Engineers Called This American Bomber "Impossible" — Until 12 Japanese Ships Sank

Every objection the engineers raised about this bomber was correct. It sank twelve Japanese ships anyway. Brisbane, November 1942. A former Navy mechanic cut the glass nose off a B-25 Mitchell, threw out the bombardier and the bombsight, and bolted in eight fifty-caliber machine guns stripped from wrecked fighters. Fired on the ground, the battery tore skin off the airplane's own fuselage and popped rivets out of the structure. Wright Field read the drawings and sent word to ground the aircraft. Twelve of them went out over the Bismarck Sea on 3 March 1943, against a Japanese convoy of sixteen ships carrying nearly seven thousand soldiers to New Guinea. The day before, heavy bombers had worked that same convoy from altitude and sunk one ship. The engineers were right: it was nose-heavy, it damaged itself, and it could not bomb from higher than fifty feet. This is the story of why none of that mattered that morning, and what the American crews paid to learn it. Subscribe for daily Pacific War stories ⚓️    / @pacificwarstoriess   Like if the Americans who fought the Pacific deserve to be remembered. Comment below — where are you watching from? #ww2 #wwii #pacificwar #militaryhistory #pacificwarstories