Just to add a bit more. Forgot I had Phillip Ardery's book "Bomber Pilot" on my shelf.
He flew Ploesti.
He talks about their training and he said they set up a practice target that was 20 feet tall and would clear it by 5 feet. His comment was they flew so low that 'we almost got vertigo when we found ourselves flying above 500 feet."
"It was usual to see a three ship flight or a six ship squadron of big Libs scudding over the flast desert land actually four or five feet from the ground. Of course the lowest ships of those formations were about four or five feet off the ground while the highest were not over fifteen feet."
He also comments: "This was the type of flying every hot pilot dreamed of all his life, but it was the sort that had cost many hundreds of pilot's lives in the states.....When you go 200 mile per hour at an altitude of eight feet, you really know you are going 200 miles per hour."
Finally, he also comments how the formations 'pulled up' to clear the smoke stacks and bomb, before dropping back down to the deck. He had two fixed 50s in the nose and was shooting them at flak gunners in the hay stacks on the way out. Now that's low
Ardery was one of the Squadron Commanders in the 389th BG. Not gonna argue with him on that one
