How Pappy Gunn Turned B-25 Bombers Into 14-Gun Monsters That Shredded Japanese Convoys

 

The morning sun had already turned the Queensland sky into a glare of molten silver, the kind of light that seemed to stick to skin and metal alike. At Charter Towers Airfield, the ground shimmered under the heat, the faint smell of oil, exhaust, and sweat mixing in the air. Mechanics in rolled-up sleeves worked around the clock, tools clanging against steel, engines coughing and roaring to life as another Douglas A-20 Havoc taxied across the uneven strip of tarmac. It was September 12th, 1942, and war had come to this stretch of Australia with a vengeance. The Japanese were advancing across the Pacific, supply convoys were slipping through Allied patrols unchallenged, and the men stationed here—American and Australian alike—knew that the balance of the Pacific war was tipping in the wrong direction.

Inside a makeshift hangar, thrown together from scavenged wood, sheets of corrugated tin, and the kind of desperate optimism that only men at war could muster, a 43-year-old man stood beside a half-disassembled bomber, his hands black with grease and his eyes bright with something fiercer than fatigue. His name was Paul Irvin Gunn. Everyone called him “Pappy.”

He didn’t look like the man who would change the course of aerial warfare in the Pacific. His uniform was rumpled, his hair streaked with gray, and his tools were scattered around the aircraft like pieces of a puzzle only he could solve. Yet behind those sharp eyes was a restless intelligence—half pilot, half engineer, all rebel. Pappy Gunn was no stranger to risk. Before the war, he had been a barnstormer, a mechanic, a stunt pilot, and an aircraft designer. But now, he was something else entirely—a man at war not just with the enemy, but with the limitations of his own side’s technology.

Six hours from now, one of his modified aircraft—a Douglas A-20 Havoc armed and altered in ways no manual had ever suggested—would take off for a test strike on a Japanese airfield at Buna, New Guinea. If it succeeded, it would prove that his radical redesigns could change the way the Allies fought in the Pacific. If it failed, it would end in fire, and the men who flew it would die.

But failure was not on Gunn’s mind. His thoughts were 1,700 miles away—in Manila—where his wife and four children were being held in a Japanese internment camp at Santo Tomas. Every rivet he turned, every wire he spliced, every weapon he bolted onto that airframe was a silent promise to them. The enemy had taken his family, and Pappy Gunn intended to take everything he could from them in return.

Just a week before, Gunn had watched a Japanese convoy slip past Allied patrols, unscathed and unstoppable, delivering men and supplies to the front lines. American bombers had tried to stop them, but the results were pitiful—bombs dropped from 12,000 feet scattering uselessly into the sea, explosions bright but meaningless. None of the ships were sunk. The anti-aircraft guns fired back, untouched. The convoy sailed on. Gunn had stood on the tarmac afterward, silent and furious, and decided he would never watch that happen again.

He had a vision: to take a standard medium bomber and turn it into something else entirely—a low-flying, heavily armed beast that could rip apart ships, strafe airfields, and crush enemy defenses before they even had time to fire. It wouldn’t rely on altitude or luck. It would rely on raw, overwhelming firepower.

The U.S. Army Air Forces didn’t have such a plane. But if the engineers back in Washington couldn’t build one fast enough, Pappy Gunn would do it himself.

This wasn’t a story about technology. It was about one man’s refusal to accept that “good enough” could win a war. It was about the kind of innovation that grows out of frustration, fear, and fury. Gunn didn’t have laboratories or blueprints—he had scrap metal, salvaged fighter parts, and a handful of men who believed in him. With them, he would take the North American B-25 Mitchell bomber—a reliable, middle-of-the-road aircraft—and transform it into a flying gun platform unlike anything the world had seen before.

The B-25 had never been designed for such a role. When it left the production lines at North American Aviation in 1941, it was meant to be a medium-altitude bomber, dependable but unremarkable. It carried a crew of six—a pilot, co-pilot, bombardier-navigator, radio operator, and two gunners. Its stats read like a balance sheet: twin Wright R-2600 engines, a 64-foot fuselage, 95-foot wingspan, maximum speed around 230 miles per hour, and a range of just over 1,300 miles.

Named after Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, the air power visionary who had once proved that aircraft could sink battleships, the B-25 was the workhorse of the Air Force. It could carry a solid bomb load and take a beating, but it wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t fast enough to outrun fighters, nor was it heavily armed enough to fight them off for long. The aircraft’s defensive setup—a tail gun, a dorsal turret, and a slow-operating ventral gun tray—was designed for formation flying, not low-level survival. The side-mounted waist guns were notorious for their blind spots. In short, the B-25 was a respectable bomber—but in the jungles and island chains of the Pacific, “respectable” was useless.

The war in New Guinea was a different kind of war. The terrain was dense jungle, mountains, and humidity that corroded everything. Altitude was a luxury no one could afford. Japanese supply convoys crept through narrow coastal passages at night, protected by fighter cover and anti-aircraft guns. Bombing from 10,000 feet was almost worthless; between the trees, the clouds, and the chaos, precision was impossible. Most bombs missed entirely. Those that didn’t rarely did enough damage to stop a ship.

The Japanese, meanwhile, could move troops and supplies at will, reinforcing garrisons and airfields before Allied forces could react. American submarines were effective but stretched thin across thousands of miles of ocean. Something had to change. The U.S. needed an aircraft that could strike hard and low—a plane that could fly just above the waves, spray enemy ships with fire, and hit so fast and so close that return fire was impossible.

