The plane jolted as the weight fell. Behind them, the airfield erupted in a series of daisy-chained explosions. But the celebration was short-lived. "Zeros at six o'clock! High!" the tail gunner screamed.
As the carrier or the dirt strip finally came into view, the crew of the medium bomber knew they had done the dirty work—the close-in, face-to-face fighting that won the war one jungle clearing at a time. Medium Bombers of World War 2
Suddenly, the airfield appeared. Elias didn't use a bombsight; at this height, it was all instinct. He toggled the "para-frags"—small bombs attached to parachutes designed to drift into aircraft hangars and fuel depots. "Bombs away!" The plane jolted as the weight fell
The Mitchell was a medium bomber, a jack-of-all-trades. It didn't carry the massive payloads of the "Flying Fortresses," but it had something better for this kind of work: agility and a nose packed with .50-caliber machine guns. As they crossed the coastline, Elias pushed the nose down. The jungle canopy became a green blur just thirty feet below the belly. "Zeros at six o'clock
The engines of the B-25 Mitchell, nicknamed The Gray Ghost , coughed to life, spitting blue smoke into the humid air of the South Pacific. It was 1943, and for Captain Elias Thorne and his crew, the mission was simple: hit the Japanese airfield at Lae and get home before the Zeros found them.
By the time they hit the open ocean, the remaining fighters had turned back, low on fuel. The Gray Ghost was riddled with holes, its hydraulic fluid leaking into the bay, but the engines held.