The Terrifying Truth About the B-17’s Ball Turret Gunners

To fit a ball turret to a B-17 they cut a hole in the floor of the aeroplane forty-six and three quarter inches across. Then a nineteen-year-old folded himself through it, pulled the door shut behind him, and stayed there for eight hours, five miles above Germany, with a machine gun either side of his head. He could not stand, kneel or turn around. His parachute stayed outside, in the aircraft. If the hydraulics failed and the guns froze pointing down, the door was blocked by the ground. And if the aircraft came home without its landing gear, he was the one problem nobody on board could solve. A poem written in 1945 fixed that job in the public mind as the deadliest in the war. The Army Air Forces' own casualty survey said something completely different — and this video goes through their numbers. Also here: the man who fell twenty-two thousand feet without a parachute and lived to be eighty-four; why the turret had a maximum height for the man inside it; why the Liberator's version was worse; and why, by the end of the war, the turrets were coming off the aircraft altogether. Every figure in this video is documented. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:47 The Hole They Cut in the Floor 1:39 He Couldn't Get In Until They Were Flying 2:24 What Was In There With Him 3:31 The Job Had a Maximum Height 4:13 The Parachute Stayed Outside 4:59 Fifty Degrees Below 6:50 Eight Hours Without Leaving 7:29 When the Hydraulics Went 8:19 Twenty-Two Thousand Feet, No Parachute 9:59 Five Lines That Fixed the Image Forever 10:49 The Army's Own Numbers Said Otherwise 11:42 Hardest to Hit, Hardest to Save 12:33 The Kills They Claimed 13:41 The Liberator Had the Same Problem, Worse 14:33 The Turrets Came Off 15:20 Nobody In There Was Measuring FOOTAGE AND STILLS US National Archives (NARA), US Army Air Forces, Library of Congress, US Air Force. All public domain works of the US Government. No AI-generated footage. Every frame of archive material in this video is real. Music: "Clash Defiant" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 — creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Further reading & primary documents: Army Air Forces Statistical Digest, World War II; Sperry ball turret technical manuals; Donald L. Miller, "Masters of the Air"; Randall Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (1945).