Grandfather in World War II: A History For Milo: Part III—Gunnery Training

Beginnings

magine, if you will, a bottle of hot sauce, about six inches tall.

Imagine that instead of hot chili sauce, the bottle is filled with liquid mercury—a very heavy metal—mixed about equally with gasoline.

Now instead of the red plastic bottle top imagine a titanium cone packed with dynamite  and sharpened to a needle-sharp point and polished to a mirror finish.

If the whole thing were a little smaller it would be called a bullet; a little bigger and it would be called a bomb.

This is a Browning fifty-caliber machine-gun cartridge.

By itself, it is a devastating package of destruction that is designed to tear through metal like a giant, white-hot nail, with a small explosive in its tip that goes off after the nail has pierced through the layers of steel and leather and glass or whatever else it encounters as it ploughs through its target.

But this machine gun cartridge is not designed to be by itself. It's designed to be in a belt with hundreds of other cartridges, all fired so quickly that they sound like the frantic buzz of some unspeakable insect and act like a lethal fire hose, wreaking devastation on airplanes and human beings alike, along with anything else that happens to be in their way.

The Browning 50-caliber machine gun was the preferred weapon for the Army Air Force, and was deployed in all airplanes, large and small, from the B-17, B-24 and B-29s to all manner of fighter aircraft.

German Field Marshal of the Air Force Hermann Göring was to observe ruefully after the war: "If we had had the Browning 50-caliber, the war would have turned out differently."

Differently indeed. For Grandfather Russell, his introduction to the Browning and gunnery training took him from sunny Florida to even sunnier Yuma, Arizona, just seven miles from the border with Mexico.

Clark Gable, here in a publicity shot while undergoing Gunnery Training

"It looked like something out of an old Western," said Russell, as he remembered the town where he went to gunnery school. "They had mostly unpaved roads, and the buildings were Mexican style, like cantinas, with the roofs sloping over the sidewalks." It seems to be a mostly fond memory of the period he spent, like so many others of his age in 1943, preparing to master the tools of their awful trade: the art of war.

The gunnery training took place over about six weeks. 

In just the first week the trainees were overwhelmed by a blitz of data about machine guns and ammunition, which they would be required to memorize. They learned proper maintenance and cleaning; how to tear down and reassemble the guns as fast as possible.

They practiced clearing jams quickly as if their lives depended on it, because it did. If a gun jammed at 28,000 feet with an enemy pilot boring in for the kill, you needed to be fast. Very fast . In fact, everyone had to achieve proficiency at stripping his gun while blindfolded and wearing gloves. 

The reason for wearing gloves was obvious: it was frigidly cold at bombing altitudes—as much as 60 degrees below zero over Europe. If the gunner touched his machine gun with bare skin it would freeze to the metal.

But why blindfolded? "It’s difficult to look straight down and see what you’re doing while zipped up to the neck in a bulky flight suit," Russell explains, "with goggles and an oxygen mask covering your face."

Bouncing around in turbulent air didn’t make it any easier to see what you were doing. Better to keep your eyes on the skies too so you could watch for "bogeys"—the flyboy slang for unidentified flying aircraft.

Two Waist Gunners squeezed together in the fuselage of a B-24 in flight

Every night after shooting for most of the day they loaded ammunition into belts, then loaded the belts into cans that fit the turrets which they would be shooting the next day. Each box of 350 rounds weighed 100 pounds and the 50-calibers had voracious appetites—firing 750 rounds per minute, or over twelve rounds per second.

Mixed in with all the firing range practice and the mechanical training of assembly and disassembly came the learning of the complex physics of air-to-air gunnery. "Deflection" became the Word du Jour. "The newspaper boy on the bike trying to hit the porch while the bike is moving was the analogy they used to help visualize the tracks of the bullet stream," Russell says. And that was only the beginning of it: there were fundamentals to successful aiming which, rather like a golf swing, could be mastered only through practice, practice, practice.

It's not known exactly which gun Grandfather Russell would have used during actual missions. Various sources say the the Radioman "when needed, manned the second waist gun," or "Added duty:  Qualified as Top Turret Gunner." But in gunnery school, one didn't train for any particular position; one just trained for any possible position.

