Maid in the Shade returns

B-25 Maid in the Shade

She flies with the Confederate, er, Commemorative Air Force:

B-25J Mitchell “Maid in the Shade” was built in early 1944. She’s very rare – one of 34 B-25Js still flying. Nearly 10,000 were produced.

Used mainly as a low altitude strafe and skip bomber. Was used in America’s first large-scale bombing offensive in the Philippines - sunk 8 ships and shot down 5 planes.

Combat History – Based out of Serraggia Airbase, Corsica from Nov 1 – Dec 31, 1944.

Assigned to:

• 57th Bomb Wing o 319th Bomb Wing o 437th Squadron
• Combat missions flown:

• 13 over Italy
• 2 over Yugoslavia

I've made several posts about B-25s including one about this same airplane.

Modesty

An airman inspects his B-25’s four nose mounted .50 caliber machine guns. The .75mm cannon can be seen on the lower right portion of the nose.
Note the machine guns mounted in pods on the outside of the cockpit.

I'm reading Indestructible by John R. Bruning. It's about Pappy Gunn and his experience fighting the Japanese in the early days of WW2 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It's a bit of a slog, about half of the book is repetitive emotional clap-trap, but the actual story is fascinating. I'm a little past half way through and he is the process of mounting eight 50 caliber machine guns to the nose of a B-25. His group is also involved in flying missions out of Charters Towers, Australia, supporting the garrison at Port Moresby, New Guinea. On page 300 we get this report of one flight to Port Moresby:

After work after weeks of working long hours and stifling hot hangers, those flights to Moresby afforded him the chance to air himself out a bit, much to the astonishment of the skeleton crew who ran with him. 

He donned an aboriginal loincloth and would stretch his shirt and slacks out behind the pilot seat to let them get some air, too. This cost him dearly once when somebody opened a side window in the cockpit somewhere over the Coral Sea the sudden jet of the slipstream into the cockpit blew his clothes into a whirlwind. Before he could catch them, they spun right out the side window. Normally, that would just have been an aggravation, but Pappy's pocket contained at least $1,000 in pay and poker winnings. The actual amount varied on the telling and retelling by his pals but even worse was his arrival at Port Moresby in nothing but a loin cloth. As they parked at the Airdrome there, a group of females - either Red Cross workers or nurses - showed up with coffee and snacks for the crew. Pappy refused to get out of the cockpit. Always modest, the idea of a woman other than Polly [his wife] seeing him in such a state roused him to panic fury. He demanded that somebody get him a change of clothes, and when his crew wouldn't stop laughing, legend has it he threatened to shoot them. Somebody finally got him a shirt and a pair of slacks he dressed while muttering a constant stream of invectives, then dropped out of the B-25's hatch and stormed off.

Charters Towers to Port Moresby

Update next day replace Darwin with Charters Towers.

B-25 Executive Sweet

North American TB-25 Mitchell (N30801)

TB-25 indicates it was a trainer, so all the bombs painted on the side are just cosmetic. B-25s have appeared here several times.

Angry Birds

B-25J Mitchell

The Shekel visits the Kalamazoo Air Zoo and discovers the original Angry Birds.

Eight machine guns mounted in the nose of a B-25J

The J version of the B-25 was the gunship version with (14) 50 caliber machine guns pointed forward.

B-25 Maid in the Shade

B-25 Maid in the Shade

That is our very own "Maid in the Shade" B25 from the Commemorative Airforce's Airbase Arizona! Go to AZCAF.org for more. It served in WWII out of Corsica and flew several combat missions. We take her around the country throughout the summer where folks can come tour through her and even purchase a ride! - Comment from William Willoughby

Corsica? Wait a minute, wasn't Catch-22 set in the mediterranean? Yes, it was, but it was set on the nearby island of Pianosa. Pianosa is a tiny island, about 2 miles across, about halfway across the 50 miles separating Corsica from the Italian mainland.

