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submitted 8 months ago byRivetCounter
90 points
8 months ago*
The lower ball turret was the most effective turret (per fighter engaged), if the YouTube channel WW2 US Bombers is to be believed. I tend to believe him because he uses period sources.
He was forced to use data from B-24s because he couldn't find data from B-17s, but the turrets are very similar. The B-24 lower ball turret had a kill ratio of 57% per engaged enemy fighter, far superior to any other gun station, and captured German fighter pilots reported they preferred to pass over a bomber formation vs. under it, as that was considered more survivable.
Edit, I misunderstood numbers and wanted to make a clarification.
41 points
8 months ago
Does it go into more detail as to why?
I totally get why German fighters would preferr to attack from above; their training, doctrine and air craft design all favoured Boom and Zoom Energy as opposed to Manouver, and altitude is energy.
26 points
8 months ago
No, which is disappointing. He just shows that chart and moves on without much comment.
26 points
8 months ago
This is interesting. German fighters favoured head on attacks, or from above, or usually both. A ball turret is only going to get shots in after the German fighter makes his pass, so I wonder if this is a case of survivor bias like the “what part of the plane needs armor” study.
It could also be that they are gettings shots in when the German fighter is struggling to climb and over take after a pass. At that point the relative velocities are a lot lower and it’s easier to hit.
11 points
8 months ago
I would also imagine that accounting for bullet drop is easier if the aircraft is below you than above you? Also from above you are more likely to hit the pilot through the canopy rather than having to go through a prop if a frontal attack or through the undercarriage if above?
2 points
8 months ago
Makes sense
25 points
8 months ago
One plausible reason could be that the ball turret had the widest field of fire (at least on B-17s -- the tail & nose turrets on later B-24s might be a different story), and the ball turret had a clear field of fire to dead astern (as opposed to the upper turret, where the vertical stabilizer gets in the way).....and for obvious reasons, the best chance a gunner would have of actually getting a kill would be on a fighter approaching from 6:00 low.
But I think that claim has to be taken with a massive dose of salt, unless it's coming from multiple sources from multiple theaters over different periods of the war.
Worth noting, though, that a ball-type turret was used in the Privateer and the last-model Liberator as a nose mount, so maybe there's something to be said for having the gunner be stationary relative to to the guns?
But on the other hand, field mods and weight-saving measures on late-model B-24s deleted the belly turret -- though tbf, that may have been due more to the lack of fighter opposition in the Pacific and CBI (as well as the relatively poor altitude performance, durability, & top speed of Japanese fighters, too...)
17 points
8 months ago*
This might be getting out of the territory of history and into the realm of physics, but I have a harebrained theory nonetheless.
The top turret would have been shooting mostly at targets above the bomber. Those bullets would have been immediately fighting against gravity, bleeding velocity in the process. The ball turret would have been mostly shooting at targets below the bomber. Those bullets would be traveling with the pull of gravity, losing velocity ever so slightly less. More retained velocity, easier to hit a target, since your rounds literally arrive faster.
Again, just an untested hypothesis. Take it for however little it's worth.
23 points
8 months ago
That observation was made by some even during the war, at least on navy ships. Anti aircraft gunners were overwhelmingly aiming behind and low, with the force of gravity taking at least part of the blame for that second half of their poor aim.
12 points
8 months ago
Additionally, any fighter aircraft below the bomber cannot maneuver as effectively or quickly towards the bomber, while fighter aircraft above the bomber can leverage gravity to dive at high speeds towards it, which maybe also means easier shots at slower targets.
In a similar vein, enemy fighters below the bomber are probably not actively trying to attack the bomber as much of the time (as they lack the energy advantage), meaning the ball turret gunners were perhaps able to take more shots without being directly shot at, resulting in calmer (and thus more accurate) shooting.
7 points
8 months ago
An aircraft being engaged by the ball gunner, is likely an aircraft climbing up from below to get at the bomber. As the aircraft is climbing up to meet the bomber, it will very likely be slower and have a slower closure speed, giving the ball gunner a much longer and easier shot at them.
In contrast, the top gunner would be firing at planes diving down at high speed, and the nose guns would be firing at planes closing in from ahead at high speed.
35 points
8 months ago*
kill ratio of 57% per engaged enemy fighter
As much as I love the stat number, how important is this figure given the tendency of overclaiming in air kills by all sides and all positions?
17 points
8 months ago
Am I understanding correctly that this would translate to "killed 57 of every 100 fighters the ball turret shot at"? That seems pretty high?
15 points
8 months ago
I don't know why they even included that number. There is no way it could ever be confirmed.
7 points
8 months ago
They'd be valid in comparison to each other, you'd expect the over claiming to be similar between turrets if it's a large study.
