On the morning of March 3rd, 1943, precisely at a.m., the roar of twin engines screamed over the Bismar Sea as Captain Paul Gun pushed the nose of his B25 Mitchell bomber into a steep, aggressive dive.
He leveled the aircraft out at a terrifyingly low altitude, skimming just 50 ft above the White Caps with his throttles pushed to their absolute limit.
For over a year, American air power had attempted to sever Japanese supply lines.
But their high altitude bombing tactics had resulted in nothing but failure.
The Japanese Navy had become keenly aware of this incompetence, sailing their convoys boldly in broad daylight, convinced they were untouchable by the Americans reigning bombs from 20,000 ft.
However, the plane gun was piloting that morning was unlike anything in the standard Air Force inventory where a bombardier should have been seated behind a glass nose.
There was only a wall of terrifying firepower.
Packed into the front of guns aircraft were heavy 50 caliber machine guns fixed to fire straight ahead, turning the medium bomber into a flying gun platform bereft of bomb sights or glass viewing panels.
The official stance from the Army Air Force was that such a modification was physically impossible and the engineers stationed at right field had dismissed the concept as completely impracticable.
They had flatly refused to authorize the changes.
But that didn’t stop Gun, a 43-year-old sixth grade dropout from Arkansas whose personal stakes in this war were unimaginably high.
With his wife and four children languishing in a Japanese prison camp for the past 14 months, Gun wasn’t interested in regulations.
He was interested in results.
In the span of the next 15 minutes, this unauthorized aircraft would annihilate the enemy convoy, sending every single transport ship to the bottom of the ocean and claiming the lives of 3,000 enemy soldiers.
It was a brutal demonstration that sometimes the most effective weapons of war are forged by men who never learned how to obey the rules.
To understand the magnitude of this shift, one must look back to the failures that preceded it.
Starting with the loss of the USS Piri in Darwin, Australia on February 19th, 1942.
When Japanese forces attacked the harbor, American B7 bombers, scrambled to 20,000 ft to engage the enemy fleet.
But despite dropping their payloads, they failed to inflict significant damage.
While the Piri took five direct hits, resulting in the deaths of 88 sailors.
The bombers returned to base with empty bays and a harsh lesson.
Dropping bombs from high altitude onto moving naval targets simply did not work.
Lieutenant James Crawford, a careful and by the book pilot with the 19th Bombardment Group, confirmed this reality on March 10th, 1942 during an engagement off the coast of New Guinea.
Crawford and his formation had executed their mission according to doctrine, climbing to a safe altitude of 25,000 ft to avoid anti-aircraft fire before targeting a convoy of four transports and two destroyers.
They lined up perfectly and released their ordinance, but the physics of freef fall were against them.
During the 30 seconds it took for the bombs to fall, a ship traveling at 15 knots would move roughly 250 yd.
Consequently, the bombs harmlessly struck the empty ocean where the ships had been moments before.
Despite making multiple passes and dropping a total of 48 bombs, Crawford’s formation failed to register a single hit.
The consequences of this inaccuracy were severe as that convoy successfully docked in New Guinea and offloaded 3,000 troops, soldiers who would go on to kill Americans for the next 6 months.
Although Crawford reported that accuracy against moving vessels from such heights was essentially zero, his commanders merely filed the paperwork and changed nothing about their tactics.
By June of 1942, the statistical evidence of this strategic failure was impossible to ignore.
B17 Flying fortresses had flown 653 sorties against Japanese shipping.
Yet they had only managed to score confirmed hits on approximately 20 vessels.
This amounted to a dismal success rate of barely 3%.
And even the recorded hits were often just near misses that caused negligible damage.
The Japanese commanders, realizing the American ineptitude, stopped fearing the bombers entirely, choosing to sail openly in clear weather while bombs fell around them like harmless rain.
While the ships sailed on unscathed, they delivered massive amounts of artillery, fuel, food, and over 40,000 fresh troops to the front lines in New Guinea.
This logistical victory for Japan meant that American ground forces were constantly outgunned and outnumbered, paying in blood for every failed air strike.
The morale among the pilots was plummeting, exemplified by Lieutenant Edward Jacobs, who after surviving his 32nd mission in May 1942, bitterly remarked to his crew chief that he had zero confirmed ship kills.
