Instructors: is no combat better?

"ArtKramr" wrote in message
...

Of course you are correct. We learn from everyone wherever and whenever we
can.
I remember one gunner telling me how to tell in advance whether an enemy
fighter coming in at you will pass over or under you. It makes a
difference
because if he will pass over he belongs to our top turret gunner and if he
will
pass under he is the waist gunners meat. Anyway, he said that if the
fighter
starts his fighter approach and has dropped his inside wing and is
swinging h s
nose toward you. then rolls over on his back and makes his attack firing
inverted, he will pass under you. But if he comes in straight, he will
pass
over you. And you know, that guy was right. Bless those who have walked
the
walk and lived to tell us about it before we found it out the hard way..


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer


In conjunction with your comment about the gunner's remarks to you; if
simple aerodynamics wasn't a part of every gunner's training during the war,
it most surely should have been. What this gunner was telling you might have
been from his training knowledge base or simply as the observed result of
his personal experience. The end result would be the same for recognizing
what the fighter was about to do, but the big difference would have been the
advantage to gunners having this knowledge up front going into combat as
opposed to finding it out through operational experience.
Every gunner out there should have had at least some basic knowledge of
positive and negative g as that knowledge relates to a firing pass by a
fighter. Those who didn't had to learn the hard way. Gunners being taught a
few simple facts about g and vectors would have saved many lives........ and
as this knowledge relates to a firing pass, could have been taught in just a
few minutes during training.
The simple truth of it is that if the fighter rolled inverted during the
pass, in order to pass over you he would have to bunt the airplane into
negative g, and the odds of this happening vs going the positive g route
under you would have all but been a sure bet that he would go positive under
you; hence the lead would become predictable based on the odds.
I should add that there were a few German fighter pilots who routinely would
go negative, but never offensively, only defensively.
Erich Hartmann was one of them, and he was not in the theatre.
I've always wanted to ask a gunner from the period if simple aerodynamics
was indeed taught in gunnery training to help with prediction lead solution,
but somehow I've always forgotten to ask
:-) If there are any gunners out there who can answer this, perhaps they
will post.
Dudley