The Doolittle raid on Japan

[The Aviator]

Now we may get a bit of balance.

Hmm. Pretty scarce birds over at the other place 'ol mate.

[Kyt]

Originally Posted by spidge

I let my daughter eat sushi for Christ's sake.

That's nothing to do with the Japanese - that's just child cruelty. Raw fish! Yuk!

[The Aviator]

Yeah and a lot of seafood are eaten while it is still alive. Surprise.

[Adrian Roberts]

Ok, back to the serious stuff, another boring question from Adrian:

The site is great on the men involved, but unless I haven't looked hard enough, I couldn't find much on the aircraft.

What did they carry in the way of gun armament? I believe that normally a B25B carried a dorsal and ventral turret with twin fifties, and a 0.30 in the nose. I can see dorsal turret in the photos: were the ventral turrets retained or were they removed to save weight? One of the crew was designated an engineer/gunner so presumably there must have been some guns retained.

Given that weight reduction was important, both for max range and to get off the flight deck, I'm a little surprised that they needed two pilots and a separate navigator and bombardier. Can any of you elaborate on why this was necessary?

[Antipodean Andy]

AR, I thought they were unarmed other than the black painted broomsticks in the tail! Looking at the pic posted by TA, it would appear the dorsal turret may have been the one with the broomsticks as there does not appear to be a tail position.

[The Aviator]

I had to look back to see what the question was about Adrian. I thought it was seafood.

The aircraft were modified by:

Removal of the lower gun turret
Installation of de-icers and anti-icers
Steel blast plates mounted on the fuselage around the upper turret
Removal of the liaison radio set
Installation of three additional fuel tanks and support mounts in the bomb bay, crawl way and lower turret area to increase fuel capacity from 646 to 1,141 U.S. gallons (2445 to 4319 litres)
Mock gun barrels installed in the tail cone, and
Replacement of their Norden bombsight with a makeshift aiming sight.
Two bombers also had cameras mounted to record the results of bombing.


On 1 April, the 16 modified bombers, their five-man crews and Army maintenance personnel were loaded onto the USS Hornet at Alameda. Each aircraft carried four specially-constructed 500-pound (225 kg) bombs. Three of these were high-explosive munitions, while the other was a bundle of incendiaries. The incendiaries were long tubes, wrapped together in order to be carried in the bomb bay, but designed to separate and scatter over a wide area after release. To decrease weight (and thus increase range), the bombers' armament was reduced. Each bomber launched with two .50-calibre (12.7 mm) machine guns in an upper turret and a .30-caliber (7.6 mm) machine gun in the nose. Two wooden, simulated gun barrels mounted in the tail cones were intended to discourage Japanese air attacks from that direction, and were cited afterward by Doolittle as being particularly effective.

In the picture below, Navy Capt. Marc A. Mitscher, skipper of the USS Hornet chats with Lt. Col. James Doolittle and the boys before takeoff.

[Kyt]

Another site on the raid:

Doolittle

Has a audio commentary by Doolittle