Aircraft Gunners............

[Jack]

I maybe stupid but.......

 

One that has always confused me - during WW2 when bombers were in formation and they were under attack, what mechanisms were in place to stop the gunners shooting each other. Or wasn't there, was it just the training?

 

 

Best wishes.

 

Jack.

[Mart]

There wasn't any proper mechanism.

 

Air gunners were encouraged to imagine "an arc of sky" or a "circle of sky" - but of course that was based on AirMin notions of a nice tight steady 1930s-airshow formation, ploughing steadily into Hunland with no vertical or lateral relative movement.

 

The door-gunner in a USAAF heavy was particularly free in his choice of directions.

 

There were some physical angle-and-direction safeguards in place on most bomber and fighter-bomber aircraft to stop mid-upper shooting off his own tailplane (in the First Lot, BE2C Lewis-gunners were known occasionally to put a burst through the tail, the propellor, or even the pilot).

 

But apart from that, anything that strayed into line of sight in the general panic was able or even likely to get a line of 303s stitched across it, and there are many records of aircraft being wounded or even downed by friendly fire from within the defensive box.

 

And that of course is to say nothing of depositing bombloads onto the aircraft directly underneath. This was filmed several times, so Lord knows how often it actually happened, especially on night raids. And since in the examples I have seen it amputated a wing, the chances of the crew escaping the centrifugal force were not good.

[Jessie The Jeep]

British bombers usually flew alone to targets, at timed intervals behind the first aircraft, therefore shooting a friendly aircraft was less likely, but not impossible.

 

The US 8th AF tried several different formations across the war. Most successful was the "Combat Box", designed as a tilted wedge, with a lead, high and low squadron flying a 'V' formation within a Group. The Groups formed into Combat Wings with a similar stagger to the formation. The Combat Wings formed into Air Divisions. This was designed to expose as much free view to gunners as possible. The mass formation stayed together on route so that fighter escort could protect the whole formation, and so that the gunners provided defense for each other.

 

Because the bomber stream could be 100 miles long and 25 miles wide, near the target, the formation split to enable smaller groups of aircraft over the target, usually approaching from slightly different angles and altitudes, but all passing over the target within as shorter space of time as possible. Manoeuvering such formations was difficult and sometimes resulted in aircraft being overflown by others during the bomb run. After bombing, the smaller formations regrouped to return in one bomber stream again. The bomb run was usually the only time the gunners had nothing to do as the enemy fighters held off while the flak batteries protected the target.

 

Except for night flying equiped B-17's, the hand aimed single .50's had no measure to prevent them from shooting their own aircraft. Any gun position could accidentally shoot another aircraft in formation while tracking an enemy fighter.

 

Steve