At 9:58 on the morning of March 3rd, 1943, Major Paul Gun sat in the cockpit of a B-25 bomber named Margaret, watching the horizon of the Bismar Sea tilt violently to the left. He was flying at 200 mph, but he wasn't flying high. He was 50 ft off the water, low enough to see the white caps, low enough to taste the salt spray on the windshield.
Ahead of him, through the haze, sat a Japanese destroyer. It was a 2,000 ton steel predator loaded with anti-aircraft guns designed specifically to kill aircraft like his. The manual said this was suicide.
The manual said a medium bomber should be at 8,000 ft, dropping ordinance from a stable, level flight path. The manual said that approaching a warship head-on at mast height was a mathematical guarantee of death. Paul Gun didn't care about the manual.
He cared about the trigger switch under his thumb. He wasn't looking through a bomb site. He was looking through a simple iron ring mounted on the cowl.
He waited. The destroyer grew larger in the glass. He could see the Japanese sailors scrambling on the deck.
He could see the barrels of their 25mm autoc cannons traversing, locking onto his nose. The distance closed 1,000 yd, 800 yd. The engineers back in California had told him this wouldn't work.
They had told him that if he pulled the trigger now, the recoil from the weapon system he had bolted into the nose would shatter the glass, twist the aluminum frame, and possibly stall the engines. They had called his invention a mechanic's fever dream. They had laughed at the springs he scavenged from a junkyard to absorb the shock.
Gun tightened his grip on the yolk. He wasn't a test pilot, and he wasn't an engineer. He was a 43-year-old father whose wife and four children were starving in a Japanese prison camp in Manila.
He squeezed the trigger. The nose of the B-25 didn't just fire, it exploded. 850 caliber machine guns erupted simultaneously.
That is 120 rounds leaving the aircraft every single second. The recoil force hit the airframe like a car crash. The bomber shuddered, the rivets screamed, and the cockpit filled with the smell of cordite, but the glass didn't break and the springs held.
Down on the water, the Japanese destroyer didn't vanish in a puff of smoke. It began to disintegrate under the impact of a chainsaw made of lead. To understand why a 43-year-old major was flying a bomber like a fighter plane, you have to look at the scoreboard.
In late 1942, the United States Army Air Force was losing. They were losing simply because they were trying to fight a war with a math problem that didn't add up. The doctrine was built around the B7 flying fortress and the Nordon bomb site.
The generals in Washington believed that a B7 flying at 20,000 ft could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel. That was the phrase they used to sell the war to the public. Pickle barrel accuracy.
It sounded great in a newsreel. It was a disaster in reality. In the Pacific, the targets weren't factories or train stations that sat still.
The targets were ships. Japanese destroyers and troop transports moving at 30 knots zigzagging across the ocean. When a B7 dropped a bomb from 20,000 ft, it took that bomb nearly 40 seconds to hit [music] the water.
In those 40 seconds, a Japanese captain could turn his ship, smoke a cigarette, and watch the bomb splash harmlessly into the sea half a mile away. The statistics were humiliating. In the first year of the war, high altitude bombers had a hit rate against moving ships of less than 1%.
They were burning millions of gallons of aviation fuel to kill fish. Meanwhile, the Japanese were running the Tokyo Express. This was a conveyor belt of fast convoys moving thousands of troops into New Guinea.
They were reinforcing their garrisons at Lee in Salamo, building a fortress wall north of Australia. If they landed enough men, they would own the airirst strips. If they own the airirst strips, they could bomb Australia into submission.
The Allied commander in the Southwest Pacific, General George Kenny, looked at the reports and realized the truth. His heavy bombers were useless against shipping. He didn't need a scalpel that worked from 5 m up.
He needed a sledgehammer that worked at point blank range. Kenny had a problem, though. He didn't have a dedicated attack aircraft.
He had the B-25 Mitchell. The Mitchell was a good plane, a medium bomber, fast and rugged, but it was designed for the wrong war. It had a glass nose where a bomber deer sat on a little stool looking through a delicately calibrated optical sight.
