B-17 High Altitude Gunnery

[Kevin G]

The other day I was surfing through the mission reports over at http://www.303rdbg.com/ and read about several plans aborting due to frozen guns.

That started me wondering, aside from actually firing the guns, how were the guns prevented from freezing?

There was plenty of mention of aborts due to flight suit electric heating failure, and frostbite casualties incurred from those malfunctions. What about the guns?

I've done a couple of B-17 walk through and didn't see anything that looked like a heating system for the guns. But it may have been there and I just didn't know what I was looking at.

And this phenomena was listed as a distinctly different failure from turret failure.

Thanks in advance.

[Taigh Ramey]

They had heaters that would clip to the receiver of the gun. It was a simple heating element that would heat up the operating parts through the body of the gun. Here is a shot of one installed on the waist gun in a B-17. The heater is the rectangular ribbed device on top of the gun just aft of the feed chute. This was the larger type as they had smaller ones.



They also had special oil that was used to lubricate the guns and instruments. This oil would not congeal at the extremely low temperatures at altitude. The oil had a very technical and cryptic designation; it was called “AIRCRAFT INSTRUMENT AND MACHINE GUN OIL”. The manual calls for very sparing use.

[Kevin G]

Thank you very much. Mystery solved.