TIDAL WAVE

The spectacular Ploesti raid and a surprising sequel.

Makos, prolific popular writer of books on World War II, including Devotion, An Epic Story of Heroism and Friendship (2014), devotes the first third of this latest to the planning and execution of the famous raid. In August 1943, a fleet of American B-24s flew from Africa to bomb the Ploesti oil refinery complex in Romania, a Nazi ally. Flying at treetop level to avoid German radar, they suffered heavy losses while inflicting severe damage that was quickly repaired. It was America’s first mass bomber operation of the war and produced a steady stream of accounts. By chance, Makos learned that one B-24 crashed on the estate of a British-educated Romanian princess who rescued the survivors. Investigating further, he turned up a living 97-year-old crewman who showed him a diary and referred him to families of crewmates who had preserved letters, memoirs, and interviews of their experience. Powerless, but a public figure, the princess persuaded Romania’s “iron-fisted dictator,” Ion Antonescu, that fliers captured after the raid were Romanian property and not to be turned over to the Nazis. As a result, crewmen were held in Geneva Convention-approved conditions, vastly superior to what they could expect in Germany. A year later, with Hitler clearly losing, Romania’s king, who had in effect been a prisoner of the military dictatorship since 1940, organized a coup that returned him to power. Romania switched sides; more than 1,000 Allied POWs were freed, and, once informed, the American Air Force sent a fleet of bombers from Italy to rescue them. This was a happy ending for the prisoners, if not for Romania, which became a Soviet satellite, and for the royal family, which was exiled by the victorious communists in 1947. It’s a little-known story that’s hard to resist.

Vivid niche history.