Long time lurker and first time poster here. I've enjoyed this site for a long time. Admire the spirit of friendliness and impressed by the level of historical and technical knowledge from the experten. You folks rock.
I know a lot of you are interested in WWII weapons as well as aircraft, so I thought I'd share something I came across that combines both. These are excerpts from a book, Bloody Skies, a 15th AF Combat Crew, by Melvin W. McGuire and Robert Hadley. McGuire was a waist gunner on 15th AF B-17s out of Italy, and the book is worthwhile reading. But what struck me was some of the things he had to say about his beloved Browning M2, none of which I'd ever come across before, so I thought I'd pass them on:
P. 232: "Although the effective range of the .50 caliber was eight hundred yards, I was confident I could hit a German fighter at a thousand yards.
I didn't like tracers, and thought those who shot them were wasting their time. Tracers, containing manganese or another chemical, quickly burned out and became progressively lighter as they burned. They did not hold their trajectory and floated back and forth. Their only benefit, in my opinion, was to let the Germans know something was still coming out of the gun. Whenever possibly (sic) I asked the armorers back at the field to change the ratio of tracers from every fifth to every seventh round when they prepared my mixture of rounds".
P 234. "Before every mission we squeezed as many rounds as possible into the plane for each gun--generally five hundred rounds per gun position, and we shot thirteen guns on each B-17...The rounds were stored in belts or canisters equipped with rollers to prevent belt-jamming. Early in my tour, I decided if the armorers removed the rollers we could store more ammunition. Did this cause jamming? Yes, but the occasional jam was worth the increased quantity of ammunition and we need as much ammunition as possible, especially on longer missions."
" ....our armorers were very innovative, One of the first things they did when the Fifteenth arrived in Italy was discard all manufacturer's specifications on the head space of the guns. This enabled us to better seat the guns in the frame. Those specifications worked in North Africa, but they were not valid in Europe. The colder temperatures we encountered in flying over the Alps made the mechanism freeze, therefore, they needed to be much looser than indicated by the factory specs. Feeler gauges were designed for making those adjustments, but we learned to determine the proper seating by the sound of the gun as it fired. We eventually had them so loose the were "just right" if they rang like a bell when fired. The slack was necessary because they had a tendency to tighten up when fired. With the "proper" head fittings, they jammed, or the cycle of fire went down. We also removed some of the oil from the buffer units. Oil had a tendency to freeze, and if we removed oil from the buffer units, it improved the fire cycle. Our armorers experimented with different types of oil in the turrets and eventually selected a brand refined by the British. Even that oil did not work well at sixty below."
p 236. "It was aggravating to see them (German fighters out of range, tracking the formation) flying near us, as they were careful to fly more than a thousand yards from us...This one skulker, an ME-109, had been with us for sometime on this particular day. He was flying absolutely even with our plane, opposite my position at the left waist, We figured he was eleven hundred yards away. I had become very good at estimating range and had been looking at him though my gun sights for about fifteen minutes. A 109's length was just a few inches over twenty-nine feet. I estimated his range to be about eleven hundred yards using that sight and kept him within that sight. He never moved.
Even though he was just a shade out of effective range, I couldn't stand it. I wanted to shoot at him so badly, but we had been ordered not to fire at planes outside of gun range as we didn't have that much ammunition to burn. For fifteen minutes I computed and re-computed, measuring the distance and calculating the ballistic drop. Nobody else was firing on him. My calculations indicated that I need to shoot at a spot ahead of him and about eighteen feet above him in order to score a hit. The lead wasn't all that bad because his speed was the same as ours. He was absolutely even with us. Finally, I thought, I'm going to try this.
I fired a short burst and the first round was a tracer, which flew out about five or six hundred yards and boat-tailed. One of the shots must have hit (the 109), because to my astonishment, the canopy blew off...cartwheeling backwards over the plane. As the airplane jittered back and forth, I could tell something had happened when it began a very gentle downward glide, It flew a little ahead of us and we watched him for many miles, flying at the slight angle until he was a speck and no longer visible.
Immediately after firing my short bust, I was chewed out by the co-pilot who had heard my gun but could not see the result. Over the intercom he said, "Come on now, that thing was over a thousand yards out. Stop wasting rounds." That made me mad. After all, I had hit the plane and probably decapitated the pilot."
