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Akronite 'Crash Lands' On Oil Target!
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By HELEN WATERHOUSE

"I'm not going to turn back!
"If anything happens to our plane, we will keep on flying to the objective and drop our bombs.
"We cannot fall out and break up the formation."
Terse sentences like these were spoken in the zero hour just before the raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Rumania by an Akron lieutenant colonel. He was giving his 10-man crew of a Liberator bomber the chance to stay back if they wished or to go on with him and see it through.
These words were repeated yesterday in the tense silence of a room where the wife of Lieut. Col. Addison Baker, reported missing in action since that raid, was receiving the news first-hand of her husband's last moments before the takeoff. Maj. Howard Moore, a fellow pilot at the North African air base now home on furlough in Akron, was telling Mrs. Baker all that he knew of her husband's fate.
"So they took off," said Major Moore, weighing each word carefully.
"Thirteen and a half hours later, just as dusk was falling, I stood on the runway at the airport straining my eyes to see them return. Only a few came back-Addison was not among them.
"Afterwards-when the wounded had been carried from the planes, the boys told me the story--
"Just three miles before they reached the target, the men who flew on the right and left of him in formation, said 'Ad's' plane was hit by light flak and the nose was shot off. Probably some of the crew were injured but not the pilot or co-pilot.
"Ad could have set his plane down right there safely- for the ground was level. But he said,
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[[image:Lieut. Col. Baker]]

[[image: Mrs. Baker]]

[[image: The most intensified anti-aircraft installations in Europe were not enough to stop Lieut. Col. Addison Baker and his companions as they drove their planes into the very heart of huge refineries in the Ploesti oil fields of Rumania. In the dramatic drawing above is Beacon Journal Artist Paul Kovacsik's conception of Colonel Baker's smoking plane, its nose shot off, plunged into a huge tank after being riddled by anti-aircraft fire. The colonel and his wife, Mrs. Frances Baker, are shown in the inset.]]