Posted on 08/23/2022 5:54:19 AM PDT by daniel1212
See this waist gunner in a B-17, flying at 28,000 feet? It’s -42 degrees below zero heading for -60 below and his fingers will start to freeze in one minute if unprotected! And if his M2 .50 jams, or needs to have a new ammo belt, to continue to protect his segment of the bomber’s defensive “box”, he WILL have to take off those gloves, and he WILL lose the tips of his fingers, guaranteed. And if this young man, aprox. 20 years old, ever gets back home to Yourtown, USA…he won't have the tips of his fingers and all of his toes.
“Deep frostbite (the most severe kind) means that all the layers of your skin and the tissues beneath it have frozen significantly. When this happens, your skin turns white or a bluish gray, and is numb to feelings of cold or pain. It may be stiff and rubbery when touched, and your joints and muscles may have difficulty working. After rewarming the skin, fluid-filled blisters may appear within 24-48 hours, and the damaged skin will turn black.”-Healthpartners
“Severe frostbite has longer-term affects and requires immediate medical attention – sometimes involving hospitalization. In the most critical cases, tissues are seriously damaged and amputation may be needed if blood flow to the skin is permanently blocked. In other instances of severe frostbite, patients may avoid amputation, but experience lifelong numbness in the affected areas.”-Healthpartners.
My mom’s cousin, Fritz, from southern Minnesota, was the pilot of a B-24 in the ETO, and flew 25 missions…he came home missing several finger tips and toes, not to flak, but to frostbite.
(Above: Famous photo from Life, Sept 1943. of some B-17 waist gunners. You can see the electrical wires coming down powering their electrically heated clothes and the oxygen tubes plugged in to the wall. Exposed flesh freezes in a matter of mere minutes. Toes were esp. hard to keep warm, and Fritz talked about the agony of just sitting there in the pilots seat, his feet on the controls, unable to even stamp his feet as the rest of the crew constantly did. ...
Bomber missions to Germany from England were often 8–10 hours long and the planes were unheated and open to the outside air as the pictures shows…and just imagine how hard it is to complete tasks in that uncomfortable clothing — from the mask to the boots.
The crew wore electrically heated suits and heavy gloves that provided some protection against temperatures that could dip to -60 degrees below zero…but often short-circuited. Once above 10,000 feet they donned oxygen masks as the bombers continued to climb to their operational level that could be as high as 29,000–32,000 feet. Approaching the target, each crew member would additionally don a 32-pound flak suit and a steel helmet designed to protect against anti-aircraft fire. Parachutes were too bulky to be worn all the time, but crewmen did wear a harness that allowed them to quickly clip on their parachute when needed…(but, oh, yeah, about that parachute: Bomber crewmen weren’t trained to jump out of airplanes with parachute. They were simply given instructions.) ...
(Above: One of the special features of the Ball Turret Gunner was extra cold…hanging down in the 200 mph air stream at those high altitudes, and that turret, though well-built, wasn’t “hermetically sealed”…it was very drafty and extra cold. A miserable crew position, not to mention lonely.
(Above: Great illustration of a B-17F, showing the bright yellow portable oxygen canisters crew members needed whentheyb disconnected to the main oxygen lines to move about the ship, and many more aspects of a B-17 that kept the crew alive at 30,000 feet,) ...
"I'm sorry, sir, I've been hit..."
Here’s the actually story of one B-17 crew member:
Joseph Hallock was a 22-year-old First LT serving as the bombardier aboard "Ginger" a B-17 flying out of its base north of London. Hallock dropped out of college to enlist in the Army Air Force in June 1942. After training as a bombardier, he arrived in England in November 1943 and began his combat career on the last day of the year:...
"“In early 1944 the number of missions required to complete his tour of duty was extended from 25 to 30."
"My first raid was on December thirty-first, over Ludwigshaven. ....
