25. Operation Tidal Wave Resulted in Heavy Losses for Relatively Little Gain
A bomber group leader saw that all formation was hopelessly lost, so he broke radio silence to order the scattered B-24s to make their way to the target area individually, and once there, to bomb as best as they could. When they arrived at Ploesti, the Liberators were met by alert defenders who’d had time to prepare for them a warm welcome. Hundreds of anti-aircraft artillery pieces, heavy machine guns, and a specially designed flak train whose cars’ sides dropped to reveal flak guns, opened up on the bombers, while fighter airplanes fell upon them.
As the B-24s pressed on at a low level, they also had to contend with smokestacks that suddenly loomed in their path amidst dense clouds of billowing smoke. Of the 177 Liberators that took off that day, 162 made it to Ploesti. Of those, 53 were shot down, for the loss of 660 crewmen. Of the 109 Liberators that survived and reached an Allied airbase, 58 were damaged beyond repair. The damage to Ploesti was quickly repaired, and within weeks, the oil complex was back in action, to furnish the Germans with even more oil products than it had before the raid.