I was watching a show on the History Channel this morning called “Suicide Missions” or something, and it discussed the “Ball Turret,” a feature of B-17 bombers which was basically a spherical enclosure that hung from the belly of the plane, enclosing a gunner whose job it was to defend the plane from attacks from below.
Anyway, the show made it out to be a very dangerous post. On the other hand, a web site I looked at claimed that it was actually the safest post on the plane.
So which is it?
More generally, what are the safest and most dangerous jobs on multi-man crewed military aircraft and why?
Well the big problem with being the ball turret gunner would come if they couldn’t retract the turret back into the plane before landing and were unable toget the actual gunner out of the turret. The turret would scrape along the ground, and well, I think you can sort of imagine the rest.
There’s a bit about it in The World According to Garp.
ASAIK the belly turret doesn’t retract on old B-17s. Getting caught in this turret would only be a problem if the plane couldn’t get it’s landing gear down - then it would be scraped off on a belly landing, otherwise no.
There’s one incident of which I’ve heard many times wherein a Fort needed to belly land, and the crew was unable to get the ball gunner out of his turret. Somebody told me this yet again just a couple of hours ago. But I presently have no details. Maybe snopes is worth a look.
According to an Uncle of mine who flew the things, he said that you always had a blind spot when on the belly, your body. He said there was no way that a belly gunner could not be in his own way trying to see because he would sit at his gun and while it was very moveable, there was always a direction that couldn’t be seen. He also said that because of the ME-109’s superior speed, they would often “come off the deck” very fast at the underbelly of the plane and basically it was a duel between the pilot and the belly gunner. And generally the edge was given to the German because he was more of a moving target than the B-17.
A bit more explanation about the operation of the belly turret: It was hydraulically operated, thus any damage to those hydraulics left the gunner hanging, yes, there was a manual override to open the hatch and permit the gunner to exit, but it’s controls were on the plane side. In addition, the turret had to be in a specific position for it to be entered or exited (a very tight squeeze, I might add. I have heard that most belly gunners did not wear parachutes because of the tight fit). Damage to the pod could lock the gunner in a position he could neither move around nor exit, thus leaving him a sitting duck. Also only one person could get in or out of the pod, so if the gunner was injured, nobody could go down and get him. My uncle further said that at least on his version of the B-17, there was no way to bail out of the belly pod without going back into the body of the plane (which if you left your chute in the body of the plane makes sense, I suppose).
Now all of this is second hand (I mean he was there, but I wasn’t), told me by a man in his 70s talking about a position on the plane as co-pilot he didn’t deal with, 40 years after the fact. So there could be holes in his explanation.
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
I couldn’t find the statistic quoted on the site listed. In addition, I’m trying to figure out where the data for such a statistic would come from.
In my (admitedly limited) experience, casualities were not specified by the particular job that the individual performed. Each squadron in a group compiled a diary of operations called the Morning Report. In it casualties were listed as "Roe, Richard, SSGT. ASN 0000000, wounded (killed in action, died of wounds, missing in action, etc) and that was all. The Morning Report was sent up to Group every day where the information was compiled in a Group report and sent to Wing where it was compiled etc., etc.
So, in order to gather data about which particular position had the most casualties, if such were actually the case, someone would have to search through casualty reports, get names and then go back and find out what the individual was doing at the time of becoming a casualty.
I really don’t believe there was all that much difference in casualty rates in various places in an airplane. The whole plane goes down. Air to air machine gun fire and flak aren’t accurate enough to “spotlight” particular small locations within a plane.
This site Machine Gun Dispersion gives dispersion of a 50 cal. gun as 0.437[sup]o[/sup] not including pilot aiming error and airframe flexing. If those are added in, a total dispersion of 0.5[sup]o[/sup] isn’t unreasonable. For a single gun then this would put the bullets into an 8 ft. circle at 300 yards. The guns were usually aimed to converge at 300 yards on the ground. At any other range and under conditions of flight with airframe flexing, aiming error, slips and skids during maneuver etc. it wouldn’t be out of line for the bullets from the guns as a group to occupy a circle 30 or 40 ft. in diameter.
Don’t get me wrong, the ball turret gunner had a miserable job. Cold, hanging out in a plastic bubble with no parachute. And there is the problem of the turret jamming from damage making retraction impossible. That could be a problem and would be an awful mental strain on everyone if it happened. But in order for that to occur the turret would have to jam AND the landing gear would have to be damaged so badly it couldn’t be cranked down. I have no statistics but I suspect it was quite unusual.
The turret escape hatch into the waist section of the plane was accessible when the guns pointed straight down. And I’ll bet quite a sum that when taking flak with no enemy fighters attacking, that’s where the gunners left them.
It’s there (look in the border of the linked page) but I’m a little skeptical. 30% and 60% sound like guesstimates to me. Anyway, I agree that there’s enough random dispersion in gunfire that it would seem unlikely that one position would be dramatically more dangerous than another.
