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