Guns are in the news a lot these days. So as long as we’re talking about guns, let’s talk about guns on airplanes.
After the invention of the airplane, some thought that it would actually put an end to war by bringing countries closer together. I believe that thought lasted exactly 5 minutes.
With the perfect development of the airplane, wars will be only an incident of past ages.
Dayton Mayor Edward Burkhart presenting medal to Wright Brothers in 1909
It wasn’t that long after the invention of the airplane that people starting looking for ways to arm them. The first recorded use of a machine gun on an airplane was this Wright Model B Flyer in 1912.
Early in WWI, airplanes were used strictly for observation and opposing crews even waved at each other in passing. Before long, however, they were carrying pistols and even rifles aloft and taking shots at each other. I’m sure it wasn’t long before some flyer asked to borrow a machine gun from the infantry “Um, no reason, just want to see how it works.” C’est le guerre.
Specifically I want to look at defensive guns. That would be guns mounted to bombers and other non-fighter type aircraft. I’m specifically leaving out gunships and door gunners on helicopters, which are a whole different thing.
Fighter pilots are fond of saying “There are two types of aircraft, fighters and targets”. While true, some targets can bite back.
Although there have been a few oddball fighters over the years that also had defensive guns. The successful WWI Bristol comes to mind.
In general, the added weight of a rear gunner wasn’t worth the loss of maneuverability.
Typical defensive setup for a WWI observation plane was one Lewis gun for the observer and sometimes one for the pilot. The Lewis gun was relatively light which made it well suited for use on aircraft. The one drawback being the drum only held 97 rounds before it had to be swapped for a fresh one — leaving you vulnerable while reloading.
WWI machine guns were generally .30 caliber (.303 British, 7.92 German), usually the same round as an infantryman’s rifle. Since WWI air combat took place at rock-throwing range this was adequate for the time. Most WWI kills took place between 10 feet and 100 yards. It helped that the average WWI aircraft was a fireball waiting to happen anyway.
It’s hard to find good numbers on how many kills were achieved by aerial gunners in WWI but it was probably a significant number. In the Meuse-Argonne offensive, US gunners accounted for 94 out of 357 German planes downed, roughly 26%.
Gunners generally didn’t receive the kind of recognition that pilots did. Most gunners were enlisted men, so there was a bit of a class issue. The public was more enamored with the “Knights of the sky” like Rickenbacker and Richthofen who took the place of the dashing cavalrymen of years past in the public imagination.
Frederick Libby, an American who flew with the Royal Canadian Air Force, scored 10 kills as a gunner. He then went on to become a pilot and score 14 more. That put him one behind Eddie Rickenbacker, but I’d never heard of the guy before I started researching this piece. Several other gunners became “aces” in WWI but like Libby, you’ve probably never heard of them.
Between the wars air power advocates believed that a bomber could be armed sufficiently to protect itself from enemy fighters without the need for escorts. Let’s just say this was a tad bit optimistic.
By 1940 most fighters were all-metal monoplanes and frequently carried armor plate in critical areas. Higher speeds and heavier armament meant that combat took place at longer ranges than in WWI.
It was hard to hit a fighter whizzing by at 400 mph and a hit might not do much.
Early daylight raids by RAF Bomber Command were nothing short of disastrous. British bombers were still armed with relatively weak .303 caliber machine guns. This proved less than adequate and the RAF fairly quickly switched to nighttime bombing. Nighttime operations reduced the RAF’s losses from “disastrous” to merely “ghastly”.
At night the gunner became more of a lookout, with firing the guns being secondary. Imagine sitting in the tail turret of a Lancaster, freezing your butt off for 10 hours while straining to spot the faint shadow that might just be a German night-fighter. Some RAF gunners even removed a section of the plexiglass to improve their visibility, which I’m sure made it even colder back there.
The Germans favored medium bombers and their planes generally carried a small number of relatively weak 7.92 machine guns. Rather than using powered turrets like the Allies, they tended to have just a dorsal (top rear) and ventral (bottom rear) gunner. German bombers tended to be shot down in large numbers.
A few WWII fighters had a rear gunner. The Bf-110 comes to mind. I don’t know how effective the rear gunner was. The high G forces encountered in dogfights made it difficult for the gunner to aim. There were also a couple of weird “turret fighters” like the Bolton-Paul Defiant, that had the guns in the back. Seemed like a good idea at the time (it wasn’t).
Most WWII dive-bombers and ground-attack aircraft also had a rear gunner. Again, I’m not sure how effective they were but I do know that the Russian IL-2 Sturmovik suffered high losses initially until a rear gunner was added. Unfortunately the IL-2 gunner wasn’t as well protected by armor as the pilot, so they had a high casualty rate.
Here in the US, the Army Air Corps was heavily invested in the doctrine of daylight precision bombing. US bombers tended to carry more guns than their British counterparts and those guns were usually .50 caliber heavy machine guns.
Despite being better protected, loss rates for US bombers were, to put it mildly, horrific. The infamous Schweinfurt raid saw the loss of 60 out of 291 B-17s in a single day. Not even an industrial powerhouse like the United States could sustain 20% losses of heavy bombers for long. Had it not been for the advent of long-range escort fighters we probably would have had to cancel daylight bombing of Germany after 1943.
You can hear the unmistakable voice of Mel Blanc in this WWII training film.
The worst spot on a B-17 or B-24 was the ball turret. It was so cramped that the gunner couldn’t even wear his parachute. I cannot confirm any of the stories about gunners being trapped in the turret and crushed during a wheels up landing. It may have happened, but it could well be the military equivalent of an urban legend (and yes I saw the Amazing Stories episode).