Corsica, Pianosa and Brenner Pass

Wikipedia has this to say about Pianosa during WW2:

During World War II, on 17 September 1943, German troops invaded Pianosa and occupied it. On 19 March 1944 French commandos landed on the island, and after a short firefight left taking away 40 prison guards as hostages. 

Wikipedia has this to say about Corsica during WW2:

After the collapse of France to the German Wehrmacht in 1940, Corsica came under the rule of the Vichy French regime, which was collaborating with Nazi Germany. In November 1942 the island was occupied by Italian and German forces following the Anglo-American landings in North Africa. After the Italian armistice in September 1943, Italian and Free French Forces pushed the Germans out of the island, making Corsica the first French Department to be freed. Subsequently, the US military established 17 airfields, nicknamed "USS Corsica", which served as bases for attacks on targets in German-occupied Italy.

The New York Times has a story by John Tagliabue that starts with this:

SOLENZARA, Corsica — So many U.S. planes and airmen were stationed on this French Mediterranean island during World War II that they called it the USS Corsica - an unsinkable aircraft carrier. Up and down its flat eastern shore stretched a string of 14 airfields, the jumping-off points for B-25 bombers and P-47 fighters that attacked German lines throughout Italy, southern France and Austria.

More than 50,000 U.S. pilots, mechanics, nurses, doctors, cooks, truck drivers and others passed through Corsica after it was taken from its German occupiers in late 1943.

One of the primary targets of the B-25s stationed on Corsica was Brenner Pass on the border between Austria and Germany. Bud's Lawn Care has good summary of this campaign. Since some of his links are broken I thought it might disappear, so I made a copy and posted in in my pages.

Maid in the Shade

Flight

Michigan shoreline seen from the nose of the B-25

Uniberp took a flight on a B-25 with Air Adventure. He reports:

You can't see it in this picture, in fact that's not the Muskegon channel at all, but as we were flying over the flight officer painted down out the window and said "submarine" pointing to the USS Silversides at dock. Sitting duck.

There are a couple of other lakes just inside the shoreline like Lake Muskegon within a few miles. 

USS Silversides in the Muskegon Channel

Since he didn't get a shot of the sub, I thought I'd take a look using Google Maps.

B-25 Rosie's Reply

In case you didn't know:

The B-25B first gained fame as the bomber used in the 18 April 1942 Doolittle Raid, in which 16 B-25Bs led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle attacked mainland Japan, four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. - Wikipedia

 

Gun Dream

.50-caliber guns tucked in the nose of the B-25, Philippines, 1945

I'm poking around in an old rural hardware store. I come across a set of four machine guns mounted together in a sort of an enclosure. They look like they might have been mounted on the chin of an airplane in some steam-punk movie scene. They are not like your normal WW2 era machine guns. These things are very much smaller. The longest is no more than eighteen inches long and the basic frame of the smaller ones reminds me of one of those malt mixers you used to see on the counter of the local drug store. Naturally, the whole thing has a thick patina of ancient congealed grease.

The calibers are all wrong too. The big ones use 38 Special, which is at least a real caliber. The smaller one uses something that looks like 7.63 by 39, but it's half the diameter, and only a quarter of the length because the bulk of the shell has been removed so the whole thing is only slightly more than a half an inch long. More like a cartridge for a pocket gun than a real weapon of war, but whatever.

Big Vise

I really want to buy this weapon, and if I do that I am going to need some ammo. So I start looking for ammo and I encounter another customer and we start looking at memorabilia from the Bruce Willis Die Hard movie franchise, posters, toy cars, that kind of thing. This guy has apparently spent some time here because he knows where everything is. Now we are looking for ammo and we have to sidle past a big vise that is sticking out in the aisle with a had lettered sign on it that says 'For Big Guns and Knives'.

