Scraps of Honor: A WWII Pilot Re-Visits his past in the Revision of a B-25

By: Meredith Price
Photos: Reuven Levitt

When the left wingtip of First Lieutenant Daniel Rossman's North American B-25 bomber failed to clear a palm tree on January 15, 1945, he and his crew were forced to abandon the plane over treacherous territory. Stationed in New Guinea, Rossman had orders to fly low-level strikes against a Japanese complex in Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, but hitting the tree ripped off nearly eight feet of the wing and made it impossible to fly the airplane. As the crew bailed out of the airplane in the Moro Gulf on the west side of the island, they found themselves floating in the vast gray expanse of the South Pacific, surrounded by enemies. "The scariest thing for us at first was the other five planes in our formation flying over dropping things. We were more worried about being hit by supplies at first than being found by the Japanese," says Rossman. The crew managed to get together and inflate a raft. Knowing that without rescue, their fate lay in the hands of either the Japanese or the raging sea, their hopes were dim. "We spent the night in the raft tied together by our shoelaces so we wouldn't drift apart and holding on with everything we had against the violent white squalls," says Rossman. Luckily, the weather was bad. This meant the sea was rough, but it also meant that the Japanese had a lower chance of finding the crew. After a long night, the sun rose on calm seas. Rossman and his crew knew that if they didn't get to shore, their capture was imminent. Just as they were making their way towards land, they heard a B-25 flying a search mission in the distance. They ignited the first of their flares. It fizzled for a moment and then died. The second flare lit but did not fly high enough to be seen. As the bright light from the crew¹s third and final flare flamed across the sky, Rossman and his men were spotted. Just over 24 hours after their crash, they were rescued by the PBY Catalina. For Daniel Rossman, this was only one episode in a string of B-25 mishaps, but no matter how bad the circumstances, he and his crew always made it home alive. Now a resident of Roswell, Georgia Rossman was the eldest son of fiercely patriotic Jewish immigrants. His Mother claimed he was born to fly because at the age of two, he put clothes pins together to make airplanes and spun through the yard in flight simulations. By six years old, he had built his first model airplane and dreamed of flying like his hero, Jimmy Doolittle. But despite his aviation inclinations, his decision to join the war effort at age 19 in 1943 was not taken well by his parents. After the tragedies they had witnessed during their escape from the First World War, they struggled to understand why he was in a hurry to stick his hand into the frying pan. Although they loved the United States, they could not understand the need to join the war effort. "My parents wouldn't let me go at first. I explained to them that if I went into the air corps, it would be two years before I would see the war, whereas if I waited for the draft, I could wind up fighting on the ground in six weeks. That convinced them," says Rossman. He persuaded his parents just in time. A few days after he signed up for the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps, Rossman¹s draft notice arrived.

Today, Rossman is one of the frequent visitors to a B-25J restoration project in Woodstock, Georgia, just North of his home. His affection for the B-25 relates closely to the fact that he survived many close calls in the war while piloting that plane and he enjoys seeing the plane being reassembled, piece by piece. Although thousands of the airplanes were manufactured during the war, only eighteen have been restored, and this particular airplane has taken countless hours and over one million dollars to prepare for flight. It was purchased by Gerald Yaegan in 1993 after sitting in boxes for nearly forty years. A lover of war-time airplanes, Yaegan has financed the restoration project and hired Jere Rosser to ready it for flight by spring of 2005. Rosser, a restoration engineer and pilot, has spent the last six years rebuilding the abandoned, rusty B-25 airplane from the inside out in a cluttered hangar overlooking a small airfield. "Gerald did it right. He had everything stripped and replaced with brand new parts," says Rosser. When Rosser began, the fuselage and wings were separated and the bottom of the airplane was completely eroded. Every cable, bolt, propeller, door and window has been replaced, and the airplane looks exactly as it did when it came off the assembly line in 1944. Rossman, who heard about the restoration project through a friend, came to visit for the first time in February of 2003. "It was a nostalgic trip. I have very strong feelings for this airplane. It brought me through many hard times," he says. For Rossman, seeing this B-25 back in the air will evoke bittersweet memories. His flight experience with the B-25 even warranted attention from the burgeoning new state of Israel. In 1948, just before he married and a few years after his return from the war, the Israeli military contacted him. "I got a phone call and this man said he wanted to talk to me about how Israel was going to become an independent country, and when that happened there would be a war, and they needed help from people with combat experience," explains Rossman. "After the war, I could either go home, stay in the Israeli air force, or fly for the national airline they were going to start that would be called ElAl Israel Airlines. I said, ‘yeah, right. I didn’t believe they would ever have their own airline.'" The Israeli military had a B-25 somewhere in the world that they wanted Rossman to fly into the country, but the timing was bad and he refused the offer. "I was still shaky, no two ways about it, I had met my future wife Sylvia, and my folks were in bad shape health-wise," says Rossman. "But it is one of the big regrets of my life. What an adventure that would have been." According to Rossman, he went to war to fly airplanes and fight the Nazis. At the time, some people in the United States knew what was going on in Europe with Hitler but refused to get involved or do anything about it. Rossman was outraged by the Nazi campaign and eager to get involved in the struggle against them. "I had a cousin who escaped from Nazi Germany because he had a lot of brains and blonde hair and blue eyes," says Rossman. "He [Edwin Langberg] crossed over 700 miles of enemy territory and the Soviet-German front lines to fight in the Polish Air Force. He recently published a memoir of his experiences." In addition to ignoring "Europe's War" and despite Roosevelt's interventionist policy, America was totally unprepared for war. A heavy price was paid for the unqualified and untrained nation's sluggish arrival on the scene. The United States was so ill-equipped that when Rossman left for basic infantry training in Miami Beach, it took over 10 days for him to receive a uniform. In June of 1943, he was selected for pilot training. "I flew PT-19s, BT-13s and twin-engine AT-17s before graduating in March of 1944," says Rossman. With only 175 flying hours, 65 of which were in twin-engine trainers that weighed about 3,500 pounds empty, Rossman began flying North American B-25 bombers that weigh in excess of 30,000 pounds at take-off. "It was like learning to drive a Toyota and being given a tractor trailer," says Rossman. At the time, a young captain told Rossman not to worry about the transition, that the B-25 was an easy airplane to fly with no bad habits. "The young captain told us that in combat, the B-25 almost always brought her crews home. And that she did," he says.

