A living piece of World War II aviation history will be back in Iola Wednesday.
A B-25J — Miss Mitchell — stopped in Iola for refueling Sunday while en route from Minnesota to San Antonio, Texas.
There, the old warbird was to take part in a ceremonial flyover to honor the legacy of Lt. Col. Dick Cole, the last surviving member of the “Doolittle Raiders,” who died in 2019 at age 103.
Miss Mitchell will arrive back in Iola sometime around 11 a.m. Wednesday, where the crew will have the aircraft on display while filling up the tank.
Rides will also be provided at $450 a pop. Proceeds go toward helping keep Miss Mitchell in flying condition, and to help fund future Commemorative Air Force projects, explained Jim Lauria, one of the nine flight crew members taking part in the ceremony to honor Cole.
THE B-25, a medium-range bomber, became an integral part of World War II, known most for its use during the famed Doolittle Raid, the first time the United States was able to strike back at mainland Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor five months earlier. Lt. Col. James Doolittle planned and took command of the raid that included 16 B-25 bombers.
The raid over Tokyo and other military installations in the archipelago caused little damage to the Japanese war machine, but still marked a major turning point in the war, because it forced Japan to reconfigure its home defenses (thus allowing the U.S. to prevail in other operations, including the Battle of Midway.)
The raid also served as a significant morale boost for the United States, Lauria noted.
But as important as the Doolittle Raid was in the history books, the true worth of the B-25 became clearer in the European and Pacific theaters.
That’s because the B-25 was large enough to serve as a long-range bomber, yet small and nimble enough to evade enemy aircraft or ground fire, Lauria said.
The B-25s were built to hold as many as 12 100-pound bombs (or a single bomb, weighing 3,000 pounds), and equipped with .50-caliber machine guns at the front of the aircraft, as well as from a turret at the top of the fusillade and two more guns in the tail section.
“They would fly in formation and cover each other’s gun sectors,” Lauria explained. “That’s how they stayed safe.”
The original Miss Mitchell was used primarily over Africa and Italy, without a single casualty through its 120-plus excursions, before eventually being taken back to the United States, and eventually destroyed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
Its replacement, another World War II-era B-25, was kept stateside during the war, then shuttled from air base to air base as those installations closed after the war, before being sold in the late 1950s to an aviation rental service company in Minnesota. She changed hands a few other times before being acquired in 1978 by the Commemorative Air Force Wing, a Texas-based network of air museums across the country.
It was in the early 1980s that CAF members decided to fully restore the B-25 and reintroduce the aircraft as Miss Mitchell.
