by Bruce Lewis
Each gunner position on the B-17 had its own characteristics. The tail gunner was likely to be young, small and wiry, though this wasn’t always the case. … Once at his station the man could only see to the rear. He could not see any of his fellow crewmen from this position. Consequently, when emergencies were encountered, he was on his own with the loneliness of the proverbial Maytag repair man.
A fighter coming in from the rear was an easy target, with accurate determination of the instant he came within range the most important. Luftwaffe pilots soon learned of this deadly tactic and altered their approach so as to attack in a turn from above or below.
The two waist gunners working in their close quarters enjoyed a sense of togetherness, but without any comforts. The designers of the B-17 had given little thought to comfort except for the pilots. The waist position was bare aluminum with a narrow walkway from which the gunners worked. There was no place to sit down. Sitting or lying on the cold walkway was a rustic rest to say the least. In the early B-17 models, the open windows were opposite each other. During battle the men were constantly bumping rears. It was like operating two jack hammers in a phone booth. On later E models the windows were staggered. This helped the situation.
The waist was one of the most dangerous positions during battle. With the open windows, there was no structural protection available. The cold was almost as hazardous as enemy flak and fire. Shell casings were ejected on the floor. During a prolonged fight the footing was like walking on marbles. Every shot from the waist required deflection skills. …
The radio operator’s life was morse code and static-ridden high frequency radios. This, in itself, was a full-tune job and vital to crew and formation welfare. For most of the war the radio operator had a top gun in his rather comfortable compartment. In the great battles it was often necessary for him to man his gun and he was not immune to the flak and fighter threats that might penetrate his area while deciphering an important message.
The ball turret was a position given many descriptions by gunners of the day. It was deadly against low attacks and was probably a little safer than the other positions. It was a glass ball with two fifty-calibre guns, extended in flight to hang below the belly of the aircraft. It was electrically operated and could be rotated in every direction below the aircraft. The gunner entered from the top, assumed the foetal position, closed the hatch and was on his own. There were no comfort facilities, so once in the turret, it took a great determination to endure the threats and pains of nature’s call.
Mechanical malfunction could render the turret inoperative and, if not aligned with the escape hatch, it was a frightening circumstance. There are no official recordings of a ball turret gunner being left at his position during bale out or other emergency, but it was a horrifying possibility.
The top turret, located behind the pilots, was manned by the engineer. Aside from his gunner duties, this man was the technical expert on the aircraft. He monitored every system, including the pilots’, at all times. Turret time during battle was just an added duty. But the top turret was deadly, versatile and necessary in fighting off enemy attacks from any direction. During firing it was an aural chorus of humming gears and chattering fifties that could be heard and felt throughout the aircraft. It was routine to fire at a passing fighter, leave the turret to switch fuel tanks and synchronize the props, and be back in the turret in time to counter the next pass of a fighter.
In the nose section, the bombardier and navigator each had a gun, and, on later models, the deadly chin turret. But their duties were so demanding, especially in lead positions, that they did not man their guns until absolutely necessary. After a few months of the war, the bombardier was not supposed to leave his bomb sight for any reason during the bomb run. But once the bombs were dropped, many bombardiers and navigators scored well against the onslaughts of the Luftwaffe.
The Waist Gunner
Odell Franklin Dobson was born in Virginia on 11 March, 1922. He had wanted to fly from an early age, and, as soon as he was old enough, volunteered for the Army Air Corps and was accepted for a pilot’s course. For reasons he was never able to understand, he was ‘washed out’ after initial flying training. Swallowing his disappointment, he wangled himself onto a course as a ‘ball turret’ gunner – for which one of the physical requirements was a height not exceeding 5ft 6in – Odel was 6ft 1½in! Fortunately for him, he finished up as the left waist gunner on a B-24 Liberator.
