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Billy Mitchell's Bombsight: Shaping the B-25 Mitchell Bomber

Book Two of "Unexpected Histories"

Edward W. Barnard

How did a court‑martialed general, a barnstorming airplane builder, a Russian ace, a mathematician, a Hollywood star, and a desperate father help create the B‑25 Mitchell bomber?  

Billy Mitchell’s Bombsight: Shaping the B‑25 Mitchell Bomber uncovers the hidden connections behind America’s most versatile WWII aircraft, linking WWI battles, failed naval doctrine, secret codebreaking, early aviation pioneers, and the birth of modern aircraft manufacturing.  

This is the real story of how innovation happens under pressure.

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About

About

About the Book

Billy Mitchell’s Bombsight: Shaping the B‑25 Mitchell Bomber reveals how a web of unlikely people, technologies, and crises shaped one of the most important aircraft of World War II. Told through deeply human stories, from Billy Mitchell’s courtroom battles to Glenn Martin’s barnstorming, from turbo‑superchargers on Pike’s Peak to Pappy Gunn’s desperate attempts to rescue his family, this book shows how innovation actually happens inside pressure, politics, and chaos.

You will learn:

  • How American air power was born, not in theory but in the messy realities of WWI  
  • Why the battleship‑versus‑airplane debate lasted decades, and how it was finally settled  
  • How bombsights, gyroscopes, propellers, and superchargers combined into one coherent technological leap  
  • How industry pioneers (Douglas, Kindelberger, Atwood) invented modern aircraft manufacturing  
  • How combat experience in the Pacific transformed the B‑25 into history’s first true gunship  
  • Why individual insight, from engineers, test pilots, codebreakers, and one determined father, mattered more than bureaucracy

This second volume of Unexpected Histories is for readers who want more than military history. It’s for anyone who wants to understand how people solve impossible problems, how technology evolves under constraint, and how the path to the modern world was shaped by visionaries the public barely remembers.

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About the Author

Edward W. Barnard

Edward W. Barnard brings unique implementation expertise from programming Cray supercomputers at the hardware level, debugging systems at classified facilities, and solving critical Y2K infrastructure problems. His 20+ years at Cray Research included hands-on work with assembly language, operating systems, and I/O subsystems. He has published over 100 technical articles, helping developers implement solutions to complex problems. His cross-domain experience, from NSA troubleshooting to Saudi Aramco installations, provides practical insights into applying advanced problem-solving techniques across diverse technical environments. 

Edward has transferred his skill of bare-metal programming the Cray I/O Subsystem (with only 131,072 bytes of local memory) to novel ways of managing Large Language Model token context windows, unlocking capabilities not yet taught in AI literature. When a skill dormant for 35 years becomes suddenly relevant again, he calls this The Time Travel Pattern.

Leanpub Podcast

Episode 317

An Interview with Edward W. Barnard

Contents

Table of Contents

Part I: The Odd Beginning of American Air Power

Chapter 1. John Pershing: How American Air Power Began

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. American Expeditionary Force
  3. America’s First and Second Armies
  4. Chief of the Air Service
  5. Formal Turnover
  6. Distinguished Service Cross
  7. Summary
  8. Timeline

Chapter 2. William Sowden Sims: Underwater Explosions Scare Submarines

  1. Why Include This Chapter?

Chapter 3. Eddie Rickenbacker: Fighting the Red Baron and Hermann Göring

  1. Why Include This Chapter?

Chapter 4: Billy Mitchell: The Air Service Over France

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Part II: Great Navies Want Bigger Guns

Chapter 5. Isoroku Yamamoto: Big Ships, Big Guns

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Five Powers
  3. Fleet Battles
  4. Air Power
  5. Ostfriesland
  6. Combined Fleet Commander-in-Chief
  7. Summary
  8. Timeline

Chapter 6. Heihachirō Tōgō: Port Arthur and Tsushima

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Imperial Japanese Navy

Chapter 7. John Jellicoe: Room 40 and Jutland

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Battle of Jutland
  3. Part III: How to Sink a Battleship