It carried a few light machine guns for defense, mostly pointing backward to scare off fighters. It was a defensive weapon platform designed to run away after dropping its payload. Kenny needed a plane that ran toward the fight.
He needed a commerce destroyer. Enter Paul Irvin Gun. The men called him Papy because at 43 he was ancient by aviation standards.
Most pilots in the Pacific were 21-year-old kids who had learned to fly in Iowa cornfields 6 months earlier. Gun had been flying since the 1920s. He had been a naval aviator, then a civilian airline pilot in the Philippines.
He knew the jungle, he knew the islands, and he knew machines. But Papy Gun wasn't motivated by patriotism or duty. He was motivated by a cold, hard rage that terrified the younger officers.
When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in 1941, [music] Gun had escaped in a damaged plane. His wife Polly and their four children had not. They were captured in Manila and thrown into the Santo Tomas internment camp.
Gun knew exactly what happened in those camps. He knew about the starvation, the disease, and the brutality. Every day the war dragged on was another day his children might die.
He didn't have time for doctrine. He didn't have time for test flights or committee meetings. He walked into General Kenny's office in Brisbane, Australia, and proposed something insane.
He wanted to take the B-25, strip out the bombardier, strip out the bomb site, and turn the glass nose into a gun battery. He wanted to pack four fixed 50 caliber machine guns into the nose, plus two more in pods on the sides, plus lock the top turret forward. He wanted to turn a medium bomber into a flying shotgun with more forward firepower than a tank.
General Kenny was desperate enough to say yes. He gave gun a hanger in Brisbane and told him to make it happen. But when the engineers from North American Aviation, the company that built the B-25, heard about the plan, they didn't just say no.
They laughed. They sent me explaining the basic laws of physics to the confused major. The nose of a B-25 was a greenhouse.
It was a lightweight frame of aluminum strips holding plexiglass panels. It was designed to support the weight of one man and a 15lb bomb site. The engineers explained the math of the 50 caliber Browning M2 machine gun.
This wasn't a rifle. It was a piece of heavy industrial machinery. Each gun weighed 64 lb.
It fired a bullet the size of a finger at 2,900 ft per second. The recoil energy generated by one gun was immense. Gun wanted to put four of them in the nose.
The calculations were clear. If you fired 450s simultaneously from that mounting point, the recoil force would shear the rivets. [music] The nose section would literally snap off the fuselage.
Even if the frame held, the vibration would shatter the glass instantly, blinding the pilot. And even if the glass held, the weight of the guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition would shift the center of gravity so far forward that the plane would be unflyable. It would nose dive into the runway the moment the wheels left the ground.
[music] They called it the suicide box. They told Kenny that Gun was going to kill his pilots before they ever saw the Japanese. Gun read the memos.
Then he threw them in the trash. He wasn't building a plane to pass a safety inspection. He was building a plane to sink the ships that were supplying the prison guards in Manila.
He went to the scrap piles at the Royal Australian Air Force Base. He didn't look for aviation grade aluminum. He looked for steel.
He found old shock absorbers, heavy springs, and felt pads used for industrial machinery. Gun's theory was simple. The engineers were assuming a rigid mount.
If you bolted the guns directly to the frame, yes, the frame would snap, but Gun wasn't going to bolt them. He was going to float them. He designed a spider mount a bizarre contraption of steel tubes and plates that suspended the four heavy guns in the center of the nose.
[music] The guns would sit on a cradle that could slide backward. Behind the cradle, he installed his scavenge springs and shock absorbers. The idea was that when the guns fired, the entire battery would recoil into the springs, which would eat the energy before it hit the delicate aluminum frame.
It was garage engineering. It looked ugly. It added hundreds of pounds of [music] dead weight to the nose.
The young mechanics in the hanger looked at the contraption and shook their heads. They called [music] it Papy's recoil toy. They whispered that the old man had finally snapped.
You couldn't just eyeball aerodynamics. You couldn't fix a center of gravity problem with a welding torch and a hunch, but gun kept working. He cut holes in the plexiglass for the barrels.
