The HORRORS of the B-25 Gunship in WW2

[00:00:00]The 3rd of March, 1943, off the coast of New Guinea, a column of Japanese troop ships is steaming toward the port of Lae, packed with nearly 7,000 soldiers. Then the bombers come in low, not high, the way bombers are supposed to. Low enough to count the rivets on the deck plates. Each one carries up to 14 heavy machine guns bolted into its nose and its flanks.

[00:00:26]Every barrel pointed forward, every barrel firing at once. A wall of lead thick enough to strip a ship's deck down to bare metal in a single pass. One American pilot watching from above said the men on the decks look like splinters thrown into a whirlwind. By the time it was over, the convoy was gone. Eight troop ships, four destroyers, nearly 2,900 men, and the aircraft that did it was never built for this. It was an ordinary medium bomber that one man, working out of a junkyard at the edge of the world, had turned into the most terrifying gun platform in the Pacific.

[00:01:08]This is the story of the B-25 gunship.

[00:01:12]To understand why that convoy never stood a chance, you have to go back a year to a time when American bombers could barely hit a ship at all. Through 1942, the standard way to attack a ship was to fly high and drop bombs on it. It almost never worked. From 3,000 ft or more, a bomb takes long seconds to fall, and a ship's captain can stand on the bridge and watch it come. He turns the wheel, the ship slides aside, and the bomb lands in his wake in a harmless tower of spray. The numbers were brutal.

[00:01:46]In early January 1943, Allied aircraft hit a Japanese convoy bound for Lae, 10 ships in all. They sank exactly one. The rest sailed on, landed their troops, and unloaded their cargo.

[00:02:02]Against a target that could maneuver, altitude was a curse, not an advantage.

[00:02:08]Over the jungle, it was even worse.

[00:02:11]Japanese troops and aircraft hid beneath triple canopy rainforest, spread out and camouflaged.

[00:02:18]You could saturate an entire grid square with bombs and kill nothing but trees.

[00:02:24]The Fifth Air Force had planes, crews, and no shortage of courage. What it did not have was a reliable way to actually kill the enemy.

[00:02:35]The man who solved that problem did not look like a savior. He looked like a mechanic, because that is what he was.

[00:02:43]Paul Irvin Gunn went by Pappy, a name he earned by being old enough to father most of the pilots around him. He had enlisted in the Navy back in 1918 as [music] an aviation mechanic, taught himself to fly as an enlisted man, and retired a chief petty officer to run a small airline in the Philippines. Then the Japanese came. When the war reached Manila, his wife and four children were trapped in the city. They were interned in the Santa Tomas camp, and for the next 3 years, Pappy Gunn did not know whether they were alive or dead. He flew supply runs into besieged Bataan through enemy airspace in unarmed transports.

[00:03:28]He earned a Silver Star and a Flying Cross.

[00:03:32]And underneath it all, he carried a cold, patient fury that he poured into machines.

[00:03:39]General George Kenney, who commanded Allied air power in the Southwest Pacific, took one look at Gunn and understood exactly what he had.

[00:03:49]Kenney called him his secret weapon.

[00:03:52]Around the airfields, the saying was simpler, "Pappy can fix it." What Gun fixed was the bomber itself.

[00:04:00]The B-25 Mitchell rolled out of the factory as a level bomber. Its nose was a greenhouse of glass where a bombardier lay on his belly and aimed his bombs at the ground far below. Gun looked at that glass nose and saw nothing but wasted space. So, he tore it out. In its place, he bolted nose stuffed with.50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns fixed rigidly forward aimed not by a bombardier, but by the pilot pointing the entire airplane at the target. He worked alongside a North American Aviation field man named Jack Fox scavenging guns from wrecked aircraft, sketching the mounts by hand, and shipping the drawings back to the factory in California.

[00:04:49]The first versions fired eight guns forward.

[00:04:53]The final ones carried far more.

[00:04:56]Four in the nose, four in blister housings bolted to the fuselage cheeks just below the cockpit, and two more up in the dorsal turrets swung forward to fire in line with the rest. 14 heavy machine guns all aimed the same direction, all hammering at once.

