The damn runway was uphill and almost fooled me, but the tires screeched, and I’stuck’ the landing…we were down in one piece! I coasted to the end …and turned down a little road off the runway, to keep it clear for the other planes trying to land.

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No one came out to meet us so we taxied up the road. ‘Cripes,’ I thought. ‘This is sure good camouflage, but that ditch was real enough,’ so I pulled up onto an embankment and cut the engines.

The silence was deafening. We were back on the ground! We were alive! We were safe!

I unfastened my safety belt. It had been 14 hours and 30 minutes since I’d sat down in the pilot seat and started out in that cold, damp morning, which now seemed so long ago.

As soon as we had cleared the runway, the commanding officer of the 98th Bomb Group, Colonel ‘Killer’ Kane, came in for a landing in his shot-up crate with one engine feathered. He misjudged the uphill runway and didn’t have enough power left to pull it up. He washed out his landing gear, nosed up, and smashed up his plane. No one was hurt and Colonel Kane beat us to Tel Aviv, leaving his wrecked plane to be salvaged by us!

Now, finally, safe on the ground, we were the happiest, tiredest, hungriest boys you’ve ever seen! We all kissed the ground we landed on.

There was a doctor working on Van when I got aft, and soon he was taken to a hospital. He’s OK now and back in the States. I haven’t seen or heard from him since.

We worked on old Vagabond using any scavenged parts we could find and soon had it flyable–barely–but flyable. We lumbered down the bumpy runway, pulled her into the air, and headed back to Libya.

Well, that is the story of my part in the big Ploesti air raid. What others did must remain secret for a while longer. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back home.

I know I may have distorted the story to appear like I was the only person on the raid, but I feel the emotions and experiences I went through were so vivid, that I want to pass them along.

I can tell you, there wasn’t a man among us who will ever be the same after that 14-hour jaunt to Ploesti. I am happy to be able to tell this story. But, I am sad for the many who were there, on that mission to Ploesti, who’ll never be able to say they were even there.

The Vagabond King and her crew were later reassigned to England. Although it is unclear what happened to John McCormick and many of the other men later in the war, we do know that 1st Lt. Marvin Mosco was reported missing in action after a mission aboard the same plane three months later. The notification received by Mosco’s family reads, in part:

‘Under date of November 29, 1943, The Adjutant General notified you that your son, First Lieutenant Marvin Mosco, had been reported missing in action … since November 18, 1943. Further information has been received indicating that Lt. Mosco was a member of a B-24 Liberator bomber which departed from England on November 18, 1943, on a bombardment mission to Norway. Full details are not available, but the report indicates … our planes encountered enemy aircraft and in an ensuing engagement, your son’s Liberator was seen to sustain damage and to fall into the sea … ‘

This article was written by Lyndon Shubert and originally published in the March 2000 issue of Aviation History.

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