On the morning of August 17th, 1942, Captain Paul Gun crouched under the wing of a Douglas A-20 Havoc at Eagle Farm Airfield near Brisbane, watching mechanics weld .50-caliber machine guns into the bomber’s nose where the bombardier used to sit.

He was 43 years old. Twenty-one years in the Navy. His wife and four children were trapped in a Japanese prison camp in Manila.

The Fifth Air Force was losing bombers faster than replacements arrived. In July alone, the 3rd Attack Group had lost eleven A-20s trying to hit Japanese convoys from high altitude. The bombardiers couldn’t hit moving ships. When they dropped lower, the deck gunners shredded them.

Captain Ed Lner had watched three of his crews burn in the Coral Sea the previous week. The Japanese were reinforcing New Guinea at will.

Gun had a different idea. If bombers flew low enough to skip bombs across the water like stones, they could hit ships at point-blank range. But first, they had to survive the approach. That meant overwhelming the deck guns with forward firepower. That meant turning bombers into strafers.

The problem was simple. The A-20 Havoc had four .30-caliber machine guns in the nose. .30-caliber rounds bounced off ship armor like hail.

Gun needed .50-caliber guns—four of them, mounted where the bombardier sat, firing straight ahead, seventeen hundred rounds per minute combined.

General George Kenny, the new Fifth Air Force commander, had given Gun one week to prove the concept worked.

Gun was using .50-caliber guns stripped from wrecked P-39 and P-40 fighters that wouldn’t fly again. The pilots were dead. The guns weren’t.

He mounted the guns on a steel frame inside the nose compartment. Each gun weighed 64 pounds. Four guns, 200 pounds of ammunition. The weight shifted the center of gravity forward.

The test flight almost killed the pilot. The A-20 barely climbed. It wanted to nose over.

Gun spent two days rebalancing the aircraft. He moved equipment aft. He adjusted the tail trim. The second test pilot reported the plane flew like it was angry—but it flew.

On September 12th, sixteen modified A-20s hit the Japanese airfield at Buna. The Strafers came in at treetop level, guns hammering. They destroyed fourteen Japanese aircraft on the ground and suppressed every anti-aircraft position.

Zero A-20s lost.

Kenny wanted more, but the A-20 had problems. Its range was too short to reach Japanese bases across the Owen Stanley Mountains. Its bomb load was too light.

Gun needed a bigger platform: the B-25 Mitchell. Longer range. Heavier payload. More space for guns.

In December, Gun pulled the bombardier and nose guns from a B-25C and installed four .50-caliber guns in the nose, four more in external cheek packs on the fuselage, and rotated the top turret forward.

Ten forward-firing guns.

Then he added two more on each side. Fourteen guns total—215 pounds of lead per second.

The ground crew called it Papy’s folly.

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Gun flew the prototype to Charter Towers to demonstrate it to the 3rd Attack Group. The plane was nose-heavy. It wanted to drop out of the sky on takeoff. He had to use full back-pressure on the stick just to keep it level.

But once airborne, the B-25 was a flying destroyer.

Kenny ordered twelve more conversions immediately. The 81st Air Depot Group in Townsville worked 18-hour days to modify every available B-25. By February 1943, they had thirty strafers ready for combat.

Then Kenny sent the blueprints to Wright Field in Ohio. The Army Air Force engineers studied the modifications for three days. Then they sent a message back to Australia.

The modifications were impractical. The balance would be wrong. The airplane would be too heavy. It wouldn’t fly properly.

They recommended grounding every modified B-25 immediately.

Kenny was in Washington when the message arrived. He walked into General Arnold’s office where the Wright Field engineers were waiting to explain why Papy Gun’s gunship was impossible.

Kenny told them twelve of the impossible airplanes had just played the key role in destroying a Japanese convoy in the Bismarck Sea.

Every transport sunk.

Sixty more strafers were already being modified in Australia.

Arnold practically ran the engineers out of his office.

The Battle of the Bismarck Sea started with intelligence intercepts on February 28th, 1943. Allied codebreakers in Melbourne had decrypted Japanese naval messages.

A convoy was leaving Rabaul: eight transport ships, eight destroyer escorts, nearly 7,000 Japanese troops bound for Lae on New Guinea’s north coast.

General Kenny had seventy-two hours to stop them.

The convoy route crossed the Bismarck Sea between New Britain and New Guinea—four hundred miles of open water.