There was only one problem: no such aircraft existed.

The U.S. had fighters like the P-40 Warhawk and the P-39 Airacobra—fast, agile, and deadly—but they lacked range and couldn’t carry enough firepower to damage large ships. Heavy bombers like the B-17 Flying Fortress were built for high-altitude strategic bombing, not the kind of brutal close-range warfare happening over New Guinea. The light Douglas A-20 Havoc had potential, but production was limited, and demand far exceeded supply.

That left the B-25—sturdy, available, and adaptable. But it wasn’t built to attack ships at sea. It wasn’t built for low-level strafing runs or skip-bombing, the dangerous tactic of releasing bombs at wavetop height so they would ricochet into a ship’s hull.

The U.S. Army Air Forces didn’t need theory—they needed results, fast. Every week that passed meant more convoys reaching Japanese outposts, more Allied soldiers cut off, more names added to casualty lists.

Then, in August 1942, Major General George C. Kenney arrived in Australia to take command of the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific. Kenney was a fighter pilot at heart, an innovator who hated bureaucracy and distrusted “by-the-book” officers. He toured his scattered bases, talking to mechanics, engineers, and pilots. He wanted solutions, not excuses.

When he reached Charter Towers Airfield, he met Pappy Gunn. And what he found there stopped him in his tracks.

Gunn’s hangar looked nothing like an official workshop—it looked more like an outlaw’s laboratory. Half a dozen aircraft sat in various states of disassembly, with engines hoisted on makeshift cranes and machine guns lined up like soldiers on benches. Sheets of aluminum were stacked against the walls, covered in chalk marks and hand-drawn sketches. On the floor, a crew of mechanics worked with the kind of focus that came from believing their work might actually change the course of the war.

Kenney watched as Gunn explained what he was doing. He pointed to the nose of a B-25 stripped of its glass bombardier compartment and replaced with a solid metal casing—into which Gunn had mounted eight .50 caliber Browning machine guns, all forward-firing. He described how additional guns could be installed in the sides and top turrets, giving the bomber as many as fourteen forward-firing weapons. It would no longer need to fly high and drop bombs—it could come in low, fast, and hammer ships and airfields into submission.

It wasn’t just an aircraft anymore. It was a concept—a completely new way to wage air war in the Pacific.

Gunn didn’t use blueprints. He used instinct, improvisation, and a kind of reckless genius that engineers back home would never have approved. He cannibalized parts from wrecked P-40s and B-17s, welded them into new configurations, and tested them himself. He personally flew the first modified aircraft in live-fire runs, strafing abandoned barges to prove the design worked.

As the men at Charter Towers worked, word spread across the base. Pilots whispered about “Pappy’s monster” and how it would chew through enemy ships like a buzz saw. Mechanics risked court-martial by stealing extra ammunition belts and spare guns for his experiments. They didn’t know if it would work—but they wanted to see it tried.

That morning of September 12th, as the engines warmed and the modified A-20 rolled toward the strip, Gunn stood in the shade of the hangar door, wiping sweat from his forehead. He had done everything he could. What happened next would either vindicate his obsession or bury it along with the men flying that mission.

For a moment, the noise of the airfield fell away. Gunn’s gaze followed the rising aircraft, banking east toward the open sky. The sun flashed off its aluminum skin. He thought of the convoys slipping through the dark seas, the ships that had escaped destruction again and again. He thought of his family in captivity, of the men dying in the jungles for lack of air support. He thought of how one man’s invention—if it worked—might finally give the Allies a weapon strong enough to fight back.

The engines roared, fading into the distance. And as the shadow of the departing plane slid across the airfield, Pappy Gunn turned to his men and said quietly, “If this works, boys… the Japanese won’t know what hit them.”

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The morning of September 12th, 1942, Charter Towers Airfield, Queensland, Australia. The heat rises in waves off the tarmac as a Douglas A20 Havoc light bomber taxis toward a makeshift hanger constructed from corrugated tin and hope.

 Inside that hanger, a 43-year-old man with grease stained hands and fire in his eyes is about to change the Pacific War. His name is Paul Irvvin Gun. Everyone calls him Papy. In 6 hours, the aircraft he’s modified will attack a Japanese airfield at Buuna New Guinea. If his modifications work, American bombers will finally have the teeth they need to tear into Japanese shipping and ground installations.

If they fail, men will die, and the innovative old pilot will be remembered as the fool who wasted precious time and resources on a crackpot idea. But Papy Gun isn’t thinking about failure. He’s thinking about his wife and four children trapped 1,700 miles north in a Japanese internment camp at Sto. Thomas in Manila.

 He’s thinking about the convoy of Japanese transports he watched slip past American forces last week because no aircraft could get low enough, slow enough, and deadly enough to stop them. He’s thinking about how a medium bomber designed to drop ordinance from 12,000 ft might be transformed into something the Japanese have never seen before.

 A low-level strafing monster that can shred ships, suppress anti-aircraft fire, and turn enemy airfields into graveyards. This is not the story of advanced technology solving a military problem. This is the story of a blacksmith’s son from Arkansas who armed with nothing but wrecked fighter planes, hand tools, and a desperate need to end a war that held his family hostage turned America’s medium bombers into the most feared gunships in the Pacific.

