Tail Gunner - General Description

General Description

The tail gun armament and arrangement varied between countries. During World War II, most USAAF heavy bomber designs such as the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-29 Superfortress used a fixed gunner position with the guns themselves in a separate turret covering an approximately 90-degree rear arc. Typical armament was two 0.50 inch M2 Browning machine guns.

In contrast, Royal Air Force heavy bombers such as the Avro Lancaster and Handley Page Halifax used a powered turret capable of 180 degree rotation containing the tail gunner and four 0.303 inch Browning machine guns. A similar arrangement was used in the American B-24 Liberator heavy bomber (but with two 0.50 inch heavy machine guns.) British turrets were manufactured by two companies Nash & Thomson and Boulton & Paul Ltd and the same turret model could be fitted to a number of different aircraft.

In German aircraft such as the Dornier Do 17, Heinkel He 111 and Junkers Ju 88, the gun position covering the tail was often in the dorsal position at the rear of the crew compartment or part way along the back of the fuselage. This gave reasonable coverage above the line of the fuselage but might be supplemented by a ventral position, or flexible ball-mount machine gun mount at the rear of the undernose ventral Bodenlafette gondola (usually abbreviated to Bola) present on many German bomber designs of World War II, that covered the rear arc from underneath the fuselage.

In smaller ground attack aircraft and dive bombers such as the Junkers Ju 87, SBD Dauntless and later versions of the Ilyushin Il-2, the tail gunner was seated right behind the pilot and operated a machine gun on a flexible mount, either enclosed within the canopy or in an open position. In these types of aircraft, the tail gunner also usually served as the radio operator.

The tail gunner fulfilled a second role as a lookout for attacking enemy fighters, particularly in British bombers operating at night. As these aircraft operated individually instead of being part of a bombing formation, the bombers' first reaction to an attacking night fighter was to engage in radical evasive maneuvers such as a corkscrew roll; firing guns in defense was of secondary importance. The British slang term for tail gunners was "Tail-end Charlies", while in the Luftwaffe they were called Heckschwein ("tail-end pigs").

In the autumn of 1944, the British began deploying Lancasters fitted with the Automatic Gun-Laying Turret, this was a fitted with a 9.1 cm (3 GHz) radar. The image from the radar's cathode ray tube was projected onto the turret's gunsight, allowing the gunner to fire on targets in complete darkness, with corrections for lead and bullet drop being automatically computed.