Japanese commanders believed bad weather would shield them. March was monsoon season. Low clouds. Heavy rain. Poor visibility.

Allied bombers couldn’t hit what they couldn’t see.

They were right about the weather. They were wrong about the bombers.

On March 2nd, reconnaissance aircraft spotted the convoy steaming south through the Vitiaz Strait. B-17 Flying Fortresses attacked from 15,000 feet through cloud breaks. They dropped 137 bombs. They claimed multiple hits.

Post-battle analysis showed they sank nothing.

High-altitude bombing against moving ships didn’t work.

The Japanese convoy kept coming.

That night, the ships scattered. The transports hugged the New Guinea coast. The destroyers formed the screen.

Japanese commanders thought they’d reach Lae by dawn on March 4th. They’d unload the troops under fighter cover. The war in New Guinea would turn in Japan’s favor.

They had no idea what was coming at first light.

Captain Ed Lner briefed the 92nd Bomb Squadron at Port Moresby on the evening of March 2nd.

Twelve B-25 Strafers. Thirty modified A-20 Havocs. Royal Australian Air Force Beaufighters for top cover. P-38 Lightnings to handle Japanese Zeros.

The Strafers would attack at masthead height—fifty feet above the water. Gun range point-blank.

The plan was simple. Overwhelm the deck guns with concentrated firepower. Skip-bomb the ships while they were stunned. Get out before the Zeros arrived.

Lner had flown one practice mission using this tactic.

One.

His navigator asked what happened if the strafer took fire on the approach. Lner said they’d find out tomorrow.

The briefing ended late that night.

Nobody slept.

Before dawn on March 3rd, the strike force assembled over Cape Ward Hunt. One hundred thirty-seven aircraft.

The B-17s would attack first from altitude to draw the defensive fire high. Then the strafers would come in low.

The Japanese convoy was seventy miles northwest of Lae when the B-17s arrived. The heavy bombers attacked through scattered clouds. The transports opened fire with every gun. The sky filled with black puffs.

One B-17 took flak damage and turned back.

The rest pressed the attack.

Then the strafers arrived.

Lner led the B-25s in from the southeast at wave-top height. Fourteen forward-firing guns per aircraft—168 guns total across twelve strafers.

They came in line abreast, a wall of firepower three hundred yards wide.

The Japanese crews on the transport Kyokusei Maru saw them at two miles. The ship’s captain ordered hard to starboard.

Too late.

The B-25s opened fire at eight hundred yards.

The .50-caliber rounds walked across the water like a chainsaw. They hit the ship’s superstructure, shredded the bridge, killed the anti-aircraft crews before they could traverse their guns.

Three B-25s dropped bombs at one hundred yards.

The first bomb skipped off the water, hit the hull below the waterline, detonated inside the engine room. The second bomb hit midship. The third bomb missed.

Kyokusei Maru was dead in the water thirty seconds after the Strafers arrived—burning, listing to port.

The ship would sink in forty minutes.

And that was just the first transport.

The transport Teiyo Maru tried to run. The captain pushed the engines to full speed, fifteen knots maximum. The B-25 Strafers were doing 240 knots.

The math was simple.

Four strafers bracketed Teiyo Maru from both sides. The .50-caliber streams converged on the deck. The anti-aircraft crews died at their guns. The bridge windows shattered. The ship’s executive officer took three rounds through the chest.

The captain lasted another ten seconds before a burst cut him down.

The strafers dropped eight bombs total.

Five hit.

The ship broke in half.

Japanese soldiers were below decks when the hull split. Most never made it topside.

The transport sank in six minutes.

Survivors jumped into the Bismarck Sea wearing full combat gear. The packs dragged them under.

Australian Beaufighters strafed the decks of the destroyer Shikami as it tried to screen the transports. The destroyer’s anti-aircraft fire hit one Beaufighter.

The Australian pilot kept coming.

His forward guns raked the destroyer’s deck from bow to stern. The Japanese gun crews went down.

When the B-25 Strafers arrived, Shikami had no defense.

Three Strafers attacked from different angles. The destroyer tried to turn into the attack.

Too slow.

Bombs hit port side, starboard side, and amidships.

The destroyer didn’t sink immediately, but it was finished—dead in the water, fires spreading.

The crew abandoned ship two hours later.