All the gun positions had their vulnerabilities. The waist gunners, the ones on the sides of the aircraft, basically shoved their guns through massive holes in the side of the fuselage. They "had the unfortunate distinction of being in the most dangerous spot on the plane," says Mike Weber¹, whose father was a waist gunner on a B-24 from the 360th Bomb Group. "The waist gunner position suffered the most casualties compared to the other crew positions. It was the least well-protected position, both from the enemy and the elements. Frostbite was a major concern." The wind howled through the large holes in the sides, frequently below -60°C/-76°F. "It was an emergency door you couldn't shut."

Disassembling the "Ma Deuce"

Unlike the nose, ball, and tail turrets, whose gunners got rid of empty .50 caliber cartridges—each one the size of a man's thumb—through slots in the floor or into holding bins, the floor around the waist gunners filled up amazingly quickly with spent shells during attacks. The gunners sometimes used a shovel just to clear a place to stand.

But the radio operator also had to know how to operate the top turret, which meant he had to know the function of every switch, knob, button, lever and handle that were all essential to the running of the turret, which rotated while enabling the twin 50-caliber guns to raise and lower. The turret was essentially a small, entirely self-sufficient little fort that provided—if used as directed—a lethal stream of firepower that theoretically covered the entire sky and provided almost half the total armed protection for the bomber and its crew.

Much of the manipulation of switches and connections had to be performed blindfolded in a final exam. If the turret malfunctioned, the bomber’s defences were weakened. If the turret door or opening could not be aligned with the opening or escape hatch, the man inside had to know how to fix it; or else he could forget about escape in an emergency.

Shoot 'Em Up

Russell Robinson, on leave; location, time unknown

With so much classroom instruction, the students may have begun to wonder if you got to shoot guns at gunnery school. Finally they had their chance. There were four basic phases of target shooting and each was progressively more difficult.

At first, they would fire from stationary positions at fixed targets and then moving targets. After a few weeks of working through these phases the students advanced to firing at moving targets from moving platforms, first on the ground, and then air-to-air target shooting in a plane.

Russell started out skeet shooting, then moved on to pistols. "I was quite good at skeet shooting," Russell says, his voice brightening with the memory, " . . . quite good. And then we did pistol shooting with .45 automatics, on a range. And then we did rifle shooting, and that's where I got the Sharpshooter medal (the U.S. military marksmanship qualification badges are awarded in three grades: Expert, Sharpshooter, and Marksman) that you have. Because I was very good at the pistol and the rifle.

"And the sergeant who examined me at the range told me, 'You're about this close,'" (here Russell holds up his thumb and forefinger to indicate a very small space) " . . . this far from Expert. In fact you're so close that I'm gonna put you in for Expert.' And he talked to the lieutenant who was in charge of the detail, and he said 'This man here got a 98.2 on this and he's so close to Expert . . .' —and the lieutenant interrupts and says 'If he DIDN'T GET IT HE DIDN'T GET IT!' . . . so I didn't get the Expert, I got the Sharpshooter."

Eventually Russell was moved into planes. "The first thing they did was take us up, in what I believe was a DC-4. The military called it with another number, naturally, but I believe it was a DC-4. (The military called it the Douglas C-54 Skymaster, which was a rugged 4-engined workhorse that would become the first presidential aircraft, nicknamed "The Sacred Cow" and flown for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then go on after the war to be used by commercial airlines that carried more passengers than any other 4-engined transport, remaining in use until 2014.)

"They took a gang of us up in a plane that had had the seats ripped out of it and I think the idea was to see if any of us got airsick. I don't know if anybody did, but I didn't. So I passed that test."

C-54 Skymaster "Sacred Cow," flown for FDR

Learning to fire and maintain machine guns and turrets was only part of becoming an aerial gunner. It was critical that gunners were proficient in split second identification of both enemy and friendly aircraft.

“If you can’t do it, you are potentially as dangerous as an enemy gunner,” according to Byron Lane, bombardier with the 392nd Bomb Group. “All it takes is one mistake to shoot down one of your own planes or assume an enemy plane is one of your own and get shot down yourself,”  he said. Consequently, students could expect intensive study of aircraft identification and recognition.

Students received manuals that pictured the silhouettes of every aircraft in operation—both enemy and ally—and instructors pointed out the variations in prominent features such as the number of engines, wing position, tail assembly, canopy, and more. Since the future gunners didn’t know to which combat theatre they would be assigned, they had to know them all—German, Japanese, Italian, Russian, British, and American—all 27 of them. Using 3-D models and cards with silhouettes, students were called on to compare and contrast the features of aircraft until identification was automatic.