After a number of missions over Europe, the bomber in which Odell had been flying became too battle-damaged to be repaired. As a replacement they were offered ‘Ford’s Folly’ by their CO. The old girl had quite a history. She was the first B-24 Liberator to be built by the Ford Motor Company of America. Early into battle, she had flown more missions than any other American bomber in the European theatre – seventy-nine raids at that time. She was a wreck and should have been written off. Yet when the ‘Old Man’ offered her to First Lieutenant C. A. Rudd, Odell’s pilot, he accepted her. The bait was just too tempting to be ignored. ‘Push her total up to a hundred missions,’said the Squadron Commander, ‘and you and your crew can take her back to the States on a War Bonds Tour.’ The idea appealed to the men very much. They would be wined and dined and feted like heroes by their fellow countrymen – and women!
After all they had made enough fuss of the ‘Memphis Belle’ – Starred her in a movie and all that kind of stuff – and she had only done twenty-five missions when they sent her home. So ‘Rudd’s Ruffians’, as the crew were known, figured old ‘Ford’s Folly’ would go over real big in the States when the time came.
The following is what happened to Staff Sergeant Odell Dobson, waist gunner, on what turned out to be the last mission flown by ‘Ford’s Folly’. This is a passage from my book Four Men Went to War:
It was the second Sunday in September, 1944. All the enlisted men from the crew of ‘Ford’s Folly,’ with the exception of Odell, were away from base on day pass. Odell had decided to stay around and take it easy, so he was far from pleased when pilot and navigator, Lieutenants Rudd and Dawson, strolled into his hut late in the afternoon and asked him if he would help them swing the compass and calibrate the instruments on their bomber. Irritably he threw down his book and followed them out to the hard stand where ‘Ford’s Folly’ was parked. It was dark long before they had finished their work, yet they were not particularly concerned, because it was after 5 o’clock and no battle order had been posted, which normally meant no operational flying on the following day.
On this occasion they were wrong. At 10 o’clock that night they were told that ‘Ford’s Folly’ was scheduled for a raid in the morning. Earlier that day it had been too cloudy to verify the sun compass, there had been no chance to carry out a flight test and guns and turrets had not been checked. As Odell said later, ‘If Rudd had been smart, he would have refused to fly the ship on that mission.’ The First Lieutenant would not have been alone in backing down – the Group had called for maximum effort, but only twenty-four out of fourty-eight aircraft took off the following morning.
As usual, after pre-flight breakfast, they were briefed. Here they were told that their target was an ordnance manufacturing depot near Hanover. It was still very early in the morning when Odell went over to the flights to oil and install his guns in ‘Ford’s Folly’. Sergeant Modlen, the nose-turret gunner, was a ‘washed-out’ navigator who acted as standby for Lieutenant Dawson, the regular navigator, in the event of an emergency. Part of Odell’s duty was to check the nose-turret guns for Modlen while he attended the navigators’ briefing. Odell fixed Modlen’s guns, but did not bother to check the electrical circuit to the nose-turret. Then, feeling tired, he took a blanket and went for a nap in an adjoining wheat-field while he waited for the rest of the crew to show up. Just before take-off, always a time of tension, the flyers were more than usually apprehensive – it was mission 13.
Nervousness was cloaked by flippant observations; Maynard, upper turret gunner and engi
neer, said This is not mission 13, it is mission 12a.’
‘No,’ cut in Roger Clapp, the radio operator, ‘Don’t kid yourself, we are taking off on mission 13, and this is the one where we go down.’
On a superstitious impulse Odell slid through the 3x5 feet camera-hatch back onto the ground. He scrubbed his feet several times on the grass at the side of the runway before climbing once more into the aircraft.
Shortly after take-off, as they were forming up, Modlen, the front gunner, called up, ‘Dobby, the radical on my gunsight won’t light up. Did you pre-flight my turret?’
‘Sure I did,’ Odell lied, knowing the pilot and all the rest of the crew were listening on the interphone. The crew had always taken great pride in its operational efficiency. Back in the Overseas Training Unit at Casper, Wyoming, the previous March, they had been awarded their own bomber on completion of the course, one of only three crews, out of a total of forty, to receive this privilege. Since then, as operational experience increased, there had been a tendency to back off on some of the routine checks, to become slipshod. Odell cursed himself for being a stupid, lazy slob. He advised Modlen to take the small bulb out of his ‘trouble light’, (the movable inspection light) and use that to replace the defective one. In a moment Modlen was speaking again: ‘Dobby, there ain’t no bulb in the “trouble light”.’ So on that trip there were no sights on the aircraft’s front guns. Afterwards, Odell’s only consolation was that, as far as he knew, there had been no head-on attacks by fighters that morning.
