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Consolidated Aircraft Company built the plane. It was powered by four 1200 horsepower Pratt & Whitney “Twin Wasp” 14 cylinder radial engines and had a maximum speed of 303 mph at 25,000 feet. It could carry eight, 1100 pound bombs and had a range of 2300 miles. It had a 110-foot wingspan, a length of 66 feet, height of 18 feet and weighed 32,605 pounds empty.

Two older men in the Museum book shop were talking about flying in WW-II. I asked one, "What did you fly?" "`24s," he said. "In the Pacific?" I wondered. "No, we flew out of Italy -- over Ploesti." My jaw dropped, for I knew what that meant.

But I'm ahead of my story. We'd just been through Galveston's Lone Star Flight Museum - their fine collection of WW-II airplanes. It was a remarkable experience walking among all those machines that'd lain at the center of my childhood -- airplanes I'd never seen so close up. Background speakers played Glenn Miller music.

A small but important item on the hangar floor was an old car with an A-sticker on its window. "A" was the tightest gasoline rationing level. This war was fueled by petroleum and gasoline was precious. Germany got petrol from the Ploesti oil fields in eastern Romania. Hitler had said that if the Ploesti refineries were destroyed, the damage would be beyond repair.

So damage them we must. But how? They lay out of reach of Allied bombers. Two elements finally came together in 1943. First the British and Americans took North Africa. Second, the Americans brought in the B-24 heavy bomber -- the Liberator.

The B-24 was designed more for range than bomb capacity. It had a nominal range of 3500 miles and now it was available.

The first great Ploesti raid left from Benghazi in Libya on Sunday, August 1st, when few Romanians would be at work. 1726 men took off in 177 B-24s, overloaded with defensive armor.

The first casualty on that 2700-mile trip was a plane that crashed on takeoff, killing all hands. The planes attacked Ploesti at treetop level -- flying into flak, machine gun fire, fighters, and barrage balloons. Their aim was no less than to shut off German petrol supplies. But things went wrong. The element of surprise was lost. Airplanes were shot down over the oil fields and on the way back. American losses approached 800 men. Estimates of lost airplanes are uncertain -- maybe 70 heavy bombers.

In the end, we paid a terrible price for shutting off sixty percent of Germany's oil -- and then we only turned it off for a while. What we did in 1943 we had to do again -- and again.

And I'm back to that museum shop. "We went out to Ploesti in 27 planes one day in 1944," the man said. "Only 14 came back. I was 19 years old. I was a ball gunner.

He left me at a loss for words, trying to add it all up. He'd flown 51 missions -- dangling out in the flak in that bubble on the plane's belly, with only luck to protect him. I'm five years younger than he -- that close to having been in that, or in some other, shooting gallery myself. But it'd been him, not me. I had momentarily brushed up against heroism, a virtue we find all too hard to believe in today. And it had been heroism on my behalf.

John H. Lienhard

Flying the Ploesti mission was rough. The one half losses is about expectable. The Liberators of 1943 burned up pretty badly as I recall, also. Very slow, as was the B-17. Navigation would be tough, especially in daylight, without meticulous reconnaissance photography. Only navigation aid was probably high frequency radio direction finding - HF DF - "Huff Duff".

The Pratt Twin Wasp used in the Liberator is a major milestone on the radial aircraft engine road. Very good engine, reliable. Not as powerful as really needed for the war, though.

The Pratt R-2800 was the star of the World War aero engines with over 2,000 horsepower. The R-4360, a post war development, ah, now that was an engine. Turbo compounded about 3,800 horse power.

Seriously, if it was my responsibility to specify engines for a new work, as opposed to toy, aircraft, I would of course use modern turbine engines. The Pratt PT-6 series will do anything any WWII radial can do with much greater reliability, lower cost, and weight. Radials are as obsolete as reciprocating steam engines. And the PT-6 is truly beautifully made, like all of the Pratt stuff.