Unauthorized Firepower: How a Rebel Engineer Stuffed Illegal Guns into a B-25, Broke Every Rule in the Manual, and Helped Turn a Single Mission into a Floating Grave for 3,000 Men

By the time Captain Jack “Moose” Mallory saw the new nose on the B-25, half the maintenance crew was already pretending not to be involved.

They scattered like pigeons when they heard him coming—toolboxes thudding shut, oily rags disappearing into pockets, eyes suddenly fascinated by clipboards. Only one man stayed where he was, balanced on the top of a rolling stand, a wrench in his hand and a cigarette dangling from his lip.

Chief Warrant Officer Ray Gunn didn’t bother to look back.

“You’re just in time,” Ray said. “You’re gonna love this.”

Jack stopped at the edge of the hardstand, boots sinking slightly into the sandy soil of the New Guinea strip. The midmorning heat pressed down even through the thin cloud cover. The air smelled of oil, exhaust, and the faint rot of jungle that never quite stayed outside the wire.

“What,” Jack said slowly, “did you do to my airplane?”

The B-25 sitting in front of him still looked roughly like a Mitchell—with its mid-mounted wing, twin engines, and broad tail. But the nose, where there should have been a glazed greenhouse and the delicate housing for a Norden bombsight, was now a blunt, solid snout of sheet metal and protruding barrels.

Six protruding barrels.

“You like it?” Ray asked, hopping down. “I relocated some hardware.”

Jack stared.

“You ripped out the bombsight,” he said. “And the bombardier’s position.”

“Yup,” Ray said cheerfully. “Dead weight for what we do down here, Moose. You know that as well as I do.”

He ran a grease-stained hand along the new nose, patting it like a proud parent.

“Four fixed fifties right here,” he said, gesturing, “plus the two from the original cheek mounts. That’s six forward. Add your top turret if you swing it forward and the waist guns if the boys lean out, and you’ve got a flying buzz saw.”

Jack took a slow breath.

“You altered the armament configuration of a U.S. Army Air Forces medium bomber,” he said. “Without a blueprint. Without a directive. Without telling me.”

Ray shrugged.

“I’m telling you now,” he said. “That almost counts.”

Jack folded his arms.

“Ray,” he said, in the tone he reserved for pilots about to do something truly dumb, “this is illegal.”

Ray’s eyebrows went up.

“Illegal?” he repeated. “According to who? The manual we left back in Kansas? The men in Washington who still think we’re flying neat little box formations at twenty thousand feet?”

He waved a hand at the jungle around them.

“Look around you,” he said. “We’re not in those training films anymore. Down here, we fly at mast height. We hit barges and airstrips and trucks on goat paths. You’ve seen what happens when we try to do that with glass noses and prayer.”

Jack had seen.

He’d flown low-level runs over Japanese supply barges with standard B-25s. He’d felt the fragile glass around the bombardier shudder when anti-aircraft fire walked its way toward the nose. He’d seen bombs skip past targets on badly timed drops.

He’d also watched Japanese transports limp away because they’d only had one pass, one narrow cone of fire.

“Even if I wanted to pretend this is okay,” Jack said, “Group won’t. They’ll throw a fit when they see you’ve turned their Mitchell into Frankenstein.”

“They’ll throw a party when they see what it does to a convoy,” Ray replied.

He jerked his chin toward the modifications.

“Look,” he said, “you know this as well as I do. The Japanese run their supplies in tight columns of ships. The brass back at Fifth Air Force wants to stop those convoys. But they keep thinking in terms of altitude—level bombing, pretty patterns. We need to get down where their captains can see the whites of our eyes. We need volume of fire in the nose, not a pretty glass Cathedral for a bombsight.”

Jack’s jaw tightened.

“Me and my copilot sit behind that ‘Cathedral’,” he said. “We like not getting sprayed with glass when somebody hits us.”

Ray nodded.

“Exactly,” he said. “Which is why I took it off. Less glass to shatter, more metal to soak up whatever they throw at us. They can’t hit what hits them first, Moose. Those transports are gonna be packed with troops. You hose the decks with eight fifties on the way in and then drop a couple of skip bombs—”

“Skip bombs?” Jack cut in. “You’ve been reading those Royal Air Force pamphlets again.”

“And stealing their good ideas,” Ray said, unbothered. “We come in low, drop the bombs at just the right distance, they skip along the water like flat stones and smash into the hulls. Combine that with this nose full of guns, and a convoy becomes a field day. For us. A nightmare for them.”