 This is the story of how improvisation defeated engineering. how necessity motherthered an invention that would define closeair support for generations. And how one man’s fury transformed aluminum and guns into a weapon that would help shatter the Japanese Empire. If you’re enjoying this deep dive into the story, hit the subscribe button and let us know in the comments from where in the world you are watching from today.

 The North American B25 Mitchell bomber was never supposed to be a gunship. When it rolled off the production line at the North American Aviation Plant in Englewood, California in 1941, it was designed as a medium bomber, a workhorse aircraft meant to deliver substantial bomb loads economically and accurately from moderate altitudes between 8,000 and 12,000 ft.

 Twin right R 2600 engines. 64 ft from nose to tail. 95 ft wingspan. Loaded weight of 33,000 lb. Maximum speed of 230 mph. Range of,300 mi. The Mitchell was a solid, reliable aircraft named after Brigadier General William Billy Mitchell, the charismatic air power prophet who proved in 1921 that planes could sink battleships.

 It carried a crew of six, pilot, co-pilot, bombardier/navavigator, radio operator, and two gunners. Its defensive armament included a tail gun, a dorsal turret, and a vententral gun tray that took almost a minute to extend, by which time a zero fighter could make three attack passes. The waste guns posed as much danger to the Mitchell’s own vertical tails and engine necessels as they did to enemy fighters.

 The aircraft was thoroughly conventional, thoroughly tested, and thoroughly inadequate for the kind of war being fought in the Southwest Pacific in 1942. In the jungles and islands of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, altitude was a luxury American bomber crews could rarely afford. The jungle environment reduced the usefulness of medium-level bombing.

 Flying at 10,000 ft, a bombardier might spot a ship, an airfield, or a supply dump. But actually hitting it through the dense canopy in the face of anti-aircraft fire while being harassed by zeros was another matter entirely. Bombs dropped from altitude scattered. Many disappeared into the jungle without detonating. Others landed harmlessly in water.

 The few that found targets often caused minimal damage because they lacked the precision to strike vulnerable points. Meanwhile, Japanese supply convoys were running nightly, sustaining isolated garrisons, reinforcing threatened positions, and delivering troops and equipment throughout their sprawling Pacific Empire. American submarines were taking a toll, but submarines couldn’t be everywhere.

 The US Army Air Forces needed a way to hammer these convoys from the air to deny the Japanese the freedom of movement that geography seemed to grant them. They needed aircraft that could fly low, loiter over targets, suppress defensive fire, and deliver devastating attacks against ships and shore installations.

 The problem was that no such aircraft existed in the American inventory in mid 1942. Fighters like the P40 Warhawk and P39 Araco Cobra had the speed and maneuverability for low-level attacks, but they lacked the range, the punch, and the survivability to sustain operations against well-defended targets. Heavy bombers like the B17 Flying Fortress were designed for highaltitude strategic bombing, not low-level ship busting.

 Light bombers like the Douglas A20 Havoc showed promise, but they were in short supply. The B25 Mitchell medium bomber was available in increasing numbers, but it was designed for a completely different mission profile. What the fifth air force needed was an aircraft that combined the range and payload of a medium bomber with the forwardfiring punch of a fighter.

 They needed something that could approach targets at wavetop height, suppress anti-aircraft fire with streams of heavy machine gun fire, and then either strafe the target to pieces or skip bomb it with 500 lb bombs released so low they bounced across the water like stones before slamming into ship holes below the waterline. They needed a gunship and they needed it in weeks, not months, not years.

 Because every week of delay meant more Japanese supply runs, more reinforced positions or dead American and Australian soldiers on jungle battlefields where air support meant the difference between survival and annihilation. Enter Major General George C. Kenny, who arrived in Australia in August 1942 to take command of Allied air forces in the Southwest Pacific theater.

 Kenny was 53 years old, a veteran of the First World War, and a man with no patience for orthodoxy when orthodoxy was getting his men killed. He immediately began touring his scattered bases, looking for solutions to the tactical problems that were bleeding his bomber force white. At Charter Towers Airfield, south of Townsville in Queensland, he found something interesting.

 A and greased former Navy pilot in his early 40s working in a shelter on a Douglas A20 Havoc, converting it from a light bomber into something else entirely. Paul Irvin Gun called Papy by everyone who knew him because at 43 he was ancient by Air Force standards was unlike any officer Kenny had ever met.

 Gun had enlisted in the Navy in 1918, served 21 years as an aviation mechanic and then a naval aviation pilot and retired in December 1939 as a chief petty officer. He was an expert in low-level flying, a gifted aircraft mechanic, and a man who understood airplanes the way a blacksmith understands iron because he could shape them with his hands.

 After leaving the Navy, Gun had moved his family to the Philippines, where he helped start Philippine Airlines, flying five privately owned beach craft aircraft on cargo and passenger routes throughout the islands. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, Gunn was in Manila.

