Sixteen B-25B bombers launched from USS Hornet.
The bombers could leave the carrier but could not return to it. Fifteen crews continued toward China; one landed in the Soviet Union.
Mission reference
Sixteen aircraft. Eighty airmen. One launch with no return path.
The mission combined Army B-25 bombers with a Navy carrier task force. It was flown on 18 April 1942, earlier and farther from Japan than planned after the force was sighted.
Five men served aboard each aircraft.
The eighty airmen are preserved across sixteen crew records and eighty individual profile routes.
Chinese assistance helped 64 of the 75 airmen who reached China evade capture.
That survival cannot be separated from the courage of the people who sheltered, treated, transported, and guided them.
From the recovered collection
The surviving visual record.