He ran ammunition shoots through the navigator's compartment, turning the floor into a river of brass casings. He bolted blister packs onto the fuselage skin, adding two more guns just below the cockpit window. By the time he was done, the B-25 Strafer looked like a Frankenstein monster.
It had guns sticking out of every surface. It was noseheavy, ugly, [music] and strictly unauthorized. The official manual for the B-25 Mitchell listed the maximum armament as sufficient for defense.
Papy Gun had just bolted on enough firepower to cut a building in half. Now he just had to prove it could fly without shaking itself to pieces. The morning of the first test flight, the airfield in Brisbane was quiet.
It was the kind of silence you get before an execution. The flight line mechanics stood back, arms crossed, watching the strange, noseheavy beast taxi to the end of the runway. The engineers from North American Aviation had already filed their reports.
They had washed their hands of the situation. They claimed the center of gravity was now so far forward that the nose wheel would collapse on impact or the plane would simply refuse to rotate off the ground. They warned that if Major Gun fired those guns in midair, the vibration would shake the instrument panel loose, leaving the pilot flying blind in a cloud of his own smoke.
To them, this wasn't an innovation. It was a million dollars of government property being driven into a grave by a madman. Papy Gun sat alone in the cockpit.
No co-pilot, no crew. He wasn't going to risk anyone else's life on a theory. He pushed the throttles forward.
The right cyclone engines roared. 3,400 horsepower pulling against the brakes. The plane shook.
It felt heavy, sluggish, like a truck loaded with cement. He released the brakes. The B-25 lumbered down the tarmac.
It didn't want to fly. The nose felt glued to the ground, weighed down by the steel guns, the ammunition, and the heavy iron mounts. The end of the runway rushed toward him.
The engineers watched, expecting the tires to blow or the plane to run into the dirt. At the last possible second, gun hauled back on the yolk. The nose groaned upward.
The wheels cleared the dirt by inches. The strafer was airborne. He climbed to 2,000 ft and headed for the coast.
This was the moment of truth. Flying the heavy beast was one thing. Firing it was another.
Gun leveled out over the ocean. He armed the system. His thumb hovered over the solenoid switch on the control wheel.
He wasn't just firing guns. He was triggering a controlled explosion inside the airframe. He squeezed the button.
The response was immediate and terrifying. The plane literally slowed down in midair. The recoil force of 850 caliber machine guns firing simultaneously effectively acted as a break, knocking knots off his airspeed.
Inside the cockpit, the noise was deafening. A continuous jackhammer roar that drowned out the engines. The cockpit filled with the acurid stench of burning gunpowder.
The floor became a vibrating plate, but the nose stayed attached. The glass didn't shatter. Gun's spider mount, that ugly collection of scrap metal springs and hydraulic shocks, was working perfectly.
It was absorbing the violent kick of the guns, letting the weapons slide back and forth just fractions of an inch, eating the energy before it could rip the rivets out of the aluminum skin. Gun watched the tracers arc down into the water. They didn't spray like water from a loose hose.
They converged. At 1,000 yd, the streams of lead met in a tight, concentrated cone of destruction. He wasn't spraying an area.
He was drilling a hole. Gun landed the plane and taxied back to the hanger. The mechanics who had laughed at his recoil toy walked up to the aircraft.
They saw the soot stains on the nose. They smelled the cordite, but they didn't see any stress fractures. They didn't see popped rivets.
The crazy old man had done it. He had built a gunship that defied the manufacturer's physics. But Gun knew that building the gun was only half the problem.
A gun is useless if you don't have a way to deliver the kill shot. The 50 calibers could shred the deck of a ship, kill the crew, and start fires, but they couldn't sink a 6,000 ton transport. For that, you needed bombs.
and dropping bombs from 50 ft was a great way to blow yourself out of the sky. This was the second half of Gun's impossible equation. He had to teach a generation of pilots trained to fly straight and level at [music] 8,000 ft to fly like maniacs.
He called it skip bombing. The concept was ancient. It was exactly like skipping a flat stone across a pond.
