Anniversary: The Operation Tidal Wave Raid on Ploiești — August 1, 1943

At first light on 1 August 1943, 177 B-24 bombers took off from Benghazi, Libya, and flew across the Mediterranean, the Adriatic and three occupied countries to strike the refineries at Ploiești, Romania, which alone supplied roughly a third of the Axis’s fuel. They flew at an altitude of barely fifty feet, below the reach of heavy anti-aircraft fire: the formation lost cohesion, arrived late, and ran into the same three hundred anti-aircraft guns and two hundred Romanian and German fighters it had hoped to evade.

Fifty-three bombers did not return. Three hundred and ten airmen died, another 186 were taken prisoner or interned in Turkey. Five men received the Medal of Honor, the most ever awarded for a single mission — three of them posthumously. On the ground, a stricken bomber crashed into the Ploiești women’s prison: crew and inmates died together in the wreckage. Romanian pilot Carol Anastasescu shot down one B-24 and rammed a second, dying alongside both crews. Within a few weeks the refineries were producing more fuel than before the raid.

It has gone down in American history as «Black Sunday». In Ploiești it is also remembered for those who died under the bombs without wearing a uniform: the Ploiești and Operation Tidal Wave entry tells both versions, and why the count of barrels shows neither side got what it paid for.