By midmorning on March 3rd, the Japanese convoy was scattered across forty square miles of ocean. Five transports sinking or burning. Two destroyers crippled.

The remaining ships tried to flee.

They didn’t make it.

The strafers returned in the early afternoon. Fresh bombs. Full ammunition loads.

The Japanese had no fighter cover. The Zeros had landed at Lae to refuel.

They were on the ground when the second wave arrived.

The transport I-O Maru took twelve bomb hits in the second attack. The ship’s magazine detonated. The explosion was visible from Port Moresby, 130 miles away.

When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left.

No wreckage.

No survivors.

Eighteen hundred Japanese soldiers gone in three seconds.

Captain Ed Lner’s strafer came in low over the transport Oigawa Maru. His co-pilot counted fourteen separate fires on the deck. Japanese soldiers were jumping overboard. The anti-aircraft guns were silent.

Lner’s bombardier released at point-blank range.

Two bombs.

Both hit.

The transport settled by the stern and capsized.

The modified A-20 Havocs hunted the crippled destroyers.

The destroyer Asashio tried to rescue survivors from the water. Three A-20s attacked from different directions. The destroyer’s crew was focused on rescue operations.

They never saw the strafers until the guns opened fire.

Asashio took bomb hits on the forward deck and bridge. The destroyer burned through the night and sank at dawn on March 4th.

By the evening of March 3rd, the entire Japanese convoy was destroyed.

Eight transports sunk.

Four destroyers sunk.

Of the nearly 7,000 Japanese troops that left Rabaul, fewer than 1,200 reached Lae. 2,700 were rescued and returned to Rabaul.

The rest died in the Bismarck Sea.

Allied losses: four aircraft—one B-17, three P-38s. Thirteen aircrew killed.

General MacArthur called it “one of the most complete and annihilating combats of all time.”

The Japanese never again attempted to reinforce New Guinea by convoy.

The war in the Southwest Pacific had turned.

And it turned because of Paul Gun’s impossible gunship.

Back in Australia, the Wright Field engineers were drafting their formal report explaining why the B-25 modifications couldn’t possibly work.

Kenny sent a message to General Hap Arnold in Washington on March 5th.

The subject line read:

“Commerce destroyer modifications approved for production.”

The body of the message contained one paragraph:

“Twelve B-25 Strafers had just destroyed an entire Japanese convoy. Request immediate factory integration of forward gun package into all B-25 production aircraft.”

Arnold called North American Aviation’s president, J. H. “Dutch” Kindelberger, that afternoon. Kindelberger said his engineers needed to see the modifications.

Arnold said he was sending the man who designed them.

Paul Gun was going to California.

Gun didn’t want to leave Australia. His wife Polly and their four children were still in the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila. The Japanese had held them since January 1942.

Fourteen months.

Gun flew every mission hoping he’d get closer to liberating the Philippines.

Going to California meant going in the wrong direction.

Kenny made it an order.

The Fifth Air Force needed factory-built strafers—hundreds of them. Gun was the only man who could show North American Aviation how to do it right.

The general promised Gun would be back in the Pacific within six weeks.

Gun landed in Long Beach, California, on March 27th, 1943.

The North American Aviation plant covered 140 acres—20,000 workers on three shifts. The assembly line produced one B-25 every four hours.

The factory engineers studied Gun’s hand-drawn blueprints. They asked about stress calculations.

Gun said he didn’t have any.

They asked about wind-tunnel testing.

Gun said he’d tested it by flying.

They asked about the center-of-gravity problem.

Gun showed them where he’d moved the radio equipment aft to compensate.

One engineer said the modifications would buckle the fuselage skin around the cheek gun mounts. The muzzle blast from the .50-caliber guns would peel the aluminum.

Gun said it did.

Then he showed them the blast tubes he’d welded to extend beyond the propeller arc.

Problem solved.

The factory engineers spent two weeks reverse-engineering gun field modifications into production drawings. They strengthened the nose structure. They redesigned the gun mounts. They added heavier-gauge aluminum patches to reinforce the fuselage skin. They calculated the exact center-of-gravity shift and adjusted the tail trim accordingly.

The first factory-built B-25G Strafer rolled off the assembly line on May 10th, 1943.

Four .50-caliber guns in the solid nose.

A 75mm M4 cannon in the forward fuselage.

The cannon used the same ammunition as the M3 Lee tank. One shell could hole a destroyer below the waterline.

