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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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