“Don’t Look Back” Wasn’t an Option — Inside the Frost-Bitten Hell of B-17 Tail Gunners Who Faced Nazi Fighters Alone in the Most Exposed Seat in the Sky

On November 29th, 1943, more than 300 B7 flying fortresses crossed into German airspace heading for Bremen.

One of them was a bomber called Ricky Tick Tavi.

Inside its tail, a 19-year-old staff sergeant named Eugene Moran sat on his knees behind twin 50 caliber machine guns.

Get your cameras, boys.

I’m going to light it up like Christmas.

Pilot the bomber.

your ship.

Ricky Tikitavi was on its fourth mission.

By the time the bombs were dropped, it was already falling behind the formation.

Alone in the sky, it became the only target.

German fighters came in waves.

BF-100s fired rockets into the fuselage.

Then BF-19s and FW19s closed in from every angle.

Moran fired back from the tail.

One by one, the voices on the intercom went silent.

Eight of the 10 crew members were dead.

The navigator bailed out from the front.

Moran was the only man left alive inside the aircraft.

Then a German flack round hit the fuselage and split the bomber in two.

The front section with the wings and engines dropped away.

The tail, a 12t piece of aluminum with no wings, no engine, and no controls, kept moving, and Moran was still inside it.

He tried to open the escape hatch.

Bent metal held it shut.

His parachute was damaged.

There was no way out.

The tail section began to fall.

Four miles below was the German countryside.

Moran had no way to slow down, no way to steer, no way to jump.

He was locked inside a piece of wreckage, dropping through 28,000 ft of open sky.

And then he did something that should not have been possible.

But that comes later.

To understand how a man ends up alone inside a falling piece of airplane, you have to understand the position he was assigned to.

The tail gunner on a B7 occupied a space that most people would not willingly enter on the ground, let alone at 5 mi above the Earth in minus60° with German fighters behind him.

It was the most isolated crew position on any Allied bomber.

The tail gunner could not see the rest of his crew.

He could not reach them.

He could not touch another human being for the entire mission.

The only way in or out was a narrow crawl through the fuselage, past the waste guns, past the ball turret, over the Bombay catwalk.

Once inside, the gunner was sealed off from everything except whatever was coming from behind.

The tail gunner was the last crew member who could evacuate if the plane went down.

Everyone else was closer to an exit.

He had to crawl the full length of the fuselage just to reach a hatch.

And in combat, [music] that crawl was often the difference between getting out and going down with the aircraft.

The position that killed them was about the size of a phone booth.

To reach the tail of a B7, a gunner had to crawl through the entire length of the aircraft.

He started behind the cockpit, squeezed past the radio room, crossed a narrow catwalk over the open bomb bay, 9 in wide with nothing below but the bay doors and a long drop, then pushed through the waste gun section where two gunners stood at open windows and finally ducked into a tunnel that led to the tail compartment.

The space waiting for him was roughly 4 ft wide.

There was no chair.

Instead, the gunner knelt on the floor and leaned against a small bicycle seat that took part of his weight.

His legs folded beneath him, his knees pressed against the metal.

In front of his face sat two M2 Browning 50 caliber machine guns, each loaded with 565 rounds of ammunition.

The guns weighed 64 lb each.

The barrels pointed backward through a small opening covered in plexiglass.

That plexiglass was the only thing between the gunner and the sky behind the plane.

It was not armor.

A 20 mm cannon round would go through it without slowing down.

The tail gunner had no room to stand.

If he was over 5’10, his helmet scraped the ceiling.

His shoulders [music] brushed the sides.

Every piece of equipment, oxygen hose, intercom cable, heated suit wiring, parachute harness, crowded the space further.

The parachute itself was too bulky to wear.

It was stored nearby within arms reach in theory, though in practice reaching it under fire was another matter entirely.

Once in position, the gunner was completely cut off.

He could not see a single member of his crew.

The nearest man, the closest waste gunner, was [music] more than 20 ft forward around a bend in the fuselage, invisible behind equipment and ammunition boxes.

Communication existed through the intercom and nothing else.

If the intercom failed, the tail gunner had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of the aircraft.

Ken Tucker, a tail gunner with the 15th Air Force, flew 35 missions in the B7 Quiterbitchon 2 out of FOA, Italy.