If you threw the stone at a steep angle, it splashed and sank. If you threw it low and hard, parallel to the water, it skipped. Gun wanted to do the same thing with a 500 pound bomb.
The physics were simple, but the execution was terrifying. To make a bomb skip, the aircraft had to be flying at 200 mph, perfectly level, at an altitude of no more than 50 ft. If the pilot dropped the bomb too high, it would dive into the water and miss the ship.
If he dropped it too low, the splash from the bomb hitting the water could catch the tail of the plane and crash it. And then there was the explosion. A 500-lb bomb has a lethal blast radius that reaches hundreds of feet into the air.
If you drop it from 50 ft, the blast will rip the wings off your own plane before you can fly away. The solution was a timing fuse. Gun and the armorers set the fuses to a 4 to 5second delay.
The bomb would hit the water, skip across the surface like a stone, slam into the side of the Japanese ship, sink below the water line, and then detonate. Those 5 seconds gave the pilot exactly enough time to pull up, throttle the engines to emergency power, and clear the blast zone. The training was brutal.
Gun found an old shipwreck, the SS Pruth, sitting on a reef off the coast of Port Morsby. It became the most bombed piece of scrap metal in the Pacific. The pilots hated it at first.
It felt unnatural. Every instinct they had learned in flight school screamed at them to pull up. The ocean rushed by so fast it blurred in their peripheral vision.
They had to fight the urge to stare at the water. They had to focus entirely on the target. But Gun was relentless.
He flew with them. He sat in the co-pilot seat, shouting over the engine roar, forcing them down. Lower.
Get lower. [music] If you aren't leaving awake with your propellers, you're too damn high. This was where the Strafer concept finally made sense.
The pilots realized why they needed the guns. In a standard bombing run, the plane is a sitting duck for the ship's anti-aircraft fire. The ship's gunners have a clear shot at the incoming bomber, but with guns modification, the bomber shoots back.
As the pilot begins his run two miles out, he opens fire with the nose guns. He sprays the deck of the ship. He kills the anti-aircraft crews.
He smashes the bridge. He forces the captain to duck. By the time the bomber is close enough to release the bomb, the ship isn't fighting back.
It's being suppressed by a wall of lead. The B-25 wasn't just a bomber anymore. It was a suppression weapon that delivered a knockout punch.
General Kenny saw the results of the training and immediately ordered every available B-25 to be converted. There wasn't time to send them back to the factory in California. They had to do it in the jungle.
Gun organized a production line in the dirt at Port Morsby. It was a scene of organized chaos. Mechanics worked around the clock, stripping the glass noses off bombers, welding steel plates, cutting holes for barrels, and bolting on the heavy spider mounts.
They scavenged parts from wrecked planes. They stole metal from supply dumps. They worked through tropical rainstorms and malaria outbreaks.
They weren't building pretty airplanes. They were building street fighters. By late February 1943, Gun had a squadron of these hybrids ready.
They were ugly. The paint was mismatched. The noses were covered in soot, but the pilots had changed.
They walked differently. They weren't high altitude bus drivers anymore. They were hunters.
They knew they had a weapon that the Japanese didn't understand and couldn't counter. They had practiced on the wreck of the proof until they could put a bomb through a specific port hole at 200 mph. But shooting at a rusted wreck is different from shooting at a destroyer that shoots back.
The test came sooner than anyone expected. Intelligence reports began to trickle in from the coast watchers and codereakers. The Japanese were making their move.
A massive convoy had assembled at Rabao, the main Japanese fortress in the region. Eight destroyers, [music] eight large troop transports, thousands of soldiers. They were heading for the Huan Gulf.
This wasn't a resupply mission. It was an invasion force. If those troops landed at Lei, the Allied foothold in New Guinea would be crushed.
The Tokyo Express was coming, and this time it was bringing the entire army. The weather turned bad. A tropical cyclone moved into the Solomon Sea, creating a curtain of rain and low clouds.
The Japanese commanders were counting on this. They knew the Americans relied on high alitude bombing. They knew the B7s couldn't target ships through heavy cloud cover.
