B17 Ball Turret accidents

This is the problem we have. No one ever can tell you the serial date and location. It always ends up being a story inspired by or told by and repeated by.

What I need on this one is cold hard data.

I seem to recall that the short Disney movie ‘Amazing Stories – The Mission’ was inspired by such a story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItnJbsljcE4

The hydraulic system was spewing fluid where the tubing that conveyed it was shot full of holes. The gas tanks were leaking. Nothing worked. The wheels, folded up into the bomber, could not be brought down without its hydraulic system and a belly landing was inevitable.

Well, the undercarriage on a B17 is electric and it can be cranked down by hand. Lowering the gear by hand may not have been possible in the time remaining or the lack of engine power together with airframe damage may have made it seem better to go with a wheels up landing.

The only hydraulics on a B17, ISTR, are the brakes, cowl flaps and windscreen wipers.

Yes that is always the problem moggy as is the artistic licence part.

Moggy,

I think I remember seeing the name on the discussion somewhere. The problem being as soon as someone comes up with an Internet related story as you said it’s not taken as proof.

It would be so much easier if there were dates and locations attached to the story. But, of course, if we assume the story told by the reporter was a genuine eye witness account, at that closeness to the incident he would obscure these details as relatives would still be alive and could possibly read the story. Still, at least noting the target as Regensburg narrows the field a little. (Later than January 27th 1943)

Moggy

I would call them 381st B17 experts, they have all the diaries and records in the museum, and have contact with many of the surviving men that served there during WW2 which provide eye witness accounts to the documented facts.

Similiar to me with all the 416th records and direct contact with the 14 surviving men for the A20s at Wethersfield.

Moggy,

I think I remember seeing the name on the discussion somewhere. The problem being as soon as someone comes up with an Internet related story as you said it’s not taken as proof.

I don’t wish to take up a lot of people’s time with this to be honest. I think I might leave the discussion to the armchair experts that are hell bent on disproving that these incidents ever happened.

I was just hoping there was just that one incident with all the info to go with it for a quick turnaround.

Project.

I think I will save bothering the folks on the 381st Facebook because as I said I may leave the armchair warriors to it.

It’s one of those ones when you start with the discussion you wonder why you bothered in the first case.

Thanks for the info so far.

ask at 381st Facebook page, Ridgewell there was a well documented incident, where they took the COs A20 Runabout up to lower a toolkit to free the ball turret before landing, it took two attempts as the first rope broke. and took along time from what i remember hearing. but if you ask on their they will give you the full story and any others at Ridgewell.

Presumably you have seen this from a Snopes discussion on a slightly different alleged incident?

Andy Rooney, who served as a wartime correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, suggested in his book My War that the tale might have been an embellishment of an actual incident he witnessed, one involving a ball-turret gunner in the belly of a B-17 who was killed when his turret stuck and the crippled plane had to make a wheels-up landing:

The worst kind of censorship has always been the kind that newspaper people impose on themselves. I was not aware of being in any way a propagandist as a reporter for The Stars and Stripes, but there were stories I didn’t write because I didn’t like to think of the bomber crews with whom I spent so much time talking, reading them. Too sad. During the two years I covered the air war, there were half a dozen stories I couldn’t bring myself to write even though it would have been more honest if I had. I remember one in particular.

The Eighth Air Force had a disastrous day when it bombed Regensburg deep inside Germany, and I was at a base waiting to interview some of the fliers when they came back.

It was the custom for concerned ground crews and flight crews that hadn’t been assigned to go out that day to gather in front of the control tower shortly before the bombers’ ETA.

All of us on the ground that day were relieved as specks appeared in the sky over the Channel. As the specks grew to dots and the dots grew to spots, radio reports started coming through and it became certain the ordeal wasn’t over. There were dead and dying men on board half a dozen of the group’s bombers. There was a frantic call from one radio operator. The ball-turret gunner was trapped in the plastic bubble hanging beneath the B-17. The gears that rotated the ball to put the gunner in position to shoot and then returned him to the position that enabled him to climb out and back up into the aircraft had been hit and were jammed. The ball-turret gunner was caught in a plastic cage.

Two of the engines of the B-17 were stopped, about 3,000 pounds of dead weight hanging from the wings. The plane was losing altitude fast and flying at barely 135 miles an hour, close to stall-out speed. The pilot ordered the crew to unload everything on board.

“Everything!” he yelled in a command that reached the control tower over the radioman’s open microphone. The crew started pitching out machine guns, .50-caliber ammunition tracks, oxygen tanks, and every instrument they could tear loose in an attempt to lighten the load and keep the foundering plane in the air.

The hydraulic system was spewing fluid where the tubing that conveyed it was shot full of holes. The gas tanks were leaking. Nothing worked. The wheels, folded up into the bomber, could not be brought down without its hydraulic system and a belly landing was inevitable.

There were eight minutes of gut-wrenching talk among the tower, the pilot, and the man trapped in the ball turret. He knew what comes down first when there are no wheels. We all watched in horror as it happened. We watched as this man’s life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber.

I returned to London that night, shaken and unable to write the most dramatic, the most gruesome, the most heart-wrenching story I had ever witnessed. Some reporter.

Read more at http://www.snopes.com/glurge/military/ridedown.asp#83FcwOuHor07z1MM.99

There is, of course, no reason this couldn’t be just a reporter’s fabricated story, or one gleaned from something he was told as had happened to a friend of the somebody that was telling him. Certainly not proof.

Moggy