The Myth of the Crushed Ball Turret Gunner

[p51]

Trust- and verify.

The mind is an odd thing. For a very long time, I recalled a helo crash I was in as being much worse than it was. My mind still carries images that I now know didn't actually happen after I did some research on it, including the report which shows the intact airframe afterward and I still visually remember it cracked in half.
To be honest, I'm embarrassed that I'd been telling stories about it for years that simply weren't accurate in any appreciable way, but it wasn't due to any conscious manipulation of the facts as my mind still recalls details that I now know weren't remotely accurate.
The funny part about that is I told someone from a museum about this and he said I was the first person he'd ever met that acknowledged they didn't remember something correctly. He said everyone else he's ever talked to doubled-down on the incorrect facts when faced with evidence to support it.

[Noha307]

While out with Aluminum Overcast, I’ve had to vets who were eye witnesses to events where the turret gunner was crushed. One pilot who didn’t have a mission but his btg filled in on another crew. Another was a fellow ball turret gunner whose friend was lost in that manner on the same mission he was on. Both vets were in person at the plane and told the story directly to us.

Do you happen to remember either of their names, what unit they were with, when it occurred or any other details that would help narrow it down?

Just to make sure this isn't misinterpreted, I want to be clear that this is not intended to be criticism and I am sincerely interested in any claims. I want to be correct, not right. My goal is not self-aggrandizement, but, as one of my history professors put it to "go where the truth lies".

I think it's important to state that lack of evidence is not evidence.

By the way, for those with an interest in philosophy like myself, the relevant theory is falsifiability. It basically says that the only theories that are credible are those that can be proven wrong. A natural extension of this is that the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim - and this applies to both sides of an arguement. Therefore, for example, if you claim that ball turret gunners were crushed on landing it is up to you to prove it. However, if the if you claim that ball turret gunners were not crushed on landing it is also up to you to prove it. In other words, the default position is not "no", but actually "I don't know". (Full disclosure, I only minored in philosophy and it has been a few years since my last course, so this may not be an entirely accurate description. )

Info and photo from "Masters of the Air" about half way down.

https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/bomb ... i/131369/8

And while all of those nit-picky details may be true, the photo does show the results of a turret being ground down.

A very fair point. When I have time, I will definitely have to look into that picture. Specifically, to check if there is an attribution for it and if that information can be used to determine where and when it was taken.

The turret can also be hand cranked or moved by hand with the the lock loosened. Anyone that's ever unloosened the turret in flight can attest if you go too far the turret will rotate extremely fast pointing the guns straight down (effectively exposing the hatch to the inside of the airplane).

That's the interesting thing about the story. As near as I can tell, there are actually very few circumstances in which a ball turret gunner could not successfully exit the turret. Forgetting the B-24 for a second, B-17 ball turrets do not retract. Furthermore, an elevation hand crank is located on the mounting ring inside the airplane, so an electrical failure would also not prevent escape. This means that essentially the only way for the gunner to be trapped in the turret is for something, such as a piece of flak, to have physically jammed the elevation gearing or for some external force to do so. This is apparently what happened to S/Sgt. Russo as his guns were wedged in the top of the fuselage of the B-17 that came up from below. On top of all of this, the situation would require the B-17 to be unable to extend its landing gear which, while certainly not out of the question, would be an additional condition that would have to be met.

I can't quote the figures, but I remember reading a postwar USAF study that showed the ball turret casualties were somewhat lesser than those in other positions on heavy bombers.

Luckily, not only do I happen to know the exact source of those figures, but I also used it to answer essentially the question you brought up. It's even the immediately preceding entry on the list of common questions and answers:

How dangerous was the ball and/or tail gun position?

According to an analysis of casualties suffered by the Eighth Air Force from June to August 1944, the crew position with the greatest chance of being injured or killed was the bombardier followed by the navigator. The tail gunner was third most dangerous and the ball turret gunner was actually the safest position.[1]

Endnotes

1. "Survey of Battle Casualties, Eighth Air Force, June, July, and August 1944," in Wound Ballistics in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1962), 571. The statistics are actually a bit more complicated than this summary suggests. For example, by percent of total casualties, waist gunner is the most dangerous, but the survey notes that since airplanes often carried two the number is likely disproportionately higher. The other quirk is that, because the survey tracked both deaths and injuries, although certain positions had a higher death rate, the overall average was lower. For example, the tail gunner position had the highest number of deaths, but only the third highest number of injuries, so the overall casualty rate was third highest.