Odell started to get his own gun ready. On a B-24 Liberator the 50mm flexible machine guns mounted in the waist of the bomber were fired through open windows on both sides of the aircraft. The ammunition boxes had belts of 500 rounds and these rattled along flexible metal chutes to feed the guns. During firing the noise and vibration were unbelievable. Odell discovered that the hooks that attached the chute to his gun were missing. He had some safety wire in his ‘para bag’ and used that to fix up the chute. Then he checked his gun and got it firing satisfactorily. Meanwhile, Sergeant Hoganson, the right waist gunner, was having problems of his own. The chute fitted on his gun all right, but the apparatus that kept the gun steady while firing came off in his hand. Odell had a precious spool of nylon cord, the first he had ever been able to acquire. He used this to bind up the contraption as firmly as possible. By this time Odell was in an ugly mood, cursing the lousy job done by armourers when supposedly preparing an aircraft for a raid.
He was relieving his frustration by swinging his gun around with considerable violence when, all of a sudden, he knocked his front sight off. To top it all, just as ‘Ford’s Folly’ crossed the Belgian coast, the motor operating the hydraulics for the tail turret caught fire and burned out. This put the most effective gun position out of action. Odell was shocked by this latest mishap. If all this could happen to the guns, he mused unhappily, what about the state of everything else connected with this wreck of an airplane? The motors themselves sounded pretty rough to him.
As they flew over the Ardennes, Odell knew they would soon be swinging north, heading up towards Hanover. He was sitting on one of his ‘personal bombs’, an empty ammunition box. He usually carried one or two of these heavy wooden containers to chuck out over the target. As he stared out of his open gun position, he realized they were stationed in one of the most vulnerable sections – lower left squadron, with only ‘Tail-end Charlie’ behind them.
Suddenly someone yelled ‘Fighters!’ They were all around. ME109s – the sky seemed to be black with them. Odell fired at one enemy plane. It broke away right under the Liberator, so close he could see the German in his cockpit. The enemy pilot was wily enough not to finish up on the bomber’s tail where the gunner would normally have the best shot at him. Tail-gunners had no worries about deflection; they just laid the sight on the fighter’s nose and blazed away. Their attacker was not to know Sergeant Place was sitting impotently behind his guns, the tail turret useless.
The Messerschmitts kept coming in on a pursuit curve. They started their attack about three or four thousand feet ahead and a thousand feet above, then rolled over and started firing as they closed in. Odell thought he had hit the next ME109 that came in. As the fighter broke away it was trailing thick black smoke and he felt sure it was going down. Then he recalled being told about the synthetic fuel the Germans were using, apparently made from coal and God knows what. When their pilots hit the throttles for maximum power while breaking away it was no wonder they made smoke with that stuff in the cylinders.
‘Hoggy’, the other waist gunner, was doing well. He exploded an attacking fighter and punched Odell on the shoulder to look round and see it so he could verify it later at squadron interrogation. Odell had already seen him blow another one out of the sky just a few seconds earlier.
The next one looked as if it was coming straight for Odell; the yellow nose cone was pointing directly at him. This time he was certain his shells had smashed home; the fighter was burning all along the wings. He waited for the enemy to explode. Then, as it came closer, he realized that the flames were only flashes from the ME109’s wing guns as it fired at him. Next moment a 20mm shell, maybe from the gun in that yellow nose cone, hit Odell’s gun and exploded. Most of the white-hot metal fragments hit him in the chest, but one piece struck him clean between the eyes. It cut through his hard rubber goggle frame and entered his head right at the top of his nose. The force of the explosion knocked him down on the deck. Although he did not know it at the time, the shell had smashed both his legs. Everything went black. He could not see, but was still aware of what was going on. Over his headphones he was conscious of Spencer, the bombardier, telling Rudd that he should salvo the bombs to lighten the aircraft, because by that time both motors on the right wing were out of action; No 3 was feathered, while No 4 was windmilling and burning. Try as they could, they were unable to get the prop to feather completely on No 4.