Jack looked at the guns again.

They looked back, dull and patient.

“This violates at least twelve mechanical orders,” he said.

“Fourteen,” Ray corrected. “I counted. But those orders were written by people who’ve never seen a Japanese destroyer from fifty feet off the water.”

He flicked ash off the end of his cigarette.

“You want to keep losing crews to some idea of ‘proper configuration,’ be my guest,” he said. “Me, I’m in the business of sending you home in one piece. This,” he tapped the nose, the metal ringing softly, “is how we do that.”

Before Jack could answer, a voice behind them barked, “What in the blessed name of Ordnance is that?”

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Kincaid, commander of the 73rd Bomb Squadron, strode up, his cap set at an angle, a stack of forms under his arm.

His gaze swept over the modified nose, and the color in his face rose two shades.

“Gunn,” he said. “Tell me this is a joke.”

Ray smiled.

“Surprise, sir,” he said. “We brought the war to your front door.”

Kincaid rounded on him.

“You took a government asset,” he said slowly, as if to a mischievous child, “a perfectly serviceable medium bomber, and you… conjured this out of it. Without authorization. Without… anything.”

He circled the plane, counting barrels with his eyes.

“How many is that?” he demanded.

“Six in the nose,” Ray said. “Plus existing positions.”

“Six,” Kincaid repeated. “You turned the front of my airplane into a porcupine.”

“Yes, sir,” Ray said. “On purpose.”

Kincaid stared at Jack.

“You knew about this?” he asked.

Jack lifted his hands.

“I came out here to see why my bombardier was suddenly out of a job,” he said. “I’m still catching up.”

Kincaid glared at Ray again.

“This violates design specifications, weight limits, center-of-gravity charts, and common sense,” he said. “If Materiel Command hears about this, they’ll have my hide, your head, and probably Mallory’s wings for being in the same zip code as this… ultraviolent science project.”

Ray’s jaw tightened.

“With respect, sir,” he said, “Materiel Command is six thousand miles away. The Japanese are eighty.”

Kincaid’s nostrils flared.

“Don’t quote distances at me,” he snapped. “I’ve flown missions too, Chief. I know the range.”

“Then you know what it’s like to make one run over a convoy and have to break off because your bombs all went long and your nose gunner has two fifties with limited traverse,” Ray fired back.

He gestured toward the jungle.

“You know what it’s like to watch their ships keep steaming toward Lae and Salamaua, offloading three thousand fresh troops to dig in against our boys,” he said. “You want to stop that, or you want to keep writing stern letters about nonstandard wiring?”

There was a moment, purely human, where something like agreement flickered in Kincaid’s tired eyes.

Then the officer in him reasserted itself.

“I want you not to get court-martialed,” he said. “Which is exactly what could happen if this goes sideways.”

He turned to Jack.

“And I want my pilots not to fly untested death traps,” he added. “You hit a chop on takeoff and that nose will shake like a tin can full of nails. You get into a dive too steep and your center of gravity will shift forward. You know what that means? You’re gonna fight your own plane as much as the enemy.”

Jack thought about that.

He also thought about the last convoy they’d hit with standard B-25s and the number of ships that had escaped into the afternoon rain squalls.

“Let us test it,” he said. “One mission. Limited. We’ll stick to the edge of the formation. If it flies like a pig, we come back, you yell at Ray, and we put the glass back on. If it works…”

He let the sentence hang.

Kincaid sighed.

“You are both going to get me killed,” he said.

“You keep sending us out in level bomb runs against maneuvering ships, we’ll get you killed by association,” Ray said. “This way, at least, we have a shot at making sure they don’t bring those three thousand men to the next beach.”

Kincaid flinched at the number.

Three thousand.

He’d seen the estimates from intelligence about the Japanese convoys supplying Lae.

“Three thousand troops per convoy,” the G-2 officer had said, tapping at photo maps with a pointer. “We sink one of these, we don’t just cut off ammunition. We drown a whole regiment.”

“Drown” was not a word they used in briefings.

“Neutralize,” yes.

“Prevent reinforcement,” yes.

G-2 had looked at the grainy photographs of the ships and said, very softly, “There are men on those decks.”

Now, standing under the Pacific sun, Kincaid saw those photographs behind his eyes.

“Illegal,” he said again, half to himself.

“Effective,” Ray replied.

“Potentially,” Jack added.