Lastly, since I've spent a bit of time thinking about this subject, I did come up with a couple of interesting thoughts. First, as the ball turret could be entered and exited from the outside of the airplane when the barrels were parallel to the fuselage and assuming for the sake of argument a ball turret did get stuck at this orientation, the gunner would in theory be in the interesting position of being able to choose the means of his own death. He could either wait to be crushed on landing, or opt to bail out without a parachute and die from the fall. (Also, just to tie this into the comment of graphic details and whether or not they are too sensitive to record, if you dig a bit into the story of the Lockerbie bombings, there's a report of a young woman actually surviving the fall before passing away shortly thereafter.)

After reading the summary of the Amazing Stories episode, I came up with my own "what if" scenario if I had the opportunity to write my own script. Knowing that ball turrets were often jettisoned over the Channel, I figured a interesting alternative would be to have the entire crew tie their parachutes to the accessible portion of the ball turret, prematurely pull the ripcords, detach the turret from the aircraft, and hope the parachutes would slow its descent enough for the gunner to survive. Fantasy, I know, but if you're already writing an off the wall story like Shadow in the Cloud why not go for it?

[Noha307]

I haven't had the time to look into the picture yet, but by chance today I happened across something else quite interesting. The following entry is found on page 98 of the January 1946 edition of the List of War Department Films, Film Strips, and Recognition Film Slides, FM 21-7:

FS 1-825 B-17 Emergency Landing-Removal of Ball Turret Prior to Wheels-up Landing.

It is worth noting that this film strip was not present in an earlier edition of FM 21-7 from January 1944. However, it is present on page 109 of the January 1945 edition, with the following rather redundant summary:

Procedure for removing and jettisoning the ball turret of the B-17 airplane prior to making a wheels-up emergency landing.

Therefore, it must have been released between those two dates.

One other interesting aside relevant to the end of the last post: a safety belt, the Type A-4, existed to prevent the ball turret gunner from falling out of the turret if the door was to open in flight:

(Source: AirCorps Library)

[quemerford]

Just to clear up an earlier, "this wouldn't have been reported" claim regarding explicit injuries, this is an example of two airmen who received injuries: the details are very detailed.

[quemerford]

And this is a report of a death, which is quite disturbing, hence the removal of personal details. The point is, upsetting as it would obviously have been, these details were widely recorded.

[Noha307]

Info and photo from "Masters of the Air" about half way down.

https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/bomb ... i/131369/8

And while all of those nit-picky details may be true, the photo does show the results of a turret being ground down.

A very fair point. When I have time, I will definitely have to look into that picture. Specifically, to check if there is an attribution for it and if that information can be used to determine where and when it was taken.

So, a quick search found me a copy of Masters of the Air. I couldn't find the exact picture from the book - whether that's because the preview didn't include it or it was in a different edition, I don't know. (The roundel does have a border, which may help date the photo.)

However, I was able to find a different photograph, accession number 2010.545.177, in the National World War II Museum's digital collections. The accompanying information states that it was taken at "Thurleigh Airfield, near Bedford, England" and that it came from the collection of Wyndom S. Haynes who served with the "369th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group". The damage to the turret is different from the photograph in Masters of the Air, so it can't be the same incident. (A Ctrl+F search of the 369th's combat diary for "ball turret" unfortunately didn't turn up any relevant information. A search for "wheels up" did reveal one incident on 27 April 1944 where a B-17 piloted by Lt. Clifford Baxter made a one-wheel landing, but the narrative notes that no crew were injured and the airplane was repaired in 28 hours.) However, it appears to be the same accident depicted in other photographs in the collection. (The same corrugated metal can be seen in all of them.) Luckily, another photograph, 2010.545.202, shows the tail number: 42-31894. According to the B-17 Fortress Master Log, the aircraft made an emergency landing on 26 March 1944, was piloted by Cliff McBride, and the ball turret gunner at the time was Bob Maloney. The April 2007 issue of the 306th Bomb Group Historical Association newsletter, 306th Echoes, states that Robert G. Maloney of the Clifford McBride crew passed away in 1960. So, the gunner survived this incident.