He described their efforts as nothing more than expensive fishing.
Realizing that the fault lay not with the pilot’s skill, but with the immutable laws of physics, a problem Washington seemed incapable of solving, the turning point finally arrived on August 4th, 1942, when General George Kenny landed in Australia to assume command of the fifth air force, inheriting a tactical nightmare.
His airfields were being pulverized by raids.
His fighters were vastly outnumbered.
His bombers were ineffective against naval targets.
And New Guinea was on the verge of collapse.
Kenny was a man who prioritized results over regulations.
And he desperately needed an unconventional solution to turn the tide of the war.
Just 3 days after taking command, he was introduced to Paul Gun, a man who at first glance seemed an unlikely savior.
Gun was a weathered 42-year-old with leathery skin and the rough hands of a mechanic who had spent the war thus far flying logistical transport missions in a beatup beachcraft.
While other officers dismissed Gun as too old, too reckless, and harboring too much anger for combat command, Kenny saw potential in the man’s unorthodox background.
Gun was a self-taught flyer who had served 21 years as an enlisted naval pilot, defying the norm that only officers could fly, and had even built his own airline in the Philippines from scratch.
Kenny also recognized the dangerous motivation burning inside Gun.
With his wife and four children held captive in Manila, Gun was a man with absolutely nothing left to lose.
Instead of sending him into standard combat, Kenny gave him a specific directive.
Figure out a way to sink ships.
Gun accepted the challenge immediately, revealing that he had already been formulating a radical modification for the B25 Mitchell bomber.
He had identified a fatal flaw in the aircraft’s design that everyone else accepted as standard.
The B-25 was built for level bombing from 10,000 ft carrying a bombardier in a glass nose cone to operate a bomb site that was useless against anything smaller than a city.
Gun looked at that glass nose and saw wasted real estate.
His vision was to strip out the ineffective equipment and fill the empty fuselage with offensive weaponry, specifically forward-firing machine guns that could strafe a ship’s deck during a head-on attack.
The tactical theory was to suppress and kill the enemy anti-aircraft crews with overwhelming fire before dropping a bomb at pointblank range.
However, when Gun presented this concept to the engineering officers at Townsville, he was met with ridicule.
Major William Fiser, the chief engineering officer with two decades of design experience, declared the idea impossible.
Fischer argued that adding eight machine guns along with the necessary mounting brackets and ammunition feeds would add 800 lb to the nose of the aircraft.
He insisted that such a modification would shift the center of gravity forward, making the plane noseheavy and utterly uncontrollable.
When gun challenged him, asking if he had actually run the numbers, Fiser retorted that he didn’t need to.
Basic aerodynamics dictated that altering the weight distribution would prevent the aircraft from flying properly.
Fiser labeled the project impracticable and vehemently refused Gun’s request for a wrecked B-25 to test the theory.
He cited a lack of authorization, stating that any such changes would require approval from North American Aviation in California, a bureaucratic process that could take months or even years.
Unwilling to wait, Gun walked out of Fischer’s office, determined to find another way.
That very evening, Gun located a B-25 that had been written off following a severe landing accident.
A broken machine destined for the scrap heap that no one was bothering to guard.
under the cover of darkness in a hanger at Townsville that was deserted save for himself, a flashlight and a collection of unauthorized tools he had essentially stolen.
Gun began his work.
He systematically gutted the nose section of the bomber, tearing away the glass panels, the bombardier’s seat, the bomb site mounting, and the navigation table, stacking the discarded components in a corner.
Once the compartment was stripped bare, gun realized the available volume was significantly larger than he had anticipated.
He had a cavity 3 ft deep and 4 ft wide, offering ample space to house a new arsenal.
He scavenged four heavy barrel Browning 50 caliber machine guns from the wreckage of a P40 fighter, weapons that weighed 65 lb a piece, and packed a tremendous punch.
Using a simple hacksaw to cut crude holes in the aircraft’s nose, gun mounted the heavy weapons in pairs, positioning two on top and two below, all trained strictly forward.
The physical mounting was straightforward, but the ammunition feeds presented a complex engineering puzzle.
Each gun required a dedicated belt of cartridges that had to travel from the ammo box to the receiver without twisting or jamming, even under the stress of hygiene combat maneuvers.
