This Day in WWII 6 May 1940 - 1945

[Donster]

North American Aviation Ad - May 1944

1940: Hitler again delays X-Day, this time till the 10th May.

1940: Francis Sayre is sent to Tokyo for talks with Foreign Minister Arita.

*Phyllis Coates

1941: Bob Hope gives his first USO show at California's March Field.

1941: US Secretary for War advocates US Navy protection for British supply convoys.

1941: Stalin declares himself 'Chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars'.

1941: The last Brigade of the British 10th Indian Division arrives at Basra with its commander Major General Bill Slim. Axis aircraft begin to land at the Mosul airfield in northern Iraq.

Phyllis Coates

1942: Corregidor surrenders after five months resistance, with 15,000 prisoners taken by 1,000 Japanese.

1942: B-17's from Australia spot the Port Moresby Invasion Fleet south of Bougainville. They attack the Japanese Carrier Shoho but miss. Admiral Fletcher is now convinced that the main Japanese force would make for the Jomard Passage between Papua and the Louisiade Archipelago and so organizes his forces for the coming battle.

1943: Hitler makes one of his increasingly rare visits to Berlin for Viktor Lutze's funeral.

Champion Spark Plugs Ad - May 1944

1945: The last U-boats of the war sunk with all hands: U-853 and U-881 in the North Atlantic by US destroyer escorts, and U-3523 in the Baltic by the RAF.

1945: Axis Sally makes her final propaganda broadcast to Allied troops.

Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane with George Reeves as Superman (1951)

1945: The U.S. Fifth Army enters Austria from Italy.

1945: Breslau surrenders after an 82-day siege, during which the Russians inflicted 29,000 civilian and military casualties and took more than 40,000 prisoners.

Phyllis Coates

*Born Gypsie Ann Evarts Stell on January 15, 1927 on her family's cattle ranch in Texas, American actress Phyllis Coates left home to attend UCLA. Shortly afterward she secured a dancing job with Ken Murray's Blackouts, a long-running LA-based stage review. She later danced for producer Earl Carroll and in a USO tour of "Anything Goes". Through the auspices of her first husband, director Richard Bare, Phyllis entered films in 1948 as leading lady of Warner Bros.' "Behind the Eight-Ball" short subjects series, playing Mrs. Joe McDoakes (George O'Hanlon). Coates stayed with the Eight-Ball series even after her marriage to Bare ended, and also appeared in supporting parts in such Warners features as "Look for the Silver Lining" (1949). In 1951, Coates was cast as reporter Lois Lane in Lippert Productions' "B"-feature "Superman and the Mole Men", wherein George Reeves played the dual role of Superman and Clark Kent for the first time. This week-long assignment led to both Reeves and Phyllis being cast in the subsequent Superman TV series. Coates played a strong-willed Lois Lane in the first 26 episodes of "Adventures of Superman", where she was given equal billing with George Reeves, even for episodes she did not appear in. Her powerful "damsel in distress" scream was used to good effect in several episodes. After shooting for the first season, the Superman producers suspended production until they found a national sponsor. When it came time to film more Superman episodes, Coates had already committed herself elsewhere. Noel Neill, who had played Lois Lane in the 1948-1950 serials opposite Kirk Alyn's Superman, succeeded her and became far more identified with the role. (George Reeves is said to have requested Coates to return to the role in 1959; his untimely death ended the series permanently.)

Phyllis remained in films until the early 1960s, mostly in westerns "Marshall of Cedar Creek" [1953] and "Blood Arrow" [1958]) and also as the lead in one of the last Republic serials, "Panther Girl of the Kongo" (1953). She appeared in quite a few sci-fi and horror films as well; in "Invasion USA" (1952) one of her fellow cast members was Noel Neill, the actress who'd replaced her as Lois Lane on Superman. Phyllis remained active in television throughout her career, co-starring on the short-lived 1958 sitcom "This is Alice" and playing good guest roles in a multitude of series like "Perry Mason", "The Untouchables" and "The Patty Duke Show". Long in retirement, Phyllis Coates returned to films and TV in the early 1990s; one of her best latter-day roles was on the newest Superman TV incarnation, "Lois and Clark" where she plays Lois Lane's mother.

[Stans]

As fearsome as the B-25H was, the supply of targets suitable for the 75mm cannon was drying up by the time the H model was deployed in combat. Some units removed the cannon and installed an additional pair of 50 cals in the cannon bay. I read that the forward position of the upper turret on the H and J models allowed the turret's guns to be added to the forward firepower of the late model Mitchells, but the blast from the muzzles played havoc with the cockpit emergency escape hatch.

[The Dude]

I never even knew there was a variant of the Mitchell with a 75mm cannon.

Was that modeled in IL-2?

[Gunny]

Yes it is.

[Old Guy]

The first B-25 with a 75mm gun was converted by Pappy Gunn in the Southwest Pacific theater. He's also the one who made the A-20 and B-25 into commerce destroyers by adding a varying number of 50 caliber machine guns to the birds, eliminating the bombardier position, and getting rid of the lower turret.

The resulting weapons were not necessarily representative of the best aeronautical design, but they worked. With a multitude of fifties and bomb bays full of parafrags, Kenney's 5th Air Force lads tore the Japs a new one.

Think what it must have been like to depart from a muddy strip in New Guinea and fly your B-25 over jungle and open ocean, through some of the worst weather on the planet, to attack Rabaul or other Jap installations. Or to hunt down and kill enemy ships and barges. I don't know if I'd have the guts to do it.

We owe a lot to Pappy Gunn and all those young men who flew those missions. Especially, we owe respect and rememberance to the ones who did not return. People come across the wrecks of various Air Corps warplanes in the jungles and even in the waters around the SW Pacific islands. But the men who flew them are gone. Most of the time not even their bones remain.

[Gunny]

All that flying and coming in to attack targets at tree top or mast top level. What a rush that must have been.

[Stans]

Probably a pretty incredible rush being on the receiving end as well. It's hard for me to imagine what it would be like to all of a sudden have a hail of 50 cals, maybe a few 75mm rounds, then bombs or parafrags going off. Couple that with a touch of malaria, dysentery, and/or dengue fever, must have been a living hell.