August 1, 1943 is forever remembered as Black Sunday, after the second worst loss occurred in the U.S. Army Air Forces on this day.
Operation Tidalwave was the largest bombing mission thus far attempted, involving 179 B-24 Liberator bombers and over 1750 aircrew on a 2400-mile round-trip low-level bombing raid on oil refineries in Rumania (now spelled Romania). Although the raid was deemed a failure, the performance of the aircrews was heroic and five men were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions. One of those men was Colonel John Kane, commander of the 98th Bomb Group and one of the key leaders of the mission.
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by Kris Cotariu Harper, EdD
John Kane, son of a Baptist minister, was born in 1907 and grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas. He graduated from Baylor University in 1928, having played both basketball and football on varsity teams. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as an air cadet in 1931 and was commissioned the following year. During the summer of 1942, he was assigned to the American forces in the Mediterranean Theater of the war where his bold maneuvers during 43 combat missions against German and Italian shipping resulted in German Intelligence giving him the nickname “Killer Kane.”
For the August 1, 1943 raid on the Nazi oil refineries in Ploesti, Rumania, Kane, now a colonel, was assigned as one of the leads. The Ploesti raid was conceived and agreed upon by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during a meeting at the Casablanca Conference in Morocco in January, 1943. General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, assigned the planning of the mission to Colonel Jacob Smart, a staff officer in Washington D.C., rather than tactical officers in Theater. The plan was to send 179 B-24 Liberators on a low-altitude (200 to 800 feet) bombing mission from American air fields in north Africa, to Ploesti, a round-trip of 2400 miles. The goal was to destroy the refineries, Germany’s largest single-source of oil, and cripple Hitler’s ability to continue the war. While the plan violated all established Air Forces policy, estimates were that the success of this strike would shorten the war by six months. When Kane first heard the plan, it is reported he responded that the mission had certainly been devised by “some idiotic armchair warrior in Washington” (Stout, 2005).
With an ominous start in the early morning hours of August 1, 1943, 179 B-24 Liberators took off from the American airfield in Benghazi, Libya. One of the Liberators crashed upon takeoff, killing all but two of her crew. A second B-24 ditched into the Mediterranean during the crossing, and a third, having circled back to investigate the second, never rejoined the formation. With more in-theater experience than lead pilot, Kane fell behind the formation, apparently due to his refusal to push his aircraft beyond limits he believed were achievable. As the third group in the formation, the remaining two groups fell behind with him. In addition, cloud cover over Greece further separated the two groups and Kane, now leading the 44th and 389th Bombardment Groups in addition to the 98th, was 20 minutes behind the lead elements.
The Germans had deciphered the American code and thus had advance knowledge of the planned raid. The German commanding general strengthened the defense system around the refineries and reinforced it with three fighter groups in addition to the local Rumanian and Bulgarian fighters, making it one of Europe’s strongest air defense systems. As the first two bombardment groups approached from the south and Kane, with the remaining two, approached from the north 20 minutes later, the Germans waited with their concealed anti-aircraft weapons, smoke generators, their fighters already in the air. The large, slow Liberators, flying at low altitude, were no match for this defensive network.
In an interview years later, one airman recalled the experience as “terrifying” and reported that flames from an exploding storage tank on the ground shot “50 feet higher than our plane” (National WWII Museum). Into this conflagration, Kane led the three bombardment groups. When Kane arrived at his designated target, he realized it had already been hit by one of the previous groups so he led his group further into the target area to find a new target. His courageous leadership and flying skill enabled his and the trailing groups to inflict additional damage to the refineries while his aircraft sustained more than 20 direct hits from anti-aircraft weapons and the loss of one engine. In spite of this damage, he completed a circle above the target area to assess the situation before returning to home. This maneuver however, consumed his airplane’s reserve fuel. Kane’s bomber, the Hail Columbia, crash landed on the island of Cypress before reaching its home base. Eight days later, on August 9, 1943, John “Killer” Kane was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Approximately 90 Liberators returned to Benghazi; without exception all were badly damaged, some unrepairable. In total, 660 men did not return – 440 were confirmed as killed in action, the remaining either captured or missing in action.
John Kane survived the war and retired from the Army Air Forces in 1954. He and his second wife, a British Army nurse whom he met in North Africa after the Ploesti raid, moved to Pennsylvania, to be near his son from his first marriage. He lived there until his death in 1996 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.
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Kris Cotariu Harper, EdD, is an Army wife and the daughter of two WWII Navy Veterans. She is an educator and trainer who often writes and speaks on values demonstrated by Medal of Honor recipients
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Cited References:
National WWII Museum, (2019, August). Over the Cauldron of Ploesti: The American Air War in Romania. Retrieved from Over the Cauldron of Ploesti: The American Air War in Romania | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans (nationalww2museum.org)
Stout, Jay, (2005, October). Raid in Ruins: Ploesti. America in WWII. Retrieved from Raid in Ruins – Ploesti Raid – America in WWII magazine