For three consecutive nights, Gun wrestled with the geometry of the feed shoots, his hands cut and bleeding from the sharp edges of the sheet metal while his back screamed in protest from being hunched inside the cramped fuselage.
Swarms of mosquitoes feasted on him in the tropical heat.
But he remained indifferent to the physical discomfort.
Every hour he labored on the plane was an hour his children were suffering in captivity.
And every mechanical problem he solved brought him one step closer to killing the men responsible for their imprisonment.
By the fourth night of his solitary crusade, the installation was complete with the firing solenoids wired directly to a trigger on the pilot’s control column.
The four nose-mounted 50 caliber guns could spit out 400 rounds per second, creating a cone of fire dense enough to shred anything in the aircraft’s path.
Yet, Gun was far from satisfied with the firepower.
He tapped into the B-25’s existing armament, wiring the two fuselage guns, originally synchronized to fire through the propeller arc, into the same trigger circuit.
Still finding room for more lethality, he bolted two additional guns onto each side of the fuselage just below the cockpit, housing them in streamlined fairings that protruded like ugly blisters from the aircraft’s sleek skin.
The result was terrifyingly effective.
10 machine guns firing forward simultaneously, a configuration that would later be expanded on some aircraft to 14 or even 18 guns.
A single 3-second burst from this flying battery could slam 200 lb of lead into a target, a volume of fire, exceeding what an entire infantry company could produce in a minute.
It took a week for Major Fiser to discover the extent of the unauthorized modifications, and his reaction was one of predictable fury.
He cited the violation of every maintenance regulation in the manual, insisting that the unauthorized parts and weight distribution rendered the aircraft unflinable and predicting it would crash immediately upon takeoff.
Ignoring the protests, Gun walked out to the tarmac, climbed into the cockpit, and fired up the engines while Fiser watched, grimly awaiting the inevitable disaster.
Instead of crashing, gun executed a flawless takeoff, flew the modified bomber for an hour to prove its airworthiness, and landed without a single incident.
Although Fiser never offered an apology, he ceased his interference, allowing Gun to proceed with his radical experiments.
Before fully committing the larger B-25 fleet to this new doctrine, Gun validated the concept on a smaller scale using an A20 Havoc, which he had similarly modified by stripping the bombardier compartment to install four additional nose guns for a total of eight.
On September 10th, 1942, he took this prototype into combat against Japanese positions at the Buna airfield.
approaching at a breathless 50 f feet with the tree line blurring beneath him.
Gun unleashed his arsenal on the grounded aircraft and exposed troops.
The sound of eight machine guns firing in unison was described as sounding like tearing canvas, and the devastation was immediate.
Tracers converged on a row of parked zeros, causing them to explode one by one as fuel tanks ruptured and ammunition cooked off, sending Japanese ground crews scattering in panic.
After three passes, Gun returned to base without a scratch, having destroyed seven aircraft and killed dozens of soldiers.
When General Kenny met him on the runway, Gun simply reported, “It works.” To which Kenny replied with a directive that would change the war, “Build me more, bigger.” With the validity of the gunship concept proven, gun turned his attention back to the B-25, knowing that while the guns solved the problem of suppressing anti-aircraft fire and killing cruise machine guns alone could not sink a heavy transport ship.
To achieve that, he needed to land heavy bombs.
But dropping them from altitude had already proven feutal.
The solution, Gun realized, was to not drop them from altitude at all.
He adopted a technique known as skip bombing.
A concept originally developed by the British which operated on a simple yet perilous principle.
The pilot had to fly extremely low and release the bomb close to the target, allowing it to skip across the surface of the water like a flat stone thrown across a pond.
The physics behind this tactic were sound.
A bomb released at 50 ft while traveling at 250 mph would bounce several times before slamming squarely into the ship S hull.
This trajectory targeted the vessel’s most vulnerable area, the waterline, bypassing the thick deck armor designed to deflect high altitude munitions.
The sides of these ships were barely armored, meaning a 500lb bomb striking at the water line would easily punch through into the engine room, fuel bunkers, or ammunition magazines.
Theoretically, one bomb equaled one sunk ship, but the challenge lay in getting close enough to release it without being shot out of the sky.
And that was exactly where Gun’s wall of machine gun fire came into play.
The attack profile gun perfected was a complex choreography of violence that relied on the seamless integration of strafing and skip bombing.
