The 345th Bomb Group's B-25s were all equipped with a camera — mounted on the rear of the fuselage — that the pilot switched on over the target. It took a frame every second, giving the squadron a running record of exactly what damage each aircraft did. In the photos, a small dark shape in the frame is the B-25's own tail skid; the little white shapes drifting down are parafrags, small fragmentation bombs about the size of a hand grenade that exploded on contact with anything at all — a leaf, a tree, a building.
"I opened my bomb bay doors and was getting ready to strafe — and then something didn't feel quite right. As I flew over, I realized it was one of our own PT boats... I imagine those guys were pretty scared seeing us come at them with our bomb bay doors open."
Roman describes coming across a boat off the southern tip of Mindanao and preparing to attack it, assuming — as with any vessel in that area before the Philippines invasion — that it had to be Japanese. At the last moment he recognized it as one of their own PT boats, disabled and adrift. They broke off, waved, and radioed its position in.
The story that follows is darker. On only his second combat mission, Roman flew with Lieutenant Nolan, a veteran pilot — and found himself grabbing the controls mid-strafing-run, twice, when Nolan seemed unable to pull up out of the dive on his own. Nolan wasn't angry; he was relieved. Roman didn't recognize it at the time, but Nolan was suffering from combat fatigue. Soon after, a mid-air collision with a damaged wingman tore six feet off Nolan's wing; he and his co-pilot nursed the plane home and everyone got out alive — but Nolan was sent home for good shortly after.
[This is a condensed excerpt for the sketch — the full page would carry the complete cleaned transcript, as already sent to Bernard for review.]
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