After a while, with the emergency oxygen running out, we had to come down to ten thousand feet, which is dangerously low. We saw four fighters dead ahead of us, somewhere over France, and we thought we were licked. After a minute or two we discovered that they were P-47s, more beautiful than any woman who ever lived. I said, 'I think now's the time for a short prayer, men. Thanks, God, for what you've done for us.'"
“The twenty-eighth [mission]was on Berlin, and I was scared damn near to death. It was getting close to the end
So many hardships endued, lives risked, and lost, in helping to save a country from a wicked madman. Yet multitudes of their physical successors chose to go to war with God and work to destroy this nation from within, while a relative remnant of true Christians seek to save souls as part of the larger spiritual war.
Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. (2 Timothy 2:3)
When men were men.. the greatest generation !!
We’ve come a long way to maternity flight suits.
Today, the morons in the defense department think the greater outrage is the term “crewman”
I’ve personally spoken to guys from the WW2 museum and the 8th air force museum.
The stories they tell are horrible, especially Black Week.
Is there much doubt that today’s generation would surrender to seek a false peace rather than accept such conditions and fight for the nation?
When men were men.. the greatest generation !! ............... Nope, when boys became men in their mid to late teens. We had 16 yr. olds using their older brother’s birth certificates. May a couple even younger got away with it. (There was a young teen kid in the Navy, that made the headlines back then.)
Just finishing up Ian Toll's trilogy on the Pacific War. These books are highly recommended to get a better understanding of the war in the Pacific, especially as most WW2 histories is European-centric.
For instance, most people are familiar with the Enola Gay atomic bombing of Hiroshima led by Col. Tibbetts but how many know that the second atomic bombing mission to Nagasaki (Bockscar led by Maj. Sweeney) was riddled with problems and almost a complete disaster. Nagasaki was not even the primary target and as the Bockscar was nearly out of fuel, it had to make an emergency landing on Okinawa with just 7 gallons left in the tanks!
In fact, it was discussed initially bringing Maj. Sweeney up on court martial for what was considered a rash of bad decisions on Sweeney's part during the mission. But fortunately, the bombing itself was a success and brought the war swiftly to an end so it never came to be (fortunately, because Sweeney was a good man who did get his crew back safely in the end). This was not known until decades later.
Anyway, a really good set of books on the Pacific War by Ian Toll. Made for fascinating reading from page one.
I lost a cousin, before I was born, who was a waist gunner. He is buried in Belgium.
As a young man, I worked with a man who was at the Chosin Reservoir. He survived the bleeding from his wound because it froze.
One tough SOB.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By Randall Jarrell
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.
When the ball turret jammed, and the landing gear collapsed, the ball turret gunner was turned into jelly.
11 weeks of Marine Corps boot camp will straighten this lad out. At least the boot camp I went to back in the early 1980s on Parris Island.
Correction: My cousin is buried in the Netherlands. His plane was shot down over Munster, Germany. Only the 2 waist-gunners were killed; tge surviving crew members were taken as prisoners. Charles had just turned 20.
incredible article!
When 19 & 20 year old boys were MEN!
Thank you for sharing this with us.
I knew a guy that had a photo album filled with photos of nose art on a lot of the bombers...photos that he took. The album also contained a safety pin from a bomb from each of his forty-some missions. He enlisted at 17.
My grandpa was a corpsman in WW2 and Korea. He said Korea was the coldest he’s ever seen and he didn’t even know it could get that cold. He had to remove fingers, toes, feet, etc on a regular basis. He said if Chinese and Korean buets didn’t kill you, the cold will
I had two history teachers, in high school and college, tell me almost the same story of commanding tanks at the Yalu when the Chinese attacked. Both were lieutenants and expressed regrets about their command abilities. These were probably reactions to loss and being put in impossible conditions.
I was sorry I never got them together.
My husband’s only maternal Uncle died in Switzerland after they got hit over Germany. Talked with other WW2 Vets who said just surviving the Bomber TAKE OFFS was a major fete, also.
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