Posted on 05/27/2019 8:52:15 AM PDT by Retain Mike
Years ago when I had my first hospital job(1993) I met a guy who was a volunteer, “Ernie’’. He served with the 8th. Air Force as a ball turret gunner in a B-17. Said he was scared to death the whole time. He didn’t want to die naturally be he told me he keep a .45 with him in case there was no way out of a crippled plane or if he couldn’t do it if were were too wounded. He told his buddies in the plane to do it “I want you to make it quick’’ he said.
My dad was an engineer/upper turret gunner on a B26. He was always glad he never had to consider being a ball turret gunner (too tall) on any other plane. The time over target was always intense enough to make your body hurl from all orifices. Took a lot of self-control.
Consider that on the Cologne, 1000 plane raid, 44 bombers were lost but with 10 crewmembers per plane that is 440 crewmembers lost in one day. The average overall loss of servicemen per day was 220. The myth passed on by the guys on the ground was that it was much safer to be in the air than in ground combat but the opposite was usually true, at least in the European theatre.
No, I was thinking of Wallace, I guess my memory is getting bad.
My dad was a waist gunner on a B-17. He flew in the missions over the oil fields in Ploesti. He never did talk about it much.
Wow..a lesson I get from this is if I were a German air squadron commander, I would tell my pilots to ignore the shiny glass ball on the belly and concentrate all fire on the plane and engines themselves!
Saburo Sakai, who was one of the few Japanese fighter aces to survive the war, wrote in his autobiography that they had a terrible time at first shooting a B-17 down. They finally ignored the fuselage and wings and aimed for an engine. The 7.7mm machine guns didn’t make much impression, but the Zero had a 20mm cannon also.
The missions to Ploesti were very unpleasant. I am not surprised.
I think those gunners had to be the bravest men in the war.
My father in law was a pilot, initially of a B-24J of the 493d Bomb Group, 8th Air Force. They were a lead crew, which usually meant that my father in law enjoyed a new copilot, the command pilot who was from Group, Wing, or Division Headquarters. The copilot flew in the tail gunner position, and one of the gunners got a day off. Shortly after flying missions, my father in law became a command pilot which meant that he usually flew with another crew, from another group. In this role he came to meet Jimmy Stewart, a fellow command pilot and one of the key leaders of the 8th Air Force.
His original crew completed their tour of duty without a single casualty, including the ball turret gunner. They all returned to the States, but since the command pilot did not fly as often, he stayed and led his group through their transition to B-17s.
At this point, most lead aircraft included not only a command pilot and a command navigator, but the ball turret was replaced by a radar system that allowed them to bomb through an overcast. The radar operator replaced the ball turret gunner and sat in the radio room behind the flight deck.
The B-17 was an interwar design. It did not initially have 10-13 .50 guns. It had fewer, mostly .30, guns.
The name Flying Fortress had nothing to do with its onboard defensive armament. It is a reference to its functioning as an aerial cordon of bombers protecting the continental borders of then-isolationist America. The name itself was intentional propaganda.
As important as the Norden bomb sight was, it would not have been effective in high-altitude precision daylight bombing if both the Boeing B-17 (Wright R-1820 Cyclone) and later Consolidated B-24 (Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp) engines had not been equipped with the relatively advanced and rare turbo-superchargers.
The North American B-25, Martin B-26, Avro Lancaster, Handley-Page Halifax and all the rest lacked turbos (having one- or two-stage mechanical superchargers) and were effectively restricted to low and medium altitudes: It took too long to climb to 25,000 feet, and they were too slow once they got there.
America was the only combatant that made effective use of the turbo. Both the P-38 and P-47 used turbos. The Allison V-1710 was particularly poor at altitude; without the turbo, the Lightning would have failed in combat.
That was not mainly the fault of General Motors. Developing the Allison for high-altitude performance was not a priority:
“... standard doctrine gave an air corps no mission beyond supporting the ground forces.”
The U.S. Army dictated that interwar planes were designed for low/medium altitude ground support. The Bell P-39 and Curtiss P-40 were deliberately compromised in altitude performance by Army dictate.
The magnificent airframe, The North American P-51, would never have succeeded as a high-altitude bomber escort if the British had not married the spectacular Rolls Royce Merlin, with its extraordinary two-stage supercharger, to the American plane.
Don Berlin, the designer of the P-36/P-40 family, coveted the Merlin XX for the Hawk. He wrangled a visit to see it run on the bench (dynamometer) in England. When he got home, he got in trouble with the FBI because the XX engine was Top Secret, and he did not have clearance to even know about it.
He eventually got a Packard Merlin V-1650 with a one-stage supercharger: an inadequate compromise that made little improvement over the Allison.
(The P-40 was actually an excellent design. It was very robust, inherently maneuverable, and had superb handling. It became a “dog” because it was not only overloaded but underpowered, especially at altitude.)
The XP-39 Airacobra flew 390 m.p.h., and climbed to 20,000 feet in 5 minutes. That was blistering performance in a prewar prototype. It had a turbo for its Allison. The Feds told Bell to remove the turbo - too expensive, and not needed for ground support - from production fighters; that crippled its performance. The Cobra was an extremely advanced (mid-engined with tricycle gear) and streamlined airframe that was ruined by the hidebound military.
Although the Axis powers seldom used turbos, they did generally have superior two-stage mechanical superchargers (and sometimes nitrous oxide boost, and/or fuel injection), far better the the early-war one- or two-stage ones in American engines.
The Mitsubishi A6M Zero was indeed an advanced design, but its superiority at 20,000 feet was largely due to its Nakajima Sakae engine having a good two-stage charger. It was the same with the Messerschmitt Bf-109 and Focke-Wulf FW-190: better altitude engine performance, whether in Daimler/Junkers inlines or BMW radials.
The U.S. eventually surpassed the enemies: The P&W R-2800 Double Wasp was an awesome engine, with either turbo or conventional booster. Very late Allisons caught up with Rolls Royce (though too late to matter, with jet engines coming along).
Clark Gable was a waist gunner. He was there to film Combat America, but flew real combat missions, five officially, but many more unofficially (according to others in his unit).
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