Gun test-flew the prototype.

The 75mm cannon recoiled four feet when fired. The entire aircraft shuddered. The navigator had to manually reload the cannon between shots.

Rate of fire: one round every thirty seconds.

Gun told the engineers it would work for ships.

Maybe not for anything faster.

North American Aviation built 400 B-25G Strafers.

Then they improved the design.

The B-25H added four more .50-caliber guns in the cheek packs. Eight guns in the nose. Four in the cheeks.

Two in the top turret, rotated forward.

Fourteen forward-firing guns total.

The H model kept the 75mm cannon but added a better recoil system. The navigator could reload faster. Rate of fire increased to one round every twenty seconds.

The B-25J removed the 75mm cannon and added four more .50-caliber guns.

Eighteen forward-firing guns—the most heavily armed production bomber in history.

North American Aviation built 4,900 B-25Js.

They delivered the first ones to the Pacific in October 1943.

Gun returned to Australia in May.

He’d been gone six weeks exactly.

His family was still in Manila.

The Strafers kept hunting.

In April 1943, B-25s destroyed sixteen Japanese barges carrying troops and supplies near Finchhafen. In May, they sank twelve cargo ships at Wewak Harbor. In June, they hit the oil facilities at Balikpapan on Borneo.

The Japanese stopped moving supplies by ship in daylight.

It didn’t help.

The Strafers learned to attack at night using radar. They learned to skip-bomb from fifty feet in complete darkness. They learned to coordinate with PT boats that illuminated targets with searchlights at the last second.

The Japanese called the modified B-25s the Black Death.

They weren’t wrong.

On November 2nd, 1943, Major Ben Fridge led four squadrons of Strafers into Rabaul Harbor.

One hundred thirty-seven Allied aircraft total.

Fifty-nine B-25s.

The harbor held thirty-eight Japanese vessels—cruisers, destroyers, tankers, cargo ships, minesweepers.

The Strafers came in at masthead height through phosphorus smoke that blinded the anti-aircraft gunners. They attacked from multiple directions simultaneously. The Japanese couldn’t track them all.

In fifteen minutes, thirty ships were hit.

Five sunk outright.

Twelve damaged beyond repair.

The rest limping.

Rabaul Harbor was finished as a forward supply base.

Gun flew that mission. He was forty-four years old.

He didn’t have to fly combat. He was a special projects officer, headquarters staff.

But his family was still in Manila, and every mission took him closer.

The intelligence reports from Sto. Tomas internment camp were getting worse. Food rations cut. Medicine running out. Prisoners dying from malnutrition and disease.

The Japanese camp commander had informed the Red Cross that all prisoners would be executed if Allied forces approached Manila.

Gun told Kenny he wanted to fly the first mission over Manila when the liberation came.

Kenny promised he could.

The Strafers evolved through 1944. Some carried eight 5-inch high-velocity rockets under the wings. Some carried napalm tanks. Some carried parafrag bombs—small fragmentation bombs with parachutes that allowed the B-25 to drop them from minimum altitude without catching itself in the blast.

The most effective tactic was the combined strike. High-level B-24 Liberators would bomb from 20,000 feet to force the defenders to look up. Then the strafers would come in low.

By the time the gunners looked down, the B-25s were already on them.

In the first eight months of 1944, Fifth Air Force Strafers destroyed 947 Japanese aircraft on the ground. They sank 273 ships. They killed an estimated 38,000 Japanese soldiers.

The modified B-25s had become the decisive weapon in the Southwest Pacific campaign.

Gun added his own modifications as the war progressed. He mounted additional fuel tanks to extend the range. He improved the gun-cooling systems. He developed new ammunition-loading techniques that increased the rate of fire.

Some B-25s in the Pacific carried modifications that existed nowhere else because Gun had invented them the night before a mission.

Other theater commanders wanted Strafers.

Kenny sent them blueprints.

The Mediterranean Theater modified B-25s for anti-shipping missions against German convoys supplying North Africa. The China-Burma-India Theater modified B-25s to attack Japanese supply lines along the Burma Road.

The concept Gun had proven in Brisbane spread across every combat zone.

On October 20th, 1944, American forces landed at Leyte in the Philippines.

The liberation of Manila was three months away.

Gun’s family had been in captivity for nearly three years.

