Tac; I'm not one for the pinpoint gunnery thing - I personally want us to have multiple gunners, and I would want to use individual guns myself.
I would disagree with your points about realism except I don't see the point. There are plenty of 'reports' of buffs bouncing numerous fighters and sending them packing. I could dig up lots of reports for you claiming that the majority of gunner deaths with ball turret gunners - killed by schrage musik, or that they were nose gunners killed in headons, or that they were tail gunners killed by fires in the aircraft making it impossible to exit the plane. Or B17 amazing-battle stories where planes were rattled with bullets and survived.
But I won't. Instead I will consider your prospect on 'real' and weigh it against the fact that many of the battle stories we see come from tail gunners. That the number of tail gunners who died from failure to bail properly from an aircraft is amongst the highest. But that the one statistic which commonly is not the highest is the death or disability rate of tail gunners on-board.
Here are some anecdotal tales:
`The one failing of the whole training system was that we weren't told more of what to expect. We just learned it strictly from experience, except for the pilot who had done two trips as a rule before he took his own crew. He didn't tell us much about what to expect; in fact I don't remember the pilot telling us anything.
'I was a tail gunner in a Halifax and away we went. One night we got attacked by two fighters. I shot down the one that came in from the rear, a Ju-88, and the mid-gunner spotted the one underneath and the pilot was able to take violent evasive action. Unfortunately the bomb aimer was mortally wounded and died after we went back to England. Within a few hours everybody was shook up. The wireless operator got hit in the rear end with a fragment of cannon shell and the aircraft was just shattered. The bomb aimer was standing in the astrodome and he was hit in the head. The attack hit the top of the aircraft. The flaps came down and the undercarriage came down; the bomb doors fell open; we had no hydraulics; the wireless set blew up and we had to fly another 2 hours or more to get back to England. We landed at a fighterdrome in the south of England. We didn't crash, we landed wheels down.
'We had some leave to go to the bomb aimer's funeral and then we went back on ops. From then on you were pretty apprehensive. I'm not going to say strict discipline because it wasn't a matter of strictness, it was a matter of strong discipline. There was no chatter, no unneccssary banter on the intercom. There was silence. When somebody switched that mike on everybody knew it and everybody was listening. You'd hear them breathing, and if they'd nothing to say the pilot would ask who was on the mike. You were apprehensive.
'After my original crew got shot down I flew with various crews. One crew I went with on their first trip and that was at the time I'd done 20/21 trips. That was an unforgettable experience because they just chattered the whole time: "Look at the lights", "Look at that", "Do you see that?". Finally I was such a nervous wreck that I had to tell them to keep quiet and they did. It was not a happy trip, but we got home fine. They unfortunately went missing a couple of trips later. They never did get any experience.'
-- Wilkie Wanless, Bomber Command rear gunner
Note in this one, the plane was attacked FROM THE REAR, and yet the tail gunner was not killed.
'It was a simple raid. It was east of Paris in daylight at the end of July [1944], and we were bombing this tunnel that stored V1 bombs 30 miles east of Paris. 617 Squadron were bombing the southern end and 9 Squadron were bombing the northern end to shut the tunnel. There were 300 planes with 12 single 1,000-pound delayed-action bombs to drop to prevent the Germans from salvaging the V1s. We had 12,000-pounders and we were at 12,000 feet to make sure we could see it. We went in in a gaggle. It was the first time I took my camera with me in the plane. It was supposed to be bad luck taking a camera! I took a few shots of the other planes. There was Flak ahead and the crew told me not to bother to take pictures of it because there were Mosquitoes covering the picture side. There were four and a half minutes left to stabilise the bomb sight. The bomb aimer said "Hold it. Hold it" and then BANG! The outer engine fell off and something went through the plane. The stick went sloppy in my hand and I said, "Stand by to bale out".