It is worth noting that Masters of the Air also cites Andy Rooney as the source of the crushed ball turret gunner story. Also, as pointed out by Jim in a previous post, it uses the same false (or at the very least misleading) statement that the ball turret was made out of plastic.[1.1]

The Masters of the Air book also repeats a story of three crewman who rode a disabled B-17 with a trapped ball turret gunner to their deaths instead of bailing out.[1.2] This story likely entered the public consciousness when Ronald Reagan told it in 1980. However, as noted in the Snopes article cited in my original post, he was almost certainly thinking of the 1944 movie Wing and a Prayer. (Unfortunately, as I have discovered, Ronald Reagan was responsible for popularizing a significant number of questionable World War II anecdotes. See also: Mary Babnik Brown and the human hair in the Norden bombsight.) The movie, in turn, was likely inspired by the story of Colin Kelly, who was killed as he attempted to give his crew time to bail out. His actions, much like "sighted sub, sank same" (or, more recently, "Russian warship, go f*ck yourself", if you prefer), became a rallying cry for Americans early in the war.[2] (As one example I always like to remember, it made its way into the Tom and Jerry cartoon The Yankee Doodle Mouse.) Usefully, Reagan's story claims that the pilot earned the Medal of Honor. Given how few were actually awarded for heavy bomber crews (17 in B-17s and 9 in B-24s/PB4Ys[3]), it is easy to disprove.

[JohnB]

Regarding the hair in the Norden bombsight story...just last week a visitor at the museum told me they used Black Widow spider webs for its crosshairs.

I'm not sure how these old storys are still getting passed around, but my guess is the multitude of cable TV documentaries.

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Newspaper editor to Jimmy Stewart's U.S. Senator character in John Ford's The Man who shot Liberty Valance, 1962.

Last edited by JohnB on Mon Feb 13, 2023 9:09 am, edited 6 times in total.

[quemerford]

Usefully, Reagan's story claims that the pilot earned the Medal of Honor. Given how few were actually awarded for heavy bomber crews (17 in B-17s and 9 in B-24s/PB4Ys[3]), it is easy to disprove.

Does the term "Congressional Medal of Honor" also count as a myth? Even if not, I'd be interested to know who coined it first.

[Noha307]

I came across an older WIX thread about the ball turret gunner myth where the subject of parachutes came up. It is interesting to note that the British had an outfit for Boulton Paul Defiant gunners called the called the GQ Parasuit. It was essentially a smock with an integral parachute that allowed the gunner to wear it inside the turret:

(Source: IWM via Wikimedia Commons)

Furthermore, in the same thread I saw that Chris mentioned he had an interview lined up with a 388th Bomb Group pilot who claimed to have first hand knowledge of an incident. Chris, did you ever manage to get that interview done? I assume this is one of the men you were referring to in a previous post.

A second post from that thread mentions that a story about a crushed ball turret gunner may have been featured in Stars and Stripes in 1944. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any publicly available, searchable digitized collection of Stars and Stripes. (Which is a real shame, given its importance.)

I also found an interesting comment in a reddit thread:

I went to the air and space museum and an old veteran pilot was there. He told us a story about how the turret needs to retract for landing regardless, I don't remember what bomber between liberator or flying fortress. The turret was stuck and the gunner couldn't get out so the crew all piled into the nose to shift the weight so the turret wouldn't scrape on landing. Said the turret Gunner was fine but absolutely dreanched in sweat when they pulled him out.

(Source: Reddit)

The authenticity of this claim aside, can anybody with experience in B-17s chime in as to whether this could have made a difference? I'm somewhat skeptical that such a relatively small change in center of gravity could affect a 36,000 lb aircraft.[1] To be clear, I know that weight and balance is an important consideration in flight, but what about on landing when the wheels are in contact with the runway? I would think the moment arm on a B-17 would be relatively short given the location of the main landing gear. (For reference, scans of a B-17 load adjuster are available from the Aerospace page on the International Slide Rule Museum website.) On the other hand, I'm reminded of a video of an incident where a B-1 with a stuck nose gear made an emergency landing and the pilot kept the nose up as long as possible using the stabilator.

Does the term "Congressional Medal of Honor" also count as a myth? Even if not, I'd be interested to know who coined it first.

Not to get too off topic, but according to a quick search of Newspapers.com, the term "Congressional Medal of Honor" goes back a long time. The answer appears to be found in a newspaper article from 1878:

A brevet commission for gallantry in
action was presented to him by Governor
Fairchild at the close of the war, and the
War Department awarded him one of the
Congressional "Medals of Honor," the
only decoration of honor in recognition
of gallantry in action authorized by Con-
gress.

