The campaign to destroy Hitler's oil supply * Narrative history of the Allied
campaign to deny key oil supply complex, Ploesti, to Axis forces.
Unlike
previous books on Ploesti, Jay Stout goes well beyond the famous big and bloody
raid of August 1943 and depicts the entire 1944 strategic campaign of
twenty-plus missions that all but knocked Ploesti out of the war and denied the
German war machine the fuel and lubricants it so desperately needed.
While
Fortress Ploesti is the narrative history of the entire air campaign to deny the
Ploesti oil complex to the Axis powers, Stout, who served as a Marine F/A-18
pilot in the First Gulf War, asks questions about the aerial strategy and combat
history relating to this crucial campaign. He carries the ball far beyond the
goal post set by all other Ploesti historians. He has gone out of his way to
describe the defences throughout the campaign, and he brings in the voices of
Ploesti's defenders to complement the tales of Allied airmen who brought Ploesti
to ruin. He describes the role of the bombers, that of the fighters, and
explains the developments in anti-aircraft defences, such as the technique of
obscuring the Ploesti complex with smoke, which defined the campaign’s combat
strategy.
In the end, Stout's narrative describes the entire Ploesti effort
for the very first time in print, and, by proxy, guides the reader through the
intricacies of the entire Allied strategic bombing campaign in Europe, and all
the weapons and techniques the Axis powers used to parry it. His lucid
presentation of complex issues at both tactical and strategic levels is
impressive.