To reach his position, he crawled through the same tunnel on every mission, eased himself down onto the bicycle seat, and plugged in his oxygen mask and heated suit.

Tucker described himself as a loner.

The isolation did not bother him.

He felt comfortable in the tale.

His first combat mission was not with his own crew.

Standard practice sent rookie gunners up with experienced crews for their first time over enemy territory.

Tucker flew with strangers to Munich.

He had never seen combat.

He questioned whether he was ready.

As the formation crossed the Alps and approached the target, the sky filled with flack bursts, thousands of black puffs of shrapnel exploding at altitude, each one throwing hot metal in every direction.

Tucker survived that mission.

He would survive 34 more.

But comfort in the tail was a relative term.

The isolation that suited a loner also meant something else.

If the aircraft was hit, if the oxygen line was cut, if the heating failed, the tail gunner dealt with it alone.

No one was coming to help him.

The rest of the crew was too far away, the fuselage too narrow, the equipment too dense.

In an emergency, the tail gunner’s first instinct could not be to call for assistance.

It had to be to fix the problem himself with numb fingers in the dark at 25,000 ft.

And at that altitude, the cold was not just discomfort.

It was a weapon of its own.

The B7 was designed to fly at 25 to 30,000 ft.

At that altitude, the outside air temperature dropped to -50 or -60° F.

The aircraft was not pressurized.

It was not heated.

The fuselage was an aluminum tube with open gun ports in the waist section where wind blasted through at 180 mph.

In the tail, the plexiglass panel behind the guns offered some protection from the slipstream, but none from the cold.

The temperature inside the tail compartment was essentially the same as outside.

At minus60, exposed skin freezes in under a minute.

Metal becomes dangerous to touch.

Bare flesh bonds to it instantly.

A gunner who pulled off his glove to clear a jammed weapon had seconds before frostbite began.

The 050 caliber Brownings jammed regularly.

Clearing a jam required manipulating the charging handle, feeding the ammunition belt back into the receiver, and sometimes physically pulling a spent casing free.

All of this demanded bare fingers or at best thin silk glove liners.

Every jam was a race between the malfunction and the cold.

The solution was the electrically heated flight suit, a one-piece coverall with thin wires sewn into the fabric connected to the aircraft’s electrical system through a plug in the fuselage wall.

General Electric had developed the technology.

The engineering came from an unlikely source, electric blankets.

Before the war, GE had built a device called the Copper Man, a mannequin used to test heated bedding.

The same wiring principles were adapted for flight suits, gloves, and boot insoles.

In theory, the system kept a crew member warm enough to function at altitude.

In practice, it was unreliable.

The wires were fragile.

Body movement bent and broke them.

A single broken connection could shut down heating to an entire limb.

Damaged wires did not just stop working.

They could shortcircuit and burn the wearer.

The temperature controls were crude.

Some men overheated until they were drenched in sweat, which then froze when the suit failed.

Others felt nothing at all.

In 1943, up to 75% of frostbite cases among bomber crews were caused by failures in the electric flight suits.

Not by exposure, [music] not by forgetting to dress properly, by equipment that stopped working at the worst possible moment.

Ken Tucker flew his missions out of FOIA and described the cold at altitude as constant and inescapable.

The heated suits improved over the course of the war.

Later models had better wiring and adjustable temperature controls, but they never became fully reliable.

On missions lasting 10 or 12 hours, a suit failure at the halfway point meant hours of exposure with no alternative.

The tail gunner had it worse than most.

The waist gunners at least had each other.

If one man suit failed, his partner could see it and help.

The ball turret gunner was cramped but enclosed.

The pilot and co-pilot sat in the most insulated section of the aircraft.

The tail gunner was alone.

If his suit failed, no one knew.

If his oxygen line iced over and the flow stopped, no one would notice until someone tried to call him on the intercom and got no answer.

By then, at that altitude, he would already be unconscious.

The cold could kill a man quietly, but German fighters were not quiet at all.

And they had a very specific reason to aim for the tail first.

The story of why German fighters targeted the tail first is also the story of how the tail gunner changed aerial combat over Europe.

If you want to see how that played out and what happened when the Luftvafa found a way around it, hit subscribe and turn on notifications.