He was flying multiple missions every day now. He told his crew chief he wouldn’t stop until his family was free.

Then the Japanese bombed Tacloban airfield.

The Japanese bombers hit Tacloban airfield on November 27th, 1944, before dawn.

Fifty-six aircraft.

Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers, escorted by Zero fighters.

They came in low from the north.

The radar operators saw them too late.

Gun was in the operations tent reviewing mission plans for the morning strike when the first bombs hit. The tent was 200 yards from the main runway.

Too close.

The blast wave knocked him off his feet. Shrapnel tore through the canvas walls. A fragment hit Gun in the left leg. Another hit his shoulder.

The medical officer found him trying to stand, blood soaking through his flight suit.

Gun said he needed to check on his aircraft.

The doctor said he needed surgery.

Gun made it thirty feet before he collapsed.

They evacuated him to the hospital at Leyte.

The leg wound was serious. The shrapnel had severed an artery. The surgeon said Gun wouldn’t fly again for six months minimum—probably longer.

The injuries qualified him for medical retirement.

Forty-five years old.

Twenty-six years of service between the Navy and Army.

He’d earned the right to go home.

Gun told the surgeon he wasn’t going anywhere until his family was free.

The Battle of Manila started on February 3rd, 1945. American forces fought house to house through the city. The Japanese had declared Manila a fortress.

They would defend every street.

The fighting was brutal—building by building, block by block.

Sto. Tomas internment camp was liberated on February 3rd.

3,700 Allied prisoners freed.

Gun’s wife Polly weighed 89 pounds.

His daughter Julia weighed 63.

They’d been eating rice and vegetable soup once a day for the past year.

His son Nathaniel had malaria.

His youngest daughter had dysentery.

But they were alive.

Gun flew to Manila on February 4th, against medical orders. His leg was still bandaged. He was using a cane.

The doctor had cleared him for light duty only.

No combat flying.

Gun went to Sto. Tomas instead.

He found his family in the makeshift hospital the Army had set up.

Polly didn’t recognize him at first.

He’d lost forty pounds since she’d last seen him in April 1942.

Three years.

He was completely gray.

She thought he was a doctor.

Then he said her name, and she knew.

The official Army report stated that Colonel Paul I. Gun was reunited with his family on February 4th, 1945, at Sto. Tomas internment camp, Manila.

The reunion lasted four hours.

Then Gun returned to Leyte.

His medical leave wasn’t over, but the war wasn’t either.

The modified B-25s kept flying.

Other pilots. Other crews.

But Gun’s modifications.

By the end of the war, North American Aviation had built 9,600 B-25 Mitchell bombers. Nearly 5,000 were strafer variants with forward gun packages based on Gun’s original design.

Those strafers sank over 800 Japanese ships in the Pacific. They destroyed over 2,000 Japanese aircraft on the ground. They killed an estimated 85,000 Japanese soldiers.

The commerce-destroyer concept that engineers had called impossible had become the most effective anti-shipping weapon in the theater.

Gun never flew combat again. The leg wound ended his operational career. The Army retired him as a full colonel on June 30th, 1948.

Medical disability.

He was forty-eight years old.

He went back to the Philippines and rebuilt Philippine Airlines, the company he’d started before the war.

Philippine Airlines resumed operations in 1946.

Gun started with three war-surplus C-47 transport aircraft. He flew routes between Manila, Cebu, Davao, and other Philippine cities.

The airline he’d built with five Beechcraft planes before the war now operated across the entire archipelago.

The Philippine government awarded him the Distinguished Service Star in 1947.

President Manuel Roxas presented the medal personally.

The citation read:

“For extraordinary heroism and exceptional service to the Republic of the Philippines during the liberation campaign.”

Colonel Gun’s innovative modifications to Allied aircraft directly contributed to the defeat of Japanese forces and the freedom of the Filipino people.

The United States military had already decorated him.

Distinguished Flying Cross with oak-leaf cluster.

Silver Star.

Legion of Merit.

Air Medal.

Nine Purple Hearts.

The Distinguished Service Cross was recommended but never approved. Some officers believed Gun’s contributions were technical rather than tactical.

They were wrong.

General Kenny wrote in his memoir:

“Papy Gun was the most valuable man in the Fifth Air Force. His mechanical genius and combat innovations changed the course of the war in the Southwest Pacific. Without his strafer modifications, the Battle of the Bismarck Sea would have been a Japanese victory. Without Bismarck Sea, we would have lost New Guinea. Without New Guinea, the road to the Philippines would have been impossible.”

