Quote:
Originally Posted by horseback
Most of the stories we hear about a solo aircraft's gunners managing to destroy or damage attacking single engine fighters usually turns out to be apocryphal if we try to investigate
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Interesting. Do you have any further info to back up this claim? I'm not disputing you, I'm interested in actually figuring out what was actually going on, and I've always wondered just how good gunners actually were.
I have to wonder if it wasn't a huge amount of institutional inertia that led to bombers being heavily equipped with gunners. After all, there is a strong tendency to "fight the last war," and during WW I gunners really were a threat given the relatively short range, limited damage and poor accuracy of the frontally-fixed fighter machine guns. But, by WW 2, many WW I pilots were colonels and generals, so they might have figured that if one or two men armed with single .30 caliber MG were good, 7-8 men armed with multiple 0.30 or 0.50 (or even 20 mm) MG were even better, without realizing that higher airspeeds made gunnery much less effective.
Arguably, the best strategy for bombing during WW2 was the Mosquito - two man crew, decent bomb payload and a very fast aircraft to make interception difficult. You send them out knowing that fast fighters and flak are going to get some of them, but low manpower requirements and relatively inexpensive design means that you can absorb the losses and win via attrition.
Instead, it seems to me that most air forces made huge design sacrifices, as well as operational and human sacrifices, to load up their bombers with gunners who literally might not have been worth their weight.
Quote:
Originally Posted by horseback
As for the B-52's stinger, the 'gunner' operated a radar aimed gun remotely, with the help of a slightly more advanced stabilization system
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Yep. But some of the later WW2 era bombers at least had tail warning radar, even if they didn't have radar-guided and stabilized guns. My point is that the "least useless" place to have a gun on a bomber is the tail, and tailgunners (or other gunners who faced to the rear) generally had the least
complicated firing solutions. I forget the exact numbers, but most of the gunner "aces" of the 8th AF were tailgunners, with top-turret gunners coming in next.
Quote:
Originally Posted by horseback
Almost any Allied fighter pilot in the theater for more than two days (i.e., long enough to visit the Officers' Club bar) could have told them that German fighters tended to belch black smoke
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Yeah, but if you've got an entire squadron of gunners swearing to God that they saw big trails of black smoke, and a few guys claiming they saw fire (due to reflections, tracers, sun glare, or whatever), plus one or two guys saying that the plane was diving "out of control" then a credulous intel officer might let the claim stand.
Eyewitness accounts are pretty damned unreliable, especially in the heat of combat. But, until you realize that, you might believe "they were there, they saw it, who am I to dispute them."