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B-25B Mitchell Doolittle Super Elite 1/41
SKU: AB25JSTS
The Doolittle Raid on April 18, 1942 was the first air raid by the United States to strike the Japanese home island of Honshu during World War II. The mission was notable since it was the only time in U.S. military history that United States Army Air Forces bombers were launched from a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier on a combat mission. The Doolittle Raid was planned and led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, a famous civilian aviator and aeronautical engineer before the war. After the raid was approved, 24 operational B-25B Mitchell medium bombers were detached from the 17th Bomb Group (Medium), based at Lexington County Army Air Base, Columbia, South Carolina, and sent to the Mid-Continent Airlines modification center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for installation of additional fuel tanks. On March 25, the 22 remaining B-25s took off from Eglin for McClellan Field, California. They arrived on 27 March for final modifications at the Sacramento Air Depot. A total of 16 B-25s were subsequently flown to Alameda, California, on March 31. On the morning of April 18, at a distance of about 650 miles (1,050 km) from Japan, the task force was sighted and spotted by a Japanese picket boat No. 23 Nitto Maru which radioed an attack warning to Japan. Although the boat was destroyed by gunfire from the cruiser USS Nashville, Doolittle and Hornet skipper Captain Marc Mitscher decided to launch the B-25s immediately, at about ten hours and 170 miles (275 km) farther from Japan than planned. The aircraft began arriving over Japan about noon and bombed ten military and industrial targets at Tokyo, two at Yokohama, and one each at Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka. Although some B-25s encountered light anti-aircraft fire and a few enemy fighters over Japan, no bomber was shot down or severely damaged. Fifteen of the 16 aircraft then proceeded southwest along the southern coast of Japan and across the East China Sea towards eastern China, where recovery bases supposedly awaited them. One B-25, extremely low on fuel, headed instead for the closer land mass of Russia. The raiders faced several unforeseen challenges during their flight to China: night was approaching, the aircraft were running low on fuel, and the weather was rapidly deteriorating. As a result of these problems, the crews realized they would probably not be able to reach their intended bases in China, leaving them the option of either bailing out over eastern China or crash landing along the Chinese coast. Fifteen aircraft reached the China coast after 13 hours of flight and crash landed or bailed out; the crew who flew to Russia landed 40 miles (65 km) beyond Vladivostok, where their B-25 was confiscated and the crew interned until they managed to escape through Iran in 1943. It was the longest combat mission ever flown by the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, averaging approximately 2,250 miles (3,600 km). Following the Doolittle Raid, most of the B-25 crews that came down in China eventually made it to safety with the help of Chinese civilians and soldiers. Japanese propaganda ridiculed the raid, calling it the "Do-nothing Raid", and boasted that several B-25s had been shot down. In fact, none had been lost to enemy action. The Doolittle Raid was the subject of two 1944 feature films. The most notable fictionalized version of the Doolittle Raid in 2001 film, the Pearl Harbor presented that the attack portrayed as having destroyed an entire industrial area against withering antiaircraft gunfire and with many other major technical inaccuracies. ********************************************* Models with SKU numbers ending in "R" are hand crafted of resin material and those ending in "P" are plastic (EXCEPTION: ALL MODELS WITH A HYPHENATED SKU, LIKE AM231-BR, ARE MAHOGANY). All others are hand carved in mahogany. They are then hand painted and detailed by our talented artists. All dimensions given are in inches. This online catalog does not reflect realtime inventory.
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