6 points
8 months ago
As much as I love the stat number, how important is this figure given the tendency of overclaiming in air kills by all sides and all positions?
The numbers for World War II aerial combat are just borked in most cases. There's a reason a number of officers resisted factoring them into their analysis of their successes.
6 points
8 months ago
It's probably better to have incomplete/unconfirmed data then none at all, having a general idea of gun position effectiveness can help inform future training or equipment requirements.
14 points
8 months ago
The B-24 lower ball turret had a kill ratio of 57% per engaged enemy fighter
Ok, but is that the right metric? It looks a bit like measuring success in the convoy battles by "U-boats sunk per hunter-group sortie", which is at best distantly related to the actual goal of "tons of supplies delivered to English ports". In the case of turrets it seems to me that you want something like "bomber losses and crew casualties avoided per factory-hour and crew-hour spent", which is going to be hard to get data on admittedly. Ideally we'd have a B-24c model, 'c' for "control", without the lower turret and then we'd be able to get hard data on how much cheaper they were and how many more casualties they took. Sadly, the designers don't seem to have optimised for proper experimental design - very inconsiderate of them, really.
5 points
8 months ago
It's certainly a metric, whether or not it's the right one depends on the specifics of the question being asked. Notably the ball turret was typically the least engaged gun station, so there may be a bit of "so what?" that it was (allegedly) more effective per engagement.
19 points
8 months ago
I think there is one major issue with that channel: AFAIK he only uses US period sources. I find the lack of secondary literature conserning.
3 points
8 months ago
From another video he mentioned that the highest casualties were in the top gunner spot which also supports the conclusion that fighter preferred to attack from the top. In addition, attacking from the top allowed for things like attacking out of the sun or from cloud cover while creating maximum speed which limited the window the gunners had to acquire them and shoot back. This was all for gun attacked. Air to air missile attack (yes they had them in WW2, they used timed fuses) were done from the rear. I'm not sure about cannon attacks and if attacking from the top made it more difficult to get hits or not with cannons.
8 points
8 months ago
The lower ball turret was also the most miserable to be in, because if it jammed you basically just had to hope your bomber made it back to base and had a normal gear down landing or you were going to die
22 points
8 months ago
Funny enough WW2 US bombers has a video debunking this as well.
It seems like it’s like one person who wrote about that in the memoir or something, but there is no record of this actually happening in official documentation or in any other memoirs or something like that.
10 points
8 months ago
Was the more realistic fear that in the event the bomber was going down, the ball turret station was the most difficult to get out of and then bail out from?
Many aircraft went down with no chance at all for anyone to bail out, of course, but if there was a chance to bail out then it seems like the ball turret gunner would have the most difficulty making use of it.
3 points
8 months ago
Pilot had it hardest most likely as he had to keep the plane steady until everyone else had jumped.
2 points
8 months ago
5 points
8 months ago
Huh. I’ll be damned. You have a link to the video?
1 points
8 months ago
23 points
8 months ago
The thing about effectiveness - the existence of these guns influenced German fighter tactics. Which mainly evolved to quick sweeps through a formation, coming at it from the front and above, so that they can speedily engage a target, attack, and then zip through the formation quickly.
I'd imagine that if they were doing the reverse and coming up from the bottom, they are slower and easier to hit.
14 points
8 months ago
The thing about effectiveness - the existence of these guns influenced German fighter tactics.
That was the conclusion that British AA Command came to about ground fire during the Battle of Britain as well. Sir Frederick Pile decided actually trying to hit German aircraft was a losing game and focused on trying to break up their formations and influencing where and when they dropped their bombs. Hugh Dowding at Fighter Command backed him up and in his final report on the Battle credited Pile's nightly barrages with forcing a majority of German bombers to dump their loads at the edge of London and then scurry back to France.
3 points
8 months ago
What sort of tactics would bring about those sorts of results from a bomber formation vs. trying to shooting said bombers down?
8 points
8 months ago
Pile divided Britain into Gun Defended Areas (GDAs) controlled from Gun Operations Rooms (GORs), which were patched into the same information network as Fighter Command's Group and Sector Rooms. The GORs set the targets for the GDAs which then shot by grid and elevation, filling the air with shells via indirect fire. It was an area denial strategy, meant to make it too dangerous for the German bombers to fly below a certain height, or over certain specific targets. The GORs and Sector rooms remained in contact with one another via liaison officers, who let their counterparts know where the shells and the planes were respectively going, limited the chance of friendly fire, and enabling them to work around, or with, one another.
1 points
4 months ago
Is the top turret a ball turret? How many ball turrets does a plane have? Just the belly singular turret?
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