The protocol dictated that pilots approach their targets at an altitude of 50 ft, low enough to stay beneath the detection of radar and under the depression limits of heavy anti-aircraft guns.
The objective was to remain invisible to the ship’s gunners until the aircraft was terrifyingly close.
At a range of 1,500 yd, the pilot would initiate the assault by opening fire with every available weapon.
10, 12, or sometimes 14 machine guns would simultaneously hammer the ship’s deck, unleashing a torrent of lead designed to slaughter the anti-aircraft crews before they could even swivel their weapons.
As the tracers tore through the defenders and sent officers on the bridge, diving for cover, the bomber would close the distance to a mere 300 yd.
It was at this point blank range that the pilot would release a 500-lb bomb equipped with a 5-second delay fuse.
The munition would drop from the bay, skip across the surface of the water once or twice like a skipped stone, and slam directly into the side of the hull.
Immediately after release, the pilot had to pull up violently, barely clearing the ship’s mast by a matter of feet.
5 seconds later, safely behind the fleeing aircraft, the bomb would detonate deep inside the ship, devastating the engine rooms and magazines.
This combination was absolute in its destruction.
The machine guns neutralized the ship’s defenses, while the skip bomb delivered the killing blow.
However, the tactical execution required nerves of steel as it demanded that the pilot fly in a perfectly straight line toward an enemy vessel for 15 agonizing seconds.
During that approach, any anti-aircraft gunner who survived the initial strafing run would be presented with a stationary head-on target.
A single well-placed burst could disintegrate the bomber instantly.
Success depended entirely on the first pass.
The pilot had to kill every threat on that deck because there would be no second chance to circle back.
Gun drilled his crews relentlessly for weeks, forcing them to fly over the water until judging a 50-ft altitude became instinctive and practicing on target rafts until they could walk their fire across a simulated deck in under 3 seconds.
By February 1943, they were lethal and ready.
While the Japanese remained dangerously ignorant of the storm about to break upon them, Japanese intelligence continued to operate under the false assumption that American bombing capabilities were limited to inaccurate highaltitude runs.
Unaware that the rules of engagement had fundamentally shifted, on March 1st, 1943, a massive convoy departed from Rabol, confident in their safety.
The fleet consisted of eight transport ships carrying 6,900 troops and supplies, protected by a screen of eight destroyers, all bound for lay in New Guinea.
General Kenny, aided by American codereakers who had intercepted the convoys orders, knew exactly where the enemy would be and had 12 of Gun S modified B-25s primed for the ambush.
Gun had personally trained every single crew member involved, ensuring they were prepared for the slaughter that was to come.
While bad weather shielded the Japanese fleet for the first day of their journey, a break in the clouds on March Id allowed high alitude B7s to spot the convoy and sink one transport, leaving 15 ships remaining.
However, the morning of March 3rd brought clear skies, stripping away the weather that had protected the fleet.
The coordinated assault began at 10 Chu.
led by a wave of Australian bow fighters that swept in at mass height to suppress the destroyer’s anti-aircraft fire.
Following immediately behind them were the B-25s.
Gun piloting an aircraft in the lead wave dropped his bomber to 50 ft and locked his sights on a transport ship.
As the vessel expanded rapidly in his windscreen, he could clearly distinguish the soldiers on the deck, some of whom were pointing up at his approaching aircraft in confusion.
At 1500 yds, guns squeezed the trigger and 12 machine guns roared to life, projecting solid beams of light and lead.
The hail of bullets swept the transport’s deck from bow to stern, mowing down bodies and forcing men to throw themselves overboard as the ship’s guns fell silent.
At the critical 300yd mark, Gun released two 500-lb bombs which skipped twice off the water before impacting the hull.
He hauled back on the controls, his aircraft screaming over the ship and clearing the mast by a scant 20 ft.
As the ship’s superructure flashed past his canopy, the delay fuses expired.
Behind him, the bombs detonated, splitting the transport s hull at the waterline and sending a plume of black smoke erupting into the sky as the ship began its fatal list.
On the bridge of the Teayom Maru, Captain Sato Yoshida stood paralyzed as his understanding of the war shattered before his eyes.
For over a year, he and his fellow officers had regarded American bombers with derision, viewing the high alitude B7s as a nuisance rather than a threat.