Kincaid glared at both of them.

“I want a full report,” he said. “Structural, weapons, navigation. And if this nose falls off in midair, I will personally haunt you from whatever cloud I end up on.”

“Yes, sir,” Ray and Jack said together.

Kincaid jabbed a finger at the plane.

“And for God’s sake, don’t talk to press about it,” he snapped. “Last thing we need is some stateside paper running a headline about our ‘pirate bombers.’”

Ray grinned.

“What if we call it a field modification?” he asked. “Sounds more official.”

“It sounds less illegal,” Kincaid conceded. “Which, for now, will have to do.”

He stalked off, muttering something about paperwork.

Jack watched him go.

“We’re really doing this,” he said.

Ray nodded.

“We were always doing this,” he said. “You just needed a nose to make it real.”

They called it “Project Porcupine” in the squadron.

Behind Ray’s back, the younger pilots called it “Ray’s Illegal Nose.”

They practiced in the days before the convoy.

At first, they took the modified B-25 out with empty ammo cans, getting used to the weight and feel. The front end felt different—heavier, yes, but also more stable once they got the trim right.

“This thing wants to stay down on the deck,” Jack’s copilot, Lieutenant Cole, said after one run. “Like it’s eager.”

“That’s because it’s finally built for what we’re asking it to do,” Ray said over the interphone from his seat in the top turret. “The factory version was built for some other war.”

They flew low over the water between dogtooth shoals and coral reefs, practicing the approach.

“Here’s how it goes,” Ray briefed them in the tent the night before their first real test. “We come in at about two hundred and fifty feet. You keep it level. Nose up even a hair and you buy yourself a wingtip in the drink. You pick your target ship—transport, not escort—and you line up.”

He used a stub of chalk to draw on the blackboard.

“First pass, you rake the decks,” he said. “Full burst with the nose guns. You’re not trying to hit individuals—you’re trying to strip their anti-air fire and keep heads down. Then, as you close, you drop your bombs—one-second interval, low fuse. Let ‘em skip. You don’t pull off until you see the splash at the bow.”

Someone shifted uneasily.

Lieutenant Harris, a solidly built pilot from Iowa with a face that rarely revealed more than mild irritation, raised a hand.

“Questions?” Ray prompted.

“Yeah,” Harris said. “What about what’s on the decks?”

“Meaning?” Ray asked.

“Meaning people,” Harris said.

There was a murmur around the tent.

“We’re talking about spraying a ship full of… guys like us with eight fifties before we even drop,” Harris said. “At that height, at that speed… We’re not just neutralizing guns. We’re… you know.”

He didn’t say “killing.”

He didn’t have to.

Ray’s jaw tightened.

“There will be gun crews,” he said. “If you don’t neutralize them, they neutralize you. You want to make this a duel at a hundred yards with their twenty-fives? Be my guest.”

Harris shook his head.

“You know that’s not what I mean,” he said. “We’re not just hitting guns. We’re raking everything. We’re going to make that water… busy.”

The tent seemed to shrink.

“You know what these convoys are carrying,” Jack said quietly. “Troops. For Lae. For Salamaua. For Buna. Men who will kill our guys on those beaches. The faster we put them on the bottom out here, the fewer we fight in the jungle.”

Harris looked at him.

“And after they’re in the water?” he asked. “What then? We come around again? Hit… rafts?”

Ray exhaled sharply.

“Nobody is talking about strafing survivors,” he said. “Our task is to sink ships. That’s ugly enough. Let’s not invent extra ugliness.”

Harris’s mouth pressed into a line.

“You sure Command sees it that way?” he asked. “Or will they decide later that anything floating is fair game, the way some guys already talk?”

“You want to sit this one out?” Jack asked.

Harris hesitated.

“No,” he said finally. “I want to hit those ships. I want to make sure my brother doesn’t have to fight whoever’s on them.”

He swallowed.

“I also want to be able to sleep later,” he added. “So maybe we keep a clear line in our own heads, even if intel writes someone’s briefing in statistics.”

Ray met his eyes.

“I can’t promise you math that feels good,” he said. “All I can promise is that this gets us closer to stopping those three thousand men from showing up where our boys are.”

He tapped the chalk on the board.

“We do our job,” he said. “We leave the numbers to the men with pens. And we remember there were faces under those helmets, even if we never saw them clearly.”

Harris snorted.

“Comforting,” he said.