At the end of the sixth week, ceremonies were held to honour the graduating gunners. The graduates received diplomas and the coveted silver wings of the U.S. Army Air Force. Privates, Techs, and Corporals received promotions to the rank of sergeant, an incentive offered to encourage volunteerism. The graduates also received the arms qualifications badges they had earned, based on their test scores: Expert Aerial Gunner, Aerial Sharpshooter, or Aerial Marksman.

Russell, if you'll remember, was told he was a hair away from getting the Expert qualification by a lieutenant, but the lieutenant was overruled by an officious prick of a senior officer and received the next-highest rank of Sharpshooter.

Russell's Sharpshooter medal

And now the big next step was coming . . . from gunnery school the new aerial gunners would be sent to combat crew training school. Here they would meet the their new crew—the men with whom they would be going to fight the war; the men who would become like a family to them. Russell would be meeting Mose and Leo and Joe, although he didn't know it yet. 

And then they would all together  spend three months flying practice missions and getting ready to join the massive battles of the Second World War, although Russell didn't even know where he'd be going: Europe or the Pacific.

The pressure was on for Russell; indeed, the pressure was on for all of them, these men who were preparing to do battle in an unpressurised world.

To be continued

¹ With many thanks to Mike Weber for portions of his website tribute to his father

Grandfather in World War II: A History For Milo: Part II

 or Grandfather Russell Joseph Robinson, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour changed “everything,” but things didn’t happen right away.

“At first I didn’t realise how hugely everything had changed on December 7,” Grandfather remembered, “but a few months later, the Air Corps—” here he winked conspiratorially—” . . . the Army Air Corps, came around to recruit, and I volunteered.”

He took the exam, and it was then that he found out for the first time in his life that he was colour-blind. “I was 20 years old, and I couldn’t read the Red-Green colour chart.”

He was told that because of this, he was “debarred” from becoming a flight officer, meaning a pilot, a co-pilot, bombardier or a navigator; all those positions were off the table for him. He was a little disappointed, because he had thought it would be “ . . . fun to be a pilot, y’know, but there was no pressure to join up, or anything.”

“Because if you were in college at that time, as I was, at Harvard, you were not ‘drafted’ (forced to join the armed forces). But people that I knew were in the Service, and the more the war went on, the worse I felt.”

Dunster House, Harvard University

He felt that the war was passing him by. “I was going from Dunster House (his house at Harvard) to class, and studying, while these other kids were going overseas and battles were raging, and the Germans almost took Cairo, and they took France, and they took Norway, and the Japanese took all those islands in the Western Pacific . . .” his voice trails off.

“I was conscious of the fact that when I walked down the street, in my suit or jacket—because you didn’t wear ‘sports shirts’ then because of the war—people would look at me and maybe be saying, ‘That young fellow looks healthy enough . . . why isn’t he in the Service?”

In Dunster House, he explained, there were staying a number of people from across the world: from France, England, South America, Columbia, Brazil, Venezuela. They were there attending a fine university, but also escaping the military draft from their various countries. Some of them made no bones about it. “They were saying, ‘We don’t want to be fighting anybody in this war,’” Grandfather says. “But I felt very different.”

He had signed up with what they called the Enlisted Reserve, so he “activated his status,” then being ordered, along with the appropriate papers, to Camp Upton, Long Island. 

One of the first things they did there, he remembers, is that they gave him an IQ test.

 He took the exam, and it was then that he found out for the first time in his life that he was colour-blind

“I took it,” he says, “and I scored 148. 140 was Genius Level, and they were terribly impressed,” he says, with emphasis. “And then you had to give them all your personal details, your background; etc. etc. And so they decided,  with all the work I’d done with the theater—singing, acting and announcing; that sort of thing—that I should be assigned to Special Services, which apparently was the Drama and Entertainment branch at the time.”

So in January, 1943, a a year and a month after Pearl Harbour was attacked, Grandfather Russell was shipped off to Miami, Florida, where he was “assigned” to the Cadillac Hotel, which had been taken over by the U.S. Army Air Corps, and which overlooked the beach amid a row of other luxury hotels.

“I was put in a room with three other guys, whose names I can’t remember, but I met a couple of Hollywood actors, like Edmond O’Brien, who was a big star at the time. We chatted. 

"Clark Gable had been through, in Special Services, a few weeks before me.” (Clark Gable was possibly the biggest film star in the world at the time, and he flew five combat missions, including one to Germany, before MGM, the film company who was his boss, managed to get him removed from any dangerous duties for the rest of the war. Grandfather was not so lucky.)

