Most Dangerous Position on a Bomber....?

[Medvedya]

You say that when the rear turret is in full rotation, the door is pointing outside yes? Because this was how the gunner bailed out. Perhaps it was armoured so that when the turret was rotated around fully to say, the port side, it was designed to protect the gunner from enemy aircraft attacking from the starboard side?

Ah - I forgot to read this. No, that would have just been a bonus. The armoured doors behind the rear gunner are to stop bullets reaching the rest of the crew. Many a time did a Lanc get back with the rest of the crew all sitting ashen-faced up front, and the poor gunner smeared all over the perspex of his shattered turret.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

I can see that, that makes a lot of sense to keep bullets from flying up to the front of the plane.

 

[cheddar cheese]

Oh well - was just a thought.

 

[Medvedya]

Have a look at this - a Fraser-Nash rear turret on a Short Stirling.

 

[Medvedya]

This sums a night bomber raid up fairly well I think.

This snippet comes from; http://www.lancastermuseum.ca

Imagine yourself in a building of enormous size, pitch black inside. You are ordered to walk very slowly from one side to the other, then back. This walk in the dark will take you perhaps five or six hours. You know that in various nooks and crannies along your route killers armed with machine guns are lurking. They will quickly become aware that you have started your journey, and will be trying to find you the whole time you are in the course of it. There is another rather important psychological factor: the continuous roar emanating from nearby machinery. It precludes the possibility of your getting any audible warning of danger's approach. You are thus aware that if the trouble you are expecting does come, it will burst upon you with the startling surprise one can experience standing in the shower and having someone abruptly jerk open the door of the steamy cubicle and shout over the noise. If the killers stalking you on your walk should happen to detect you, they will leap at you out of the darkness firing flaming tracers from their machine guns. Compared with the armament they are carrying, you are virtually defenceless. Moreover, you must carry a pail of gasoline and a shopping bag full of dynamite in one hand. If someone rushes at you and begins firing, about all you can do is fire a small calibre pistol in his direction and try to elude him in the dark. But these killers can run twice as fast as you, and if one stalks and catches you, the odds are that he will wound and then incinerate you, or blow you into eternity. You are acutely aware of these possibilities for every second of the five or six hours you walk in the darkness, braced always, consciously or subconsciously, for a murderous burst of fire, and reminded of the stakes of the game periodically by the sight of guns flashing in the dark and great volcanic eruptions of flaming gasoline. You repeat this experience many times - if you live."

 

[cheddar cheese]

Thats a gives a good impression of what it must have been like, and that pic...ugh...poor guy

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Yeah I dont think that guy made it out alive.

 

[the lancaster kicks ass]

i've read that account as well, to give it a name it was said by Murray Peden DFC and i've spet a couple of weeks on that site and it's very good...................

 

[Anonymous]

He might well have survived. Those look like 20mm HE hits. Often fusing on the 20mm HE rounds was such that they detonated on contact, and the image seems to indicate this. If this is so the gunner might well have only suffered 2ndary shrapnel damage and might have survived.

I think which position was most dangerous depends a lot on what plane you are talking about.

If we are including all planes with a gunner, I think there is little doubt the most dangrous position was the gunner in the IL2. It was not uncommon for a Sturmovik pilot to return with a dead gunner, they'd grab an infantryman and put him in the bloody seat, send them out, and when the Sturmovik returned that gunner was dead too.

=S=

Lunatic

 

[cheddar cheese]

i've read that account as well, to give it a name it was said by Murray Peden DFC and i've spet a couple of weeks on that site and it's very good...................

Continuosly?

 

[the lancaster kicks ass]

well when i'm not on this site, thet's proberly where i'll be..................

 

[cheddar cheese]

Ah... 8)

 

[the lancaster kicks ass]

unless i'm on another site, in which case i wont be on that site..............

 

[cheddar cheese]

Well, its logical

 

[the lancaster kicks ass]

unless i have two browser windows open but then it gets complicated.........

 

[cheddar cheese]

Dont confuse me

 

[MP-Willow]

I would not have wanted to be in a Stirling for any type of mission. But a Halifax Maybe that would work.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

For a bombing mission I think I would have wanted to be in a B-24 but just for historical reasons I would want a B-17 for atleast one mission just so I could say I did it. That ofcourse it just from what I know today, back then they would have put me on what ever they wanted to train me on.

 

[Yeomanz]

I'd say the nose position was most dangerous , because wouldn't they go for the front more often ?

 

[Anonymous]

I'd say the nose position was most dangerous , because wouldn't they go for the front more often ?

Not really. It was a very difficult shot even if the enemy could get it setup perfectly. The amount of time the pilot had to aim was so small that only the best marksmen could hope to score on the actual nose of the target.

Most "frontal attacks" were conducted from above and in front, with the target being either a wing root or the cockpit area of the fuselage.

If I had a way to make the 22 mb guncam footage .mov file I have available you could look at it and you'd see that very few of the attacks in this Luftwaffe' training film are from anything close to dead on from the front. Unfortunately, my isp only allows 10 mb of webspace for each of 7 emails and I don't have a server available right now. If anyone has sufficient server space somewhere, I'd be happy to ftp it up to it for you guys to nab.

=S=

Lunatic