7:42 A.M. — A Man, A Burning Sky, And an Idea Too Crazy to Live

At 7:42 a.m. on August 17th, 1942, Captain Paul “Pappy” Gunn crouched under the wing of a Douglas A-20 Havoc at Eagle Farm Airfield near Brisbane, watching a team of grease-covered mechanics weld four .50-caliber machine guns into the bomber’s nose.

The heat from the torch shimmered in the winter air. The smell of burned metal mixed with aviation fuel.

Gunn barely blinked.

He was 43 years old.
He’d spent 21 years in the Navy.
His wife and four children were locked inside a Japanese prison camp in Manila, starving behind barbed wire.

Every night he lay awake knowing that.

Every morning he walked onto the airfield anyway.

The Fifth Air Force was bleeding to death.
In July alone, the 3rd Attack Group had lost 11 A-20s trying to hit Japanese convoys from high altitude.

Bombardiers couldn’t hit moving ships.
Drop lower, and deck gunners shredded them.

Captain Ed Larner had watched three crews burn alive in the Coral Sea the week before.

The Japanese were reinforcing New Guinea at will.

Everyone saw a problem.

Gunn saw a flaw he could exploit.

If bombers flew low enough to skip bombs like stones…
If they blasted ships with overwhelming forward firepower…
If they stunned the gunners before the gunners could aim…

Then maybe—just maybe—those 70-year-old sailing instincts inside him could rewrite the math of the Pacific.

The idea was insane.

So was the man holding it.

Pappy Gunn — The Wrong Man in the Right War

To understand what happened next, you have to understand the man.

Paul Irvin Gunn wasn’t an engineer.
He wasn’t an academic.
He wasn’t a bomber pilot from West Point.

He was a mechanic, a sailor, a fly-by-feel technician who could tear down a radial engine to the pistons and rebuild it before lunch.

Before the war, he ran Philippine Airlines with five Beechcrafts.
When the Japanese invaded, he threw himself into the cockpit, flying evacuation missions until he was shot down, strafed, and nearly killed.

His family paid the price.
Captured. Interned. Starving.

Most men would break.

Gunn sharpened.

Every mission, every tool, every modification—he chased one impossible goal:

Make the Fifth Air Force lethal enough to reach Manila.

The manuals didn’t matter.
The regulations didn’t matter.
The engineers at Wright Field didn’t matter.

All that mattered was finding a way to kill Japanese ships faster than they could kill American aircrews.

And that brought him back to the A-20 with sparks showering across his boots.

Turning a Bomber into a Chainsaw

The A-20 had four .30-caliber guns.
Against steel hulls, they were useless—hailstones on armor plate.

Gunn needed .50s.

Big ones.
Four of them.
Firing 1,700 rounds per minute, point-blank, straight into a ship’s bridge.

He stripped the guns from wrecked P-39s and P-40s whose pilots were dead but whose guns still lived.

He built a steel frame inside the nose.
He ripped out the bombardier’s position.
He crammed the guns in until they barely fit.

The first test flight almost killed the pilot.

The A-20 nosed over like it wanted to plow into the earth.
Too heavy.
Center of gravity forward.
A flying hammerhead.

Gunn didn’t flinch.

He spent 48 hours moving equipment aft, adjusting trim tabs, shifting weight until the A-20 stopped trying to commit suicide.

The second pilot said it flew “like it was angry.”

Good.

Anger was exactly what Gunn needed.

On September 12th, 16 modified A-20s roared into Buuna at treetop height.

They destroyed 14 Japanese aircraft, silenced every anti-aircraft position, and lost zero planes.

General George Kenney asked for more.

Gunn had a bigger idea.

The Birth of the Flying Destroyer

The A-20 was too short-legged.
It couldn’t reach deep targets across the Owen Stanleys.

Gunn needed range. Space. Payload.

He needed the B-25 Mitchell.

He tore out the bombardier station.
Installed four .50-caliber guns in the nose.
Bolted four more in external cheek mounts.
Rotated the top turret forward.
Added two waist guns.

Fourteen forward-firing guns.
215 lbs of lead per second.

A bomber turned into a gunship.

Ground crews called it:

“Pappy’s Folly.”

Then they saw it fly.

Barely.

It wanted to drop out of the sky on takeoff.
Gunn held the stick like a wrestler fighting a bear.
But once airborne, the B-25 became something new:

A flying destroyer.

A commerce killer.

A weapon the Pacific had never seen.

The Battle the Engineers Said Was Impossible

Wright Field engineers studied Gunn’s mods for three days.

Their verdict: ground them immediately.

Too nose-heavy.
Too unbalanced.
Too structurally dangerous.
Too unstable under fire.

Kenney was in Washington when the message arrived.

He walked into General Hap Arnold’s office, where the engineers were ready to testify against the modifications.

Kenney cut them off:

“Twelve of the ‘impossible’ airplanes just destroyed a Japanese convoy in the Bismar Sea.”

Arnold stared.

Kenney continued:

“Every transport sunk. Every destroyer hit. Sixty more strafers already in production.”

Arnold didn’t wait.