They believed the storm would cloak their movement, allowing them to slip through the damp silence and land their troops without losing a single man. They were right about the B7s. The flying fortresses were grounded or flying blind, unable to see the ocean floor.
The Japanese assumed they were safe, but they didn't know about the modifications happening in the mud at Port Morsby. They didn't know that the Americans had stopped looking down from the stratosphere. They didn't know that a new type of aircraft was sitting on the runway, engines idling, waiting for the signal.
These planes didn't need clear skies at 20,000 ft. They liked the clouds. They liked the low ceiling.
It gave them cover. It allowed them to sneak in at wavetop height, invisible until it was too late. On March 1st, a lone B-24 Liberator on patrol spotted the convoy through a break in the storm.
The radio message went back to headquarters. 14 ship convoy heading west. The location was plotted.
The speed was calculated. They were heading into the Bismar Sea. The trap was set.
General Kenny looked at the map. He looked at the reports from his weather officers. The storm was expected to break in 2 days.
He looked at Papy Gun. The time for welding and testing was over. The theory of the recoil spring and the skip bomb was about to be tested against 16 warships and 7,000 men who were ready to die for their emperor.
The order went out to the squadrons, clearing weather predicted. Maximum effort. Crews were briefed in humid tents.
They were shown the silhouettes of the Japanese destroyers. Asio Arashio, Takitsukazi, fast modern warships with 5-in guns and batteries of 25mm autoc cannons. The pilots looked at the blurry reconnaissance photos.
They looked at their own modified planes with their snub-nosed machine guns and their heavy bomb loads. There was no backup plan. If gun's crazy idea failed, the B-25s would be swatted out of the sky like flies and the Japanese army would pour into New Guinea.
On the morning of March 3rd, the clouds began to lift. The Bismar sea lay flat and gray. The Japanese convoy moved in a tight defensive formation.
The destroyers circling the transports, guns manned, eyes scanning the high altitude sky, waiting for the B7s. They were looking up. They should have been looking down.
At 10:00 a. m. the battle of the Bismar Sea stopped being a battle and started being an execution.
The Japanese captains on the destroyers were experienced men. They knew how American air power worked. They expected the high drone of heavy engines at 20,000 ft.
They expected to see tiny black dots releasing bombs that would take 40 seconds to fall. They had their helmsmen ready to turn the wheels hard to starboard or port, dodging the ordinance with ease. They were looking at the clouds, waiting for the B7s.
They were playing a game of chess against a grandmaster who was moving very slowly. They didn't realize that Papy Gun had flipped the chessboard over and pulled out a knife. The first sign that something was wrong wasn't a sound.
It was a shape. Out of the mist on the horizon, a swarm of aircraft appeared, but they weren't the high altitude specks the Japanese were trained to spot. These planes were hugging the deck, flying so low their propellers were kicking up spray from the ocean surface.
Leading the charge were Australian bow fighters, heavy twin engine fighters with four cannons in the nose. They came in first acting as the suppression team, raking the decks of the destroyers to force the gun crews to keep their heads down. Then came the B-25s, the strafers, the 90th squadron, the 38th group.
They came in line of breast, a wall of aluminum moving at 200 mph. Inside the lead bomber, the pilot lined up on the destroyer Aratio. The Japanese ship was a 2,000 ton beast, bristling with weaponry.
In a normal engagement, the destroyer wins this fight. Its 5-in main guns can vaporize a bomber 3 mi out. Its 25 mm autoc cannons can shred an airframe at 1 mile, but the Arashio couldn't fire its main guns at a target flying 10 ft off the water.
The barrels couldn't depress low enough, and the autoc cannon crews were staring down the barrels of something they had never seen before. The B-25 pilot flipped the solenoid switch. This was the moment the North American aviation engineers had warned about.
This was the moment the nose was supposed to snap off. The pilot squeezed the trigger. The recoil spring system, that ugly, jury-rigged contraption of junkyard springs and shock absorber slammed backward.
The entire airframe groaned under the stress. The cockpit vibrated so violently the instruments blurred. But the rivets held, the glass held, and from the nose of the plane, a solid stream of armor-piercing incendiary rounds erupted.
