Posted on 05/27/2019 8:52:15 AM PDT by Retain Mike
The Ball Turret Gunner
The near certainty the United States would be drawn into WW II prompted creation of an autonomous Army Air Force. Until the war in Europe began, standard doctrine gave an air corps had no mission beyond supporting the ground forces. Now air power advocates received the authority to prove the theory that bombers could win wars. The B-24 Liberator and B-17 Flying Fortress carried 10-13 .50cal machine guns for defense and the Norden bombsight for precision daylight attack. Under combat conditions, peacetime accuracy was never realized and bombers suffered horrendous losses until the P-51 Mustang could escort them all the way to the target. Now granted a lot of the men ended up as prisoners of war, but one historian noted that Kamikaze squadrons had a lessor casualty rate until fighter escorts could accompany the missions. Completing 25 missions was so extraordinary in 1942 and 1943, that the aircraft and crew of the Memphis Belle returned to the United States to sell war bonds.
Even though all crew members had to contemplate a dismal fate, that of the ball turret gunner exceeded all others. The man operating the two machine guns on the belly of these aircraft is described by Gregory Freeman in his book The Forgotten 500.
“Nobody really wanted to be in a ball turret. This Plexiglas ball hanging from the bottom of the bomber was one of America’s latest innovations in air warfare. An ingenious piece of machinery built by the Sperry Corporation; the ball turret was a heavily armed bubble just big enough to hold a grown man – but only on the small side. It had room for the gunner and its two fifty-caliber machine guns – and little else. The extremely cramped quarters meant that the gunner was the only crew member on a bomber who did not wear a parachute during a mission. Provided the hoist worked, he was left sitting up in the main part of the plane, where he would have to go to get it and put it on before escaping with the rest of the crew. [Clare] Musgrove always told his students: ‘Stow your chute where you can find it in a hurry. You won’t have much time’.”
“The ball turret was not a place for the claustrophobic. It was a tiny space, though it had a great view of the scenery below – or the fighter plane coming up to kill you. The entire unit rotated around in a circle and also up and down, so that the gunner could fire on planes coming from any direction. Being suspended underneath the plane gave the gunner a sensation of flying free, and that often meant that the attacking fighter seemed to be going after him personally rather than trying to shoot down the bomber itself. Everyone on the plane was riding an adrenaline surge during a fighter attack, but none more so than the ball turret gunner who was furiously firing his fifty – caliber machine guns at the German plane trying to kill him in his little glass bubble.”
“The ball turret gunner sat curled up in a fetal position, swiveling the entire turret as he aimed the two guns. As he moved the turret quickly to find attacking planes and then follow them with his guns, the gunner could be in any position from lying on his back to standing on his feet. The gunner sat between the guns, his feet in stirrups positioned on either side of a thirteen-inch-diameter window in front, his knees up around his ears and very little room for moving anything but his hands. His flight suit provided the only padding for comfort.”
“An optical gunsight hung in front of his face, and a pedal under his left foot adjusted a reticule on the gunsight glass. When the target was framed in the sight, the gunner knew the range was correct and he let fly with the machine guns, pushing down one of the two firing buttons located on the wooden handles that controlled the movement of the ball. Shell casings were ejected through a port just below the gun barrels, pouring out as fast as the beads of sweat on the gunner’s face.”
“The plane carried two 150 round belts of ammunition per gun for the ball turret and fed them down from boxes mounted on either side of the hoist. The ball turret in the B-24, which Musgrove flew, could be electrically raised and lowered, unlike those on the B-17 bombers, which had to be manually cranked up into the fuselage. Musgrove thought this was a great improvement over the B-17 design, because no one wanted to be trapped in a ball turret. There was no way to exit the turret without raising it into the fuselage of the plane, so a turret that could not be retracted was a deathtrap for the gunner. Any system that made it faster and easier to retract the turret was welcomed by the gunners. They had all heard the stories of ball turret gunners who were trapped in their glass bubbles when battle damage prevented them being retracted into the fuselage. Not only was the gunner left out there with no protection, probably with his guns empty or inoperative, but he also faced the prospect of the big plane landing with him hanging from the belly.”
“It was every ball turret gunner’s nightmare, and it became a horrifying reality for some. If the gunner was already dead in the turret and it could not be retracted into the plane, the crew sometimes would jettison the whole apparatus, because the plane was not designed to land with the ball turret hanging underneath. But if the gunner was alive, they would have to tell him that they had no choice but to put the plane down eventually. The ball turret gunner had a long time to contemplate his fate, maybe to say good-bye on the intercom to his crewmates, as the damaged plane limped back to the base or looked for a field in which to crash. All he could do was sit in the glass bubble like a helpless fetus in the womb, watching the ground come closer and closer. When the plane landed, the ball turret was often scraped off the belly, taking the gunner with it. This problem occurred with the B-24. There was sufficient clearance with the B-17 for the turret to be in the lowered position, if the plane could land with the wheels down.”
These bombers were mainly crewed by teenagers and men in their early twenties. Memorial Day provides an opportunity to contemplate the extraordinary hazards some of these young men, become our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, faced to be considered the “Greatest Generation”.
The Forgotten 500 by Gregory Freeman
United States Army Air Forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Air_Forces#Army_Air_Forces_created
Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-17_Flying_Fortress
Consolidated B-24 Liberator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_B-24_Liberator
Norden bombsight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Ball_Turret_Gunner 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.
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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