This was written in 1983
MITCHELLS OVER MEXICO
or 130 combat free hours in a B-25 over the Sea of Cortez
written and photos by L.P."Stoney" Stonich
"It's a Catch-22 situation". How many times have you heard that phrase? How many of you remember reading the satire "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, based on a B-25 squadron in the Mediterranean in WW II. Paramount Studios made a movie based on this novel in 1969.
The movie started in total darkness with only a dog barking in the distance...then a B-25 ENGINE STARTS!!! The scene lightens as sixteen B-25's taxi out to the runway and make a mass takeoff, never again will that fight sequence be repeated. Sixteen B-25's in four diamonds in diamond, on their bomb run, the bomb bay doors open and 128 bombs plunge down in to the Sea of Cortez. All this under the flying leadership of the late Frank Tallman.
It's summer, 1968, and my flying career consists of flight instructing at Fullerton, CA. with slightly over 1,000 hours. A friend of mine called to tell me that some B-25's were being readied for a movie at Orange County Airport at Tallmantz Aviation (Tallmantz was a partnership between Paul Mantz and Frank Tallman). I immediately went there to see about flying in the movie. There I talked to the Chief Pilot, Jim Appleby, and filled out an application, I was told that other phrase we hear all the time "Don't call us, We'll call you".
So I waited for that call..and waited..until one day my friend called to say he had just been hired as a mechanic for the movie. Apprehension got the better of me, so I returned to Tallmantz and let Appleby know that I was still very interested in flying for them. Two more weeks of waiting and then they called: report to the hangar Monday, Dec. 2, 1968!
That Monday morning there were ten of us at the Tallmantz Hangar. Two Captains and ten Co-pilots. Chief Pilot Jim Appleby and V.P. for Flight Operation, Frank Pine, were in charge of the weeks activities: ground school and flight training. What a shock going from a 160 h.p Apache to a 1,700 h.p. per engine, over 15 ton airplane! After filling out more paperwork for Paramount Studios, we completed our training and stood by for our departure date for Mexico.
It wasn't easy to get this many airplanes together for a movie. When Tallmantz Aviation got the contract, They had to go out and find all these airplanes. They came from as far away as Long Island, NY. (a 3,000 mile ferry trip). Others came from Grey Bull, WY., Buckeye, AZ., Houston, TX., Champaign, IL. and forest fire tanker bases all over the western U.S. They also had to be made ferryable to get them to southern California. Finding flyable airplanes was difficult enough, then came the many little jobs to make them look the part. This required some engine changes, replacing hoses and cockpit glass, getting bomb bay doors to work, finding turrets and guns to go in them, and other "wartime" fixtures for airplanes 25 years old, a tough job, but the mechanics at Tallmantz Aviation were up to it.
On New Years Day, 1969 I was part of the second flight of B-25's to be flown from Orange County Airport to San Carlos Bay, Mexico. Many of us had not flown formation before and forming up over the Pacific Ocean south of Newport Beach, CA. had its share of trills and excitement. Getting those "ponderous beauties", as Frank Tallman called them, to stay 100 feet apart for three and half hours wasn't easy. From the ground the sight must have seemed hilarious..from the cockpit, hair-raising. We had an intermediate stop for customs and immigrations at Hermosillo, Mexico.
Paramount Studios had cut down all the organ cactus for a mile around to prepare this shooting location. They constructed a 6000' X 200' runway, with a perimeter taxiway and a hard stand for each airplane. It was very well built..the bad part was that it was surrounded on three sides by mountains, that meant we always had to land from the sea and takeoff towards it and no matter which way the wind blew, it was always a crosswind. All airplanes arrived without incident.
Paramount also built a "base" at the site with a hospital, a large brick house, mess hall, control tower, bomb dump and enough pyramid tents to house the entire cast and crew. Fortunately we didn't have to live in them, the local motel was bad enough. The location was detailed right down to the comm wire running to the squadron commander's office. You would swear you were somewhere in the Mediterranean during WW II. My Marine Corps rifleman days were partially spent in Sicily and Sardinia and this "base" could easily have been in either of those places during the war.
After our debriefing we looked up the crews from the first flight of six airplanes that arrived the day before, they were suffering the aftermath of drinking too much Tequila on New Year's Eve in Mexico. Fortunately no one landed in jail, but in some cases it was close!
The next day we reported out at the "base" for duty. By act of Paramount, I was commissioned a First Lieutenant, USAAF, my highest rank in the Corps was Corporal. We were issued uniforms and leather flying jackets with the Squadron insignia patch on it: a naked, long-haired lady riding a diving bomb and holding a spear in her right hand.
The special effects department did wonders making the airplanes look war weary. Oil and paint were splashed over them, nose art sanded to made it look like they had flown many missions. We did have to change one thing: we had to clean the windows - no one would go into "combat" with dirty windows! Most of the airplanes had names; Free, Fast & Ready, Luscious Lulu, Berlin Express, Dumbo, Denver Dumper, Booby Trap, Hot Pants, Annzas, Laden Maiden, Superman, Vestal Virgin, aBOMBinable Snowman and the one I flew the most, Passionate Paulette.
Each day we had a pilots meeting to brief on the flying for the day, weather and assign duties for the non-flyers. Tallmantz had a Cessna 310 that did a mail run to Los Angels each day with the film shot the day before, it would pick up the processed film and any high priority cargo and return to the "base". If we had no duties that day we would play volleyball, cards or lounge on the beach, the triangular fins in San Carlos Bay kept us out of the water.
Our formations were flown stacked up and we used right echelon, diamond, diamonds in diamond and diamond echelon. Normally we landed out of a right echelon with the leader breaking over the numbers and spacing ourselves about 2000' in trail.