Now back to 1942.

When American heavy bombers first appeared over occupied Europe, the Luftvafa attacked them from behind.

It was the logical approach.

A fighter closing from the rear matched the bomber’s direction of travel, which meant a low closing speed and more time to aim.

The fighter pilot could line up his shot, hold steady, and fire sustained bursts into the fuselage.

Against earlier B7 models, this worked.

The tail was weakly defended.

Then the B17E arrived.

Boeing had added a tail gunner position, two 50 caliber Brownings covering the rear ark.

The first German pilots who came in from behind the new model were met with concentrated fire they had not expected.

Enemy pilots gained a healthy respect for the tail guns almost immediately.

It was this position that forced the Luftvafa to completely rethink how they attacked American bomber formations.

One German pilot later said that attacking a B17 formation from behind was like trying to embrace a porcupine that was on fire.

The problem was not just the tail gunner.

A formation of 36 B17s flying in a combat box could bring roughly 700 defensive machine guns to bear on an attacking fighter.

Approaching from the rear meant flying into the concentrated fire of dozens of tail gunners, waist gunners, and ball turret gunners simultaneously.

A Luftvafa analysis calculated that destroying a B17 from behind required approximately 20 direct hits from 20 mm cannon shells.

At the average German pilot’s accuracy rate of 2%, that translated to 1,000 rounds to bring down a single bomber from that angle.

From the front, the math was completely different.

The B7’s nose was its weakest point.

thinner armor, fewer guns covering the forward ark, and a head-on closing speed of over 500 mph that gave the bombers’s gunners almost no time to react.

From the front, four or five well-placed shells could destroy the [music] aircraft.

The Luvafa adapted.

They developed a tactic the Americans called 12:00 high.

fighters attacking head-on from a slightly elevated angle, diving through the bomber formation at combined speeds approaching 600 mph.

The engagement window lasted barely 2 seconds.

It required precision, nerve, and a willingness to fly directly into the formation.

The best German pilots scored kills this way.

Average pilots often missed entirely, but the tail was never safe.

The Luftv Fafa developed a specific attack pattern known as the tail gunner’s headache.

Fighters would position themselves on both sides of the formation roughly 2,000 m out, then take turns [music] diving at the rear of the bombers approximately 10 seconds apart, rolling and splitting away after each pass.

The attacks came in rapid sequence, each from a slightly different angle, designed to overwhelm the tail gunner with targets he could not track simultaneously.

Later in the war, the Stormb Booka appeared.

Foculf 190’s fitted with additional cockpit armor and 30 mm cannons.

These fighters pressed their attacks to within 150 m of the bombers before firing.

At that range, [music] a single 30 mm round could destroy a control surface or kill a crew member instantly.

[music] The tail gunner was the priority target.

German pilots knew that a stationary tail turret, guns that were not tracking, signaled a bomber that had already lost its rear defense.

That bomber became the primary target for the entire formation attack.

The contest between the tail gunner and the fighters behind him lasted the entire war.

Tactics shifted, weapons evolved, formations tightened and loosened, but the underlying equation never changed.

The tail gunner sat at the point of maximum exposure, facing whatever the enemy sent with two guns and roughly,00 rounds between himself and everything behind the aircraft.

The question was never whether the position was dangerous.

The question was how long a man could survive in it.

And the numbers were brutal.

When a crew joined the Eighth Air Force in England, they were told their combat tour was 25 missions.

Complete all 25 and you went home.

The number sounded manageable.

It was not.

In 1943, the statistical chance of completing a full tour was roughly 1 in4.

Three out of every four crews would be shot down, killed, or captured before reaching mission 25.

The odds improved somewhat in 1944 after long range P-51 Mustang escorts began accompanying the bombers deep into Germany.

But even then the numbers remained grim.

The eighth air force suffered more casualties than any other command in the American military during the Second World War.

26,000 men were killed in action.

Another 28,000 became prisoners of war.

[music] In total, 4,754 B7s were lost in combat.

37% of the 12,731 ever built.

One in three flying fortresses produced in American factories never [music] came back.

For the British, the toll was even worse.

RAF Bomber Command flew primarily at night, which reduced fighter attacks, but did nothing against radar guided flack.

The statistics for every 100 men who joined Bomber Command tell the full story.

