He’s actually a much better singer than I thought he’d be!!
Bear in mind that the early B-17s were basically an aluminium funnel with a bit of glazing over the wide end. It was not at all uncommon for a head-on attack to kill the tail gunner by putting a load of bullets/shrapnel into his back.
“Urban legend” may be the wrong phrase, but Doris “Dorie” Miller has been acclaimed for things he may not actually have accomplished.
Miller was the mess boy played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the movie Pearl Harbor. He’s often credited with shooting down multiple Japanese planes on December 7, 1941, but it’s at all certain that he shot down ANY Zeros.
And several American sailors present said they were more afraid of getting shot by Miller than of getting shot by the Japanese.
It’s fair to say that Doris Miller was a brave, resourceful young man who TRIED to help. It just isn’t clear whether he actually accomplished anything. But I guess the Navy felt they had to find SOME bright spot in what happened that day.
I was born in Minneapolis, and I know all four verses as well. The tricky thing is to recite them as poetry (as they were originally written), rather than sing them (to the traditional tune of “Anacreon in Heaven”).
The P-38 Lightning fighter had all its guns in the nose, aligned to fire straight forward, unlike conventional fighters with guns in the wings, which were aligned to converge at a point in front of the fighter. The Lightning’s gun and cannon suite were referred to affectionately as the "buzz saw"for its efficiency in shredding targets.
One of the pilots who shot down the two twin-engine “Betty” bombers carrying Admiral Yamamoto and his staff once noted that he got right in on the tail of the Betty he shot down; his gun suite fired straight down the length of the narrow, flimsy aluminum fuselage at point-blank range. He said he was certain he killed everyone in the airplane with that single burst.
Ok, well all this is telling me that fighters wouldn’t aim at a gun turret. They’d be firing at the heart of the plane, and hitting just about everything when they did.
Ball turrets were not made of Pexiglass. They were metal (aluminum, I would assume), with tiny windows installed mostly in the gunner’s field of peripheral vision and a circular panel for him to aim through (think TIE fighter in the original STAR WARS). They were mounted on a rotating yoke attached to the spine of the aircraft and partially retracted into the fuselage to allow access by the gunner. A hatch over his head would be closed before the turret was lowered into the plane’s slipstream.
The dorsal turrets on bombers were basically framed Pexiglass. Also, all US combat planes I’ve ever heard of had at least some armor protection, around the pilot(s) if nowhere else. In the -17 and -24, the other crew stations were afforded some armor, though it was quite limited due to weight considerations.
I’ve read that gunners on Fortresses and Liberators carried only enough ammunition for one minute of continuous firing; however, the planes were regularly overloaded on take off, so much so that if they made it off the ground (there were many accidents), the climb to altitude was agonizingly slow. A lot of that weight was undoubtedly extra ammunition, since the bombers would have to defend themselves sometimes for hours before effective long-range escort fighters entered service.
Not really. Even the YB-40 variant, which was basically a gunship without bomb load only carried 11,000 rounds. The basic .50 cal cycles at 13 rounds/second. The YB-40 had 14 guns, minimum. That’s 60.43 seconds of continuous fire from each gun.
The B-17F and B-24D would have been the models most affected by German fighter activity between August 1942 and March 1944. They carried a standard nine .50s, sometimes two or three more in the nose. Even with a bomb load, they would have found room for extra ammunition (I certainly would have made the effort).
As an aside, I remember reading that on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission (October 1943), the gunners were ankle-deep in expended shell casings long before their planes had even reached their targets.
Not hard to imagine at all. Think of this space covered by 1400 empty shell casings. Since all the available ammo has to be pre-loaded into the magazines, and they don’t have a lot of spare space, the amount of extra ammo carried was likely minimal.
Of course, if David Simmons was still around he could probably tell us from first-hand experience.
Just to give everyone an idea of the function and interior of a ball turret; here’s a clip of a restored turret (minus the guns).
B-17 Ball Turret comes to life
First part of the video discusses restoration. If you are really curious they show how the gearing and controls work.
Go to the 8 minute mark if you want to see the whole assembly in motion and the 9 minute mark for a look inside.
Also a slight nitpick- The B-24 lowered the turret; the B-17 did not.
There was definitely some sort of manual crank-operated system for getting out of the ball turret on B-17F models; my grandfather was a sometime ball turret gunner, and he said that more than once, the powered traverse got damaged, and he had to crank the turret around and get out.
I say sometime; he was assigned as a replacement flight engineer/top turret gunner to his crew in 1943 after the 1st Schweinfurt/Regensburg raid, and flew with other crews to catch up with his crew in terms of mission count- he didn’t want to be part of a second crew. Typically, since he was 5’6", he was assigned the ball turret, unless they already had an experienced ball turret gunner, or needed a flight engineer.
Another UL from Pearl Harbor: The one that the Frank Loesser song"Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition",about a chaplain who manned a ship’s gun during the attack while shouting that phrase, was real. Not exactly. Chaplain Lt. (j.g.) Howell Forgy of the USS New Orleans did say that to the men supporting the ship’s gun crews, but that was it.
Hair stuffing is always the worse Thanksgiving side dish (sorry).
Andy Rooney’s My War describes the belly landing of a bomber with the belly turret gunner stuck beneath. I read that years ago and the thought still gives me chills.
Like I said, the whole play provided pretty much no protection from things like flak. That stuff would punch two holes right through the middle of the plane and anything or anyone in the way. Best defense was to avoid it or slog through it and get out the other side. The aircrew had helmets and flak jackets which probably gave them more protection than the plane did.
Here’s another one (told to me by my cousin, who was in the USAF). “Save a bomb for Mainz”-supposedly, an allied aircrew crash landed outside Mainz, Germany-they crew were manhandled and hung by the townspeople. After that, every bomber crew saved a bomb to drop on Mainz, to avenge this act of murder.
True or false?
I was sure this was true to a point see link
The townspeople lynching the airmen is probably a reference to the Russelsheim Massacre. As the Allies didn’t even realize until after the war that the airmen involved were American, not British, I doubt that the massacre inspired the saying. I do not know when the saying first arose.
Sounds like bullshit.