In the early morning hours of Aug. 1, 1943, Leon Johnson of Columbia led one of the most daring and strategically vital bombing runs of World War II.

Johnson

Flying at treetop level over Nazi-occupied Romania, Johnson’s 44th Bomb Group dropped 1,000-pound bombs on the oil refinery that fueled much of Germany’s mechanized power. The bombers left the refineries in the Ploesti oil fields in an inferno of 1,500-foot flames and, historians said, severely undercut the Germans’ ability to make war from that point forward.

"It would take me a week to even begin to tell you about some of the individual stories involved," said Ruth Morse, publisher of "8 Ball Tails," a magazine about the 44th Bomb Group.

"It’s comparable to Pickett’s Charge in the Civil War," she said referring to the attack considered to be a suicide mission. "It was such an awesome mission that five leaders of different groups won the Medal of Honor." Three of them were awarded posthumously.

This week, the medal won by Johnson will be donated by Johnson’s grandson, Leon Johnson Abbott, to the Army Heritage Museum of Carlisle, Pa. Abbott, 52, believes this is just as the general would have wanted it. Johnson died in 1997 at age 93.

"I don’t have any children, and I feel very strongly that it is part of the legacy of our nation that I sincerely do hope will provide inspiration to future generals," Abbott said. "It belongs with the history of the 44th so the entire spirit and character and courage of the 44th is there to testify to future generations."

Johnson was born in Columbia in 1904 in what his grandson describes as a family of well-known bankers. Not much has been recorded about his early years, Abbott said, but something went sour in the banking business, and when Johnson was a teen, the family moved to Moline, Kan.

Johnson enrolled at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at age 17 and would wear the uniform most of the rest of his life. In January 1943, then a colonel, Johnson assumed command of the 44th Bomb Group and six months later moved the group to Libya, where they began to plot the Ploesti run.

The bombing mission covered 2,400 miles - one of the longest of the war - and required the planes to be weighted down with ammunition and extra fuel. "If someone shoots the plane, the whole thing will go up in one big cloud," Morse said.

After they flew into enemy territory, a crewman broke radio silence, which tipped off the Germans, Morse said. When the fliers assembled over the railway station leading into Ploesti, the doors on some railway cars swung open to reveal hidden anti-aircraft guns, and Germans began to pick off a number of the B-24 Liberators.

Things stayed hairy from that point forward. Johnson and a formation of six other Liberators flew at an altitude of 30 feet into Ploesti, which was already engulfed in flames. As they entered the inferno, according to an article published at the time in Yank magazine, an updraft opened a tunnel of air in the middle of the "roaring mass." "The rear gunners see the following six planes head into the inferno," the Yank article continues. "The flames close in. ... Only one" plane "comes out."

That one plane, Johnson’s, was burned jet-black and shot through by antiaircraft fire, but he piloted it safely to the air base in Libya.

About 400 men died in the bombing run. "When they closed up doors that held the bombs, they had stalks of corn in the planes," Morse said. "That tells you how low they were flying."

Bombers continued to attack Ploesti for the next eight months to destroy the refineries that produced 485,000 tons of petroleum a year at their peak. By the end of the war, Morse said, the German air force had so little available aviation fuel they were sending new pilots up with as little as five hours of flight time. "They were knocked out of the air like it was a turkey hunt," she said of the green pilots.

After the war, Johnson served as air deputy to the supreme allied commander of NATO in Paris and later held the post of director, Net Evaluation Subcommittee Staff/National Security Council in the Pentagon.

Abbott lived with his grandfather for a time in a large mansion in Paris that is now home to the Saudi Arabian Embassy. He recalls a warm man who never bragged about his feats and shared his thoughts about war, peace and government with a twinkle in his eye.

"There’s a book by Tom Wolfe, ‘The Right Stuff,’ " Abbott said. "I do feel my grandfather had the right stuff."

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