Bombing Ploeisti

Charles Fillmore had a bird’s eye view of the war over Europe as he manned the nosegunners’s roost. He sat in the front of a B-24 Liberator on 35 bombing missions to sites in France, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria and Poland.
He was the guy who called in the reports of incoming flack, the direction from which it came and where it was in relation to the bomber seeking its target.

One mission stands out, both for the strategic importance of the target and because of how heavily defended it was by German anti-aircraft units.
“Ploeisti was the worst one. They had so many ack-ack guns ringed around. No matter where yu came in, you had to go out through them (more flack) on the other side”

The day was Aug. 17 1944. The mission was to bomb the Ploeisti, Romania oil refineries, the major supplier f oil products for the Nazi forces. To cripple the refinery would mean to intensively hamper the mobility of the Axis forces dependent upon the Ploeisti complex for fuel.

“That was the biggest refinery in Europe and they had it Protected<” Fillmore recalled. “The sky was black.” The smoke from exploding anti-aircraft shells provided the ink darkening sky, the same sky Fillmore and his crew as well as the entire contingent of planes had to fly through.

His was the fourth plane in the formation, the first to get through the defense. He watched as the three planes ahead of them were shot down.
“There were parachutes going over us, going under us and all around us.” the Hamlin Township resident recalled.
Even more troublesome was the downed planes carried the navigators for the section, all of the radar equipment used for navigation, and their commander.

Now they were on their own, plotting courses manually, heading through flak to the refinery

“You wondered if you were going to come out the other side”

They flew over their target, but the bombs weren’t dropped over the target as planned. He looked back into the plane and saw the bombardier, hands at his head “and he was crying like a baby.” So Fillmore pulled the cord to release the bombs, not in a nicely spaced pattern, but all at once.

Later the crew found out their bombardier, who had substituted on another crew’s mission that ended in a crash before the Ploeisti flight, had suffered a brain concussion in the crash that had not been detected.

Fillmore and his crew then tried to head back to their Carignola, Italy base.

We didn’t make it back that day. Our gas tanks were shot out. We headed to a little island in the Adriatic Sea.”

They spent two days on the island of Vis, which had a special emergency landing airstrip fo rallied planes in trouble.

There were other memories too, such as the mission to destroy a bridge in Verona, Italy. The first planes in missed the target.

“I could see the black smoke in the air from the ack-ack guns that went over, I could see the Railroad Bridge down below.”


He stood up in his nosegunner’s turret to get a better look below. “Then I haerd a “Boom-Boom.” The flak had hit and destroyed the plane’s hydraulic units. “We were able to land, but we had to fly around and run out of gas.”

Without hydraulics they switched to hand controls for the flaps and rudders, but they still lacked brakes, an important tool when touching down at 150 mph. So they tied parachutes to side-mounted .50 caliber guns and let them rip as they hit the runway. The plane slid along and past the end of the runway, the canvas straps of the parachutes giving out. But they made it safely.

Meanwhile, stateside in Ludington, his pregnant wife, Betty awaited for news and watched the Daily News for accounts of the war.

In 1942 she had lost her job in the payroll department at Dow’s Ludington magnesium plant when she married-there was a policy in place saying “it was understood” a married woman couldn’t work in payroll. She turned down Dow’s offer to transfer to Midland.

Instead she followed her husband around the states for a while, heading back to Ludington, surviving a train wreck in New Mexico on her way home when he was shipped overseas.

And she worried.

“We didn’t think, being a nosegunner, he would ever make it back. That’s what some family members said,” Betty recalls.

She didn’t see the photos of where her husband worked- in the Plexiglas enclosed nose of the bomber- until after the war.

It was a difficult time.

“When you’re young, you didn’t realize what was going n. I grew up real fast from 17 on, and I;m sure Chuck did too, sitting home watching the news.”

For his part, Chuck said he and the other members of the 15th Army Air Force knew the war was going well.

They were particularly pleased when they received work that the Soviet Union had won Romania and there will be no more Ploeisti bomb runs.

“Then everybody breathed a sigh of relief.”