[00:05:16]Think about what that actually means.

[00:05:19]Each Browning spat up to 800 a minute, every slug leaving the barrel at nearly 2,900 ft per second. 14 of them together threw an estimated 215 lb of metal every single second. That is the firepower of three or four fighter planes packed into the nose of one bomber. A single squadron of these aircraft carried more.50 caliber guns than four infantry regiments. A burst of only 3 to 5 seconds put hundreds of rounds into whatever sat in front of it, enough to chop through jungle and sweep a ship's deck clean before the men on board could even raise their rifles. And then gun and the engineers went further still. On some versions, they mounted a 75 mm cannon from the same family of guns that armed the Sherman tank, slung low beneath the cockpit floor. A navigator hand loaded its 15-lb shells one at a time, getting off perhaps four rounds in a single firing pass. When it fired, the whole aircraft shuddered and seemed to break in midair. The cockpit flooded with smoke and cordite, and the recoil could knock the navigation compass off by as much as 15°.

[00:06:32]A field artillery piece flying.

[00:06:36]Up to this point, it was all theory and scavenge parts. The first time the gunships went to war, the theory turned into something close to slaughter. On the 16th of December, 1942, Captain Ed Larner led six of the modified Mitchells against the airfield at Salamaua. They came in low and fast below the tree line, and the Japanese never heard them until the guns opened up. Parachute [ __ ] fragmentation bombs tumbled across the runways while the.50 caliber machine guns swept the parking areas.

[00:07:10]Dozens of aircraft were wrecked on the ground in minutes. Salamaua was only the rehearsal.

[00:07:17]Then came the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, and the gunships stopped being a clever field experiment and became a legend.

[00:07:26]Japanese planners had war game the run to Lae and predicted losing four of their 10 ships, a 50-50 gamble, and since the last convoy had slipped through almost untouched, a gamble they were willing to take. They were moving the better part of an infantry division, close to 7,000 men in eight transports screened by eight destroyers. The allies knew they were coming. Code breakers had already read the plan, and the attack that the Fifth Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force put together was a piece of murderous choreography.

[00:08:04]High bombers to scatter the ships and break their formation. Australian Beauforts screaming in at wave top height, raking the decks with cannon fire, so the anti-aircraft crews died at their guns. And then, into the smoke, the gunships.

[00:08:22]Major Lana's 90th Bomb Squadron came in at masthead height, lower than the ships' own masts. They skipped 500-lb bombs across the surface and into the holes at the waterline, the way a flat stone skips across a pond. And all the way in, every forward gun was firing.

[00:08:40]One Mitchell, nicknamed Chatterbox, skipped a bomb straight into a destroyer's bridge. The ship lurched, collided with a supply vessel beside it, and the two went down together. Another pair caught a fleeing destroyer and raked it from bow to stern, straight down the middle. The troop ships were the worst of it. A co-pilot named Garrett Middlebrook watched a gunship work over a transport crowded with soldiers. At first, he said, what he saw looked like little sticks, splinters flying up off the deck. Then he understood. He was watching hundreds of men torn off the ship by the machine guns, flung into the air like sticks in a whirlwind, dropping into the sea. 12 gunships sank multiple ships in roughly the first 15 minutes. When the smoke cleared, all eight transports were on the bottom. So were four of the eight destroyers. Close to 2,900 Japanese were dead. Of the 7,000 men who had set out for Lae, by some accounts as few as 800 ever reached it with nothing but the uniforms they swam ashore in.

[00:09:46]The naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison described it as the most devastating attack of the entire war by aircraft against ships.

[00:09:57]What had changed was not the bombers and not the men flying them.

[00:10:01]What had changed was a steel nose full of guns bolted on by a mechanic who wanted his family back.

[00:10:08]If this is the kind of history you came here for, the real machines and the men who built them, take a second to subscribe.

[00:10:16]We break down the weapons that decided the Pacific one airframe at a time because the gunship was only getting started.

[00:10:25]By the spring of 1943, the gunship had proven itself over the water, but the squadrons that flew it were about to carry that firepower over land against airfields and harbors crawling with men.