 Major General Lewis Britton, commander of the Far East Air Force, immediately commandeered Philippine Airlines aircraft and personnel. Gun was sworn into the Army Airore as a captain, given command of a makeshift air transport squadron, and ordered to evacuate military personnel from Japanese- held territory. For the next 6 weeks, Gun flew mission after mission into hostile airspace in unarmed, unarmored beachcraft planes, bringing out pilots, fing supplies to besieged troops on Batan and performing feats of low-level flying that earned him a reputation as either the bravest or the craziest pilot in the Philippines. He survived being shot down once, crashing into a coconut plantation, and being rescued by the plantation owner, someone he’d flown as a passenger during peace time. Eventually, in late January 1942, Gun flew one of the last aircraft out of the Philippines to Australia, carrying key personnel to safety. But he left something behind. –  his wife Clara Louise and their four children Nathaniel, Connie, Julie, and Paul Jr. were trapped in Manila when the city fell. On January 20th, 1942, the Japanese rounded up American and Allied civilians and interned them at the University of St. Thomas. Papy Gun’s family would remain prisoners there for three years, living on starvation rations, subject to brutal discipline, slowly wasting away while he fought from Australia, unable to reach them, unable to protect them, able only to kill as many Japanese as possible in the desperate hope that ending the war faster might save their lives.

This was the man General Kenny found working on an A20 in a tin shelter at Charter Towers in August 1942. This was the man who, when asked what he was doing, explained that he was installing four 50 caliber machine guns into the bombardier’s nose, replacing the transparent plexiglass with solid metal, and transforming the light bomber into a low-level strafer that could suppress anti-aircraft fire and tear enemy aircraft and installations to pieces. Kenny asked where Gun had gotten the machine guns.

Gun explained that he was scavenging them from wrecked fighters scattered across Australian airfields, P40 Warhawks, and P39 era Cobbras damaged beyond repair, but with functional weapons. The fifth air force supply of 50 caliber machine guns was severely limited throughout the Southwest Pacific. There were never enough.

 So, Gun did what any good mechanic does. He improvised. He found wrecks. He salvaged guns. He fabricated mounts. He tested, adjusted, tested again. He made it work because making it work was the only option. General Kenny was impressed. This old sailor understood something that headquarters staff in comfortable offices never would.

 that war is not won by following procedures, but by solving problems, and that the best solutions often come from people who know their tools intimately enough to bend them to new purposes. Kenny immediately placed gun on his personal staff as special projects officer, and gave him a simple mandate. Convert more aircraft, make them deadlier, do it fast.

 guns set to work with a fury that astonished everyone around him. He wasn’t just an engineer solving a technical problem. He was a father trying to save his family by shortening a war. Every aircraft he modified, every sorty that aircraft flew, every Japanese ship sunk or airfield destroyed brought the war closer to Manila, closer to Sto.

 Thomas, closer to his wife and children. Fury is a powerful motivator. Desperation is an even more powerful engineer. By early September 1942, gun had converted several A20s into strafers. The modifications were crude but effective. Four 50 caliber Browning M2 machine guns mounted in the nose. Solid metal panels replacing the bombardier’s transparent station. Additional ammunition storage.

 bomb racks modified to carry parachute fragmentation bombs. Small bombs slowed by parachutes so the attacking aircraft could escape the blast radius even at ultra low altitude. The paraffrag bombs would float gently down over enemy airfields and installations, exploding above parked aircraft and fuel dumps, showering them with red hot fragments and white phosphorus that set fire to everything the fragments touched.

 The converted A20s were tested in combat on September 12th, 1942 in a raid against the Japanese airfield at Buuna New Guinea. The results exceeded every expectation. Flying at wavetop height and treetop level, the Strafers roared in before defenders could react, suppressing anti-aircraft fire with streams of 50 caliber armor-piercing rounds, then releasing their paraffrag bombs directly over the target. Japanese fighters caught on the ground exploded.

 Fuel dumps detonated. Buildings disintegrated. The lightly constructed Japanese aircraft built for agility and range, not armor tore apart under the half-in bullets traveling at 2900 ft pers. The strafers pulled up and away, leaving behind a trail of destruction that looked like the wroth of an angry god. General Kenny immediately ordered gun to do the same thing to the B25 Mitchell.

This was a bigger challenge. The A20 was a light bomber, relatively small, relatively easy to modify. The B-25 was a medium bomber, larger, more complex, with different aerodynamics and structural considerations. Adding weight to the nose of an aircraft affects its center of gravity, which affects its stability and handling.

Installing guns creates recoil forces that must be absorbed by the airframe. Modifying a bomber designed for high altitude level flight to perform low-level strafing runs meant accepting risks that no engineer at North American aviation would have approved. But Papy Gun didn’t work for North American Aviation. He worked for General Kenny.

And General Kenny didn’t care about what the manual said was possible. He cared about what needed to be done. Gun was assisted by Jack Fox, a North American aviation technical representative based at Charter Towers. Fox sent drawings of Gun’s proposed modifications back to the factory in Long Beach, California, but there were too few B-25s in the theater to spare any for modification experiments yet.

 The first B-25s were needed for conventional bombing missions. Gun would have to wait for more aircraft to arrive before he could begin the conversions that would define the rest of the Pacific Air War. The waiting was agony. Every day meant more supply runs, more reinforcements, more American soldiers dying on jungle battlefields, more time his family spent in that internment camp.

 Gun flew combat missions himself, testing his A20 conversions, refining the tactics and proving the concept. He flew more missions than almost any other man in theater, accumulating combat hours and enemy kills, earning two distinguished flying crosses, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Air Medal, and eventually nine Purple Hearts, nine separate wounds. Nine times he bled in combat and kept flying.

 By late 1942, B25 Mitchells were arriving in Australia in greater numbers. General Kenny authorized Gun to begin the conversion program. Working with a small team of mechanics, Gun established a B-25 conversion center at Townsville. The modifications were extensive. Remove the transparent bombardier’s nose. Replace it with solid metal panels.