I know a lot of you are interested in WWII weapons as well as aircraft, so I thought I'd share something I came across that combines both. These are excerpts from a book, Bloody Skies, a 15th AF Combat Crew, by Melvin W. McGuire and Robert Hadley. McGuire was a waist gunner on 15th AF B-17s out of Italy, and the book is worthwhile reading. But what struck me was some of the things he had to say about his beloved Browning M2, none of which I'd ever come across before, so I thought I'd pass them on:
P. 232: "Although the effective range of the .50 caliber was eight hundred yards, I was confident I could hit a German fighter at a thousand yards.
I didn't like tracers, and thought those who shot them were wasting their time. Tracers, containing manganese or another chemical, quickly burned out and became progressively lighter as they burned. They did not hold their trajectory and floated back and forth. Their only benefit, in my opinion, was to let the Germans know something was still coming out of the gun. Whenever possibly (sic) I asked the armorers back at the field to change the ratio of tracers from every fifth to every seventh round when they prepared my mixture of rounds".
P 234. "Before every mission we squeezed as many rounds as possible into the plane for each gun--generally five hundred rounds per gun position, and we shot thirteen guns on each B-17...The rounds were stored in belts or canisters equipped with rollers to prevent belt-jamming. Early in my tour, I decided if the armorers removed the rollers we could store more ammunition. Did this cause jamming? Yes, but the occasional jam was worth the increased quantity of ammunition and we need as much ammunition as possible, especially on longer missions."
" ....our armorers were very innovative, One of the first things they did when the Fifteenth arrived in Italy was discard all manufacturer's specifications on the head space of the guns. This enabled us to better seat the guns in the frame. Those specifications worked in North Africa, but they were not valid in Europe. The colder temperatures we encountered in flying over the Alps made the mechanism freeze, therefore, they needed to be much looser than indicated by the factory specs. Feeler gauges were designed for making those adjustments, but we learned to determine the proper seating by the sound of the gun as it fired. We eventually had them so loose the were "just right" if they rang like a bell when fired. The slack was necessary because they had a tendency to tighten up when fired. With the "proper" head fittings, they jammed, or the cycle of fire went down. We also removed some of the oil from the buffer units. Oil had a tendency to freeze, and if we removed oil from the buffer units, it improved the fire cycle. Our armorers experimented with different types of oil in the turrets and eventually selected a brand refined by the British. Even that oil did not work well at sixty below."
p 236. "It was aggravating to see them (German fighters out of range, tracking the formation) flying near us, as they were careful to fly more than a thousand yards from us...This one skulker, an ME-109, had been with us for sometime on this particular day. He was flying absolutely even with our plane, opposite my position at the left waist, We figured he was eleven hundred yards away. I had become very good at estimating range and had been looking at him though my gun sights for about fifteen minutes. A 109's length was just a few inches over twenty-nine feet. I estimated his range to be about eleven hundred yards using that sight and kept him within that sight. He never moved.
Even though he was just a shade out of effective range, I couldn't stand it. I wanted to shoot at him so badly, but we had been ordered not to fire at planes outside of gun range as we didn't have that much ammunition to burn. For fifteen minutes I computed and re-computed, measuring the distance and calculating the ballistic drop. Nobody else was firing on him. My calculations indicated that I need to shoot at a spot ahead of him and about eighteen feet above him in order to score a hit. The lead wasn't all that bad because his speed was the same as ours. He was absolutely even with us. Finally, I thought, I'm going to try this.
I fired a short burst and the first round was a tracer, which flew out about five or six hundred yards and boat-tailed. One of the shots must have hit (the 109), because to my astonishment, the canopy blew off...cartwheeling backwards over the plane. As the airplane jittered back and forth, I could tell something had happened when it began a very gentle downward glide, It flew a little ahead of us and we watched him for many miles, flying at the slight angle until he was a speck and no longer visible.
Immediately after firing my short bust, I was chewed out by the co-pilot who had heard my gun but could not see the result. Over the intercom he said, "Come on now, that thing was over a thousand yards out. Stop wasting rounds." That made me mad. After all, I had hit the plane and probably decapitated the pilot."
