The plan sounded simple enough on paper: have a swarm of B-24 bombers fly low over Ploesti, Romania, and blast away the Nazi-controlled oil refineries there. To the men who would be inside those B-24s, however, the plan sounded like a script for a one-sided bloodbath—with them on the wrong side. Resistance to the plan surfaced up and down the chain of command. In North Africa, 98th Bomb Group commander Lieutenant Colonel John R. "Killer" Kane—who would have to lead his men on the deadly mission if the orders came down—declared the idea the product of "some idiot armchair warrior in Washington."
Not surprisingly, orders arrived and the mission was set for August 1, 1943. If it worked, many Allied leaders believed, it would deprive Germany of fuel essential to its war machinery. They hoped it would shorten the war by at least six months.
The US brass had a point. Even Adolf Hitler realized he needed a reliable source of oil, and he had known it from the start, even before he began his blitzkrieg to grab chunks of Europe. The type of mechanized warfare he envisioned demanded it. The trouble for Hitler’s regime was that, during the1930s, less than one percent of the world’s total petroleum output came from Germany. Accordingly, the Germans immediately initiated a crash program to produce synthetic fuel from lignite coal, a soft, brown, low-grade coal plentiful in Germany. They also built up stores of imported oil. Still, Germany needed more fuel.
