I have the shell casing of the first ever 75mm canon fired from a B-25. My Father pulled the lanyard. it was installed at the Modification Center in Tulsa, OK. Jimmy Crawford was pilot that day, Updike was co-pilot I believe and it was Dad’s turn to all the other stuff. Radios, guns, bomb sight, etc…
A lot of those ground pictures look like the South end of the Douglas mile long building. the Mod Center metal hangers were to the West & North of where those movies were taken IIRC
B-25’s used such strafe/skip bomb tactics for the rest of the Pac War, just getting started in the Battle of Bismarck Sea though that was a highlight. They sank dozens of ships, but the tactics were by definition to suppress AA fire with the heavy forward firing .50 cal armament then drop bombs at mast head height horizontally, which might skip off the water even if dropped short and eventually hit the target. The idea wasn’t to try to sink ships worthy of bomb expenditure with just machine guns, that’s true.
And B-25’s didn’t sink any actual destroyers that way. They sank smaller escort and merchant ships with mg’s alone sometimes. Also the 75mm armed B-25’s were not a big success with the ship attack units in the Pacific, disliked by one of the leading skip bomb units, the 345th BG (as told in the remarkable book ‘Warpath Across the Pacific’, there are a number of amazing widely published photo’s of B-25 skip bombing and airfield attacks, but this book is full of dozens of them not seen elsewhere).
A destroyer which might have been sunk by .50 cal rounds hitting depth charges was IJN Kisaragi sunk in the first attempt to invade Wake in December 1941. Since the ship exploded and all hands were killed there is no definite answer if the cause was a hit by 100# bomb reported by one of the VMF-211 Wildcats (but reported bomb hits didn’t always mean bomb hits), fragments from a bomb near miss, or .50 cal from the intense strafing, or fires started by .50 cal or the bombs which eventually caused the explosion. IJN Yuzuki was seriously damaged by strafing alone of VF-42 F4F’s from USS Yorktown in raid on Tulagi May 4 1942, CO killed, an auxiliary minesweeper was rendered a total loss. This incident was said to be the cause for the ersatz bridge protection seen on later photo’s of Japanese destroyers. Likewise the damage and casualties caused by VF-9 F4F’s from USS Ranger strafing the French destroyers sortieing from Casablanca Nov 8 1942 made a strong impression on the French Navy. USN destroyers never faced concentrated strafing attacks by heavily armed a/c.
Did you happen to miss the post where I showed that every destroyer lost in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea was put out of action and sunk by bombs, not by the forward firing machine guns or the fixed 75mm (which proved to be of little actual utility) of B-25s (B-26s saw very little action in the Pacific and of those that did none were gunships, btw) in the post right above where you responded three times in a row or do you need me to detail how every Japanese destroyer lost in WWII was sunk?
Tell you what, you can look that up yourself, there’s the Tabular Record of Movements of every Japanese destroyer in WWII here. Let me know when you find one listing the cause of loss as strafing by .50 caliber machine gunfire by B-25s. Here’s a hint: you won’t.