Chapter 8. First Provisional Air Brigade

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Aerial Bomb Tests
  3. Glenn Martin, Observer
  4. General Mitchell’s Version
  5. Great Transcontinental Air Race
  6. Lessons Learned
  7. Sperry Gyroscope
  8. Night Practice
  9. Sea Sick

Chapter 9. Sanford Moss and the Man Who Fell Six Miles

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Sanford Moss
  3. General Electric Turbo Supercharger
  4. The Man Who Fell Six Miles
  5. Summary
  6. Timeline

Chapter 10. Alexander de Seversky: From Billy Mitchell’s Bombsight to Walt Disney’s Propaganda

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Alexander de Seversky
  3. Victory Through Air Power
  4. Part IV: Shaping the Future

Chapter 11. Lawrence Sperry and Dorothy Rice: Automatic Pilots

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Lawrence Sperry

Chapter 12. Frank Caldwell: Gearshift of the Air

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Frank Caldwell

Chapter 13. Hedy Lamarr: Hermann Göring and German Aircraft Production

  1. Why Include This Chapter?

Chapter 14. Jimmy Doolittle: Air Power Theory Becomes Practice

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Departing the Hornet
  3. Returning Home
  4. Hap Arnold
  5. European Theater
  6. Pacific Theater
  7. Technology Advances
  8. Conclusion
  9. Timeline
  10. Part V: The Builders

Chapter 15. Glenn Martin: Barnstormer and Airplane Builder

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Glenn Martin
  3. The Boy Engineer
  4. This Conversation Did Not Happen–Yet
  5. Look West, Young Man!
  6. Boom Town
  7. Homestead Act
  8. Box Kites
  9. Rapid Opening
  10. From Boom to Bust

Chapter 16. Erik Nelson: First World Flight Proves Douglas Cruisers

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. World Flight Authorization
  3. Additional Bombing Tests

Chapter 17. Donald Douglas: The Incredible DC-1 and DC-3

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Donald Douglas

Chapter 18. Dutch Kindelberger and Lee Atwood: Inventing Modern Aircraft Production

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Reaching Back in Time
  3. Dutch Kindelberger
  4. German Production
  5. Ernst Udet
  6. Naming the “Mitchell” Bomber
  7. Lee Atwood
  8. Design to Build
  9. North American Aviation

Chapter 19. William Boeing Departs: Congressional Punishment of Aircraft Manufacturers

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Congressional Punishment of Aircraft Industry
  3. Commercial Market
  4. Design Ownership
  5. Speculation
  6. No Remorse
  7. Summary
  8. Timeline
  9. Part VI: Naval Doctrine Meets Air Power

Chapter 20. Big Jim Davies: The Royce Raid

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Philippines Air Strike
  3. Summary
  4. Timeline

Chapter 21. Joseph Rochefort: Midway’s Impact

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Related to Midway
  3. The Codebreakers
  4. B-25 and B-29 Manufacturing Swap
  5. Summary
  6. Timeline

Chapter 22. Elizebeth and William Friedman: The Codebreakers

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Samuel Snyder
  3. Conclusion
  4. Timeline

Chapter 23. Khubilai Khan: Divine Wind

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Divine Wind

Chapter 24. Homer Lea: Explaining Pearl Harbor in 1909

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Homer Lea

Chapter 25. Akiyama Saneyuki: Developing Naval Doctrine

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Imperial Japanese Navy
  3. Summary
  4. Timeline
  5. Part VII: Insurmountable Distance

Chapter 26. Polly Gunn: Santo Tomas Internment

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Pappy Gunn
  3. Gunns in Manila
  4. Polly Gunn
  5. Prison Camp
  6. Rescue
  7. December 7-8, 1941

Chapter 27. Pappy Gunn: B-25 as Strafer

  1. Why Include This Chapter?
  2. Pappy Gunn
  3. Jack Fox
  4. Pacific Theater
  5. Gunship
  6. Pappy Gunn

Epilogue. B-25 Flyover for Doolittle Funeral

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