Rossman, now 81 years old, was involved in five B-25 crashes and emergency landings during World War II. The first one, on June 6, 1944 (D-Day in Europe), was in South Carolina during a flight practicing single engine procedures. "The instructor pilot decided that we should also practice combat type low-level flying," explains Rossman. "Flying over Lake Greenwood, South Carolina, we got too low and the props touched the water. We had to ditch the airplane and it took 24 stitches to close the rip in my chin when the seat belt opened." Rossman was allowed to continue with his training after a reprimand and a fine. He signed an I.O.U. for the lost B-25 and kept flying. In August of 1944, Rossman and his crew received orders to fly to Biak, New Guinea via California and Hawaii to deliver the plane and crew to the 13th Air Force in the South Pacific. The trip to California was uneventful, but unprecedented bad weather in Sacramento delayed the flight to Hawaii for nearly six weeks. The crew was finally cleared for take-off one night at one a.m., but two hours into the trip, the weather again turned turbulent. Unable to contact any of the three surface weather ships, the crew never got the recall message given to the other aircraft in the flight. To make matters worse, two hours before sunrise, the navigator, Dick Shave, had no idea where they were. Approaching their 10-hour flight time, fuel began to run low. Rossman started using his commercial band radio to try and pick up a signal. "Eventually, I faintly heard what I recognized as the Coca-Cola theme song from Morton Downey's radio show, and realized I had picked up a commercial station, which would hopefully be Honolulu," says Rossman. The crew made a 45-degree right turn and headed for the signal. As Diamond Head, Hawaii came into sight, the B-25 requested a straight-in approach and landed with less than 50 gallons of useable fuel after 13 hours and five minutes of flight. They were the only plane to get through that day. Shortly after the crew made it to their destination of Biak, New Guinea, the Aussies welcomed them to jungle survival training in Nadzab. "The first thing the squadron briefer said to us was, 'welcome to the war. You're not going to like it. If you've come to this war expecting to win medals you've come to the wrong place, you should have gone to Europe.'" "That was our introduction to the place," says Rossman. And after flying only three missions, Rossman's crash in the Philippine Islands quickly turned those words into a reality. "I was convinced that my chances of making it through the war were not very good," Rossman remembers.

BY JULY of 1945, the pilots were being briefed about the upcoming invasion of Japan. They knew that air-to-air kamikazes, already encountered by the B-29s, were a certainty. The invasion of Japan would be a bloody battle. "No one at that time thought the war was anywhere close to being over," says Rossman. "The dropping of the A-bomb is the only reason why I'm alive and why the war ended when it did." By the end of the war, two months short of Rossman's 22nd birthday, he had been flying for nearly two years with over 700 combat hours. He had bailed out of one airplane, ditched two airplanes, crash-landed three airplanes, and survived two engine fires and one double-engine failure. After losing a total of six airplanes, Rossman returned to the US tired of flying and unable to sleep. He continued to fly in the reserves until his retirement in 1972, when he returned to his hobby of building model airplanes. As soon as he heard about the restoration for flight of a B-25 in Woodstock, Georgia, he knew he must see the plane for himself. He delights in watching the transformation of metal scraps into an airplane and enjoys probing Rosser about the engineering involved. Today, smartly dressed in a blue blazer with his lovely wife Sylvia by his side, Rossman has a faraway look in his eyes. As he stares up at the magnificent B-25 that is scheduled to fly again in the summer of 2005 for the first time in over fifty years, he is silent for a moment. "I came back from the war with tremendous respect for the maintenance people and the aviation mechanics," he says patting Rosser fondly on the arm. "By all rights, I should not be standing here today," he says quietly, glancing up again at the huge presence of the renovated B-25. "She always brought me home safely." For Rossman, being brought home safely happened more often than he could ever have imagined.