“It’s war,” Jack replied. “Nothing about it is comforting. But better we think about it now than after.”

The tent fell quiet.

Outside, rain hammered the canvas.

The convoy came two days later.

“Eight transports, four destroyers,” G-2 said, tapping the map in the briefing tent. “Estimated three thousand troops, plus equipment. Approaching from Rabaul to Lae. They think the heavy weather will keep our big boys grounded.”

He smiled grimly.

“They forgot about you lowlifes,” he said.

There was a ripple of laughter.

Jack studied the map. The convoy was strung out along a rough line, making about eight knots. Enough time for them to get into position.

“We’ll go in waves,” Kincaid said. “First wave—B-25s with the field modifications.” He didn’t use the word “illegal.” “Second wave—standard Mitchells. Third—Beaufighters and A-20s. We keep the pressure constant. They won’t know where to point their guns.”

He looked at the front row.

“Mallory,” he said. “You lead the first nose-job flight.”

Jack’s stomach clenched and lifted at once.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Harris muttered something that sounded like “of course.”

Ray, sitting at the edge of the seating, gave Jack a quick nod.

“You hit those bastards hard,” Kincaid said. “Make those guns earn their keep. We don’t get a lot of chances like this.”

In the corner of the tent, a young chaplain shifted, his hand tightening around his Bible.

“Remember,” Kincaid added, “you’re not just hitting ships. You’re hitting the men who’d be shooting at our infantry next week if they get through.”

His voice faded into the background hum as the pre-mission rituals took over: checking maps, studying silhouettes, memorizing call signs.

Jack sat on his cot later, pulling on his boots, thinking of ships full of men he’d never meet.

“Three thousand,” he murmured.

Cole looked up.

“Yeah,” he said. “You gonna count ‘em one by one?”

“Somebody will,” Jack said. “In an office. With a pencil.”

Cole grunted.

“Leave the pencils to them,” he said. “We got enough to do.”

Lieutenant Hiroshi Tanaka had never liked convoys.

He trusted ships, within reason. He trusted the sea, cautiously. He trusted American pilots not at all.

But the war had narrowed his options.

He stood on the bridge wing of the transport Hokkai Maru, collar turned up against the spray, watching the low gray line of the New Guinea coast on the horizon.

The convoy plowed through the choppy water in staggered formation—transports heavy with soldiers and stores in the center, destroyers and smaller escorts on the flanks.

Below him, the deck swarmed with khaki-clad soldiers, their helmets and gear making them look like rows of nearly identical shapes. Some smoked. Some played cards. Some stared at the sea with the blankness of men who had gotten used to being carried from one danger to another.

Hiroshi listened to the creak of steel and the low hum of engines and tried not to think about how visible they must look from the air.

He’d seen what American and Australian aircraft could do.

He had seen, from another ship’s rail, a sister transport stagger under bombs, flame shoot from its holds, men leap into oil-slick water.

He had also seen American crews break off after the first pass, circling back higher to drop more bombs.

He had not yet seen what was coming today.

“Enemy aircraft?” he asked the signalman, eyes still scanning the clouds.

“None spotted, Lieutenant,” the man replied. “But radio reports are… uncertain.”

“Radio reports are always uncertain,” Hiroshi said.

He thought of his wife in Yokohama, of the photograph of his son in his wallet, of the letter he’d written last night that he might never mail.

He glanced down again at the soldiers.

Were some of them thinking of their own wives, their own letters, their own lists of regrets?

“Eyes open,” he said. “Notify me of any change.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hiroshi checked the horizon once more, then stepped back into the shadow of the bridge as a gust of spray hit the rail.

He prayed—quickly, awkwardly—that American pilots had found something else to do today.

They had not.

Jack saw the convoy before he saw individual ships.

From fifty feet above the waves, the line of wakes and gray silhouettes looked like some kind of moving island chain, rising and falling with the swell.

“Jesus,” Cole breathed. “That’s a lot of metal.”

“And meat,” Ray said over the interphone from his turret. “Don’t forget the meat.”

Jack gripped the yoke, feeling the B-25’s vibration through his palms. The eight .50-caliber guns in the nose felt like a promise he wasn’t sure he understood.

“Stay at fifty feet,” he told Cole. “We climb, we die. We drop too low, we swim.”

Ahead of them, the first wave of Beaufighters from the RAAF slid in, their sleek profiles hugging the surface, engines whining. They angled toward the leading destroyers, guns already spitting.

