That looks fun there, but not on a real plane and getting shot back at. My friend's dad was a tail gunner in WWII. He just didn't have time to worry about incoming fire, just did his job.
Excellent point, and I sincerely apologize if I gave anyone the impression that I thought a ball turret gunner's job was fun.
At an airshow in Youngstown, Ohio, about 35 years ago, I spotted a gentleman with a B-17 baseball hat standing near the tail gunner's station on Texas Raiders, the Commemorative Air Force's restored Fortress.
I asked him how many missions he'd flown, and he told me he'd completed 14. Noting my quizzical look, he told me he'd been shot down on his 15th mission, over Hamburg.
He explained that after the bombing run, the bomb bay doors wouldn't close, so the flight engineer left the top turret and went into the bomb bay, without his parachute, to crank them closed manually.
While he was doing this, an 88mm round hit the Fort between the number 1 and number 2 engines, blowing off the left wing. The plane immediately and violently pitched over to the left, throwing the engineer out of the bomb bay, and began spinning toward the ground.
The gentleman told me how he struggled and fought like hell against the G-forces being generated to get his 'chute on, and then to get his escape hatch, just behind him on the left, open. When he finally did so, they were only about 1000 feet off the ground, and he pushed himself out.
He was captured immediately upon landing. The Germans took him to the crash site to identify the bodies of his dead crewmates; he was the only one who'd been able to bail out.
While I'm glad we have the opportunity to see things like this operational ball turret, you're quite right, Jeffrefrig...it wasn't fun to them, not at all...
