Warbird Information Exchange

This rare original 16mm silent film was donated to the USS Hornet Museum by the Knobloch Family. It documents the Doolittle Raiders training in B-25's at Eglin Field in March of 1942 prior to embarking on the USS Hornet for the Raid on Tokyo.

https://youtu.be/b2zGF9FfIOo

Fantastic stuff! I hope that film gets some serious conservation and cleanup.

SN

At 1:12, appears to be 40-2344, the lead aircraft flown by Doolittle & Cole. The closing moment of the film appears to show 40-2245, a spare that did not go on the raid. It has been years since I dug into Doolittle serials, but I believe there is a source that lists the airplanes that were modified as spares but which did not make the final cut of 16 aircraft.

Ken

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"Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves."

Was any wreckage of the ones that landed in China found and retrieved?

Saville, I read a while back, maybe here, that someone went searching for parts and found a cockpit seat(or seats) or maybe it was the armor plate mounted on the seat back. I would imagine a lot of the parts were picked up by locals and sold for a little money. In my mind there still has to be quite a few of those planes that were never found. On this site a while back someone posted a picture of a B-25B fuselage found in a scrapyard in Japan. It was probably brought back from China for propaganda purposes.

While we're on the subject, the famous photo of Doolittle sitting by the wreck of his B-25 seems to indicate that the ship didn't burn (no fuel left) and was in big pieces if not still one piece.

Curious about the missing aileron fabric, though.

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45-47=-2

Bryan Moon conducted a few trips and found crash sites and collected bits. He passed away in 2015 and his website is gone, but google turns up quite a bit on what he found...

kr

Some of the Doolittle Raiders' crew members are seen in front of an air raid shelter in Wang Village.


The descendants of the Doolittle Raiders taking a group photo at their original location from the year 2012.

Below is the Facebook page dedicated to the Raiders by the "Doolittle Raid Rescue Memorial"

https://www.facebook.com/DoolittleRaidR ... ial/photos

Thanks for posting Mark.
Hope you are well friend.

I could swear there was another picture of that B-25B fuselage in that junk pile that showed the extended tail skid. Also, can anybody make out any numbers on the vertical stabilizer? From the original pictures I think the numbers would be even with the horizontal stabilizer.