This is an original limited edition rare signed giclee on stretched canvas artwork of “Evasion Over Sagami Bay” by renowned aviation and landscape artist William S. Phillips, showing a B-25 Bomber plane, signed and number 25/100. Shortly after bombing the Tokyo Gas and Electric Company, Pilot Lt. Harold F. Watson banks the B-25 Whirling Dervish steeply to avoid a Japanese cruiser that lay directly on the aircraft’s escape route to China. It was the ninth of sixteen aircraft to leave the carrier USS Hornet on the audacious April 18, 1942 Doolittle Raid on Japan. That United States Army Air Forces bombers could launch from a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier was inconceivable at the time. President Roosevelt claimed the aircraft came from a secret airbase in the mythical Shangri-La. American bombers striking the Japanese homeland and passing within sight of Mount Fuji, the most sacred mountain in all Japan, delivered a succinct message to the warring Axis nation: America, the Sleeping Giant, had begun to stir. "Evasive Action Over Sagami Bay" is an authentic historical document, countered-signed by American heroes that participated in the Doolittle Raid, Gen. David Jones, Col. William Bower, Col. Richard E. Cole, Maj. Thomas C. Griffin, and MSgt Edwin Horton. This is a unique opportunity to own and preserve an important moment in aviation and U.S. military history. After one of his paintings was presented to King Hussein of Jordan, Phillips was commissioned by the Royal Jordanian Air Force. He developed sixteen major paintings, many of which now hang in the Royal Jordanian Air Force Museum in Amman. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum presented a one-man show of Phillips’ work in 1986. He is one of only a few artists to have been so honored. In 1988, Phillips was chosen to be a U.S. Navy combat artist. For his outstanding work, the artist was awarded the Navy’s Meritorious Public Service Award and the Air Force Sergeants Association’s Americanism Medal. At the prestigious annual fund raiser for the National Park Service, Bill’s work has been included in the Top 100 each year he has entered the competition and his work has won the Art History Award twice. Phillips was selected as the Fall 2004 Artist in Residence at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and tapped by the U.S. Postal Service to paint the stamp illustrations and header design for a pane of twenty stamps in 1997 entitled Classic American Aircraft. He was chosen again in 2005 for a pane of twenty stamps (ten designs) entitled American Advances in Aviation. Bill’s major collection of aviation art, Into the Sunlit Splendor, was published by The Greenwich Workshop Press in 2005. This giclee on canvas is in excellent condition, no marring noted. Provenance from the Greenwich Workshop is included. Measures 30"W x 33.75"L