[00:10:39]The 3rd Attack Group, the Grim Reapers, and another outfit known as the Air Apaches tore into the airfields at Wewak and the great fortress harbor at Rabaul.

[00:10:50]At Rabaul on the 2nd of November, nine squadrons of gunships went in under heavy fighter cover. The lead squadrons laid down white phosphorus to blind the anti-aircraft batteries and the rest came through low behind it strafing and scattering fragmentation bombs across the town and the ships at anchor. Far to the west in the skies over Burma and China, the cannon-armed Mitchells hunted barges and coastal craft along the rivers and the coast. The 75-mm gun was murder on small boats. One veteran flying the type in the Mediterranean described firing everything at once as an upside-down Niagara Falls of fire, the whole airplane shaking so hard he could barely believe what it was doing.

[00:11:39]But the Bismarck Sea has a darker chapter, one that most accounts leave out, and an honest telling has to face it.

[00:11:49]In the days after the convoy went down, thousands of Japanese survivors were left clinging to rafts, lifeboats, and floating wreckage across miles of open water. Allied aircraft and patrol boats went back out and strafed them in the sea.

[00:12:07]The reasoning at the time was cold and specific. Every soldier who reached the shore was a soldier who would have to be fought all over again in the jungles of New Guinea, and it came after an atrocity of its own. When an American bomber broke apart over the battle, Japanese fighters had gunned down its crew in their parachutes as they drifted helplessly down in full view of the other Allied airmen.

[00:12:33]None of that makes the water any less terrible. Men who were already beaten, already drowning, were killed with no chance to surrender. It is part of what this weapon did, and part of what the war in the Pacific had become, and it deserves to be looked at squarely rather than tidied away.

[00:12:54]The gunship did not invent that kind of fighting. It only made it efficient.

[00:13:00]For all its terror, the gunship was not perfect, and the men who flew it knew exactly where it fell short.

[00:13:08]The 75-mm cannon turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. Loading 15-lb shells by hand in a bucking aircraft was painfully slow.

[00:13:21]Holding the long, flat, steady run needed to aim the thing left the bomber hanging in front of every gun the enemy had. Crews decided they would rather carry two more machine guns than the cannon, and by early 1944, mechanics in the field were ripping the big guns back out. The weapon that looked most fearsome on paper was the first thing the veterans threw away, and the work itself was lethal for the men who did it.

[00:13:50]Flying at treetop and masthead height left no margin for a mistake.

[00:13:55]A master ridgeline, a wave, or one well-aimed shell, and the crew was simply gone.

[00:14:02]The Air Apaches alone lost 177 aircraft and 712 men over the course of the war in a theater where a captured airman could expect to be executed.

[00:14:16]Pappy Gunn paid as well. Late in 1944, phosphorus fragments from a Japanese air raid tore into him on Leyte and knocked him out of the war for good. He was reunited with his wife and children only when the camps were liberated in 1945.

[00:14:35]He never received the nation's highest decoration, and he never asked for one.

[00:14:40]He died in 1957 still flying when his small plane went down in a Philippine storm.

[00:14:48]But the idea he proved did not die with him. The low-level gunship led straight to the attack aircraft that followed it, and that line runs all the way to the modern gunships that still circle battlefields today. A cannon in the fuselage raining fire down from above.

[00:15:06]It all began with a mechanic, a hacksaw, and a glass nose he refused to leave alone. One of those wartime aircraft still flies. A single B-25 with the 75-mm cannon still in its nose, the last of its kind anywhere in the air, a living reminder of what 14 guns and one stubborn man did to the Pacific.

[00:15:31]Go back one last time to that convoy off New Guinea.

[00:15:37]The captain of one of the transports was reportedly telling the troops crowded on his deck not to worry that there would be no air raid that morning. At almost the exact moment the gunships came out of the sun.

[00:15:52]Within minutes the deck he was standing on had been swept clean. That was the real horror of the B-25 gunship, not simply that it could kill.

[00:16:03]Every weapon kills. It was that it took a clumsy, missing, almost harmless bomber and turned it into something that could erase a deck full of men in the space of a single breath. And that the man who built it did it with his own two hands an ocean away from the family he was fighting to get back.