Read Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 for Free Online

Freeman was among

the 35 men kidnapped. Shortly afterward Antonescu became prime minister of

Romania. He appealed to Hitler for military aid. Der Führer's conditions

were the expulsion of "foreign" oil interests and German occupation of

strategic military positions in Romania. Antonescu accepted.
     
     
The German military assistance group arrived in Bucharest to take over

control. Its chief was a short, little-known forty-eight-year-old colonel

with red hair and an equable and scholarly air. Alfred Gerstenberg was

born on the Polish border and was imbued from childhood with German

xenophobia. Originally a cavalryman, Gerstenberg became an aviator

and flew with Hermann Goering in the First World War. When Germany was

forever denied an air force in the Treaty of Versailles, the Soviets

afforded her clandestine air training at Lipetsk, 230 miles southeast of

Moscow. Gerstenberg was among a secret group of German officer-instructors

who formally resigned their Reichswehr commissions in 1926 and went to

the U.S.S.R. as members of the Red Army. Gerstenberg reported to Marshal

Klimenti Voroshilov and remained in the Soviet until Hitler took power and

Stalin broke off the arrangement. Back in Germany, Gerstenberg resumed

his military commission but remained aloof from the Hitlerites. He was

not a member of the National Socialist Party and refused to wear the

swastika on his uniform.
     
     
In Romania, Gerstenberg was nominally air attaché to the embassy in

Bucharest, a modest pose which disguised his actual role as the executor

of German military designs in the Balkans. He was diplomatic, far-sighted,

realistic, and, as much as he stood apart from the actual party machinery,

was willing to accept responsibility for Südostraum , the Nazi concept

of a Balkan empire. Gerstenberg was a bachelor, a connoisseur of books

and paintings, and a host whose dinner invitations were soon coveted by

Bucharest society. General Otto Dessloch, who served with him, said,

"He was a dedicated man. To better fulfill his duties he learned to

speak Polish, Russian and Romanian. He worked sixteen hours a day

with one goal in mind -- to make Ploesti too costly for the enemy to

attack." Thus, a full year before the United States entered the war an

exceptionally able and resolute Protector was placed in charge of the

Romanian refineries. Indeed, in the person of the genial and adroit air

attaché there had come the actual war-time ruler of Romania.
     
     
Romanian nonbelligerence was Hitler's strongest shield for undisturbed oil

production. The Germans consolidated control by forming the Kontinentale

Oil Company, "nationalizing" the Allied-owned refineries and staffing them

with German technicians, setting up new boards of directors consisting of

pliant Romanian politicians and lawyers. This done, Gerstenberg turned

to a more serious endeavor, that of squeezing men, guns and planes

out of Goering to defend Ploesti. He bent his powers of persuasian and

scare propaganda on Berlin rather than Bucharest, which he dominated with

unobtrusive art. Gerstenberg thought little of the Antonescu mob. Romanian

fratricide served only to strengthen German rule. One night the Iron Guard

murdered 64 politicians of the Liberal party -- leaving fewer patriots

to annoy him. A few months later, however, Antonescu's crazed domestic

fascists gave Gerstenberg a start by rising against their own leader for

"selling out to the German!" Antonescu, however, controlled the Romanian

Army and squelched the berserkers with 6,000 deaths. It gave Gerstenberg

a period of domestic tranquillity in which to carry on his preparations.
     
     
For Romania the result of Antonescu's embrace of Hitler's protection was

immediate national humiliation. Other willing Nazi satellites waited

until 1945 for territorial disgorgement, but Romania was partitioned

immediately. Soviet Russia, accepting Antonescu's word that he was too

weak to protect the