Side View Of B25 Mitchell Medium Bomber Propeller Aircraft

Title

Side View Of B25 Mitchell Medium Bomber Propeller Aircraft

Artist

Phillip Espinasse

Medium

Photograph - Photograph

Description

Image# 20200712_D75_8273_1_B25BMitchell

Side view of the B25 medium bomber , as seen from inside Hangar 37 at the Pacific Aviation Museum on Ford Island, within Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (Oahu).

Better Hit the Deck when you hear “Billy’s Bomber” !

Manufactured by North American Aviation and named in honor of General Billy Mitchell, a pioneer of U.S. military aviation, the B-25 Mitchell was an American twin-engined medium bomber. It was used by many Allied air forces, in every theater of World War II, as well as many other air forces after the war ended, and saw service across four decades.

This aircraft was an American workhorse and a legend! "The B-25 Mitchell design was far from perfect, but highly regarded by flight crews as durable and reliable, forgiving to pilots even with one engine out and full of bullet holes. It was not out of the ordinary for B-25 to have logged enormous amounts of repaired damage throughout their flight lifetimes." By the end of its production, nearly 10,000 B-25s in numerous models had been built.

Take a seat, and I’ll tell you a little story about this aircraft’s key role shortly after Pearl Harbor….

It was made famous by what is known today as the Doolittle Raid (or Tokyo Raid) of April 1942 during WWII. Shortly after the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and in a Dec. 21, 1941 White House meeting, President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally conveyed to his Joint Chiefs of Staff that “Japan should be bombed as soon as possible to boost public morale after Pearl Harbor”… and so planning and preparations began immediately!

As part of the retaliation for the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a fleet of 16 B-25B Mitchell medium bombers launched on April 18, 1842, without fighter escort from the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) deep in the Western Pacific Ocean, each with a crew of five men.
Commanded and planned by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, this audacious raid’s mission was to bomb the Japanese capital Tokyo and other places on the island of Honshu.

Running extremely low on fuel after bomb drop, all the crews realized they wouldn’t be able to reach their intended bases in China, leaving them with the option of either bailing out over eastern China or crash-landing along the Chinese coast (most crews ended up bailing out over china, two crews went missing, and one flew to Russia where they were interned for a while before escaping). Doolittle and his crew had to ditch their aircraft and parachute into China, after which they received assistance from Chinese soldiers and civilians, before being repatriated home.

While the raid itself caused negligible material damage to Japan, it had a profound and positive psychological effect on the United States, as it strongly boosted American morale after the surprise 1941 Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. It was the first air operation to strike the Japanese archipelago and demonstrated that the Japanese mainland was vulnerable to American air attack.

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August 12th, 2020

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