Every few moments Odell heard someone on the interphone yell out, ‘More fighters coming in!’ In fact there was a continuous babble of voices and Hoggy said several times, ‘Dobby’s been hit. Dobby’s been hit.’ Then Dawson, the navigator, cut in: ‘Get off the damned interphone, Hoganson.’ He wanted everyone to be quiet so no essential orders would be missed. Unknown to Odell, Mainard, the upper-turret gunner, had been hit and possibly killed in the first fighter attack. His canopy was shot away and Roger Clapp, the radio operator, saw him slump forward and then slither out of his turret, down onto the floor below. Roger put Mainard’s head in his lap and tried to put a bandage over a gaping hole in his skull, but the gunner never spoke, or even opened his eyes.
The situation was more than desperate – two engines knocked out and only Hoganson’s waist gun still firing. Odell could not figure out how Hoggy kept going the way he did. After a while, Odell was able to see out of his right eye. There was blood running out of his head and dripping into the severed half of his goggles dangling on his left cheek. He tried to raise himself up, but did not get very far. Hoggy was still firing, but then he was hit and fell down on top of Odell. He struggled back up, holding on to his shoulder, turned round and tried to charge Odell’s gun to get it firing again, but it had been completely knocked out in the explosion. Then Odell watched Hoggy swing back to his own gun and fire at another fighter. He hit it for sure. In a moment Hoggy was struck again and collapsed onto Odell a second time. Incredibly, he got back up.
His oxygen mask was hanging off and blood was pouring down his face. He fired at the plane he had just hit as it dived past the Liberator’s right wing. The Messerschmitt was burning from its wing roots all the way past the cockpit. It was heading straight down to earth. Then a 20mm shell hit Hoggy in the head and he fell down for a third time. He did not get up after that. Odell could see the flames streaming out of No 4 motor. He was sure the bomber was going to blow any second. Struggling out of his flak suit, he clipped on his parachute and crawled to the camera hatch which he managed to open. Lying close to th
e opening, Odell prayed that, if the airplane exploded, he would be blown clear. Still connected to the interphone, he heard Rudd, his Captain, saying: ‘Hang on boys. I’m going to hit the deck.’
As they started to descend, Odell guessed they were around 27,000 feet. The big bomber was diving steeply, when, for some reason he could not understand, ‘Ford’s Folly’ began to climb at an acute angle. It stalled with all the power coming from the two remaining motors on the left wing. It rolled over to the left and started spinning. The first two or three turns of the spin were fairly flat, but then it nosed over and began to go down fast with the flames streaming from the right wing.
Odell knew that, if he were to get out at all, this was his last chance. The centrifugal forces were pinning him to the deck, but he managed to pull himself over the hatch. Just before the slip-stream caught him and pulled him out, he had time to take one last look inside the aircraft. Back near the tail, Place had climbed out of his turret and was sitting with his back to a bulkhead; his oxygen mask was off and blood streamed down his face. Hoggy was lying where he had fallen, his eyes glazed, but, as Odell looked at him, his friend half-raised his hand for a moment, then it fell back to his side. There was nothing that Odell could do to help. The next second he was gone.
The Ball Turret Gunner
It would be remiss to leave the subject of air gunners without relating the unique story of ‘Snuffy’ Smith. Staff-Sergeant Maynard H. Smith from Caro, Michigan, was the son of a circuit judge, who sadly did not live long enough to learn of his son’s outstanding courage during the course of his first mission on 1 May, 1943.
Below is the 32-year-old old ‘Snuffy’s’ own account of what happened, as he told it the day after he had flown with the 306th, of the 8th AAF, and bombed enemy installations at St Nazaire. He was a small man who fitted snugly into the ball turret of his B-17 Fortress: