According to an article in Snopes regarded a Reagan anecdote, there is a story by Andy Rooney(in his book “My War”) about a stuck ball-turret gunner who was crushed when his B-17 had to belly land.
Who was this gunner? There has to be more details out there other than Andy Rooney’s accounts and anecdotal information.
I believe it happened a number of times. The ball turret mechanism was prone to jamming and if the plane had to land…
To start with it would have been a B-24 ball turret which retracted for landing.
Here’s an old discussion on a veteran’s forum.
According to one of the participants, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force called it an “urban myth.”
The ball turret on the B-17 had to rotate to the vertical position to allow the hatch to be opened into the plane for exit during flight. If the mechanism was damaged that prevented that position, it would have had the same effect as not being able to retract.
Rooney describes it as something he witnessed. However, since it would have been a pretty natural fear of the bomber crews, in general, he may be recalling an actual event or his memory might have converted legends into a “memory.”
With no USAAF documentation of such an event, we are left with having to choose between an uncorroborated memory and a lack of documentation.
I can’t imagine that the Air Force would subject the family with the knowledge that their loved one died such a gruesome death. This is clearly something that wartime censors would have edited out. You’ll never have a definitive answer.
I have no doubt that it happened more than once.
HERE is the Andy Rooney interview, the relevant bit starts around the six minute mark.
Donald L. Miller’s 2006 book Masters of the Air, NY Time review here and goodreads reviews here, repeats the Rooney story and also includes a photo (#29, credited to the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum, Savannah, Georgia) with this caption –
So this undated photo shows what looks like a disintegrating turret, and the purported victim is still anonymous. Still, it looks plausible to me as a way of death that the Air Force would prefer to list as “combat death”. The Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum, website here, could have more of the story behind its photo. No surprise, it is selling Miller’s book here.
http://www.americanairmuseum.com/aircraft/12001
43-37995 crash landed with one fatality.
Censored info. no one knows…
As the photo shows it in a field with tress, its possible the ball turrent smashed into something but the rest of the plane didn’t suffer much . eg a rock outcrop could be hidden in the grass …
The name Ronnie Kramer in some book is a fictitious name for a turrent gunner lost on landing, fictitious as the info is censored and it gives the story an appearance of fiction if he says “unknown gunner”.
Here’s one potential remedy…[link to video on Vimeo]
There is no ‘n’ in turret.
That is all.
One would think that the crew could break the plexiglass and get the guy out. My first thought is unbolting a radio-they were huge, my Father had one for his ham radio hobby-and two or three guys smashing the plexiglass with it,
If this was an actual issue, I wonder why the design of the turret was not revised to either permit opening or even to fall free and allow the gunner a chance to parachute? Then too, if it was an issue, or even widely believed contemporary myth, I wonder why nobody mentions gunners or crews having field expedient escape tools to hand?
And even if it didn’t, as long as the (tricycle) gear extended and the pilot didn’t flare too much, he’d be fine. The B-17 was a taildragger, and if any of the three wheels wasn’t down and the ball turret was, then the plane would land on the ball turret.
Another vote here for Miller’s book, which despite its title is not the usual hero-worship or dry recitation of mission details but a realistic-seeming discussion of all aspects of what the war was like for those men.
The ball turret on a B-17 didn’t retract.
*The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarrell, 1914 - 1965
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.
Did you look up how a ball turret worked?
The gunner was in the fetal position with his feet above his head (yes, there was one short guy on the crew).
No room for parachute, another hatch added weight and would increase survival by .001%
This was war. People die. A few thousand planes are not going to be recalled for safety issues.
And yes, the designers probably figured out that there was the distinct possibilty that some gunners would get squished.
My question is: Were the gunners on bombers actually useful, or did they serve the purpose of providing the crews with the belief that they were protected from high-speed interceptors?
I suspect it was the placebo effect - it looks good and it is reassuring to think that Rob will shoot down any nasty fighter that comes along.
Early on, the bombers had greater range than their escorting fighters and, on deep missions, they had no cover - those guns were all that there was for defense.
I don’t know if the tales of a ball turret gunner being trapped while the plane actually landed on a runway are true or apocryphal, but the gunners definitely got trapped in those things and sometimes went down with the plane.
A major player in one of my nonfiction WW2 books was a ball turret gunner who was stuck there when the pilot called to abandon ship because the bomber was going down. (I personally interviewed him many times and corroborated his story with other sources.) The ball turret had lost all power, so to get out he had to manually retract the ball using a hand crank. This was difficult and excruciatingly slow when you’re the last person left on the plane and it’s losing altitude quickly. And when you get up and out of the thing, you still have to find your parachute which may have been tossed all over the inside of the plane. (The ball turret is too cramped to wear a chute.)
This guy made it out just in time for his chute to open effectively. He, as well as other bomber veterans, told me stories of incidents in which the ball turret gunner died because he couldn’t get out in time. Missing Air Crew Reports filed after a plane went down, written by the surviving pilot or other crew, sometimes stated something like “ball turret gunner last seen trapped and unable to extricate himself, presumed to have gone down with the aircraft.”
While it may seem cold that a crew would leave the ball turret gunner trapped, they had no choice. There isn’t a lot of time when the pilot orders abandon ship. I’m sure there were bomber veterans who were haunted by leaving a ball turret gunner behind.
It wasn’t just early on. The fighters never had the range of the bombers. That’s why they had to take Iwo Jima so the fighters had a place to take off from that would let them escort the bombers all the way into Japan.
They were useful. Air gunners could and did shoot down fighter planes.
Google “air gunner victory” for some cites.
This thread brings remote turrets to mind. How did the optics work on remote turrets? How did the gunner see the bad guy?
Here’s an article on the B-29 superfortress’s remote gun turrets. It looks like the gunners didn’t sit that far from their weapons, basically they had a small plexiglass bubble to look out of with the (complicated looking) gunsight mechanism to aim with. The gun turrets themselves were relatively nearby and they were also fairly low profile.
Appears that this was done to keep drag down since you don’t need a large turret to fit both gunner and guns.
Based on a little quick reading the gunsight was adjusted by turning a control so that an aiming circle matched the wingspan of the incoming fighter. You keep the gunsight on the target and the computer (mechanical, I think) did the rest, automatically adjusting the guns to point at whatever the gunner was sighted on.