Just a little side note...when I was a volunteer at the Grissom Air Museum near Kokomo, Indiana a number of years ago, there was a wonderful gentleman there name Rollie Douglas who was a former ball turret gunner with the 100th. When his ball turret was replaced with a Mickey radar, he was transferred to a gunners pool. On December 31, 1944, he was a fill-in tail gunner on a B-17. He told me that as they were over the target, he looked up and remembers seeing a plane that he had been a gunner on in the past. At almost the same moment, the plane above him took a direct hit of flak in her bomb bay. A large section of it's wing came down and cut his plane in half. The tail section which he was trapped in, went into a spiral and the centrifugal force would not allow him to unbuckle and get out. Somehow, he managed to finally claw his way out, pulled his rip cord and almost immediately his feet hit the surface of a small frozen pond. He became a guest of the Luftwaffe shortly afterwards (his words). Said he got all the sawdust bread he could eat and black water he could drink for the remainder of the war.
Rollie was always there on Saturdays and loved to talk about fishing and girls. He would talk to everybody about his time with the 100th...all the friends he had and all the friends he lost during the war. A spectacular human being. If he is still a volunteer there and you have the time on a Saturday, stop in and visit with Rollie, you will not regret it. Oh yeah, they have a very nice collection of planes at Grissom as well.
Sorry if I got this thread side tracked. The mention of ball turret gunners with the 100th immediately reminded me of so many wonderful hours spent listening to SSgt Douglas
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