“Just another day,” Robert Rans told me Friday, when asked how he will spend Aug. 1.
“It’s just another day.”
For most people, perhaps.
But on Aug. 1, 1943, U.S. Army Air Corps Staff Sgt. Rans, who is now 94 and living in Tampa, took part in history.
Until this point in World War II, U.S. military doctrine called for high altitude, daylight, mass bombing raids. That, combined with the British doctrine of night raids produced a round-the-clock aerial campaign against Nazi Germany.
Among the key targets was Nazi oil production. One of the biggest of those targets was the massive oil refinery complex in Ploesti, Romania, which at the time was out of reach by bombers from England, but within striking distance from allied bases in the Middle East and North Africa.
Allied leaders decided to bomb Ploesti during the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, according to an Air Force history of the raid, and Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold delegated the task to Col. Jacob Smart of his advisory council.
Smart’s choice was Operation TIDALWAVE, a low-level massed raid on the nine most important Ploesti refineries by five B-24 bomb groups, two from North Africa and three borrowed from Eighth Air Force in England.
It was the antithesis of everything the flying branch had done to this point.
And it was to take a terrible toll.
❖ ❖ ❖
Robert Rans was 22 and stationed at an airbase in the Libyan city of Benghazi in the summer of 1943.
It was one thing to drop bombs from 15,000 feet or higher, which was still deadly business thanks to German anti-aircraft fire and fighters. But Smart was calling for flying far lower than that, close to the deck until near the target then pop up to 300 feet.
“We practiced for two weeks before we went,” Rans said. “We knew what we were getting into.”
On the morning of Aug. 1, Rans and nine other crew members boarded their B-24 Liberator, dubbed the “Yen Tu,” a name derived from an off-color ditty about a man and his three daughters. The Yen Tu rumbled down the dusty desert runway and climbed into the sky, joining 177 other B-24s headed to Ploesti.
At first the flight went off without a hitch, Rans said, as the aerial armada crossed the Mediterranean and passed the island of Corfu.
But trouble cropped up, he said, as they crossed the Pindus Mountains into Romania.
“We ran into storms and got split up,” said Rans, who served as photographer on the flight.
According to the Air Force history, radio silence prevented the planes from communicating with each other, ending the plan for a single, mass attack.
Once out of the mountains and into Romania, the Yen Tu flew just high enough to skirt the trees and rooftops.
“As we got to the target, we flew up to 300 feet to get over the towers and that’s when we got hit,” Rans said. At the time, he was looking at his camera.
“I was listening for ‘bombs away’ when I got a bath of gasoline and caught on fire.”
He turned around and saw two crew members jump out windows.
“And so I jumped out, too.”
They were the only three to make it.
“The rest of them went down with the airplane.”
After pulling the cord on his parachute, Rans “blacked out” but came to when he landed in a corn field.
“As I was pulling my ‘chute under the corn, I looked up and saw a Romanian peasant farmer. He had a sickle. He was about 20 to 30 feet from me and coming toward me.”
Rans was sure he was about to be killed, but then he heard a voice. In German.
“It was a German soldier, telling the guy to leave me alone. He pointed his rifle at the guy. A German soldier actually saved my life.”
Still, he took Rans prisoner.
“He took me into town and I sat with a German officer. He was trying to interrogate me. My face was burnt. I had big blisters on my hands. I told them I wouldn’t say anything until I saw a doctor.”
The officer relented, calling for a doctor, who had hard advice for Rans.
“He said, ‘The best thing I can do for you is nothing,’” Looking back, it turned out to be the truth. In retrospect, I have to thank the guy for it.”
As bad as things were for Rans, he was among the lucky ones on that raid.
According to the Air Force, of the 178 planes that took off for Ploesti, only 88, most of them badly damaged, returned to Benghazi. Aside from the seven men on the Yen Tu, 303 other airmen were killed; 108, including Rans, were captured; and 78 were interned in Turkey.
“Despite the extreme heroism of the airmen and their determination to press the mission home, the results of Operation TIDALWAVE were less than expected,” according to the Air Force.
The raid temporarily eliminated less than half of the 8.5 million tons of oil produced annually.
“Unfortunately, these losses were temporary and reflected much less than the planners had hoped for,” according to the Air Force. “The Germans proved capable of repairing damage and restoring production quickly, and they had been operating the refineries at less than full capacity, anyway. Ploesti thus had the ability to recover rapidly. The largest and most important target, Astro Romana, was back to full production within a few months while Concordia Vega was operating at 100 percent by mid-September.”
Because of the tremendous toll exacted on the air crews, the U.S. Army Air Forces never again attempted a low-level raid against German air defenses.
❖ ❖ ❖
As the Germans repaired the damage his fellow airmen had wrought, Rans remained in a Romanian hospital from Aug. 1 until Dec. 1
“They treated me well. I have no complaints at all.
Then he was placed in a prisoner of war camp, under the control of the Romanians.
“They always kept us separate from the rest of the POWs, because there wasn’t a raid on Romania until April, 1944. They treated us very good.”
By September 1944, Rans and the other survivors were liberated by the advancing Soviet forces.
“By October, I was back home in Chicago.”
❖ ❖ ❖
Staff Sgt. Jimmy Waltman, one of the other men who survived the flight, died two years later from his wounds, Rans said. The other airman who bailed out, a guy he remembers only as Fitzpatrick, died sometime later, making Rans the lone survivor.
He laughed when I ask him about the kerfuffle between Donald Trump and John McCain, in which Trump said McCain’s stint as a prisoner of the Vietnamese didn’t in itself make him a hero.
“Donald Trump,” he said with a chuckle. “He doesn’t impress me.”
As for himself?
“I don’t really consider myself a hero. Things happened so fast and so hard.”
❖ ❖ ❖
The Pentagon announced no new troop deaths in support of ongoing operations last week.
There have been 2,347 U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, seven in support of the anti-ISIS campaign Operation Inherent Resolve, and two U.S. troop deaths and one civilian Department of Defense employee death in support of the follow-up Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan.