This one is new to me. Balls of steel on those pilots.
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Watching “Masters of the Air” gave me a whole new level of respect for those Allied bomber crews in WWII. Their odds weren’t great and yet they’d do what they needed to do.
Suckers and losers, so we are told. Seriously, these guys were badass. I had an uncle who was a navigator and flew on D-Day and survived the war.
You probably know the story of the Bloody Hundredth.
No combat unit sustained such heavy losses as the Group’s original flight crews, only four of the original thirty-eight co-pilots completed their combat tour of twenty-five missions, in fact three Flying Fortresses were lost on their first mission on June 25, 1943.
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In our discussion here about the Master of the Air series I think someone showed an info graphic about the casualty rates of the various positions within the bomber. I might be wrong but I think the belly side bubble turret had like a near 100% casualty rate.
Yeah, I’d never seen that footage either.
It reminds me of the torpedo bombers at Midway. Very few of them survived. It wasn’t until we sent in the dive bombers that things changed.
Wrong if you mean this graphic:
The ball turret was actually one of the safest places. But you also have to know that the percentages were of the total number killed how many occupied that position. So 18% of the 110 KIA were bombardier, not 18% of bombardiers were killed. Turns out the most dangerous positions were the tail gunner and the bombardier (the stats for waist gunners is misleading because there are two of them). Bombardiers had essentially no armor protection. Tail gunners were the first targets of the Luftwaffe as they best way to take out a formation of B-17s is to eliminate their rear guns stay out of the firing arc of all the rest.
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Unless you had to get out, that is?
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One of the best series ever put to film.
My grandfather was career military. He was a navigator on B17s and B29s in WWII and Korea. I really need to get my father to tell me more about his history.