 Install eight 50 caliber Browning machine guns, four in the nose, four in underwing blisters or fuselage packages. Some aircraft received additional guns. Two more forward-firing guns in cheek blisters on either side of the nose, bringing the total forward-firing armament to 10 or even 12 heavy machine guns.

 Add the dorsal turrets to guns which could be synchronized to fire forward with the fixed guns and some B-25s could bring 1450 caliber machine guns to bear on a target simultaneously. 1450 caliber machine guns. Each gun fires 850 rounds per minute. Each round a halfinch diameter armor-piercing projectile traveling at 2900 ft per second. 14 guns equaled 11,900 rounds per minute, nearly 200 rounds per second, creating a cone of destruction so dense that anything caught within it simply disintegrated.

 The conversions took time, weeks, not overnight. Not a single desperate night of improvisation, but a sustained program of modification and testing. Each aircraft had to be carefully modified to maintain structural integrity. The guns had to be aligned, tested, adjusted. Ammunition feed systems had to be installed and debugged.

 Pilots had to learn new tactics for an aircraft that now handled differently, weighed more in the nose, and required different flying techniques to compensate for the weight of all those guns and all that ammunition. But the results, when they came, were devastating. The first squadron of Strafer B25s was ready for combat in early 1943. They would prove their worth in the most dramatic fashion imaginable.

 The Battle of the Bismar Sea. One of the most one-sided victories in the history of naval aviation. A battle that would demonstrate beyond any doubt that Papy Gun’s juryrigged gunships had changed the Pacific War forever. The first days of March 1943, intelligence reports reach General Kenny’s headquarters in Port Moresby, New Guinea.

 A Japanese convoy is assembling at Rabol eight transport ships carrying nearly 7,000 troops escorted by eight destroyers. Destination Lei, New Guinea, where Japanese forces are under pressure from Allied advances. The convoy represents a massive reinforcement effort, enough troops to turn the tide of the ground campaign, and enough supplies to sustain Japanese resistance for months. General Kenny knows what he has to do.

 The convoy must be destroyed, not damaged, not delayed, destroyed. Every ship, every soldier, every ton of supplies. Because if those 7,000 troops reach Lei, American and Australian soldiers will pay for it in blood on jungle battlefields where the enemy already holds every advantage terrain can provide.

 Kenny has the aircraft to do it. He has B17 flying fortresses for high alitude bombing. He has B25 Mitchells, both conventional bombers and papy guns starter conversions. He has A20 Havocs. similarly modified. He has P38 lightning fighters for escort and strafing.

 And he has a new tactic that has been tested in smaller engagements, but never against a target this large, this welldefended, this important. Skip bombing. The concept is simple in theory, terrifying in execution. A bomber approaches its target at extremely low altitude, 200 ft or less. sometimes as low as 50 f feet above the waves. At point blank range, perhaps a quarter mile from the target, the bomber releases its bombs with a slight upward trajectory.

 The bombs skip across the water like flat stones thrown by children at a pond. Except these stones weigh 500 lb and contain high explosives. They skip once, twice, then slam into the ship’s hull at or below the water line, exactly where naval architects know a ship is most vulnerable. The explosion opens the hull to the sea. The ship floods. The ship sinks.

 But skip bombing requires pilots to fly directly at heavily armed warships through walls of anti-aircraft fire. Low enough that a single mistake means hitting the water and disintegrating. Slow enough that enemy gunners have time to aim. Close enough that if the bomb detonates prematurely, the attacking aircraft gets caught in its own blast.

 It requires nerves of steel and perfect timing. It requires aircraft that can suppress the anti-aircraft fire long enough for the bomber to release its ordinance and escape. It requires Papy Guns Strafer B25s. If you find this story engaging, please take a moment to subscribe and enable notifications. It helps us continue producing in-depth content like this. The battle of the Bismar Sea begins on March 2nd, 1943.

The Japanese convoy departs Rabbal, steaming southwest through the Solomon Sea toward the Huan Gulf and Lea. Australian reconnaissance aircraft spot the convoy and shadow it, reporting position and course. General Kenny mobilizes his air groupoups. Bombers and fighters take off from bases throughout New Guinea and northern Australia. The weather is terrible.

 Heavy clouds, rain squalls, poor visibility, but the weather works in the allies favor, allowing aircraft to approach unseen until the last moment. The first attacks are conventional. B17 Flying Fortress’s bomb from altitude on March 2nd and third, scoring few hits, but forcing the convoy to maneuver constantly, slowing its progress.

 Then the weather clears on the morning of March 3rd, and Kenny unleashes the strafers. The modified B25s and A20s come in low, so low that their propellers are churning spray from the wavetops. They approach in formation, a wall of aircraft bearing down on the convoy at 200 mph. The Japanese ships see them coming. Anti-aircraft guns open fire.

 20 mm and 25 mm cannons throw up walls of explosive shells. Heavier 40 mm guns pump rounds in arcing trajectories. The sky fills with tracer fire, with black puffs of exploding shells, with the smoke and fury of desperate defense. And then the strafers open fire. 1450 caliber machine guns per aircraft. Multiple aircraft attacking simultaneously. Thousands of rounds per second hammering into Japanese ships.

