Aerial Machine Gunners
Bomber gunnery was quite complex, and hitting an enemy airplane from a bomber was far more difficult than doing so from a fighter, whose pilot simply aims the plane and fires straight ahead. By contrast, bombers’ aerial gunners often fired to the side, requiring them to factor in numerous variable, including the bomber’s speed, which ends up slewing the bullets sideways, relative speed of the approaching fighter to the bomber, and basic ballistics.
During the interwar years, American bomber crews were taught aerial gunnery in a generalized way at US Army Air Corps schools. However, after WWII and the lessons of the early years filtered in, the need for well trained aerial gunners became apparent, so the first specialized aerial gunnery school was opened in Las Vegas in mid 1941. Another school opened in Texas a few months later, and after America joined the war, five more were opened – another in Texas, two in Florida, and two in Arizona.
It was a six week training course, that began with firing with pellet guns at indoors target galleries, such as those at county fairs and amusement parks. It then progressed to skeet shooting outdoors with shotguns, and finally, to machine gun ranges where trainees fired .30 and .50 caliber weapons. There was also class work on aircraft recognition, range estimation, Morse code, and the theory of ballistics. Operating at full capacity, the aerial gunnery schools could pump out up to 3500 aerial gunners per week, and by war’s end, they had graduated nearly 300,000 trained crewmen.
Once training was complete, aerial gunners were sent out to operational bomber units as crewmen, serving as waist gunners, tail gunners, or most physically demanding, as ball turret gunners. The spherical manned ball turrets, deployed mainly on the bottoms of B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers, were very small in order to reduce drag, and were typically manned by the smallest crew member. Even so, it was still a tight and cramped fit. The ball turret gunner had to assume a fetal position with his shoulders and head against the rear wall, the small of his back and buttocks on the turret’s bottom, his legs held up by straps, with a pair of .50 caliber machine guns stuck between them. Other than during takeoffs and landing, the turret gunner had to remain inside the turret for missions that could last up to ten hours or more.
While the ball turret was the most uncomfortable station for aerial gunners, the most dangerous one was that of tail gunners. Often known as “tail end Charlies”, they operated machine guns placed in the bombers’ rear, and were tasked with acting as lookouts and primary defense for attacks from that direction. Unfortunately for tail gunners, attacking from the rear was one of the German fighters’ favorite tactics. While other attack angles ran the risk of facing most or all of a bomber’s machine guns, a careful attack from the rear placed the Luftwaffe pilots in an advantageous one-on-one matchup with the rear gunner.