One day when I was flying #4, I saw #3 hit the wake of #2 and go sliding out to the right. #3 corrected back to the left and hit the wake again, this time sliding to the left and aimed right at the control tower. He only missed it by raising his left wing. After we landed we heard what it was like from the view point of one of our pilots at the base of the tower. "I watched it coming at me and was dumbfounded. The pilot saw that he might hit the tower and lifted the left wing, then I was knocked to the ground by a little feller and he left foot prints on my chest..just like in the cartoons". The pilot speaking was 6'5" and 265lbs.
There were other incidents while filming the movie, some funny, some almost tragic, and one fatality. One day we were flying across the field at low level as background for a scene when we were told to go away for awhile as they made some setup changes. Seven airplane in trail and looking for adventure. We found it in the form of a sports fishing boat. We went by a guy on this boat three times at about fifteen feet, the first time he was waving, the second time he shook his fist at us and the third time it looked like he had a shotgun. On landing the lead airplane had a rip in his elevator fabric that we assumed came from the poles that hold the fishing lines out from the boat, because the first two times we went by in front of him and the last time we hopped over the top.
Another day the scene called for Frank Tallman to cut a plastic dummy in half with a Stinson L-5. The dummy was standing on a swimming raft so Frank had to fly about 5 feet off the water. They shot the scene a couple of times and then an "insurance" shot. This time the hand of the dummy got wedged between the horizontal stabilizer and elevator. Frank didn't have any elevator control, but did his usual fine job of flying and landed safely.
The fatality was the second unit director who was also the aerial cameraman. I was flying #11 in a twelve ship formation, three in echelon, echelons in trail at 4000'. The nose of the camera plane had a specially built glass insert that allowed unobstructed 180o viewing and this setup, perfected by Paul Mantz, made Tallmantz Aviation the leader in aviation photo planes at the time. The twin tails of the B-25 made another great area for unobstructed filming if eight inches were removed from the rear fuselage at the tail gunners position, making a two by four foot opening to mount a camera in. The cameraman was using the rear fuselage opening and fell out into the Gulf of California.
The most dangerous part the rest of us had in the movie was the mass takeoff. Sixteen airplanes lined up on the runway, all at 30" of manifold pressure, then releasing brakes at one to two second intervals and go to max power. This scene was used at the beginning of the movie. Can you imagine the wake turbulence. We did this four times, on the first two I was number two and the turbulence wasn't bad. On the third, we were number nine and the turbulence was terrible. We found ourselves drifting left towards the next plane to takeoff, with both of us on the control we couldn't stop this left drift. Then we hit the turbulence going the other way and shot to the right, what a ride. On the fourth one we were number sixteen and had a runaway propeller right after the gear came up, it was caused by a prop governor failure. After landing we found out a B-25 will not taxi on one engine. You can turn into the dead engine, but with no nose wheel steering that all you can do. Another area that calls for special handling on the B-25 is the touchy brakes.
Of the eighteen B-25's in "Catch-22", most were TB-25Js. These had been through the Hayes Conversion after WW II which eliminated all the combat equipment on them and they were used as multi-engine trainers by the USAF. After being surplus by the Air Force, they went on serving as Corporate airplanes or Borate Bombers until being grounded by the US Forestry Service. After the filming was completed, Paramount asked Tallmantz Aviation to sell the airplanes for them. The studio owned fourteen, Tallmantz owned three, and the eighteenth that had so much corrosion it had to ferried in with the gear down was destroyed for the movie. The asking price was $6-7,000 each, at the time price seemed ridiculously high.
Flying the B-25 in 1969 was a big thrill for me and it still is even with another 14,000 plus hours behind me. It started my love of warbirds. Since then I have crewed on a P-51 at the Reno Air Races (Race 2, flown by Bob Love, owned by Jack Hovey), owned my SNJ-5 for 13 years (it has the "Catch-22" insignia on it), flown other warbirds and some heavy iron like the PV-2D, DC-3, DC-4, DC-8, DC-10, B-737, B-747, but there's a soft spot in my heart for the heaviest feeling of them all, the B-25.
Where are they now, the seventeen B-25s that came back from Mexico are listed in the latest Warbirds World Wide Directory.
N10V "Berlin Express" is now with the EAA at Oshkosh, WI.
N1042B to Aces High Ltd. North Weald, UK as "Dolly".
N10564 NASM, Washington-Dullas Airport.
N1203 One of the Tallmantz glass nose photo planes crashed in Columbia.
N2849G Tom Reilly, Kissimmee, FL.
N3174G March AFB CA.
N3507G "Passionate Paulette" Grissom AFB IN.
N3699G changed to N30801 Challenge Publications, Van Nuys, CA. as "Executive Sweet".
N7681C to the movie "Hannover Street" as "Amazing Andrea" destroyed in hangar fire, Musee de Air, Le Bourget, France.
N7687C "Tokyo Express" sold at the Harry Doan auction.
N8195H to Mike Pupich Van Nuys, CA. as "Heavenly Body".
N9115Z to the movie "Hannover Street" now at the RAF Museum, Hendon, UK.
N9451Z "Dumbo" to Malmstrom AFB MT.
N9452Z to Maxwell AFB AL.
N9456Z Mid-Atlantic Air Museum, Middletown, PA. as "Briefing Time".
N9494Z "Laden Maiden" to the movie "Hannover Street" as "Gorgeous George-Ann". To be rebuilt by Visionair.
N9856C with Aero Traders, Chino, CA. as "Pacific Princess".
Dedicated to those who have "gone west" Frank Tallman, Frank Pine, Tom Mooney W.G.F.P., Skip March, Bill Reid, Bill Fritz, and to all the rest who helped make "Catch-22", for me, a truly memorable aviation event.
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