 The effect is apocalyptic. Anti-aircraft gun crews are sithed down where they stand. Gunshields are perforated like paper. Bridge windows shatter. Super structures are shredded. The armor-piercing rounds punch through light armor, ricochet off steel bulkheads, tear through wooden structures, set fires, detonate ammunition. The Japanese gunners who survived the initial onslaught find themselves suppressed, unable to aim.

Unable to fire, forced to take cover as half-in bullets tear apart everything around them. And in that window of suppressed fire, the skip bombing B25s and conventional Mitchells release their loads. 500 lb bombs skip across the water. Some miss war is never perfect, but many hit.

 They slam into hulls below the water line. They explode with the force of half a ton of high explosive concentrated against the weakest part of the ship’s structure. Steel plates buckle, welds fail, the sea pours in. The transport ships, heavily laden with troops and supplies, are particularly vulnerable. They’re not warships.

 They don’t have armored hulls or sophisticated damage control. When the bombs hit, when the hulls open to the Pacific, they begin sinking immediately. Troops below decks, trapped in compartments that are flooding, have nowhere to go. The ships settle lower in the water, list to one side, then capsize or break apart and slide beneath the waves. The destroyers fare better.

 Their warships designed to take punishment, but even they cannot withstand the coordinated assault. One destroyer takes a bomb amid ships and breaks in half. Another is so riddled with 50 caliber fire that it becomes unmanageable, drifting in circles as fires rage unchecked. A third destroyer trying to rescue survivors from a sinking transport is caught by strafers and turned into a funeral p. The battle continues for 3 days.

 Every time the Japanese try to rescue survivors, Allied aircraft appear. Every time a damaged ship tries to limp away, it’s attacked again. The Strafer B25s hunt like wolves working in coordination with conventional bombers, with fighters, with reconnaissance aircraft spotting targets. They use the new parachute fragmentation bombs, floating them down over the decks of destroyers, killing exposed personnel, starting fires, creating chaos.

 They strafe lifeboats and debris fields not out of cruelty, but because those survivors are soldiers who, if rescued, will fight again on New Guiney’s battlefields. By March 4th, the battle of the Bismar Sea was over. The results are staggering. All eight transport ships sunk, four destroyers sunk, three others heavily damaged.

 Approximately 3,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in the sinking ships or in the water. Fewer than 1,000 reach land, and most of those are immediately captured or killed by Allied forces. The reinforcement effort is annihilated. The supplies that were supposed to sustain the Japanese garrison at Lei for months are at the bottom of the Bismar Sea. Allied losses.

 Four aircraft shot down, 13 air crew killed or missing. It is one of the most one-sided victories in the history of warfare. And at the center of it making it possible are Papy Guns modified B-25s, the Strafers that suppressed defensive fire that allowed the skip bombers to approach that tore Japanese ships apart with concentrated machine gun fire. General Kenny immediately orders more conversions.

 Word spreads throughout the theater. Other air forces want the Strafers. The 13th Air Force sends B-25s to Brisbane for conversion. Depo engineers at Tontota begin modifying aircraft. The 10th Air Force in India picks up the modifications. What began as one man’s desperate improvisation in a tin hanger in Queensland becomes standard practice across the Pacific.

 But the story doesn’t end with tactical success because North American aviation back in California has been watching. The factory representatives have been sending reports about guns modifications. Engineers in Long Beach have been studying the results and they’ve begun incorporating guns innovations into new production models.

 In late 1943, North American introduced the B25G model. The transparent nose is gone, replaced by a solid metal nose housing a 75 mm M4 cannon, a tank gun mounted in an aircraft, firing three lb high explosive shells that can engage ships from 2 mi away and sink smaller vessels with a single hit. 450 caliber machine guns supplement the cannon.

 The concept is innovative. The execution is problematic. The 75 mm cannon produces tremendous recoil. Each time it fires, the entire aircraft shutters. Pilots struggle to keep the aircraft stable. The cannon is manually loaded, slow to reload, and quickly exhausts its limited ammunition supply. After 7 weeks of combat, units equipped with the B25G have expended all their 75 mm ammunition.

 The cannon-armed Mitchells are an interesting experiment, but ultimately they prove less effective than Papy Gun’s simpler solution, more machine guns. The B25H model appears next 1,000 aircraft built with even more machine guns. The 75 mm cannon is replaced with a lighter 14 gun version, eight in the nose, four in side blisters, two in the dorsal turret.

 Some H models also carry rockets, 5-in high velocity aircraft rockets that can be ripple fired in devastating salvos. But the ultimate expression of Papy Gun’s vision is the B-25J introduced in 1944. North American builds over 4,000 J models. Many are delivered with transparent noses for conventional bombing, but the air depot system creates conversion kits the strafer nose option.

 When a J model is converted to a strafer, it carries 1850 caliber machine guns. Eight in the nose, four in the fuselage packages, two in the dorsal turret, one in each waist position, and two in the tail. 14 of those 18 guns fire directly forward. 18 50 caliber machine guns on a single aircraft.

 15,300 rounds per minute combined rate of fire, over 250 rounds per second. A B25J Strafer firing all forward guns simultaneously puts more lead into the air than an entire infantry company could fire with their rifles. The effect on targets is not destruction, it’s disintegration. These heavily armed Mitchells continued to devastate Japanese targets throughout New Guinea, the Philippines, and Okinawa until the end of the war. They strafe airfields, destroying parked aircraft.

