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Originally Posted by
AZPhil
I'm keeping my promise.
Thanks Arizona Phil, we should never forget the heroism of these brave souls and be grateful for the sacrifice they made for extinguishing the Hitlerian monster.
The average age of an Eighth Air Force bomber crew in Europe was a mere 22 years of age, and the unfortunate truth was that their life expectancy in 1943 and 1944 was only 12 to 15 missions. To have reached a 20th mission was already defying the odds.
It's interesting to see on the casualty list that everyone is either a Lieutenant or a Sergeant. Apparently because of the high attrition rate, there was a high likelihood of being captured as your story illustrates. Every enlisted man, regardless of earned rank, wore the uniform of a sergeant, and, I can see from the list they were given the rank in the official files. Because the German command was oriented to respect hierarchy, it was believed that, if a crewman was captured and thrown into a prisoner of war camp, the extra sergeant stripes would merit more favorable treatment.
All: Keep the stories coming!!
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Originally Posted by
AZPhil
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Thanks for the casualty list. What stands out is that nearly 50% (46%) of the casualties (12) occurred between the positions of Pilot/Co-Pilot/Navigator, all clustered in or in front of the cockpit. This would lead one to believe the German pilots were gunning for the officers in command of the plane, not the plane itself. Any thoughts??
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Not exactly the Officers. It's not a leadership thing or a command thing. The pilots fly the plane. Kill the pilot/destroy the controls and the aircraft crashes. Simple. Usually they would take a run at the aircraft and rake it end to end. Then once it was showing signs of damage, they'd lie back and slide from side to side and rake with cannon and down she'd go.
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Plus, at this point in the war the weakest angle for the B-17 was head-on. In the B-17E and most B-17Fs, usually only the two .50 cal. guns of the top turret and max of two at a time very restricted field of fire .30 cal. flex mounts in the nose could be brought to bear directly to the front. At the tail end of the B-17F series they added the nose turret which substituted a pair of .50 cal. guns with reasonable field of fire and sighting for two of the .30 cal. guns but still the nose was the weakest position to attack from. Additionally, the whole "battery fire" concept of defensive formations helped least on a frontal attack.
The German fighters developed the tactic of coming around from the front and cutting through the formations because it simply exposed them to less defensive fire. Unfortunately this also added the hazard to the bombers that if you killed the pilot of a fighter, the plane might very well collide with the bomber. There are several accounts of collisions where the fighter entered the bomber at the nose and its engine and prop, still running, exited the bomber at the tail, heralding the death of eleven men (ten on the bomber and one on the fighter).
Really brutal stuff.
Read Jablonski's Flighting Fortress and Caidin's Flying Forts for more.
Bob
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I see some of those photos of wings on fire and buckling from the heat or half of a wing missing and the aircraft beginning its death role and they are painful to even look at as I think what it would be like being a 19 or 20 year old aircrewman and knowing there you are dead in seconds.
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I once saw a list of casuality percents in 4 engine bombers for WW2 . They were evenly split between all positions to within one percentage point except waist gunner . Thier rate was twice the rest . I wondered why , but then realized , there was two of them per plane.
Chris
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That, and the waist gunners were more exposed standing as they did at an open window in an un-armoured fuselage. Turret gunners usually had the benefit of some degree of bullet proofing at least from a face-on engagement.
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Vincent,
Where did you find that information?
Skirmisher