In any event, this page disagrees (without giving any references)
As far as the story of a gunner being trapped in the turret for a belly landing (which was also relayed on the History Channel), it seems a little ULish to me. For one thing, they didn’t give the name of this unfortunate airman. For another, it’s easy to see how such a tale could emerge. I can easily imagine people saying “wouldn’t it be horrible if someone got trapped in there and the plane couldn’t get its landing gear down?” From that, it’s a short leap to "Hey there was once this guy who got trapped . . . "
I basically agree, although one can imagine that some positions would be a little more vulnerable than others.
This makes sense, and it seems to me that such events would not make a significant difference in overall mortality rates.
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The B17 turret did not retract into the body, but the turret of the B-24 did. Hence the confusion.
Secondly, the danger inherent in the ball position largely is the confinement. If your plan was going down at several thousand feet per second, and the forces being imparted by the spin/fall/whatever are making it very hard for you to get out of your cramped little (possibly non-functional turret), with no parachute, there’s a good chance everyone in the crew will get a chance to bail except for you.
So I’d imagine a lot of cases where 8 or 9 guys bail out of the plane, and one of the guys left behind was the ball gunner.
Er, plane, not plan. And I meant to say ‘with no parachute on your back’, since obviously someone with no parachute at all won’t be too succesful at bailing.
My grandfather flew Halifax bombers during the war - also large four engined bombers, except without a ball turret position. He flew 15 daylight missions and 20 night missions. A few notes from him;
It was his impression that in the Halifax and the Lancaster, the TAIL gunner position was by far the most vulnerable, it being the first point of attack for German fighters. This would suggest that the “extremity” positions at points of attack might, in fact, be the most vulnerable.
It was fairly unusual for an enemy fighter to be clearly shot down by a single gunner; bombers killing fighters was rare anyway, but when it happened it was usually in a crossfire. He was one of the few people he knew with a clear kill, and that was a weird case; a Bf-109 had slowed down below their nose to line up a shot and he put a long burst into it with the nose gun. It was the only kill his crew ever took credit for. For the most part the fight against enemy interceptors was a series of lighting-fast passes with quick bursts. You didn’t have one-on-one duels; German pilots, who were not idiots, would not let you line them up.
Until the B-17G, which added more armament to the forward position, German fighters were sometimes in the habit of attacking B-17s head-on, where the plane had the fewest guns.
I think Senorbeef is right on; the issue, really, is confinement. When your plane is rolling and diving towards the ground it would be incredibly difficult to bail out anyway, and to get out of a ballturret would be nigh on impossible. Even if you can crawl out you’ve wasted precious seconds doing so and you still have to don your parachute and escape the plane, which could be rolling like a log and burning, and the planes were not necessarily all that easy to get out of in an emergency. Your chances weren’t very good no matter where in the plane you were, and having an extra step to getting out would make them all that much worse.
However, I would guess there weren’t too many cases where everyone got out EXCEPT the ball gunner, just because there would not be too many cases where everyone got out. Assuming you survive the attack - after all, there’s bullets and shrapnel flying through your plane, which will tend to kill you - the plane might catch fire or just up and explode and kill everyone, and if it does give you some time to bail out it might be spinning or turning of diving straight down at three hundred miles an hour with flames ripping through it. Not the easiest way to egress a plane. Allied bomber crews had very high casualty rates until the end of the war.
Well, “casualty” didn’t mean they were killed in action. I don’t have any cites offhand, but from what I remember, being able to bail from a bomber was fairly common, and there was a good chance you’d be able to. Most of the times planes went down, it wasn’t catastrophic… the plane didn’t rip apart or explode hugely… it would just be a loss of engines, hydraulics, control surfaces, etc. And so, I believe, it was pretty common for most, if not all, of the crew to get out. However, if one or two didn’t make it would naturally tend to be the ball gunner, I’d imagine.
Anecdote: A good friend of mine, her mother had the temerity to fall in love with and marry a B-17 Ball-Turret gunner (American, and enlisted to boot! Horror!). Her family didn’t get around to disowning her until after the war, when it was obvious that her husband would survive the war.
My friend’s father told some pretty harrowing tales, and the shrapnell/splinter scars back them up. Two confirmed solo kills to his credit, he said that some German fighters would dive down behind the bomber, then zoom up under the bomber, almost straight up, trading speed for altitude. They’d hose the belly of the bomber down, raking it from nose to tail. His two kills were pilots that got too close and slow doing this, before breaking off. Probably novices.
I’m not sure exactly how one became a ball turret gunner. I’m guessing from some bits I remember from various documentaries that a number of gunners were assigned to a bomber, and they found amongst themselves who worked best for what.
I know that because of the cramped space, typically your smallest guy would be the ball turret gunner. As far as switching positions, I’m not sure, but I doubt it… it’s better to become an expert at your area.