by 2nd Lt. Chuck Widener
Hunched behind a pair of .50-caliber machine guns in the tail of a B-24 Liberator, Robert Sweatt could only watch the Ju-88 fighter unload its 20 mm cannons into his plane as he hastily tried to unjam his guns.
“ My gun would fire two short bursts and jam,” said the 81-year-old veteran, recalling a 1943 mission over Germany.
Narrowly escaping the first attack from the Luftwaffe fighter, Sweatt’s entire body clinched up as he watched the German swoop around for his second attempt.
“ I knew he had us. He was so close I couldn’t shoot him. The bullets looked like golf balls coming right at us,” he explained as his voice got louder. “He couldn’t have been a hundred yards from me.”
Then BOOM!
“ A P-38 Lightning came out of nowhere and hit him right in the middle,” he said.
As a member of the 389th Bomb Group’s 566th Bombardment Squadron during World War II, Sweatt flew on 17 missions over Europe. His squadron was in one of three 8th Air Force B-24 groups that took part in the Ploesti mission — one of the war’s most daring heavy bomber raids of oil fields in Romania. The fields were estimated to be supplying 60 percent of Germany’s crude oil. Of the 177 planes and 1,726 men who took off on the mission, 54 planes and 532 men failed to return.
If you were to ask Sweatt about his other missions, he could describe each one in vivid detail. There was the time his plane sustained heavy damage from a wake of flak, and the crew courageously flew the bomber across the coast of England at 200 feet with two engines out. The aircraft landed in a sugar beet field about 150 feet off the coast. On another mission, his plane was shot down by German ace Egon Mayer. That was the last mission he and his crew flew. Sweatt was the only survivor.
He was just one of about 297,000 gunners trained in the Army Air Forces after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941. Gunners, of course, defended the bombers while riding “shotgun.” They were an integral part of the flying fleet during World War II since they served in every theater of operations, and gunners today continue the legacy while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it was 29 years before the attack on Pearl Harbor that the art of aerial gunnery began.
The first to draw
On June 7, 1912, Capt. Charles Chandler, an early visionary and proponent of arming aircraft, fired a Lewis machine gun from between his legs while flying at about 500 feet onboard a Wright Model B biplane. He fired about 45 rounds at a 6-by-54-foot target. Some 14 rounds found their way to the target, making Chandler the first aerial machine gunner.
Amazingly enough, it wasn’t until 1915 that mounted machine guns began popping up on planes. Observers who sat in the rear cockpit of early World War I model warplanes, such as the DeHavilland DH-4, quickly learned the advantages of a mounted machine gun.
The observer/gunner positions were typically held by enlisted members, so little attention was given to those who filled the slots until they began scoring aerial victories. Sgts. Albert Ocock and Philip Smith of the 8th Observation Squadron each claimed a victory in the St. Mihiel offensive, and it wasn’t long before the enlisted observers/gunners found themselves flying with bomber squadrons.
Sgt. 1st Class Fred Graveline of the 1st Day Bombardment Group shot down two German planes during his 15 missions. He flew more combat sorties than any other enlisted man in World War I.
Others began claiming victories as well. During the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the final battle of World War I, American observation plane gunners shot down an estimated 55 German warplanes. Gunners aboard bombers reportedly knocked out another 39 of the 357 enemy planes shot down by American fliers, a significant accomplishment, considering there were only 23 aerial gunners on the front in France.
Packing heat
By the mid-1930s, gunnery technology had improved vastly along with aircraft design. With the advent of bombers like the B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, and B-26 Marauder, gunners were challenged to defend the heavy bombers armed with .50-caliber Browning machine guns.
To meet the high demand for gunners after the start of World War II, the Army Air Forces began training enlisted gunners at seven schools, and fired out graduates at the rate of 3,200 per week. That’s roughly 166,000 students per year. By September 1944, an unbelievable 227,827 gunners had been trained.
A great percentage of gunners were volunteers who took their training seriously. Like bombardier trainees, they knew they had but one destination after training — combat.
Sweatt was one of those volunteers despite the rumors that the average lifespan of a gunner was about 17 seconds.
“ I know we were scared,” he said. “We always knew someone was coming after us. You just didn’t pay attention to it.”