'My engineer handed me my chute. Took my helmet off and put my chute on. I shouted, "Bale out!", and the crew all dashed to the front to get their chutes and to get down the escape hatch at the front. If you have plenty of time you ask the rear gunners to come up, but in an emergency like this, with the plane beginning to spin down, they get out as soon as they can from the back. I could not get out of my seat, so I tried to open the side window but couldn't open it. I couldn't open the other window. I remember all the dinghies fell out. I turned the escape handle in the escape hatch, and as I turned it the whole nose of the plane must have come off, because the next thing I knew I was falling through the air and felt for my chute. There was quiet - no engine noise. I felt for my cord, pulled it. I thought it was not working when it suddenly jerked. I held on like grim death because I was not sure if I had put it on right. I could see trees coming up. I kept my legs together as all good men should do and slid into the trees. I thought I had broken my leg it was so numb. My hand was broken, hit when I came through the hatch, and my face was all burned.
'I got down from the tree, took my chute off and poked it under a bush and then looked for my escape route. I could hear the bombs still going off because of the delayed action. I was quite near the target so I headed away. I had a dressing with me which you always carried and I sat and wrapped up my hand. I thought, "If I go further south I could speak French and make my way back".
'The invasion forces were the other side of Paris. I stodd up, and there were three big Germans with rifles and bayonets standing round me. They had seen the parachutes coming down into the trees. I saw the tail part of my plane in the trees and I pointed to it to see if I could go to it. By that time a German had come up who spoke better English than I did. He was wearing white jodhpurs. He thought I was American because it was a daylight raid. I went to my plane. The mid upper gunner was just inside, in the tailplane, dead. The rear turret was about 20 yards from the plane with the rear gunner in it dead with his chute. He had managed to get his chute on, but when he headed out he hit the ground. Twenty minutes later they came up with my wireless operator with his ankle all twisted. His chute must have opened in the plane and torn, because he hit the ground too fast and knocked himself out.
'I took it that the rest of the crew were all safe. They had been in front of me and I had followed out after them. Our navigator was a French Canadian, so I thought he would be all right, and Chunky, my engineer, was a big strong chap. I thought, "Lucky devils, they are definitely away".
'And it was not until we came back from prison that I found out that they had all been killed. Whether they had been trapped in the nose, or their chutes had not opened, I don't know. They are buried in France.'
-- Bill Reid VC, Bomber Command pilot
But, to argue your case for you Tac:
'I pedalled into the aerodrome and they said, "Hurry up, you're flying."
'This was 8 o'clock in the morning. There was not a cloud in the sky, it was unreal. Wellingtons were scattered all over the sky. You thought the flak was going to hit you straight between the eyes and then it veered off. We went through a huge barrage and you couldn't see anything except big puffs of black smoke. As we came through the barrage there were the Messerschmitts waiting for us. We hadn't got any guns at all. All our gadgets had packed in so we had no front gun, no rear gun or anything. We discovered afterwards that they used the wrong oil in our hydraulic system.
'During one of these attacks I was hit in the back and then through the ankle. I rang up the skipper and said, "I've been hit and it bloody well hurts."
'He told me to come to the front and get it dressed. I staggered to the front of the aircraft. The wireless operator saw my ankle and got a hypodermic syringe and bunged this stuff through my flying trousers into my leg, which killed some of the pain. He was hit and killed immediately. He went a funny sort of grey and purple and died. A Messerschmitt sat on our tail and shot right through the aeroplane, through the rear turret and out through the front of the aircraft. I was sitting on the bed behind the wireless operator's area watching the blood coming out of my foot. The second pilot had to stand with his legs astride and the bullets going between his legs. Then a bullet hit him in the thigh.
'I heard the skipper say he had got to go down. We had caught fire. We were over an island off the German coast and he found a bit of beach to land on. We were burning by now. I got to the hatch at the top and pulled myself up but I got stuck and I could feel the flames burning my rear end. They pulled me out and carried me to the sand dunes.'
-- Harry Jones, Bomber Command rear gunner
