The Tokyo raider, named for the Air Corps champion General Billy Mitchell, has done much to prove all that be said about the possibilities of an air force on the offensive. The men of our Group have come to know The Mitchell as a good sturdy airplane, always dependable and a horse for carrying bombs. It was in the Mitchell that the Group piled up several records for this theater and some for the entire U.S. Air Force. Without fanfare the B-25's were over the target day after day, blasting gaping holes in runways with one thousand ponders, destroying pile after pile of the enemy's precious stores, killing Nip soldiers in direct support of the Aussies or Yanks on the move, burning villages with incendiaries and high explosives, or reducing the Jap air force by destroying planes on the ground.

    In one month with the Mitchells. the group ran more combat sorties than any other unit in the Fifth Air Force, and dropped more bombs than any other medium outfit in a similar period of time. In January, two squadrons broke their former record by boosting the strike sorties so high that no other bomber squadron in the A.A.F. has equaled them. In that one month a squadron sent 338 airplanes out on strikes. During all this terrific continuous work maintenance and performance remained at an enviable high level. The crews had the utmost faith in their Mitchells, and justly so. In the whole of these record-breaking- operations, when 1,869 sorties were run in four months, not a plane was lost in combat although on repeated missions over Alexishafen and Matang four out of five, or six out of seven planes were shot up by the accurate ack-ack. And in all the flying by this Group in B-25's, only four men lost their lives due to the failure of the airplane.

    The Mitchell has proved a hard hitter no matter whether flying at treetop level or at 10,000 feet. The only limit to the load it will carry seems to be the number of bombs for which space can be found. In spite of the reluctance of the men to switch from B-26's to the B-25's, the Mitchells soon won the confidence of the worst diehard, and came to be their airplane in a personal sense.