P.S. There is a 'new' Bruce Willis movie up on Netflix called Hard Kill. I generally like Bruce Willis movies, but I am a little leery of this one. I mean, isn't Bruce getting kind of old? I know I am. But movies are the result of of the collaboration of a whole bunch of craftsmen, and I imagine whoever is on the Die Hard production team can put together a fine movie. Bruce is just like the tip of the spear. The question is whether the rest of the spear is well constructed or not. Hollywood Reporter says no.

Die Hans, Die!

Remember Hans Gruber from the original Die Hard? I certainly do. He was certainly villain of the year, if not the century. What a foul scumbag. It was a joy to watch him die.

Airplanes

Deicing an Airbus A300 at Appleton (Wisconsin) International during a heavy wet January snow storm.Top Beacon light gives "effect".

Airliner skimming the surface of the moon

Austrian Air Force Saab J35Oe Draken

B-25 bombers fly over Mount Vesuvius in Italy while it erupts in March 1944 during the Italian Campaign of World War II. Colorised.

September 19, 1962. Plot George Aird ejects from his English Electric Lightning. Photo by Jim Mead.

ASN Aircraft accident 13-SEP-1962 English Electric Lightning F1 XG332

Whilst carrying out a demonstration flight, there was a fire in the aircraft’s reheat zone. Un-burnt fuel in the rear fuselage had been ignited by a small crack in the jet pipe and had weakened the tailplane actuator anchorage. This weakened the tailplane control system which failed with the aircraft at 100 feet on final approach.

I came these across while skimming items on feedly. Failed to note where they came from.

Catch-22

Catch-22 (1970) - B-25 Mitchell take-offs - HD
Iaman is looking for a cabana on the beach in San Carlos, Mexico.

San Carlos, Mexico, is about equidistant from San Diego, El Paso, Cabo San Lucas and Mazatlan
Follow the link to see the airstrip location.

In the course of his musings, he discovers that the aircraft scenes for the movie Catch-22 were filmed there. "Paramount planned to film the Catch-22 aerial sequences for six weeks, but the production required three months to shoot and the bombers flew a total of about 1,500 hours. They would appear on screen for 12 minutes." The film cost $20 million to produce and this was back in 1970 when a dollar was actually worth something. "The Catch 22 airport was constructed from scratch for the movie."

Norden Bombsight

Norden Bombsight in the nose of a B-25 bomber

Posthip Scott sent me an Ebay listing for a Norden Bombsight. I'd heard of them and I knew they were sort of a big deal, but I had never come across any good information about them, like how the machinery inside actually worked. I realize now that they are horribly complex mechanical computers that performed some operation that any $2 digital calculator could do now. The 20th century military-industrial complex was full of this stuff. In short, they were complicated, expensive pieces of precision machinery and if you were so inclined you could spend years sorting out all the ins and outs of their design, construction and operation. It might be fun, but at this point it's more like archaeology.
     Looking around I uncovered a couple of interesting bits. I found this one on Wikipedia.

At the beginning of WW2, after Britain was engaged but before the USA got into it, the Brits were keen on obtaining the Norden bombsight, so they sent some guys to the USA to talk about it. During one visit there was a demonstration.

The RAF's desires were only further goaded on 13 April 1939, when Pirie was invited to watch an air demonstration at Fort Benning where the painted outline of a battleship was the target. "At 1:27 while everyone was still searching [the sky for the B-17s] six 300-pound  bombs suddenly burst at split second intervals on the deck of the battleship, and it was at least 30 seconds later before someone spotted the B-17 at 12,000 feet". The three following B-17s also hit the target, and then a flight of a dozen Douglas B-18 Bolos placed most of their bombs in a separate 600 yd × 600 yd square outlined on the ground. - Top Secret Exchange: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War by David Zimmerman

Malcolm Gladwell gave a TED Talk about the Norden bombsight back in 2011, wherein I found this bit:

And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars -- billion dollars in 1940 dollars -- developing the Norden bombsight. And to put that in perspective, the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion dollars. Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era. 

That's in 1940 dollars which were worth about 20 times what they are now.