850 caliber machine guns firing at once creates a density of fire that is hard to comprehend. It's not just bullets, it's a physical force. The rounds didn't just hit the arachio.
They disassembled it. They punched through the steel plating of the bridge. They shredded the thin metal of the gun tubs.
They turned the deck into a slaughterhouse. The Japanese gunners didn't have time to aim. They were cut down where they stood.
The recoil system worked so well that the pilots could hold the trigger down for 3, four, 5 seconds. They could walk the fire from the bow of the ship to the stern, hosing it down like they were cleaning a driveway, but the machine guns were just the kin opener. The bomb was the knife.
The pilot held the dive until the destroyer filled the entire windscreen. At 300 yd, he was staring into the eyes of the terrified men on the bridge. He released the bomb.
A 500lb cylinder of high explosive dropped from the bay. It didn't fall, it flew. It hit the water at a shallow angle, skipping off the surface like a flat stone thrown by a giant.
It bounced once, twice, three times. It slammed into the side of the Aratio right at the waterline. The delay fuse ticked.
1 second, 2 seconds. The B-25 roared directly over the ship's mast. The pilot pulling back on the stick.
The engines screaming. 3 seconds. 4 seconds.
The bomb detonated. The explosion didn't go up. It went in.
It blew a hole the size of a garage door in the side of the destroyer. The shock wave lifted the 2,000 ton ship out of the water. The boiler rooms flooded instantly.
The Arashio broke its back. This scene was repeating itself across the entire convoy. The Japanese formation shattered.
The troop transports fat, slow ships carrying thousands of soldiers were defenseless. They had relied on the destroyers for protection, but the destroyers were burning. [music] Papy Guns pilots turned toward the transports like wolves on a flock of sheep.
They lined up for their runs. They didn't even need the bombs for the softer targets. The 50 calibers were enough.
The heavy rounds tore through the unarmored hulls of the transport ships. They ignited the fuel drums stored on the decks. They detonated the ammunition crates stacked in the holds.
One B-25 pilot, Major Ed Larnner, took his plane so low that he had to pull up to avoid hitting the mast of a transport. As he flew over, his tail gunner strafed the deck from the rear. The ship was the Kenny Omaru.
It was carrying aviation fuel. When the skip bombs hit it, the ship didn't just sink, it vaporized. A fireball rose 1,000 ft into the air.
The B-25 flying behind Larner had to fly through the fireball. The paint on its wings blistered from the heat. The pilot came out the other side, sustained and shaking, but still flying.
The Commerce destroyer concept was working with terrifying efficiency. The skip bombing technique was proving to be lethally accurate. At high altitude, a 10% hit rate was considered excellent.
At mast height, the B-25s were achieving a hit rate of nearly 50%. They weren't missing. They were putting bombs into the engine rooms of moving ships.
The Japanese captains tried to maneuver, tried to zigzag, but you can't outrun an airplane flying at 200 knots. The B-25s would simply circle, wait for the ship to commit to a turn, and then strike from the broadside. By noon, the Bismar Sea was a graveyard.
The destroyer Takitsukazi was dead in the water, sinking. The Asashio was burning from stem to stern. All eight transports were hit.
Most were sinking or already gone. The water was covered in a thick layer of oil, debris, [music] and thousands of struggling survivors. The B-25s ran out of bombs, but they didn't go home.
They came back for strafing runs. They used the recoil spring guns to finish off the crippled ships. They punched holes in the lifeboats.
They strafed the debris fields. It was brutal industrial killing. It was war without mercy.
But the pilots remembered the reports from Batan. They remembered the stories of American prisoners being executed. They remembered Papy Guns family in Manila.
They kept shooting until the barrels of their guns glowed red-hot and the ammunition shoots were empty. Back at the base, the ground crews waited. They heard the drone of engines returning.
They counted the planes. They were all coming back. Some had holes in the wings.
