A Ride in a B-25 Bomber – In World War II, this reporter’s father served in the Marine Corps and flew on the PBJ medium bomber. It was an exciting opportunity for me to be able to take a flight on the legendary aircraft with the Commemorative Air Force.
Brief History of the PBJ
The PBJ, of course, will be better known to most aviation buffs as the B-25 Mitchell, as that was the name conferred upon it by the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), and that was indeed the name that the plane officially went by during the legendary Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, which in turn was further immortalized by the 1944 motion picture “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” starring Spencer Tracy.
The B-25 was built by North American Aviation (NAA), whose other most famous product was the game-changing P-51D Mustang fighter plane. It was the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps that redubbed the plane the PBJ. As noted by the info page of the Devil Dog Squadron, the chapter of Commemorative Air Force (CAF; formerly known as Confederate Air Force) that made my ride experience possible:
“Not many people know that the US Marine Corps flew bombers in WWII … PBJs came about by chance … They were too large for regular carrier duty … The U.S. Marine Corps, however, was looking for a medium bomber. They agreed to take the B-25s and use them for ‘night heckling’, anti-shipping missions, or close air support of beachheads and landings. … As most of the missions were performed at low altitude, there was not much need for the glass nose/bombardier position. It was replaced with a solid nose and armed with up to 8 – .50 caliber machine guns, or in some versions, a 75mm cannon … 9 PBJ squadrons made it overseas before the war ended in the Pacific. Twenty-six PBJs were lost in combat and 19 were lost in operational accidents while in a combat zone … The Devil Dog represents a PBJ-1J (the second J designates the model) of the VMB 612 squadron.”
My Dad’s WWII PBJ Experience
The specific Marine Corps unit that my Dad – then PFC Earle W. Orr Jr. (later Dr. Earle W. Orr Jr.) – served with from 1943 to 1946 was Marine Air Group 61 (MAG 61); he held the Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) codes of 911 – Armorer, Aircraft, and 656 – Aerial Mine Worker.
In these positions, my father was primarily a groundcrew member, with one of his postings being the Emirau Island, which is part of Papua New Guinea. But then-PFC Orr did get to go up on the warbird at least once, on a practice skip-bombing run. For this ride, Dad sat at one of the waist gunner positions, and he found it so disorienting that he couldn’t properly discern the horizon; in his own words, “I couldn’t tell which was the sky and which was the sea!”
My Own PBJ Ride
It was out of the Georgetown Municipal Airport – 34 miles from Austin, Texas – that my fellow Devil Dog passengers and I embarked on our amazing journey. Two of my fellow passengers were USMC vets, and apparently, I was the token ex-Air Force puke of the bunch.
The intrepid onboard crew consisted of pilot Valerie (her surname escapes my memory), co-pilot Beth Jenkins (who has 30 years of flying experience under her belt), two other inflight crew dogs including safety officer Bryan Maloy, and one other gentleman whose name unfortunately totally slips my senile mind at the moment.
As was true of the B-17 Flying Fortress “Sentimental Journey” that I rode back in August 2020 courtesy of the Airbase Arizona Chapter of CAF, going up in the PBJ was absolutely incomparable to any modern-day commercial jetliner ride. There’s just something about breathing natural air – albeit with some avgas mixed in – as opposed to recycled pressurized cabin air, and the purring of those two Wright 2600-13 engines with their 1,700 hp at take-off … man oh man, no words that I can type here can do justice to how it truly felt, looked, sounded, and smelled.
We maxed out at an altitude of 1,200 feet above ground level (AGL). I had the honor and privilege of sitting in both the top turret gunner’s seat and a jump seat directly beneath the copilot’s seat. In midflight, I also got to tour the entire length of the fuselage interior, including the waist guns and the tail gunner’s position. One random observation I made was that the idling time and taxiing distance for the PBJ were considerably shorter than they were for my B-17 ride.
B-25 Image from 19FortyFive Author.
A huge thanks to CAF Devil Dog Squadron for an absolutely unforgettable experience – Semper Fidelis and OORAH!!!
Want to Take Your Own Ride?
For a mere $425.00 – on par with what you might pay anyway for a commercial jetliner ride – you too can experience the joys of riding in the B-25. If you’d like to take a flight in a historical aircraft of any type, but a trip to Texas isn’t feasible for you, there are CAF chapters all around the country with all sorts of super-cool vintage warbird rides to choose from. The Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber – my personal favorite WWII aircraft – and Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber are next on this writer’s bucket list.
B-25 Image from 19FortyFive Author.
Christian D. Orr is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch and The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). In his spare time, he enjoys shooting, dining out, cigars, Irish and British pubs, travel, USC Trojans college football, and Washington DC professional sports. If you’d like to pick his brain in-person about his writings, chances are you’ll be able to find him at the Green Turtle Pasadena in Maryland on Friday nights, singing his favorite karaoke tunes.
