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country, and not herself at war with Germany, served

an ultimatum for the return of Bessarabia and Bukovina and got them back

next day. Whereupon Antonescu's Axis neighbors, Bulgaria and Hungary,

twisted his arm and regained southern Dobruja and most of Transylvania,

respectively. Queen Marie's Greater Romania vanished overnight. Soon

King Carol II was in flight to Switzerland with Iron Guard assassins

at his heels, and his seventeen-year-old son, Michael, was placed on a

powerless throne.
     
     
In February 1941 Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Romania.

Two months later Hitler blitzed Yugoslavia and Greece. Outnumbered Royal

Air Force squadrons resisted with hopeless valor. In the fortnight left

to her in Greece, Britain proposed to hurl her remaining two-engine bombers

at Ploesti. The Greek cabinet forbade it because Greece was not at war with

Romania. The last chance to hit Ploesti from Europe was lost. Germany had

won the prize intact by a combined diplomatic and military offensive that

forced Britain a thousand miles from Ploesti, far beyond bombing range.
     
     
Among the R.A.F. escapees from Greece was a long-haired, histrionic

Anglo-Irish peer, Wing Commander Arthur Patrick Hastings Viscount Forbes,

formerly air attaché in the British Embassy at Bucharest. Lord Forbes

arrived in Cairo crying for vengeance upon Ploesti, but there was no

way now to bomb it.
     
     
Gerstenberg made use of the lull to obtain more men and arms from

Berlin. Hitler, preparing his onslaught on the U.S.S.R., was disinclined

to strengthen a region where enemy incursion was impossible. But

Gerstenberg's old comrade, Goering, helped him, and the Protector

came into good luck a few days after Hitler's attack on Russia in

June. During the first week, Red Air Force bombers came three times

to Ploesti in small numbers. The last raid, a twilight affair, left

some damage and a few parachuted airmen. Gerstenberg used it to get a

substantial reinforcement from Berlin. There was no follow-up by the Red

Air Force. Stalin, a leading proponent of massive long-range retaliatory

bombing, quickly dropped the whole idea. Many of his heavy bombers were

destroyed on the ground by the first Luftwaffe attacks; the Wehrmacht

rolled over his forward air bases, and Stalin lent every resource of

soviet aircraft production to ground-support craft for the Red Army,

and fighters to defend his cities. Gerstenberg gained another epoch of

calm for his preparations. He was promoted to Generalmajor (brigadier)

and was moving along briskly toward the unique result of his mission,

an autonomous theater command, not subject to Oberkommando politics or

Hitler intuition.
     
     
Antonescu drove a half-million unwilling, ill-trained and poorly

equipped peasants into the U.S.S.R. under the name of the Third Romanian

Army. Hitler sacrificed 50,000 of them to win Odessa. (During the war

Germany consumed about one-third of the able-bodied farmers of Romania,

a nation with an 80 percent agricultural population.) As a consequence,

Gerstenberg's new troops came to a land of lonely women. From hardship,

deprivation, blackout and bombing in Germany, they came to peace and

plenty. Werner Nass, who arrived with the 622nd Antiaircraft Battalion

from the Ruhr, said, "As an NCO I got fourteen thousand lei a month;

that bought ten pounds of bacon. You could buy anything -- things no

longer known in the Rubr -- eggs, sausages, ham, fruit and as much

wine as you wanted. From our first home leaves we brought old clothes

to sell to the Romanians. Our pockets were full of money. We were

everything but soldiers. It was like Feldmarschall von Mackensen said

when he went to Romania in 1916: 'I came with an army of soldiers and

returned with an army of salesmen.'" The only flaw in the good life

was the exacting Gerstenberg who fought obesity, alcoholism, venereal

disease and laziness with incessant drills. Every day the gunners in

their