drgondog
Major
It's surprizing to see how much difference there was in the stability of the gun mounts or sights of the different gun positions.
It's also surprizing that the B-17 got hit in about 11% of it's attacks, but the B-24 only about 1%. But there's that qualifier "hits whose direction could be determined" which I guess the B-24 got hit more, but they couldn't determine which direction it came from. Some statistics just don't tell you much.
From those figures it appears they attacked from straight ahead about as much as from straight behind, and got almost the same % of hits from each.
I suspect that the number of attacks measured on the B-24s were "1042" or "1045" or "1025" as it is highly unlikely that B-24s were attacked 3x more than B-17s when they only had about 35% of the heavy bomber force in that timeframe.