By maintaining tight formation, a group of bombers could maintain overlapping fields of fire. In short, their guns protected each other. If a plane was separated from the formation, however, the fighters would set upon it like a pack of wolves.
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarrell 1945
From the German (or Japanese) standpoint, flying into a storm of .50 caliber probably wasn’t a fun time.
So how many gunners became “aces”? We’ll never know.
Gunners on bombers such as B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators destroyed enormous numbers of enemy aircraft, but the Army Air Forces quickly abandoned the attempt to systematically award aerial victory credits to them. The average bomber had ten machine guns and six gunnery positions, and the average bomber formation contained many aircraft. If a formation shot down an enemy airplane, witnesses could not determine exactly which bomber, much less which gunner, destroyed the airplane.
www.afhra.af.mil/...
Interestingly enough, the top ranking RAF gunners were all on the much-maligned Boulton-Paul Defiant. This makes sense once you realize that the Defiant was converted to a night-fighter, a role which it was much better suited for. I would guess that most of those kills were on the attack rather than on the defense. An even dozen Defiant gunners were credited with 5 or more kills, the top scorer having 13 to his credit.
From what I was able to determine, the top ranking US gunner was B-17 tail gunner S/SGT Michael Arooth (8th Air Force) who was credited with 17 kills. He survived the war, and hopefully never had to pay for a beer the rest of his life.
The advent of pressurized cockpits with the B-29 meant gunners no longer had to freeze their buns off in open doorways or cramped turrets. The fire control system on the B-29 was a marvel of 1940s engineering. Probably one reason that the B-29 program cost more than the Manhattan Project.
The B-29 had five “sighting stations” that were equipped with what was an analog computer. The computer compensated for airspeed, gravity, temperature, humidity and calculated the amount of “lead” required for the bullets to hit the target. All the gunner had to do was track it long enough for the computer to do its thing. Each gunner had the ability to bring one or more of the bomber’s turrets to bear on the target.
In one instance a single B-29 fought off 79 Japanese fighters, downing 7 of them. Keep in mind that few Japanese fighters could even catch a B-29 at altitude. Plus the Japanese were probably scraping the bottom of the barrel for pilots at that time.
In Korea the B-29 had a tougher time when facing Russian-built MiGs. After heavy losses in daylight raids the B-29s were forced to switch to night bombing. B-29 gunners still managed to claim 27 enemy aircraft during that conflict.
Early models of the B-36 had guns all over the place. There were six remote-controlled turrets plus a nose and tail turret for a total of sixteen 20mm cannons. When fired the vibrations were so bad it shook the wiring loose and messed up the vacuum tube electronics.
Later models had all but the tail turret removed to save weight and make the lumbering B-36 slightly less lumbering.
Radar directed tail guns were pioneered by the British late in WWII. Here you can see the radar dish below the turret. Makes sense since the British pioneered radar as well as night bombing.
The tail guns on the B-47 were radar directed and were operated by the copilot, who could swivel his seat backwards to double as the gunner. In one instance an RB-47 was shot down by a Soviet MiG-19 over the Baltic Sea. The MiG was able to jam the Boeing’s fire-control radar, rendering it essentially defenseless.
I spoke to my former B-52 gunner about this incident. He was of the opinion that in a B-52G he could have resorted to “spray and pray” if his radar was jammed.
The B-58 carried a 20-mm Gatling gun in the tail, which was radar directed and operated by the DSO (Defensive Systems Operator). Since the B-58 never saw combat I don’t know how effective it was. It might have been effective, since most fighters of the time could barely catch a B-58 and the missiles of the day weren’t that good.
The B-52 had tail guns up until 1993, when the tail turrets were removed. The early “tall tail” A through F models had the gunner sitting in the tail, WWII-style. Bailout for the gunner involved jettisoning the entire gun turret and then jumping. It was reportedly a very rough ride back there. I’ve heard stories of D-model gunners coming back from missions with their helmets cracked.
The B-52G and H models moved the gunner to the cockpit. The gunner and Electronic Warfare Officer sat about 10 feet behind the pilots, facing backwards.
I liked having the guns back there. It made the fighter guys want to stay away from your six-o-clock position. It was also a morale boost knowing we had something to shoot back with. The gunner was also my “eyes” in the back of the jet with his radar.
During the Linebacker II operation in December 1972, B-52 gunners scored two kills against MiG-21 interceptors. Those were the last kills scored by aerial gunners.
The guns were removed from the B-52’s shortly after Desert Storm. Mostly as a cost-saving measure. The fire-control system was a high maintenance item and the odds of it ever being used were pretty slim.
The Russians liked to put guns on just about everything. The TU-16 “Badger” had remote gun turrets similar to those on a B-29. I’m not usually one to accuse the Russians of copying our stuff, but the TU-4 was almost a direct copy of a B-29. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tupolev used the same fire-control system in some of their later efforts.
Even some of their transports had a gunner position at one time.
A lot of countries have operated Russian-made bombers and transports over the years. Egypt, Iraq and Libya come to mind. You would think that with all the wars those countries were involved in, some gunner on a TU-16 or TU-22 might have engaged a fighter at some point. If it ever happened, I can find no record of it.
What about the future? Our two most recent bombers, the B-1and B-2, have only passive defenses. They mostly rely on being hard to see to accomplish their mission.
The follow-on B-21 “Raider” may have some form of “active defense”. Aircraft mounted laser weapons are still a few years off (but are definitely in the works). The B-21 may carry small defensive missiles capable of giving it a “hard kill layer" against enemy missiles or even fighters at close range. Of course, there will be no “gunner” as this will likely be autonomous. In fact the B-21 itself is to be “optionally manned”.