Oh, and if the aircraft’s landing gear couldn’t be deployed on approach and the pilots had to perform a belly landing, you were fucked. One morbidly funny anecdote I heard once is that if a ball turret gunner got hit, they’d try to throw their frozen blood out of the plane so they wouldn’t have to clean it up later when they landed and it melted. If you got hit you had to just hope and pray that you wouldn’t bleed out before you got back to base. I can’t imagine being crammed up in that thing four or five miles up while fighters zip around and riddle your plane.
But being a ball turret gunner in a B-17 or B-24 seems like a truly awful slice of Hell. Approximately 3,300 PBY aircraft were built and during World War II, PBYs were used in anti-submarine warfare, patrol bombing, convoy escort, search and rescue missions (especially air-sea rescue), and cargo transport. Marks was able to pull a total of 56 drowned sailors out of the water and later shut off the engines and put additional survivors on the bobbing wings, tying the last of the 56 men down with parachute lines. Like, being a nose gunner on a PBY? Scary, sure, but at least if you get hit you can retreat into the aircraft and tend to your wounds. The PBY Catalina landed like an Ark sent by God but took some damage due to the high swell that threw up the Cat, bouncing over the waves. I think it’s probably a spectrum of horror though lol. Yeah, being a turret gunner on any aircraft during the war seems like a horrifying proposition any way you slice it.
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