A B-25 "Mitchell" WW-II bomber. This medium weight bomber is named after General Billy Mitchell. Mitchell was first among the American Military to recognize the true potential of aircraft in attacking warships. Following WW-I he campaigned heavily for the creation of a powerful air force. Around 1930 he put on a demonstration for the War Department in which a dive bomber sank a surplus WW-I battleship. Still, even after the British successfully employed air power to destroy the bulk of the Italian Navy as it lay at anchor in its Mediterranean home port, it took the disaster at Pearl Harbor to convince the U.S. Military the airplane was going to play a significant roll in any future warfare. The B-25 is the plane Jimmy Doolittle and twenty-nine other intrepid crews flew off the deck of the aircraft carrier Yorktown in the first American air strike of Japan. A raid made famous by the film "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." The plane saw only limited action in Europe but was used extensively off of the short "Atoll" airstrips during the American advance across the Pacific.