This photograph was taken at Tacloban Airfield on October 28, 1944. There were two crews that flew this airplane from the island of Biak, just off New Guinea, to Leyte's Tacloban Airfield, shortly after the invasion of the Philippines. The first crew consisted of Captain Jones and his crew, and this photo is a photo of my crew. Our job was to return the plane back to Biak.
The crew members in this photograph, going from left to right: James Pitzner, he was a tail gunner. Conrad Greenquist — he was a crew chief, and he had flown many missions. The navigator, Belvin H. Robin, a good navigator. The co-pilot, Jay Moore, who's still alive and lives in North Carolina. Then there's me, Roman Ohnemus, pilot. And next to me is Robert Casty, radio operator, one of the fellows who had flown many, many missions — over 100 by this time.
"I heard the sound of machine guns firing, and I figured the field was being strafed... It so happened that it was a P-38 that had been out on a mission and had been shot up, and as he was coming in to land, his machine guns went off inadvertently."
The field at Tacloban had just been under construction — only half completed when they landed. While refueling, with the crew warned that Japanese planes would strafe the airfield every afternoon, Roman climbed into the cockpit to have his picture taken when he heard gunfire — a false alarm from a damaged P-38 landing nearby, but tense all the same.
On takeoff, with a newsreel photographer waiting to film them buzzing the field, the plane struggled through soft sand at the end of the runway and nearly didn't get airborne. They cleared the water just above the surface, climbed out, circled back for the newsreel pass — and flew straight into a typhoon on the way home, three hours of blind flying that Roman didn't know was a typhoon until years later. They landed safely at Owi Island, where Roman was unexpectedly invited to dinner by Brigadier General Jarred V. Crabb, commander of V Bomber Command — arriving disheveled after 24 hours awake and a flight through a storm.
[This is a condensed excerpt for the sketch — the full page would carry the complete cleaned transcript, as already sent to Bernard for review.]
← Back to Roman Ohnemus