They attack bridges, severing supply lines. They hunt coastal barges and small vessels. They support ground troops with devastating close air support. They are so effective that captured enemy documents warn Japanese forces not to attack when the Strafers are overhead weapons are useless against them, and attacking will only infuriate the monsters. The Strafer crews develop their own tactics and their own reputation.

 They fly low enough to see the expressions on enemy soldiers faces. They approach from unexpected angles over mountains, up valleys, along coastlines, using terrain to mask their approach until the last second. They work in coordination with each other. One aircraft suppressing fire while another delivers the killing blow. They are feared. They are hated. They are merciless.

 And behind every one of those aircraft is Papy Gun’s desperate fury, channeled into engineering, transformed into lethality. Major Gun promoted for his innovations, and his combat record is eventually sent back to the United States to oversee factory production of the new B-25 variants at North American Aviation.

 It’s a recognition of his contributions, an acknowledgment that his field modifications have been so successful they need to be incorporated into production aircraft. But Gun doesn’t want recognition. He wants to be in the Pacific fighting, killing Japanese, shortening the war that holds his family hostage. He returns to the Pacific as soon as he can. He continues flying combat missions.

 He continues taking risks that make his commanders nervous. In late 1944, a Japanese bombing attack on Laty in the Philippines catches him on the ground. He’s wounded his ninth Purple Heart badly enough that he’s removed from active combat. The war continues without him. But by then, the Strafer program he pioneered is so thoroughly integrated into Pacific air operations that it no longer needs him. In February 1945, American forces liberated Manila.

 They fight house to house, building to building against fanatical Japanese defenders who would rather die than surrender. On February 3rd, American troops reached the University of Sto. Tomas. They find over 3,000 internes starving, sick, traumatized by 3 years of captivity. Among them are Claraara Louise Gun and her four children. Papy Gun is reunited with his family.

 They’re alive, barely malnourished, traumatized, forever marked by their ordeal, but alive. The war he fought to shorten, the modifications he made, the missions he flew, the Japanese he killed, all of it was for this moment. His family survives. The Philippines are liberated. The war grinds toward its conclusion.

Gun retired from the Army Air Forces as a full colonel on June 30th, 1948. Medically retired due to his accumulated wounds. He returns to the Philippines to rebuild Philippine Airlines, the airline he helped start before the war. The company expands, provides flights across the South Pacific, and becomes one of the region’s major carriers.

 Gun flies again, not in combat, but in commerce, carrying passengers and cargo instead of guns and fury. On October 11th, 1957, Colonel Paul Irvin Papy Gun died when his chartered Beach 18 crashed in a storm over the Philippines. He’s 57 years old. He survived 21 years in the Navy, 5 years of brutal combat in the Pacific War, nine combat wounds, countless close calls, and the loss of nearly everything he cared about during the dark years when his family was imprisoned.

 A storm over the islands he loved finally claims him. But his legacy endures. The strafer concept he pioneered doesn’t die with him. During the Korean War, modified B-25s provided closeair support using the same tactics gun developed. The principal heavy forward-firing armament on a stable platform becomes doctrine. In the 1960s, when the United States began developing gunships for Vietnam, the engineers looked back at Papy Gun’s work. They study his modifications.

They understand his insight. That sometimes the best weapon isn’t the newest or the most technologically advanced, but the one that puts the most firepower, exactly where it needs to be. The AC47 Spooky, the first modern gunship, uses sideways firing guns and a pylon turn, a different approach than guns forward firing strafers.

 But the same understanding that transport and bomber aircraft can be converted into devastating gunships. The AC130 Spectre, still flying today with 105 mm howitzers and sophisticated targeting systems, is a direct descendant of guns vision. Take an aircraft designed for one purpose, modify it for another, and create a weapon so effective it changes how wars are fought.

 Every Air Force closeair support doctrine written since the 1940s acknowledges implicitly or explicitly that Papy Gun was right, that desperation can produce innovation, that field modifications can outpace factory design, that the side willing to improvise, to break rules, to transform its tools into weapons its enemies have never seen holds an advantage that technology techology alone cannot provide.

 The irony is profound and multi-layered. A bomber designed to drop ordinance from altitude becomes a low-level strafer. A former Navy pilot retired and running a civilian airline becomes one of the most innovative weapons designers of the war. An aircraft modification program born from desperation and scavenged parts became the foundation for gunship doctrine used for 80 years. A man fighting to save his family helps destroy an empire.

 And perhaps the deepest irony, the B25 Mitchell, which Papy Gun modified so dramatically, was never supposed to be a closeair support aircraft. It was supposed to deliver bombs from medium altitude. It was supposed to be safe, orthodox, and conventional. But orthodoxy doesn’t win wars. Innovation does. Desperation does. Fury channeled into engineering.

 The morning of September 12th, 1942, Papy Gun’s modified A20 attacked Buuna. The raid succeeded beyond all expectations. But Gun wasn’t celebrating. He was already planning. The next modification, the next improvement, the next innovation. Because every day the war continued was another day his family spent in that camp.

 Every sorty his aircraft flew, every enemy position his modifications destroyed, brought the end closer. War is often portrayed as a story of grand strategy, of decisive battles, of great commanders moving armies like pieces on a chessboard. But wars are also won in tin hangers in the Australian heat. By middle-aged former sailors with grease under their fingernails and fury in their hearts.

