Were the crews all under 23 or so? I get freaked out when my father in law fills his aged gas cans and carries them around in the back of his scion (30 gallons or so.) Gasoline terrifies me but I remember draining the tank of my step van into a sheet rock bucket when I was younger and more clever.
In talking with people who flew in the big war, most gunners on bombers were in the 19 to 22 year age group, while most bomber pilots were between 21 and 25, with the exception of the squadron and wing officers, but even those guys were young, and many when on to be generals by age 40, (Curtis Lemay). They came from all walks of life in America and they all had one thing in common, they wanted to help win the war! The quickest way to the air war was to vol. to be a gunner! Count the number of gunners needed on a 17, 24 and you see real quick the military problem of filling those positions. Then you couple that with gunners getting wounded, killed or captured after bailing out, gunners were in short supply until about mid 1943.
During the war years when building large bombers, engineering had not learned the lesson of "flex" joints in fuel lines and therein lays some of the problem with the 24. Any large aircraft is going to flex a certain amount, especially where the wings and fuseledge are joined! They finally started running crossover fuel lines in the wing "box", the center section where the main spar of the wing cross from one side of the aircraft to the other and has less flex than other parts of the wing area and then a lot of those fuel problems went away.