He threw the engineers out of his office.

The myth ended.

The legend began.

The Bismar Sea — Low Altitude Hell

February 28th, 1943.
Intercepted Japanese messages:
Eight transports.
Eight destroyers.
Nearly 7,000 troops en route to Lae.

The Fifth Air Force had 72 hours to stop them.

High-altitude bombing had already failed.

Clouds. Monsoon rain. No visibility.

The Japanese thought they were safe.

At 6:30 a.m. on March 3rd, 137 Allied aircraft formed over Cape Ward Hunt.

The plan:

B-17s bomb from above to draw fire

B-25 strafers come in at 50 feet, guns blazing

Skip bombs dropped at point-blank range

A-20s clean up survivors

P-38s handle fighters

Larner led the first wave.

Twelve B-25s wide, a wall of steel 300 yards across.

Fourteen guns per aircraft.
168 forward-firing guns in formation.

The Japanese saw them too late.

The 50-caliber streams tore across the water, walked up the hulls, shredded anti-aircraft crews before they could reach their triggers.

Bombs skipped into ships like thrown stones.

Kyokusei Maru sank in 40 minutes.

Teiyo Maru broke in half.
Survivors drowned under the weight of their own packs.

Destroyers burned.
Transports capsized.
The sea turned black with oil and bodies.

By nightfall:

8 transports sunk

4 destroyers sunk

Over 5,000 Japanese troops dead

Allied losses: four aircraft

General MacArthur called it:

“One of the most complete and annihilating combats of all time.”

The battle turned the tide of New Guinea.

Pappy Gunn’s “impossible gunship” had done it.

Factory vs. Field — And the Man Who Knew Both

Arnold ordered Gunn to California.

North American Aviation needed to mass-produce strafers.

Gunn didn’t want to go.

His family was still starving in Manila.
He wanted to fly missions.
Every sortie took him one mile closer to them.

Kenney made it an order.

At the factory, engineers asked about stress calculations.

Gunn said he didn’t have any.

Wind tunnel tests?

None.

Center of gravity?

He pointed to the place he’d moved radios to fix it.

Muzzle blast peeling the fuselage?

He showed them the blast tubes he welded.

Every question they asked, he answered with a scar.

In two weeks, engineers turned his field mods into production blueprints.

On May 10th, 1943, the first B-25G Strafer rolled off the line.

Four .50s in the nose.
Four in the cheeks.
Top turret forward.
A 75 mm cannon capable of holing a destroyer.

It recoiled four feet every shot.

Gunn smiled.

It was perfect.

The Black Death of the Pacific

Across 1943–44, strafers became the nightmare of the Japanese Navy.

They hunted barges at Finchhafen.
Destroyed convoys at Wiwak.
Hit Balikpapan’s refineries.
Attacked Rabual with 59 aircraft at mast height through phosphorus smoke.

In just eight months of 1944:

947 Japanese aircraft destroyed on the ground

273 ships sunk

38,000 Japanese soldiers killed

The Japanese called the B-25s:

“The Black Death.”

They weren’t wrong.

Manila — The Only Mission That Mattered

Pappy’s war was never about ships.

It was about Manila.

On November 27, 1944, Japanese bombers hit Tacloban Airfield.

Gunn was in the operations tent when shrapnel tore into his leg and shoulder.

He tried to stand.

He collapsed after 30 feet.

Doctors told him:

“Six months before you can fly again.”

Pappy said:

“I’ll fly tomorrow.”

He didn’t.

But when Manila was liberated on February 3rd, 1945, Pappy—bandaged, limping, bleeding—flew there anyway.

He found his family in a makeshift hospital.

His wife weighed 89 pounds.
His daughter: 63.
His son had malaria.

She didn’t recognize him at first.

Then he said her name.

Three years vanished.

He stayed four hours.

Then he flew back to war.

Legacy of the Impossible Machine

By war’s end:

9,600 B-25s built

Nearly 5,000 were strafers

Over 800 Japanese ships sunk

More than 2,000 aircraft destroyed

85,000 enemy soldiers killed

And all from handwritten pencil sketches made under a bomber wing in Brisbane.

Gunn retired in 1948 as a full colonel.

He rebuilt Philippine Airlines into an international carrier.

He died in a storm over the Cordillera Mountains in 1957.

He was 57.

The Philippine government gave him a state funeral.

General Kenney wrote:

“Pappy Gunn was the most valuable man in the Fifth Air Force.”

He wasn’t wrong.

When a Mechanic Beat an Empire

The story of Pappy Gunn is not just the story of a gunship.

It’s the story of a man who refused to accept the rules.

The engineers said his design wouldn’t fly.
The manuals said bombers don’t strafe.
The strategists said the Bismar Sea convoy couldn’t be stopped.
The war said he couldn’t reach Manila.
The doctors said he wouldn’t walk for months.

He proved all of them wrong.

He turned a bomber into a destroyer.
Turned scrap metal into salvation.
Turned his grief into firepower.

He didn’t save ships.

He saved lives.
His family’s.
His men’s.
And thousands who never knew his name.