51 were killed on operations.

Nine more died in training accidents and crashes in England before they ever reached the enemy.

12 became prisoners of war.

Three were seriously injured.

One managed to evade capture.

24 survived unharmed.

That meant 3/4 of everyone who joined Bomber Command was killed, captured, or wounded.

Among those dead were approximately 20,000 rear gunners.

The Yorkshire Air Museum documented that figure.

20,000 men who died in the most isolated position on the aircraft.

The average age across Bomber Command crews was 21.

The tail gunner’s odds were shaped by a simple mechanical fact.

He was the last man who could get out.

In an emergency, loss of control, fire, structural failure.

The crew bailed out through hatches in the forward and middle sections of the aircraft.

The pilot and co-pilot could exit through the cockpit windows or the forward hatch.

The bombader and navigator had a hatch beneath the nose.

The waist gunners were steps from the main fuselage door.

The ball turret gunner had to retract his turret and climb into the fuselage first, which was dangerous, but at least possible with help from the waist gunners nearby.

The tail gunner had none of that.

To bail out, he had to disconnect his oxygen mask, unplug his heated suit, unbuckle his harness, grab his parachute from its storage position, clip it to his chest, then crawl forward through the narrow tunnel past the tail wheel assembly and into the waist section to reach the nearest exit.

In a stable aircraft, this took time.

In a spinning, burning, or breaking apart bomber, it was often impossible.

The centrifugal force of a spinning aircraft could pin a man against the walls of the fuselage.

Fire could block the crawlway.

Structural damage could seal the tunnel shut.

More than 2,800 airmen were killed during training alone.

Not in combat, but in the routine practice of flying in tight formation.

Wing tips collided.

Aircraft stalled in turbulence.

Crews died learning the skills they would need to survive missions they would never fly.

The men who made it through training, survived their missions, and came home were statistical outliers.

Completing a full tour required not just skill and courage, but an extraordinary amount of luck.

The right weather, the right position in formation, the right moment when a flack burst exploded 10 ft to the left instead of 10 ft to the right.

Some men had that luck.

One of them was a 20-year-old from California who climbed into the tail of a B7 called Full House and came out the other side 35 missions later.

Larry Stevens was a sophomore at Alhhamra High School in Southern California when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

He was too young to enlist.

He spent the next year as a volunteer air raid warden, walking through his neighborhood after dark, knocking on doors, telling his neighbors to turn their lights off.

By 1943, he was old enough.

He joined the Army Air Forces and was sent to gunnery school at Fort Meers, Florida, where [music] he shot Ski twice a day.

It was pleasant duty.

Then a letter arrived from his mother.

His older brother, Ernie, had been killed in action at Msina, Sicily.

Stevens finished gunnery school.

In December 1943, he was assigned to a 10-man B17 crew and given the tail gunner position.

He took to it immediately.

Everyone else on the aircraft was close enough to at least one other crew member for conversation, even if only over the intercom through the engine noise.

The tail gunner was alone.

Stevens did not mind.

He knelt on the floor, leaned against the bicycle seat, and watched the sky behind the plane.

His aircraft was a B7G named Full House.

Stevens flew in the worst spot in the formation, a position the crews called Tails Ass Charlie.

last plane in the wing, the farthest back, the most exposed, the first target a trailing fighter would see if the formation came under attack from behind.

Fullhouse caught it first.

On March 31st, 1944, Stevens and his crew boarded the liner Queen Elizabeth and sailed for England on a zigzag course to avoid hubot.

By late April, they were flying combat.

Their first mission drew light flack and no [music] fighters.

It would not stay that way.

Over the next four months, Stevens flew over France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

Full House bombed submarine pens, airfields, and V1 and V2 rocket factories.

They dropped supplies to French resistance [music] fighters.

On June 6th, 1944, they flew over Normandy as the invasion beaches burned below them.

On one mission returning from Tresba, Poland, Stevens took off his oxygen mask at 10,000 ft and started to relax.

Then he heard the pilot scream to the co-pilot to grab the controls.

Full House veered out of formation and started to dive.

Stevens looked forward through the fuselage and saw smoke filling the aircraft.

Somewhere inside the plane, something was on fire.

