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A Surgeon With 300% Mortality Rate From a Single Operation and Other Historic Screwups

Khalid Elhassan October 11, 2020 32 min

Robert Liston - Surgery — Dr. Robert Liston operating. Wellcome Images

21. Series of Mistakes Doom a Well Planned Raid

B-24 Liberators during the Ploesti Raid. Air and Space Museum

During WWII, American air commanders planned a raid on the Ploesti oilfields and complex in Romania, which furnished the Nazis with a third of their fuel. The plan was for B-24 Liberator heavy bombers, without fighter escort, to take off for a 2000-mile trip north from Libya across the Mediterranean, then turn northeast towards Ploesti upon reaching the Greek coast. On August 1^st, 1943, which came to be known as “Black Sunday”, 177 Liberators took off from Libyan airfields. The plan was good, but it was wrecked by cascading mishaps and mistakes.

B-24s bombing the Ploesti oilfield complex. Wikimedia

Maintaining radio silence, the B-24s skimmed over the Mediterranean, flying at 50 feet or lower to avoid German radar, then flew at treetop level upon reaching land. However, the Germans were alerted and the raid came to grief because of a series of misfortunes and mistakes. First, a navigation error took some bombers directly above a German position. Then, a lead navigator crashed, and the bombers following him arrived over the target staggered, instead of simultaneously.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.