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The following transcript is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Dan Patterson: Walter Stewart was a lieutenant in the Army Air Forces with the 93rd Bomb Group in 1943 when the 93rd was assigned to the mission known as Operation Tidal Wave. It was a daring and risky American bomber attack against the Romanian oil refineries at Ploesti.
Operation Tidal Wave
The intelligence was that these oil facilities produced almost 40% of the fuel the Nazis were using to power their war effort.
The B-24s the Air Force flew were secretly flown from England to Tunisia for the mission. Their objective was to fly at a very low level across the Mediterranean and bomb the facilities, which had ironically been built by American oil companies such as Standard Oil, Marathon, Occidental, Phillips 66, and others before the war.
The mission was organized as a complex series of flight legs with turns, all of which had to be made on an exact schedule and under strict radio silence.
The lead bomber with the mission navigator mysteriously crashed into the sea on its way to the target, but the bomber forces had to proceed regardless.
The attack turned into chaos, with the bomber formations arriving from all directions. However, the Nazi oil refineries were severely damaged.
The B-24s were heavily attacked by flak and fighters on the way in and away from the target.
Of the 178 aircraft that took off, 54 were shot down, 579 of the 1,763 men were killed, wounded, shot down, or missing.
Walter Stewart
Lieutenant Walter Stewart flew that mission. He had named his B-24 plane, "Utah Man," and it came back from Operation Tidal Wave with 365 holes from antiaircraft fire. The aircraft's damage was so severe that Stewart had to reduce airspeed and nearly ran out of fuel on his way back to safety.
The plane landed two hours after most aircraft had returned to base.
His navigator reportedly said, "We have never been so out of gas."
A lush green valley
When I met the retired Colonel Stewart, who stayed in the Air Force after the war and retired after 36 years as an Air Force attorney, it was at his home in Benjamin, Utah.
He met me at the door in his full-dress Air Force uniform, his pilot wings above row upon row of combat ribbons, often called fruit salad.
Colonel Stewart walked with me outside and described his return home. His family home in Benjamin sits in a lush green valley surrounded by ranges of snow-capped mountains. Roads are laid out in a precise grid. He was raised here and returned here after the war and after retirement.
I wanted to say a loud hello.Colonel Walter Stewart on flying his B-24 home after WWII ended in Europe.
He described the scene to me.
He was allowed to fly a B-24 home from the bomb group, but not his "Utah" Man B-24, which was so shot up after the mission, it had to be scrapped.
He looked across the valley, swept his arm across the flat land, and said, "See this flat valley, I wanted to say a loud hello. I lined that B-24 up at the top of the valley, and I came down here as low as I could, and I really buzzed this old farm twice."
Photographing a hero
He told me his loyal cat followed him everywhere in his retirement, and when we got ready to make the photo on his property, his cat jumped right up onto the fence post and signaled his approval.
Stewart was well aware of Operation Tidal Wave's importance and was happy to have survived and buzzed his home.
Operation Tidal Wave generated five Medals of Honor, the most awarded from any single bomber mission in American history. Of those five, only two were still alive after the mission.
Blue Skies and Tailwinds is presented by SNC, a global aerospace and defense firm, with support from the Wright State University Aviation Science and Technology Program. The series is produced at the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