“Let them take the escorts’ attention,” Ray said. “We’ll come in behind.”

Jack nodded.

He could see the puffs of anti-air fire begin—small, white bursts around the leading aircraft.

“Target?” Cole asked.

“Third transport in the line,” Jack said. “Port side. Looks like it’s loaded to the gills.”

As they closed, details emerged: the square superstructure, the deck swarmed with figures, the black barrels of antiaircraft mounts swinging up.

“Guns ready,” Ray said. “Nose armed. Safety off.”

Jack felt the world narrow to the rectangle of glass in front of him.

He eased the throttle forward.

“Here we go,” he said. “Stay steady.”

They crossed the thousand-yard mark.

The Japanese gunners opened up.

Tracers stitched the air around them, low-caliber fire slicing through spray.

Jack felt the plane shudder once as something nicked a wing.

“Hit,” Cole reported. “No serious damage. Yet.”

“Approach,” Jack said. “Ray…”

“Firing,” Ray said.

Jack thumbed the nose-gun trigger.

The B-25’s new nose came alive.

The roar of eight Brownings firing at once drowned out the engines for a heartbeat. The nose jumped slightly under the recoil, but the added weight balanced it.

Streams of tracers reached out, glowing lines toward the transport’s bow.

Jack saw them rake the deck—saw gun crews duck, some fall, saw a swarm of figures scatter.

He did not try to pick out faces.

“Guns suppressed,” Ray called. “Most of ‘em, anyway.”

“Bombs,” Cole said.

“Hundred yards,” Jack said. “Standby… now!”

He toggled the bomb release.

Two 500-pounders dropped from the bay at low altitude, tumbling once before hitting the water.

They skipped, exactly like Ray’s chalk drawing—slapping the surface, bouncing toward the hull.

“Pull up?” Cole asked.

“Not yet,” Jack said, teeth gritted.

The ship loomed in front of them, a gray wall of steel.

For a terrifying moment, he thought they were going to ram it.

“Now,” Ray said, calm.

Jack hauled back on the yoke.

The B-25 climbed, skimming over the ship’s mast.

Behind them, the bombs hit.

There was no slow arc from altitude, no long wait. The explosions were brutal, immediate. A flash, a spray of water and debris.

“Hit!” Cole shouted, turning to look.

Jack resisted the urge to crane his neck.

“Keep us level,” he said. “We got more business.”

Ray swore softly.

“That ship’s done,” he said. “Hit her right at the waterline.”

Over the interphone came the chatter of other crews, the clipped voices of pilots calling hits, misses, near collisions.

“Two ships burning,” someone reported. “Third listing.”

“They’re turning,” another said. “Trying to scatter.”

“Escorts on us,” came a warning. “Watch your tail.”

Jack banked gently, coming around for a second run on a different target.

The sky above the convoy was chaos now—Beaufighters knifing through, A-20s dropping parafrag bombs, more B-25s with and without Ray’s nose making their attacks.

From his vantage on the Hokkai Maru’s bridge, Hiroshi saw the first wave of assaults as if in a nightmare.

The planes came in so low he could see numbers on their tails.

He watched tracers three-dimensional, arcing toward his convoy, watched one transport ahead of them take two hits and blossom with flame, watched men on its deck scatter like leaves in a gust.

Then one of the drab-green twin-engine bombers turned toward them.

“Starboard gun!” he shouted. “Aim low!”

The gun crew swung their mount, fingers white on the grips.

The bomber grew in size, sunlight flashing on its cockpit glass.

Hiroshi could see its nose—solid, bristling with guns.

He had just enough time to realize this was different before the first line of tracers walked across the bow.

He threw himself flat as the glass of the bridge exploded inward, instruments shattering.

Outside, the world became a howl of metal and fire.

He felt the deck shudder under his chest as something hit near the starboard side.

For a moment, there was an eerie, deep groan from the ship’s belly—as if a giant had gripped it and squeezed.

“Hit!” someone screamed.

He stumbled to his feet, ears ringing.

Smoke rolled down the passageway.

“Damage control!” he shouted hoarsely. “All hands—”

The ship listed.

Slowly at first.

Then faster.

He grabbed for a bulkhead, fingers scraping metal, heart pounding.

“Abandon ship!” someone yelled from lower down.

The words cut through the din like a knife.

Hiroshi staggered toward the rail.

Below, the deck was chaos. Soldiers ran in all directions. Some struggled with lifeboats. Others simply jumped, vanishing into the churning, debris-streaked water.