Some had pieces of Japanese ship rigging stuck in their landing gear. One B25 landed with a crushed nose wheel, [music] not from a bad landing, but because it had clipped the smoke stack of a sinking transport. The pilots climbed out of the cockpits.
They were soaked in sweat, their hands shaking from the adrenaline and the vibration. They walked into the debriefing hut and threw their flight helmets on the table. General Kenny looked at the reports.
He couldn't believe the numbers. In one morning, papy guns, suicide boxes, had done more damage to the Japanese Navy than the entire fifth air force had done in the previous 6 months. The high altitude B7s, which had also participated in the raid, claimed a few hits, but the reconnaissance photos told the real story.
The ships had holes in their sides right at the waterline. That was the signature of the skip bomb. The decks were chewed up, the bridges destroyed.
That was the signature of the strafer nose. The impossible physics of the recoil system had held up. The springs had absorbed the energy of hundreds of thousands of rounds.
The mounts hadn't cracked. The glass hadn't shattered. The engineers who had mocked the idea, who had written the memos about center of gravity and stress fractures, were silent.
The math had said it couldn't be done. The wreckage burning in the Bismar Sea said otherwise. That evening, the Tokyo Express ceased to exist.
The Japanese high command in Raalo was in shock. They had lost an entire division of troops. They had lost vital destroyers.
They had lost the ability to reinforce New Guinea by sea. They sent a message to Tokyo. [music] The enemy has developed a new type of bombing.
It is extremely low and extremely accurate. They didn't know it was the work of a 43-year-old major with a welder and a grudge. They just knew that the Bismar Sea was now closed to shipping.
The victory was absolute. Eight transports sunk, four destroyers sunk, over 3,000 Japanese troops killed. The Americans lost 13 men.
It was one of the most lopsided victories in the history of naval warfare. And it was won by a plane that wasn't supposed to exist using a tactic that the manual said was suicide. fired through a mounting system made of scrap metal.
Papy gun walked out to the flight line that night. He touched the nose of his B-25. The metal was cool now.
The soot was thick on the aluminum. He checked the springs on the mount. They were compressed, worn, but unbroken.
He lit a cigarette and looked north toward the Philippines. He had killed a lot of men that day. He had sunk a lot of ships, but he knew it wasn't enough.
His family was still in Stomas. The war wasn't over. He would have to build more planes.
He would have to find more guns. He would have to kill more destroyers. And God help anyone who told him it was impossible.
The silence that followed the battle of the Bismar Sea was louder than the gunfire. In the officers clubs in Brisbane and the boardrooms of North American Aviation in California, the laughter stopped. The recoil spring wasn't a joke anymore.
It was the new doctrine. The engineers who had written lengthy memos explaining why the B-25 would disintegrate if you put machine guns in the nose now had to explain why a mechanic in the jungle had outsmarted their entire design department. They didn't send an apology.
They sent a team of draftsmen with measuring tape. They arrived at guns open air workshop in Port Morsby sweating in their clean uniforms holding clipboards. They climbed over the soot stained battlecard B25s.
They measured the thickness of the steel plates. They sketched the ugly welded spider mounts. They poked at the scavenged shock absorbers.
They realized that while the math said this shouldn't fly, the physics of combat said it was the most lethal medium bomber in the world. The factory reps did exactly what smart men do when they've been beaten. They stole the idea.
They packed up their drawings, flew back to the United States, and started building the B-25J when the new J models rolled off the assembly line in Kansas City. They didn't have a glass nose for a bombarder. They had a solid metal nose packed with 850 caliber machine guns installed at the factory using a refined version of Papy Gun suspension system.
They called it the Strafer model. The manual was rewritten. The suicide box became the standard configuration for the rest of the war.
Gun didn't get a patent. He didn't get a royalty check. He just got the satisfaction of watching thousands of factory-built clones of his impossible plane arrive in the Pacific to finish the job he started.
But Gun wasn't finished. The victory at the Bismar Sea didn't satisfy him. It just proved that his method worked.
His family was still in Stomas. The Japanese were still in the Philippines, so gun kept escalating. If 50 caliber machine guns were good, he decided a cannon would be better.