A running joke shared among the convoy commanders who felt untouchable.
But the aircraft approaching him now were not dots in the stratosphere.
They were skimming the waves, attacking with the ferocity of fighters, but packing the punch of battleships.
Yoshida scrambled to order his gunners to engage, but the command died in his throat as the American plane opened fire first.
A deafening roar engulfed the ship, and in a split second, his forward gun crews were vaporized in a mist of blood and twisted metal.
Before he could process the carnage, the ship shuddered violently as the skip bombs detonated deep within the hull, flooding the engine room and tilting the deck beneath his feet.
The Teayom Maru, a massive transport vessel, was swallowed by the ocean in just 10 minutes.
Although Yosha survived the sinking, he spent the next 3 hours drifting in the oil sllicked water, helpless as he watched the rest of the convoy suffer the exact same fate.
The slaughter lasted a mere 15 minutes, but in that quarter of an hour, the modified B-25s achieved what the entire air force had failed to do for months.
By the time the guns went silent, all eight transport ships had been sent to the bottom along with four of the escorting destroyers, while the remaining four destroyers limped back to Rabal heavily damaged.
The human cost was staggering.
Of the 6,900 Japanese soldiers packed onto those transports, fewer than 1 to200 survived the morning.
Most drowned in the crushing hulls or were strafed in the water, a brutal testament to the effectiveness of guns design.
In stark contrast, American forces lost only 13 airmen, making the Battle of the Bismar Sea the most lopsided naval air engagement in the history of the Pacific War.
The victory was absolute, achieved by aircraft that the leading experts in aviation engineering had insisted couldn’t fly.
Back in Tokyo, the Japanese high command was left reeling, having lost more men in this single convoy disaster than in the entire attrition of Guadal Canal.
The afteraction reports were baffling to Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa and the admirals in Tokyo, who could not comprehend how an entire fleet had been erased in minutes.
Survivors spoke of terrifying new tactics.
Low-level bombing, bombs that skipped like stones, and aircraft bristling with 10 forward-firing machine guns.
Descriptions that contradicted every piece of intelligence regarding American capabilities.
They had no way of knowing that this strategic catastrophe was the result of one man’s unauthorized midnight tinkering with scavenged parts.
The defeat forced Admiral Yamamoto to issue a humiliating new directive.
There would be no more large convoys to New Guinea.
From that day forward, supplies would have to be smuggled in by submarine or small barges at night, effectively severing the lifeline to their garrisons and altering the strategic landscape of the Southwest Pacific forever.
Following the battle, General Kenny sent Gun to Washington with orders to show the top brass exactly what they had built so it could be put into mass production.
However, the meeting at Wright Field quickly turned into a bureaucratic disaster.
The engineers, stubbornly clinging to their theories, examined the specs and once again told General Henry Arnold that the modification was impracticable and the aircraft simply would not fly properly due to weight distribution.
Arnold was on the verge of cancelling the program when a telegram arrived from Kenny.
It bluntly stated that 12 of these unflyable B-25s had just sunk an entire Japanese convoy.
Faced with the undeniable reality of the combat report versus the theoretical calculations of his staff, Arnold practically chased the engineers out of his office.
Within weeks, the B-25G and B-25H Strafer models were rushed into factory production, turning guns impossible backyard modification into standard military equipment.
Paul Gun continued to fly combat missions until late 1944, earning nine Purple Hearts for wounds sustained in the air.
His ultimate victory, however, came in February 1945 when American tanks smashed through the gates of the Santo Thomas prison camp.
His family, including his 9-year-old daughter, Julie, who had incredibly served as a spy for the resistance by hiding messages in her clothes, was finally free.
When Gun reunited with them in Australia after 3 years of separation, the man who had fearlessly faced down the Japanese Navy found himself unable to speak.
After the war, Gun returned to aviation, rebuilding Philippine Airlines and flying until the very end.
On October 11th, 1957, true to his own prediction that he would die with his boots on and throttles firewalled, he was killed instantly when his beachcraft hit a tree during a storm in the Philippines.
While official history books often credit North American aviation with the engineering improvements of the Strafer, the pilots and mechanics knew the truth.
They knew it was Papy Gun, the stubborn old man who broke every rule to save his family, who truly won the war in the Pacific.