Another bomber roared overhead, guns blazing.

He ducked instinctively, then straightened.

There was no order left to give.

He looked once toward the horizon, where the rest of the convoy bucked and burned under the Allied assault.

Then he climbed onto the rail and jumped.

When it was over, when the last airplane had spent its ammunition and the last viable target had slipped beneath the surface or sat burning and listing, the pilots gathered in the debriefing tent.

“Seven transports sunk,” the intelligence officer said, his voice a little too bright. “One heavily damaged. Four escorts crippled or destroyed. Excellent work, gentlemen.”

He pointed at a map with red Xs.

“We estimate three thousand enemy troops lost,” he said.

The number hung in the thick, humid air.

Jack sat on the wooden bench, fingers still twitching slightly with the phantom feel of the trigger.

Three thousand.

“When you say ‘lost’,” Harris said quietly, “you mean…”

“Removed from the order of battle,” G-2 said.

He tapped his pointer again.

“They won’t be showing up at Lae,” he added. “Our infantry will thank you.”

Harris stared at the tabletop.

His knuckles were white.

Jack glanced at him.

“You okay?” he asked under his breath.

Harris swallowed.

“I watched one of the ships blow,” he said. “Guys… faces… in the water. We came around for the second pass and…”

He trailed off.

“And?” Jack prompted.

“And I had the nose guns,” Harris said. “I didn’t fire.”

Jack considered.

“We weren’t asked to hit survivors,” he said. “We were asked to sink ships.”

“We were also asked to come back alive,” Harris replied. “There were still guns on some of those boats. Hard to tell who’s who in that mess.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face.

“I keep seeing them,” he said. “In the wake. Like… driftwood. Only driftwood doesn’t look back.”

Jack stared at the map.

“Remember,” G-2 said, oblivious to the undercurrent, “each one of those ships might have landed a thousand men. You saved lives.”

“Which ones?” Harris muttered.

Jack shifted on the bench.

“Theirs or ours?” he asked.

“All I know,” Harris said, “is I’m going to be counting past three thousand when I try to sleep.”

From the back of the tent, Ray cleared his throat.

“About the nose,” he said.

Kincaid shot him a look.

We’ve just killed three thousand men, and you’re talking hardware? his eyes said.

Out loud, he said, “What about it?”

“She held,” Ray said simply. “No structural failures. No serious vibration issues. The guns performed as expected. Better.”

He looked at Jack.

“You saw how they reacted,” he said. “Those ships didn’t know what hit ‘em. They’re used to bombs from above, not a wall of lead in their faces.”

Kincaid pressed his lips together.

He looked at G-2’s red Xs.

“At the risk of incriminating myself,” he said, “I’m going to write in my report that field modifications improved mission effectiveness.”

“Without specifying that they were unauthorized,” Ray suggested.

“Without specifying anything,” Kincaid said. “If Materiel Command asks how we did it, I’ll say ‘initiative’ and pretend I didn’t notice the extra barrels.”

There was a ripple of laughter.

Thin.

Nervous.

“Gentlemen,” Kincaid said, “today we hit them harder than they have been hit in this whole area. The cost on their side was… significant. The cost on ours was minimal.”

He paused.

“That’s what the war department will see,” he said. “Charts. Ratios. Tonnage. They will put this in dispatches. Some journalist will write about daring low-level attacks and call those B-25s ‘terror of the Bismarck Sea’ or some such thing.”

He looked around the tent.

“You will see other things when you close your eyes,” he said quietly. “Decks. Wakes. Faces. You’ll hear metal and water.”

He straightened.

“Both are true,” he said. “We did what we were sent here to do. That doesn’t mean we have to be proud of all of it.”

He folded the map.

“Get some rest,” he said. “Tomorrow, we go back to hitting airstrips. That, at least, will feel less like sinking ferries.”

Hiroshi Tanaka clung to a piece of wreckage as the convoy burned.

His fingers were numb from the cold of the water. Oil slicked his hair, stung his eyes. Smoke scratched at his throat.

Around him, the sea was full of shapes—bits of wood, suitcases, crates, men.

Some called for help. Some were silent.

Above, the aircraft wheeled less frequently now.

Some strafed still, angry wasps making last runs where they thought they saw guns.

He watched one plane—a battered-looking B-25 with a blunt nose—line up on a ship that was already listing at a steep angle.

Its guns flashed.

