The Mitchell groaned as Elias shoved the throttles forward. The Japanese fighters dived, their tracers stitching lines across the wings. A medium bomber's greatest defense was its speed and its ability to hug the terrain. Elias banked hard, threading the bomber through a narrow river valley, the wingtips nearly clipping the ancient trees.
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. Medium Bombers of World War 2
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. The Mitchell groaned as Elias shoved the throttles forward
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. Elias banked hard, threading the bomber through a
"Twenty minutes out," Elias crackled over the intercom. "Gunners, check your belts."
Unlike the heavy B-17s that droned at high altitudes, the Mitchell lived in the "dead zone." They flew fast and low—so low the salt spray sometimes smeared the cockpit glass.
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!"