Sgt. Mac's Blog

The first group to drop bombs on Europe, known as the Egypt-Libya Campaign,  belonged to a small detachment of B-24′s, led by Col. Harry A. Halverson. Halverson’s group originally had planned to bomb Japan, but because of Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo, the Japanese responded by overrunning the bases in China, that were going to be  used for Halverson’s mission.

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Halverson’s group received orders to help the Soviet Red Army in their front against Hitler. The target of this new raid, was Ploesti, Rumania, a very large repository of oil refineries, used by Hitler for his war machine.

The small group of a dozen B-24 Liberators, attacked Ploesti at dawn on the 10 June 1942. For the most part, the mission was unsuccessful.

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An intriguing story of the unsuccessful raid however, was and unusual escape by one of the B-24′s piloted by 1^st Lt. Eugene L. Ziesel. His aircraft ran low and fuel and was forced to land at Ankara in neutral Turkey, where he and his crew were interned.

The ever resourceful Ziesel, convinced his captors, that the B-24′s engines must be started every few days, to keep them from deteriorating. Each time the pilot ran up the engines, he used less fuel than the Turkish ground crew put into the tanks. After he had built up the supply of fuel in the tanks, he took off surprising  the Turkish mechanics, and flew back to an Allied base. A week after returning to combat, Ziesel and his crew died,  during an attack on Naples, Italy.

Source/Credits:

afhaso.af.mil
With Courage: the United States Army Air Forces in WWII, 1994, by Bernard C. Nalty, John F. Shiner and George M. Watson.