 By men who understand that sometimes the difference between victory and defeat is simply being willing to look at an aircraft, a perfectly good conventional orthodox aircraft, and ask, “What if we added more guns?” Papy Gun asked that question. He answered it with a wrench and a welding torch.

 And the Japanese Empire paid the price in blood and steel at the bottom of the Bismar Sea. The B-25 Mitchell flew in every theater of the Second World War. It participated in the Dittle raid on Tokyo. It bombed targets across Europe, Africa, and Asia. It served with distinction in dozens of air forces around the world. Nearly 10,000 were built. It was reliable. It was versatile. It was loved by its crews.

But in the Southwest Pacific, the Mitchell was something more. It was a gunship. It was a ship killer. It was a terror weapon that forced the Japanese to abandon daylight supply runs, to scatter their convoys, to accept that American air power could reach them anywhere, any time, and turn their ships into funeral pers.

 And all of it, the tactics, the modifications, the victories, traces back to one man who refused to accept that his family’s imprisonment was inevitable, who refused to accept that the war would last as long as orthodox thinking suggested, who refused to accept that aircraft had to be used the way their designers intended. Paul Irvin Papy Gun didn’t invent the gunship overnight in a moment of desperate improvisation.

 He developed it over months of trial and error, testing and refinement, combat experience and engineering insight. But he did it faster than any official program could have. He did it with salvaged parts and improvised solutions. He did it because he had to, because every delay meant his family suffered. Because fury is a powerful engineer when channeled through skill and determination.

 The Strafer B-25s weren’t perfect. They were noseheavy. They handled differently than conventional Mitchells. The recoil from firing all those guns simultaneously was violent enough to slow the aircraft noticeably. Ammunition consumption was enormous. A strafer could expend its entire load in seconds of sustained fire. The aircraft were vulnerable to ground fire because they flew so low. Crews died.

 Aircraft were lost. War is never clean, never easy, never without cost. But the Strafers worked. They changed the Pacific War. They allowed American forces to interdict Japanese supply lines, to support ground troops with devastating precision, and to destroy enemy installations before defenders could respond.

 They saved lives, American, Australian, and Allied lives by shortening battles, by preventing reinforcements from reaching embattled garrisons, by giving ground forces the air support they desperately needed, and every time a Strafer B25 dove toward a Japanese ship or airfield, every time those 14 machine guns opened fire and the target disintegrated under concentrated fire, It was Papy Gun’s fury made manifest.

 It was a father’s desperation transformed into engineering. It was improvisation defeating orthodoxy. It was proof that sometimes the best solutions come not from careful planning but from having no other choice. The Pacific War ended on August 15th, 1945 with Japan’s surrender. Papyun’s family was free. The Strafer B-25s had helped bring that moment closer.

 How much closer? Impossible to calculate. But every ship sunk, every airfield destroyed, every battle shortened contributed to the cumulative pressure that forced Japan to accept the unacceptable. Wars are won by many factors. Strategy, logistics, industrial production, courage, sacrifice.

 But they’re also won by individuals who see problems and solve them, who refuse to accept limitations, who transform ordinary tools into extraordinary weapons. Papy Gun was such an individual. His contribution to victory wasn’t a single decisive battle. It was hundreds of modifications, thousands of sorties, tens of thousands of enemy casualties inflicted by aircraft. He transformed.

 The B-25 Mitchell bomber was a good aircraft. Papy gun made it a great one. Not by sophisticated engineering or advanced technology, but by asking a simple question. What does this aircraft need to do the job that needs doing? The answer was more guns. more forward firing, heavy machine guns capable of suppressing enemy fire and destroying targets with overwhelming firepower.

 So he added more guns. He added them with wrenches and welding torches, with salvaged parts and improvised mounts, with ingenuity born of desperation and refined through combat experience. And the result changed warfare. 80 years later, the United States Air Force still operates gunships based on principles Papy Gun pioneered.

 The platforms are different turborop transports instead of piston engine bombers. The weapons are more sophisticated cannons, howitzers, precisiong guided munitions. The targeting systems use radar, infrared sensors, and computers that would have seemed like magic to guns generation. But the fundamental insight remains unchanged. A transport or bomber aircraft properly modified can deliver sustained devastating firepower against ground targets with a precision and intensity that other platforms cannot match.

 Every AC130 gunship pilot owes a debt to Papy Gun. Every close air support controller calling in fire from circling gunships is using tactics refined in the skies over New Guinea and the Bismar Sea. Every innovation in aerial gunnery stands on foundations gun laid in a tin hanger in Queensland, working with hand tools and fury. This is not the story of advanced technology defeating primitive enemy equipment.

 The Japanese were not unsophisticated. Their aircraft were excellent. Their ships were wellarmed. Their pilots were skilled and courageous. They understood warfare as well as anyone. But they didn’t have papy gun. They didn’t have a blacksmith’s son from Arkansas who understood aircraft intimately enough to transform them, who was desperate enough to try unconventional solutions, who was furious enough to work 18-hour days modifying bombers because every hour of delay was an hour his family spent in captivity. The Japanese fought bravely.

They fought skillfully. They fought with everything they had. But they couldn’t adapt as fast as gun could innovate. They couldn’t counter tactics they’d never seen before. And when those Strafer B25s came in at wavetop height, guns blazing, bombs skipping across the water toward their hulls, all the courage and skill in the world couldn’t save them. Thank you for watching.