Gunners

History & service

Image Early heavy bombers only had hand-operated flexible guns in the nose, leaving them vulnerable to frontal attack from enemy fighters. Later versions of the B-17 (top photo) and B-24 (left) had more effective, powered, twin-gun nose turrets like those pictured here.

The B-17 (left) had hand-operated tail guns with a limited field of fire while the B-24 (right) had a powered tail turret that covered a wide area.

In May 1943, enemy flak and fighters set ball turret gunner SSgt Maynard Smith’s B-17 afire over Brest, France. For more than an hour, Smith alternated between tending to a wounded crewman, battling flames, and firing the waist guns against enemy fighters. He finally extinguished the fire by hand after throwing exploding ammunition overboard, saving the aircraft.

In February 1944, SSgt Archibald Mathies, along with navigator 2^{nd} Lt Walter Truemper, nursed their heavily-damaged B-17 back to England after the copilot was killed and the pilot badly wounded. The crew was ordered to bail out, but Mathies and Truemper refused to leave the pilot. They attempted to land the damaged plane, but it crashed, killing all three. Mathies and Truemper received the Medal of Honor for their selfless act.

A-2 jacket and trousers worn by Eighth Air Force ball turret gunner Sgt Richard Benson. The front of his jacket displays the 18^{th} Bomb Squadron emblem, while the trousers list his combat missions.

Field jacket and bag owned by Sgt Larry Gardner, a Fifteenth Air Force tail gunner. During his tour, he had a finger shot off, and his B-24 was shot down over enemy territory. Fortunately, Gardner was rescued by Italian partisans.

A-2 jacket worn by Fifteenth Air Force ball turret gunner SSgt Emil Barney. In November 1944, his B-17 fell out of control over the Adriatic Sea after being attacked by Bf 109s. Barney bailed out and was rescued two days later.

These linked 50-cal. rounds represent the 35 combat missions flown by B-17 top turret gunner TSgt Marion “Mickey” Popivchak, 306^{th} Bomb Group. Popivchak put Stars and Stripes newspaper clippings related to each mission inside the cartridge cases. The red-tipped tracer round represented the January 10, 1945 mission, when his B-17 crash-landed in Belgium after heavy damage knocked out the oxygen system and two engines.

Aircraft change the battlefield

In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.

The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.

Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.