ability of the Allies Air Forces to Ensure the Success of an Early Assault on the Italian Mainland, Exploiting the Rapid Success of the Husky Operation,” 16 July 1943, pp. 2-5, Spaatz Papers, Library of Congress.

[12] Robert S. Ehlers Jr., The Mediterranean Air War: Air Power and Allied Victory in World War II  (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 304-306.

[13] Ibid, 364.

[14] Group Captain J.C.E. Luard, “The Balkans Situation-Possibilities of Air Attack,” 24 April 1944, “The Balkans Situation-Possibilities of Air Attack,” 24 April 1944, Box I-17, Carl Spaatz Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C., 1.

[15] Luke Truxal, “Bombing the Romanian Rail Network,” Air Power History Magazine, Spring 2018 vol. 65 no. 1. (March 2018), 15-22

[16] Robert Walsh to Carl Spaatz and Ira Eaker, 2 August 1944, Carl Spaatz Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

[17] David M. Glantz and Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 218-221.