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pale blue, short-sleeved shirts and mustard-colored shorts --

an Afrika Korps fashion -- ran through firing exercises. Russian POW's

in Red Army uniforms with insignia removed served up the shells, and on

some guns a "reindoctrinated" Red even pulled the firing cord.
     
     
Life became even sweeter when 1,200 Luftwaffe air-women and hundreds of

German civilian girls came as secretaries and technicians. Romanian women

also were kind to the rich soldiers. However, a German having relations

with Romanians or Russians outside the line of duty had to report each

contact to an Intelligence officer. There were a few Romanian antifascists

who would risk espionage work, but most of the information leaving the

country was carried by diplomats or commercial travelers going to neutral

Turkey. The United States and British embassies there received generalized

impressions and Bucharest café chatter but very little about Gerstenberg's

strength or dispositions. He allowed no one but German troops near the

flak batteries, airdromes and warning installations. He divested Ploesti

of occupants not holding essential refinery or commercial jobs. On the

ruling level, Gerstenberg had a singular strength; he spoke Romanian,

which his Anibassador Buch-Killinger did not, so that the General

controlled intimate communications between him and Antonescu.
     
     
Gerstenberg disdained both of them. He permitted them to think they were

running Romania while having his own way on matters of importance. Colonel

Bernhard Woldenga, Gerstenberg's fighter controller, said, "He was

absolutely the key man. He knew everyone and all combinations in court

circles, the Romanian staff, businessmen, estate owners and people who

knew what the peasants were thinking." Only his immediate staff knew

what Gerstenberg was thinking. His plans for holding Ploesti were quite

un-Nazi. Berlin had no notion what to do about defeat or insurrection

until they occurred. The Protector, however, was cooly anticipating an

Allied bombing offensive, a Romanian rising and a Soviet roll-back of

the Wehrmacht three years before they in fact occurred.
     
     
To handle bombers Gerstenberg required the world's heaviest concentration

of flak guns and warning systems. He was defending a curious city;

it had a soft civilian center five miles in diameter and, close around

it, an almost solid belt of oil plants and transportation systems. The

Protector wanted an outer ring of powerful, highly mobile guns which

he could shift and concentrate quickly in the most likely tangents of

aerial assault. He demanded 250 first-line interceptor planes standing

by and 75,000 Luftwaffe troops, mostly technicians, to serve the planes,

guns, radar and communications systems.
     
     
On the second possibility -- the national rising -- Gerstenberg's

thinking was subtly realistic. Although the Iron Guard's anti-German

outbreak had been smothered in bullets, he was aware of a more tactful,

pro-Allied, or opportunistic, core in the Romanian general staff and

among the aristocracy and big landowners. He was surrounded by Romanian

toadies whose fortunes had improved under the German rule, but he did not

delude himself that they were any more than an ineffectual and expendable

minority when the patriotic war came.
     
     
The Protector held Saturday afternoon staff meetings in which he

elucidated his analyses and plans. He reminded his officers that

the Antonescu crowd would be broken quickly in a rising and it

would be entirely left to the Germans to save themselves and the

refineries. Ploesti was the key. It lay astride the main road and rail

routes from Germany to the southeastern front. If the Romanians rebelled,

Gerstenberg would pull his outer flak rings in tight against the oil

city and use the guns as artillery against the insurrectionists. He

called this concept Festung Ploesti , an unconquerable redoubt. At the

same time, he insured that a corridor would remain