ArtKramr wrote:

Subject: Aircrew casualities
From: Guy Alcala
Date: 9/16/03 9:09 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:

e (and thus less effective fire from the
fighters, due to evasive action and longer firing ranges), and in the last
resort,
it being much easier to find and put on parachutes and then locate the

Interesting.We never took evasive action against fighters.we jus tightened our
formation, stayed on course and returned their fire.

No, I meant the fighters taking evasive action on the run-in, and preparing to do
so after the firing pass. At night, they could usually just cruise leisurely into
position behind/under (with Schrage Musik) the bomber at very short range, aim for
the fuel/oil tanks in the wings, and fire. 50-100 yd firing ranges weren't
uncommon for the better pilots.

We did take evasive action
against flak. Find their parachutes??? We wore them from the ground up.Y'mean
the Brits didn't??? If you got hit and didn't have your chute on it was often
too late to put it on.

The USAAF bomber crew didn't have backpack parachutes either for quite a while (it
seems to have been late in 1943 that they started to come in). Normally it was a
clip-on chest chute, and they were normally left off until needed as they made it
difficult to move around in the a/c. Pilots got seat pack or backpack chutes (in
some cases, from the Brits) first. That's another reason why ball turret gunners
had such a high casualty rate; there was no room in the turret for them to have
their chutes, so they had to first make it back up into the fuselage, get their
chute and put it on before they could jump. The waist gunners had it far easier.

Guy