MacArthur agreed.

In a classified letter to the War Department dated July 1945, MacArthur recommended Gun for promotion to Brigadier General.

The recommendation was denied.

The Army Air Force was reducing force structure.

Promotions were frozen.

Gun remained a colonel.

He never complained.

He’d gotten what he fought for.

His family was free.

The Philippines were liberated.

The Japanese were defeated.

That was enough.

Philippine Airlines expanded through the late 1940s and early 1950s. Gun acquired DC-3 aircraft, then DC-4s, then Convair 340s. The airline established routes to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore.

By 1956, PAL was flying to San Francisco.

Gun’s small inter-island airline had become an international carrier.

He flew constantly—Manila to Cebu, Cebu to Davao, Davao to Hong Kong.

He couldn’t stop.

The war had taught him that movement meant survival.

Standing still meant death.

Some of his pilots said Gun was still fighting, still outrunning something.

Maybe the memory of Sto. Tomas.

Maybe the faces of the men who’d flown his modified aircraft and never came back.

On October 10th, 1957, Gun chartered a Beechcraft Model 18 twin-engine plane.

He was flying from Manila to Baguio.

Routine trip, 140 miles north.

Weather forecast showed scattered thunderstorms over the Cordillera Mountains, but nothing severe.

He filed his flight plan early that morning. Departure scheduled for midmorning. Expected arrival before noon.

The tower cleared him for takeoff.

The weather deteriorated faster than forecast. The Cordillera Mountains were socked in. Heavy rain. Low visibility. Turbulence.

The Beechcraft’s radio went silent in the storm.

Search and rescue teams found the wreckage three days later on a mountainside near Baguio. The aircraft had flown into a storm cell. The pilots had tried to climb above it. The winds drove them into the ridge.

Impact killed everyone instantly.

Paul Irvin Gun died on October 11th, 1957.

He was 57 years old.

Fifty-eight in one week.

The Philippine government gave him a state funeral. Six thousand people attended—American veterans, Philippine Airlines employees, former prisoners from Sto. Tomas.

General Kenny sent a wreath from the United States.

The Manila Times published Gun’s obituary on October 12th.

The headline read:

“War hero dies in plane crash.”

The article mentioned his Distinguished Flying Cross, his role in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, his liberation missions over the Philippines.

But it couldn’t capture what he’d actually done.

The numbers told part of the story.

Five thousand B-25 Strafers built with his modifications.

Eight hundred Japanese ships sunk.

Two thousand aircraft destroyed on the ground.

Eighty-five thousand enemy soldiers killed.

Those were the official statistics, but the real impact was different.

The Strafer concept changed how air forces thought about bombers.

Before Gun, bombers dropped ordnance from altitude.

After Gun, bombers became multi-role weapons.

Strafing.

Skip bombing.

Close air support.

The AC-130 gunship used in Vietnam was a direct descendant of Gun’s B-25 modifications.

So was the A-10 Warthog.

So was every modern attack aircraft with forward-firing guns.

North American Aviation hired Gun as a consulting engineer in 1948. He worked on the B-45 Tornado jet bomber. He advised on gun-mounting systems. He designed forward-firing armament packages.

The company paid him well.

He gave most of the money to veteran organizations.

His son Nathaniel joined the Air Force, flew B-52s in Vietnam, retired as a colonel, wrote a book about his father titled Papy Gun. The book was published in 1994.

It sold 12,000 copies.

Most people had never heard of Paul Gun.

The National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, displays one of Gun’s original gun-mounting drawings. The paper is yellowed. The measurements are handwritten in pencil.

The sketch shows four .50-caliber guns mounted inside an A-20 nose compartment.

No stress calculations.

No computer modeling.

Just the drawing that killed 8,000 Japanese soldiers in the Bismarck Sea.

The Air Force Association inducted Gun into the Air Force Enlisted Heritage Hall in 2008. The citation mentioned his innovations, his combat record, his influence on modern attack aviation.

The ceremony was held in Washington.

Three of his grandchildren attended.

Philippine Airlines still operates today.

The airline flies to 42 destinations across Asia, Australia, and North America.

The company headquarters in Manila has a portrait of Gun in the main lobby.

Most employees don’t know who he is.

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