He ducked instinctively, even though he was in the water.

The sound of bullets hitting steel and wood rattled across the waves.

Then the bomber turned away.

Another came.

Another line of splashes marched toward the ship.

He saw no malice in it.

Only procedure.

Hours later, when the aircraft had left and the sea had quieted, he looked around at the wreckage and thought, irrationally, of blueprints.

Of the way some engineer, somewhere, had looked at a front-line report and said, “We need more forward fire.”

Of the way someone else had said, “That’s not legal,” and then stopped trying to stop it.

Three thousand men, he thought. Roughly. Maybe more. Maybe less. Rounded for someone else’s convenience.

He clung tighter to the wood.

He did not know yet that he would survive—that a small coastal craft would pick him up, that he would end the war in a hospital bed reading about “the great convoy disaster.”

He did not know that one day, after the war, he would stand on a dock and watch merchant ships bearing grain and machinery instead of troops.

He only knew, in that moment, that the war had shrunk to very simple things.

Wood.

Water.

Breath.

After the war, in a hangar in Kansas where B-25s sat in neat rows waiting to be sold for scrap or turned into fire bombers, an older Jack Mallory walked with an older Ray Gunn between dust motes and faded paint.

“This is her,” Ray said, patting the nose of a Mitchell with a still-solid snout. The metal had been smoothed now, the guns removed. Only the mounting points remained, like scars.

Jack ran his fingers along the rivet lines.

“They legalized it,” he said.

“Yeah,” Ray said. “After the reports, everybody suddenly wanted gun noses. North American started producing ‘em. Factory-made. Stamped and blessed.”

He snorted.

“They never mention our little ‘field modification’ in the brochures,” he added.

Jack smiled faintly.

“Illegal until it worked,” he said. “Then it was ‘innovation.’”

Ray shrugged.

“That’s how it goes,” he said. “You break the rules, you get results, they write new rules that match the results.”

He looked at Jack.

“You still count ‘em?” he asked.

Jack knew what he meant.

“Three thousand?” he said. “Sometimes.”

“Too high?” Ray asked.

“Too low,” Jack replied. “Too round. Too… neat.”

He stared at the nose.

“You ever think,” he said slowly, “that somewhere out there some guy is telling his kids about the day his ship got hit by one of these? About how many of his friends went under?”

Ray nodded.

“I hope he is,” he said. “Because that means he made it.”

They walked on, their footsteps echoing in the mostly empty hangar.

“You know what gets me?” Jack said. “It’s not the legality. Not anymore. It’s how easy it was to turn something ‘illegal’ into the new normal.”

Ray glanced at him.

“Guns?” he asked. “Or missions?”

“Both,” Jack said. “We took a bomber, packed the nose with guns, flew so low we were practically sailors, and killed three thousand men in minutes. People wrote books about it. Called it brilliant. Sometimes I think we got away with something we should have had to explain more.”

Ray’s mouth twisted.

“You want to stand up in front of a tribunal and explain to guys who never left a desk why you did what you did?” he asked. “Good luck.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Jack said. “I mean… to ourselves.”

Ray was quiet for a moment.

“I sit in my chair at night,” he said finally, “and my grandkids ask about the war. I tell ‘em about the airplanes. About the noise. About the missions. I leave out the number.”

“Three thousand,” Jack said.

“Too big for a nursery,” Ray replied.

They stopped in front of another B-25, this one with a clear nose.

“Think they’ll ever get rid of these?” Ray asked. “Airplanes, I mean. Think we’ll ever decide not to solve problems by dropping metal on other people?”

Jack looked at the planes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope so.”

Ray snorted.

“You always did,” he said.

They stood there, surrounded by relics of a war that had asked them to bend the manual until it broke.

“Illegal,” Jack said again, softly.

Ray shrugged.

“Yeah,” he said. “But so was trying to fight a modern war with obsolete tactics. One of those illegalities killed more of us than the other.”

He patted the nose one last time.

“Doesn’t make the number sit any easier, though,” he added.

Jack nodded.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

They walked out into the Kansas sunlight, leaving the B-25s to their dust and their stories.

Somewhere, far away, the sea over the Bismarck still moved, indifferent to what had sunk through it.

Somewhere else, men who had once been carried in ships now rode in trains, buses, airplanes that didn’t bristle with guns.

And everywhere, in memories and in manuals, the line between “illegal” and “effective” remained as thin and as dangerous as ever.

THE END