Rescue from Ploesti: The Harry Fritz Story : A World War II Triumph

by William G. Williams

In the early 1940s, thousands of young American men, some still in their teens and many without ever having been in an airplane, worked through brief training courses and found themselves within a year or less to be combat veterans. Such a young man was Pennsylvanian Harry Fritz, who was trained as the tail gunner on a B-24 Liberator bomber. Flying with the 15th Air Force from Italy, Fritz’s plane was shot down during a raid over the mammoth ring of oil refineries that encircled the city of Ploesti in Romania. When Romania abandoned Nazi Germany and joined the Allied cause, 1,100 Allied prisoners were left stranded. A daring rescue mission by dozens of B-17 Flying Fortresses brought all of them to safety in one of the war’s most amazing operations.

127 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003