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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

20. A Disaster of a Raid

A B-24 group leader finally broke radio silence, when he saw that all formation was hopelessly lost. To salvage something from what was shaping up to be a disaster, he ordered the scattered bombers to make their way to Ploesti individually and bomb as best they could. Unfortunately for the American airmen, the Liberators were met by alert defenders.

Hundreds of antiaircraft gun, heavy machineguns, and a specially designed train whose cars’ sides dropped to reveal flak guns, opened up on the bombers, while fighter aircraft savaged them. The low flying B-24s also had to contend with industrial chimneys suddenly looming in their path amid the billowing smoke. Of 177 B-24s that took off that day, 162 reached Ploesti. Of those, 53 were shot down, for the loss of 660 crewmen. Of the 109 Liberators that made it back, 58 were beyond repair. The damage to Ploesti was quickly repaired, and within weeks, the oil complex’s production was higher than it had been before the raid.

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.