He took a 75 mm field artillery piece, a weapon designed to be towed by a truck, and fired from the ground, and decided to shove it into the nose of a B-25. The recoil of a 75mm cannon is like getting hit by a freight train. When he test fired it, the plane almost stopped in midair.
The rivets popped. The structure groaned, but he made it work. He created a flying tank destroyer that could sink a ship with a single shell from 2 mi away.
He flew these Frankensteines until his body started to fail him. In late 1944, during a mission over the Philippines, Gun's luck finally ran thin. He was shot down.
His plane crashed into the jungle. He survived, but he was badly burned by white phosphorus. He lost a finger.
His arm was mangled. The flight surgeons took one look at him and signed the papers to ground him permanently. They told him his war was over.
He was a 45-year-old man with a crippled hand and degree burns. He should have been on a hospital ship heading to San Francisco. Gun ignored the doctors the same way he ignored the engineers.
He wasn't leaving until he opened the gates of Santomas. He talked his way back onto flight status. He flew supplies.
He flew reconnaissance. He flew anything with wings. When General MacArthur finally returned to the Philippines, waiting ashore at Ley, Papy Gun was flying overhead.
He was watching the ground, counting the miles to Manila. On February 3rd, 1945, the nightmares ended. The first cavalry division smashed through the gates of the Santo Tomas internment camp.
They found 3,700 civilians who were barely alive. They were skeletons, starving, surviving on less than 700 calories a day. Among the walking ghosts were Poly Gun and her four children.
They had survived three years of hell. They had survived the hunger, the disease, and the brutality of the guards. When Papy Gun finally walked into that camp, he wasn't the legendary commerce destroyer.
He was just a husband and a father who had spent every waking second of the last 3 years trying to build a machine violent enough to save them. He found them alive. That was the only victory that mattered.
The ships at the bottom of the Bismar Sea, the medals on his chest, the history books, none of it meant anything compared to the moment he put his arms around his wife. The rage that had fueled him, the cold anger that had allowed him to turn a bomber into a slaughterhouse finally evaporated. After the war, the air force tried to keep him.
They offered him promotions, a desk at the Pentagon, a chance to teach the next generation of engineers. Gun turned them down. He had no interest in peace time bureaucracy.
He had no interest in wearing a uniform when there was no one left to fight. He stayed in the Philippines. He loved the islands.
He started a civilian airline, Philippine Air Aviation. He went back to doing what he did before the world caught fire, flying people and cargo over the jungle, fixing engines with bailing wire and landing on dirt strips that terrified younger pilots. But men like Papy Gun don't die in bed.
They don't fade away in a retirement home playing shuffleboard. They live by the machine and eventually the machine claims them. On January 16th, 1957, Gun was flying a Beachcraft Bonanza through a storm near Manila.
He was 57 years old. He had survived the Japanese Navy, the jungle, plane crashes, and phosphorus burns. He had survived the skeptics and the generals, but he couldn't survive the weather.
The plane went down. Papy gun died instantly. His legacy isn't sitting in a museum case.
It's flying over the battlefield today. Every time you see an A-10 Warthog, a plane that is essentially a giant gun with wings wrapped around it, you are looking at the great grandchild of Papy Guns B-25. Every time you see an AC-130 gunship circling a target, pouring fire from the side, you are seeing the evolution of the strafer concept.
Gun proved that in war, the person who adapts the fastest wins. He proved that the manual is just a suggestion and that an engineer with a welding torch and a reason to fight is more dangerous than a committee of experts. Most historians focus on the admirals and the generals.
They talk about nimmits in MacArthur. They talk about grand strategy and fleet movements. But the war in the Pacific wasn't won by arrows on a map.
It was won by guys like Papy Gunmen who looked at a problem, realized the official solution was going to get them killed, and built their own solution out of scrap metal. He took a defensive bomber and turned it into an offensive weapon that broke the back of the Japanese merchant marine. He did it while everyone told him he was crazy.
He did it while they laughed at his recoil spring. And he did it for the simplest reason of all. He just wanted to get his kids back.
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