Cadillac Hotel, Miami Beach

They began to drill (practice marching and running while in formation, which is thought to create discipline and develop automatic behaviours that are supposed to be helpful when under fire in combat) “ . . . up and down Collins Avenue, hup-hup-hup, and drill in the nearby park, I remember. Drill, drill, drill, hup-hup-hup.”

Then, because he was in Special Services, which was already a somewhat unusual branch of the armed forces, he was assigned various tasks: “I was assigned to do some radio dramas, with a bunch of other guys who had been actors . . . I played a German Nazi in one of them. And the director, who was from Broadway (Broadway was a very popular form of entertainment at the time, consisting of elaborate stage (live) performances of large groups of actors, dancers and singers, in the Broadway district of New York) was very impressed with my performance, and he told me so.”

In addition, Grandfather Russell did “ . . . quite a lot of singing. I sang to the troops! There would be thousand of them out there and I’d be there with the microphone and I’d sing Begin the Beguine, or Old Man River or whatever.”

“I also entertained for the chaplains (Catholic priests) and sometimes sang at Mass.”

So the months went by and Grandfather Russell was involved with various projects—but he seemed to be getting nowhere, fast.

"There was some big talk about how the Air Corps (it wasn't known as the Air Force yet) was going to make this big Broadway show—'Winged Victory,' they were going to call it. Edmond O'Brien was going to be in that one. The Army had one on already, called 'This Is The Army.' I don't know if the Navy had one planned or not!"

He used to kill time between his singing and acting by hanging around on the beach, as everyone else did. He got so tanned by being in the sun that one day he got on a bus and the bus driver, who was white, asked Grandfather Russell to lift the strap up off his wristwatch so the bus driver could look underneath.

"If, as he suspected, I was Black, I would have been told to get to the back of the bus. That's how dark I was!"

So as the time wore on and Grandfather Russell seemed to be getting nowhere fast, he finally approached one of his commanding officers. "I asked him, how do I get on Active Duty? He told me, 'You are on Active Duty.' I said, No sir, I mean active duty. Combat duty.'

"So he said, 'Well, It's not a matter of choice. You go where the Army tells you to go and do what the Army tells you to do.'

Amy Air Corps Radio school textbook cover

"So I said I didn't want to spend the rest of the war doing what I was doing, and if they insisted that I keep doing what I was doing then, sure, I'd sing, just not very in tune, and I'd act sure enough—I'd act just like a living room coffee table.

"So, he finally saw the light."

His superiors, confronted by this unwilling showman, pulled his records to see what they could do with him. They reaffirmed that he was not qualified to be in a cockpit because he was colour-blind.

"But then they gave me a test, which was a sound test. They played what sounded to me something like 'Deet-de-deet-deet-de-deet-deet'—that kind of thing, just a series of tones. So I took that test along with a number of other people, and it turned out that it was a test for radio operators; and I got a phenomenal score, because I was a musician, and I had a good ear!"

And forthwith, Grandfather Russell was informed that he was assigned to Radio School. 

"I hopped on a train, with orders, and reported to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to a camp that was somewhere outside town.

 "And for some peculiar reason—they trained 24 hours a day—I hooked the midnight shift.

"So every night for six, eight, ten weeks—I suppose they gave you a night off, but I don't recall—you'd go in there, and put your headsets on, and they'd teach you Morse Code.

Amy Air Corps Radio school textbook introduction page

"First you'd learn all the letters—painstakingly—from A to Z, and then you'd begin to get . . . the 'I LOVE YOU'-kind of messages, and you'd try to write them down. And then they'd have a sentence, and you'd try to write that down."

"And then they'd increase the speed, until the speed was up to  twenty-five, thirty words a minute.

"So finally, I passed, and I was told that I was to proceed—to Gunnery School."

To be continued

Grandfather in World War II: A History For Milo: Part I

Sergeant Russell J. Robinson, 1944

n December, 1941, Grandfather was nineteen years old. On December 7th of that year—now almost exactly 79 years ago—Japan attacked America’s main naval base in the Pacific ocean at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

At that time the war in Europe had been going on for over two years; Germany had attacked many countries and had even invaded and occupied some, like France. Germany had even attacked the biggest country in the world at the time, the Soviet Union (now Russia) in June of 1941, so the Germans were fighting a war on two fronts—in the East against the Soviet Union and then in the West, all the other countries in Europe, especially against England, who were holding out almost alone on their tiny island.

