Noha307 wrote:
mustangdriver wrote:
While out with Aluminum Overcast, I’ve had to vets who were eye witnesses to events where the turret gunner was crushed. One pilot who didn’t have a mission but his btg filled in on another crew. Another was a fellow ball turret gunner whose friend was lost in that manner on the same mission he was on. Both vets were in person at the plane and told the story directly to us.
Do you happen to remember either of their names, what unit they were with, when it occurred or any other details that would help narrow it down?
Just to make sure this isn't misinterpreted, I want to be clear that this is not intended to be criticism and I am sincerely interested in any claims. I want to be correct, not right. My goal is not self-aggrandizement, but, as one of my history professors put it to "go where the truth lies".
quemerford wrote:
I think it's important to state that lack of evidence is not evidence.
By the way, for those with an interest in philosophy like myself, the relevant theory is
falsifiability. It basically says that the only theories that are credible are those that can be proven wrong. A natural extension of this is that the
burden of proof lies with the person making the claim -
and this applies to both sides of an arguement. Therefore, for example, if you claim that ball turret gunners were crushed on landing it is up to you to prove it. However, if the if you claim that ball turret gunners were
not crushed on landing it is
also up to you to prove it. In other words, the default position is not "no", but actually "I don't know". (Full disclosure, I only minored in philosophy and it has been a few years since my last course, so this may not be an entirely accurate description.
)
mike furline wrote:
Info and photo from "Masters of the Air" about half way down.
https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/bomb ... i/131369/8mike furline wrote:
And while all of those nit-picky details may be true, the photo does show the results of a turret being ground down.
A very fair point. When I have time, I will definitely have to look into that picture. Specifically, to check if there is an attribution for it and if that information can be used to determine where and when it was taken.
Quote:
The turret can also be hand cranked or moved by hand with the the lock loosened. Anyone that's ever unloosened the turret in flight can attest if you go too far the turret will rotate extremely fast pointing the guns straight down (effectively exposing the hatch to the inside of the airplane).
That's the interesting thing about the story. As near as I can tell, there are actually very few circumstances in which a ball turret gunner could not successfully exit the turret. Forgetting the B-24 for a second, B-17 ball turrets do not retract. Furthermore, an elevation hand crank is located on the mounting ring inside the airplane, so an electrical failure would also not prevent escape. This means that essentially the only way for the gunner to be trapped in the turret is for something, such as a piece of flak, to have physically jammed the elevation gearing or for some external force to do so. This is apparently what happened to S/Sgt. Russo as his guns were wedged in the top of the fuselage of the B-17 that came up from below. On top of all of this, the situation would require the B-17 to be unable to extend its landing gear which, while certainly not out of the question, would be an additional condition that would have to be met.
p51 wrote:
I can't quote the figures, but I remember reading a postwar USAF study that showed the ball turret casualties were somewhat lesser than those in other positions on heavy bombers.
Luckily, not only do I happen to know the exact source of those figures, but I also used it to answer essentially the question you brought up. It's even the immediately preceding entry on the list of common questions and answers:
Noha307 wrote:
How dangerous was the ball and/or tail gun position?According to an analysis of casualties suffered by the Eighth Air Force from June to August 1944, the crew position with the greatest chance of being injured or killed was the bombardier followed by the navigator. The tail gunner was third most dangerous and the ball turret gunner was actually the safest position.[1]
Endnotes- "Survey of Battle Casualties, Eighth Air Force, June, July, and August 1944," in Wound Ballistics in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1962), 571. The statistics are actually a bit more complicated than this summary suggests. For example, by percent of total casualties, waist gunner is the most dangerous, but the survey notes that since airplanes often carried two the number is likely disproportionately higher. The other quirk is that, because the survey tracked both deaths and injuries, although certain positions had a higher death rate, the overall average was lower. For example, the tail gunner position had the highest number of deaths, but only the third highest number of injuries, so the overall casualty rate was third highest.
Lastly, since I've spent a bit of time thinking about this subject, I did come up with a couple of interesting thoughts. First, as the ball turret could be
entered and exited from the outside of the airplane when the barrels were parallel to the fuselage and assuming for the sake of argument a ball turret did get stuck at this orientation, the gunner would in theory be in the interesting position of being able to choose the means of his own death. He could either wait to be crushed on landing, or opt to bail out without a parachute and die from the fall. (Also, just to tie this into the
comment of graphic details and whether or not they are too sensitive to record, if you dig a bit into the story of the Lockerbie bombings, there's a
report of a young woman actually surviving the fall before passing away shortly thereafter.)
After reading the summary of the
Amazing Stories episode, I came up with my own "what if" scenario if I had the opportunity to write my own script. Knowing that ball turrets were often jettisoned over the Channel, I figured a interesting alternative would be to have the entire crew tie their parachutes to the accessible portion of the ball turret, prematurely pull the ripcords, detach the turret from the aircraft, and hope the parachutes would slow its descent enough for the gunner to survive. Fantasy, I know, but if you're already writing an off the wall story like
Shadow in the Cloud why not go for it?