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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
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.
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Not much beyond the few times I've tried to look up the reports of aircraft like "Pistol Packing Mama's" last fight, and been able to find nothing to actually confirm beyond reports that usually came from people in no position to see what happened.
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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 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.
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I've made exactly the same general argument myself on more than one occasion.
I think that the momentum was in place by 1930 or so, with Douhet's 'the bomber will always get through' dogma, coupled with the way that big multiengine aircraft were outperforming the single engine fighters of the same period. I'm sure that the Powers That Were assumed that the fighters would never become as fast, long ranged and heavily armed as they eventually did (or if they did, they assumed that they themselves would be safely retired by then). In the cash poor Depression era US Army Air Corps, big bombers offered a lot of bang for the taxpayers' buck (and they looked quite impressive).
A lot of the men who were generals in 1942 made their marks in the early-mid 1930s as advocates of this strategy before the development of radar made locating the bomber formations a lot less chancy, and fighter aircraft became not only as fast and high flying as the big bombers, but much more so. These generals and the big aircraft companies that built the big bombers had already made a major investment in the concept before the war though, and probably really did believe that the Germans and the RAF simply hadn't used big enough formations of aircraft capable of flying as high and fast as the B-17 or B-24, with enough well trained men at heavy machine guns to swat away the few fighters able to get to altitude in time to intercept.
By the time reality had set in, it was late 1943, and the war machine had poured billions into bomber production, trained aircrew and propaganda, not to mention lost thousands of lives. You could quietly reassign the less senior responsible parties to training commands and early retirement (after the war) but you couldn't tell the world, the taxpayers (a large subset of which had become Gold Star Mothers due to your miscalculations), the 'crusading' politicians and especially the enemy that you had been terribly wrong.
Rosie the Riveter would find you and kick your *%&$$!!! and that would be the least of your problems.
Better to re-purpose the bombers and let the new long range fighters destroy the Luftwaffe (and its pilots) in the air after using the bombers to get them to come up and fight; once the fighters finally established air supremacy, you could finally use the bombers to destroy the enemy's industry, starting with fuel and lubricants, and gradually reducing the surface of his territory to a moonscape for the sake of bragging rights and a shot at a role in creating a separate Air Force and maybe even take over the aviation arms of those arrogant bastages in the Navy and Marine Corps, all while saying that was how you had planned it all along.
As RoseAnne Rosannadanna used to say "It could happen."
cheers
horseback