(Source: Newspapers.com)

Aside from the obvious statement that "only decoration [...] authorized by Congress", note that the term is: 1) plural - "Medals of Honor", not "Medal of Honor" and 2) is placed in quotation marks - presumably indicating the author felt that it was so new of a term that the audience would not be familiar with it. To coincidentally tie it to recent events, a newspaper article about the award ceremony for Frank Luke in 1919 even includes a direct quote where the phrase "Congressional Medal of Honor" was spoken aloud.

[Noha307]

So, a quick search found me a copy of Masters of the Air. I couldn't find the exact picture from the book - whether that's because the preview didn't include it or it was in a different edition, I don't know. (The roundel does have a border, which may help date the photo.)

A partial success! I can't believe I didn't think check for it earlier, but our museum has a copy of Masters of the Air. The first thing I learned is that I was looking in the wrong place. I had assumed that the picture was on page 29, because that was the number that appeared in the upper right corner of the picture in the forum post. However, it turns out that the number actually refers to the photo, not the page. (For the sake of completeness, there are three sets of picture plates in the book and the relevant one is located between pages 272 and 273.) According to the photo credits at the bottom of the colophon, photo number 29 came from the "Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum, Savannah, Georgia". So I will need to contact them to see if they can provide the particular context of the photo.

[Noha307]

I received an email from Dr. Vivian Rogers-Price, the Research Center Director of the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, today. She was able to locate the photograph that was used in Masters of the Air. According to her the scan provided to Donald Miller had the following notation: "(GE-98-303) (20-JAN-'44) (A/C 42-31060) CRASH LANDING". Based on that, she was able to determine that the pictured B-17 was from the 303rd Bomb Group. She then searched the 303rd Bomb Group website and came across another picture of the aftermath. It is here she found not only the identity of the aircraft in question, B-17G, 42-31060, "Pogue Ma Hone", but also the answer to the question at hand. The caption for the picture states:

2Lt F.X. Sullivan was flying #42-31060 "Pogue Ma Hone" on a night cross country flight. He could not lower his landing gear and made a wheels up landing at station 127, the Little Staughton emergency airfield. There were no injuries. [Emphasis added]

In sum, while it is true that these pictures prove a ball turret could be destroyed in a belly landing, there is still no evidence that anyone was ever in one when it happened. Furthermore, we are now two for two with debunking claimed pictures of the aftermath of a crushed ball turret gunner. So, again, while it is still possible that there could be counter evidence out there, the liklihood of the story being true is looking more and more remote.

As a final point, in defense of Donald Miller, she also noted that at the time he used the photograph for his book it had not been cataloged. Therefore, there was no additional context that could have alerted him to the fact that it could not be an example of Andy Rooney's anecdote. The photograph came from one of 17 notebooks of photographs that were collected by Colonel Richard E. Sims, the Ordinance Officer at High Wycombe, VIII Bomber Command.

I want to thank Dr. Rogers-Price for being so kind as to follow up on the details of the picture. This discovery would not have been possible without her efforts and she went above and beyond to not only find the source of the photograph, but also look up the circumstances behind it. Her email was thorough enough, in fact, that, aside from the analysis after the quote, this post is essentially just a paraphrase of it.

[quemerford]

The name "Pogue Ma Hone" (Irish: póg mo thóin) somehow seems apt too

[Taigh Ramey]

https://www.pbs.org/video/full-focus-the-303rd/

Listen to his story at 25:12.

Just some old guy who probably doesn't remember the details accurately after all these years? No date, time, serial number, group, squadron, name, aircrew casualty report, so it never happened?

[quemerford]

https://www.pbs.org/video/full-focus-the-303rd/

Listen to his story at 25:12.

Just some old guy who probably doesn't remember the details accurately after all these years? No date, time, serial number, group, squadron, name, aircrew casualty report, so it never happened?

No proof it ever happened.

[p51]

No proof it ever happened.

Any veteran from any era will tell you that people in the military are more prone to repeat stuff 3rd/4th/5th/6th hand worse than a sewing circle.
The old joke is:
Q: What's the difference between an old soldier story and a fairy tale?
A: The fairy tale starts with, "Once upon a time" and the old solider tale starts with, "This is no [poop]..."
It's not to say that a vet is lying to you when they tell you these stories, but any vet of any era is prone to passing along stuff they heard as fact.