The main thing that had stopped the Germans from invading England (also known as Great Britain and nowadays mostly called the UK, or United Kingdom) was that small stretch of water that separated England from France—the English Channel, only 22 miles wide at its narrowest point.

The reason the Germans couldn’t cross the English Channel was mainly because the German Air Force, which they called the Luftwaffe, (meaning “Sky forces”) hadn’t defeated the English air forces. If they had tried to cross the English Channel, their boats would have been attacked by the English planes and sunk.

Invasion

At that time, invasions of countries by water—either the ocean, or a sea, or even just a river—was very difficult, because you had to have air superiority above all, but then you had to have huge numbers of ships and boats to carry all the soldiers, because the soldiers of the country being invaded would only have to put lots of guns all along their coast and shoot all sorts of bombs onto the invasion fleet’s boats to stop them from invading.

In military thinking they like to say that any invader’s armies have to outnumber the country being invaded’s army by three to one, meaning that the invaders had to have three times as many men, as well as all the weapons, and of course, all those men had to be fed, and they had to have tents and supplies and ammunition for their guns and all that stuff took a LOT of planning and organising. So behind the army that was invading a country there had to be another army which was carrying all the supplies for the invading army; plus, lots of men (there were no women soldiers in the American forces) whose job it was just to organise the whole thing, because if you didn’t have people who were doing all the planning then the soldiers would not have known what to do when they finished invading the target country.

So at the time that Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, the American forces—the Army, Navy, and the Air Force (which was at that time actually part of the Army—but more on that later) were a lot smaller than Germany’s and even Japan’s, because in the years before World War II there was a huge segment of American people who just didn’t want to get into any war. World War One had just finished less than 20 years before and of course lots of people could remember it very well, and lots of men had even fought in it. So they all didn’t want to get back into another war, especially in Europe, because they felt that the people in Europe were always starting wars and they just didn’t want to have to go and fight another war, because they figured that they had just finished one and were just tired of it.

But luckily, the president of America at that time, whose name was Franklin D. Roosevelt (pronounced “Rose-velt”) and whom everyone just called “FDR,” had begun to get worried that sooner or later, if the Germans somehow defeated England—which would have meant that the Germans would now be the rulers of all of Europe—then America would have to get involved.

FDR had many reasons why he didn’t like the Germans, but a lot of it was that the ruler of Germany, Adolf Hitler, was determined to kill anyone who he thought was not as smart or as strong as the Germans. This meant he wanted to kill all the Jewish people, all the Black people, and other people who weren’t White or did not have the same religion as the Germans. Back at that time, religion was much more important in the world and most Americans and Europeans would go to church once a week or so and would celebrate Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas and lots of smaller religious days each year.

So FDR realised that he didn’t want the Germans to control Europe, and now Hitler was even threatening the Soviet Union, and at that time, in December 1941, it looked a lot like the Germans might completely defeat the Soviets, which would have meant that only England, that tiny island on the Atlantic coast, would be the only country that would not be ruled by Adolf Hitler and his soldiers, who were called Nazis.

At the same time, from around 1935 or so, Japan, which had been becoming more and more militarised, meaning they had made their Army and Navy and Air Force much stronger than normal, and invaded China and were now threatening to invade lots of other countries in Asia, like Vietnam and Thailand and even India, so FDR had begun building up the strength of the American armed forces starting in about 1939.

One way of doing that was by having a "draft," which meant that when boys became 18 years old they were automatically put into the Armed Forces, where they were usually, but not always, allowed to choose what "branch" they wanted to join.

Grandfather wanted to be a pilot, but because he didn't pass a test called the "Color Blindness Test"—which mean that a person can't properly see certain colours, usually red or green. If you fail that test, it usually means that you can't be a pilot.

Can you see the numbers in this picture?

Russell The Radio Operator

When Pearl Harbour happened on December 7, 1941, Russell  was a 19-year-old student at Harvard University when " . . . a friend and I were waiting for two girls at an Emerson College rooming building and there was a radio in the hall, and it was about noon . . . and the radio announcer was saying 'And a Japanese fleet has bombed Pearl Harbour!' blah blah blah, and I remember saying to myself 'Where is that?'—I had no idea—'Is that Manila?'"

Russell remembers, in a 1999 interview: "Everything—everything—changed on December 7, 1941."

To be continued