The waist gunner, Gordon Langford, grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran forward through the bomb bay to put it out.

He was not wearing a parachute.

He ran across the 9-in catwalk over the open Bombay doors with nothing on his back, holding a fire extinguisher in his hands.

He put the fire out.

On August 25th, 1944, Larry Stevens completed his 35th and final mission.

He was 20 years old.

In four months, he had flown from bases in England, Russia, and Italy.

He had crossed occupied Europe dozens of times.

He had sat in the tale of Full House for hundreds of hours alone, watching the sky, waiting for whatever was coming.

When Stevens arrived back in New York, a customs inspector glanced at the combat ribbons on his uniform and told him to go home and enjoy himself.

Stevens did not go home.

He volunteered to fly as a tail gunner on a B-25 Mitchell in the Pacific [music] for the invasion of Japan.

The war ended while he was still in training.

He returned to Alhhamra and joined the fire department.

He served for 31 years.

He wrote a book about his war called It Only Takes One.

He had beaten the odds.

But not every tail gunner had to beat them the same way.

Some survived by doing something the odds said was impossible.

The man who fell inside the tail over Brimman was one of them.

And what he did on the way down was not an act of survival.

It was an act of war.

Eugene Moran was born on July 17th, 1924 in Wisconsin.

[music] He grew up on his family’s farm near Solders Grove, shoveling horse manure and working the fields.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Moran was 17.

He waited until October 1942, the month he turned 18, and enlisted in the Army Air Forces.

After training, he was assigned to the 96th Bombardment Group, 339th Bombardment Squadron, 8th [music] Air Force.

His station was RAF’s Netton Heath in England.

His aircraft was a B17F, nicknamed Ricky Tickavi, after the Mongoose in Ruddyard Kipling’s Jungle Book.

His position was the tail.

Moran and his crew flew three missions without incident.

The fourth was Bremen.

[music] On November 29th, 1943, more than 300 B7s launched toward the city.

Ricky Tickavi was among them.

The formation reached the target.

Bombader Donald Curtis dropped the payload over Brimman.

Then on the turn for home, Ricky Tickavi began to fall behind.

Something was wrong with the aircraft.

[music] It drifted out of formation and into open sky, alone and unprotected.

The Germans saw it immediately.

A stafle of BF-100s came in first, armed with 21 cm mortar rockets, weapons designed to break up bomber formations from long range.

Then the single engine fighters followed.

BF 109s and FW19’s swarmed the lone bomber from every direction.

Moran fired from the tail.

The waste gunners fired from the sides.

It was not enough.

One by one, the crew stopped responding on the intercom.

Eight men were killed.

Only Moran in the tail and navigator Jesse Orrison in the nose were still alive.

Orrison bailed out from the forward hatch.

Moran could not.

The tunnel leading out of the tail was blocked.

His escape hatch was jammed shut by bent metal.

His parachute had been shredded by gunfire.

Then a burst of flack tore through the fuselage and split the aircraft [music] in two.

The forward section, cockpit, wings, engines, fell away and crashed.

The tail section, 12 ft of aluminum with no flight surfaces that mattered, separated cleanly and began to drop.

Moran was inside it, surrounded by ammunition, pinned between his guns and the walls of the compartment.

What happened next was recorded by witnesses on the ground and confirmed after the war.

As the tail section fell, spinning through the sky, German BF 109s continued to attack it.

The pilots either did not realize it was wreckage or mistook it for some unknown type of Allied aircraft.

It appeared to be gliding under control, [music] and Moran, trapped inside a piece of a destroyed bomber falling from 28,000 ft, fired back.

He aimed his twin Brownings at the fighters making passes at him and squeezed the triggers.

German anti-aircraft batteries on the ground also opened fire on the falling tail section, [music] adding flack to the chaos around him.

He was shooting at German fighters while falling four miles without a parachute.

The tail section hit a tree in a wooded area near the town of Psych, a few miles south of Bremen.

The impact threw Moran’s head against his machine guns.

He [music] was alive.

His skull was cracked.

Both forearms were broken.

Several ribs were shattered.

He was bleeding badly.

Two Serbian prisoners of war who happened to be doctors saw the crash and ran to the wreckage.

They pulled Moran out and treated his wounds.

Later, at a prisoner of war camp, a Serbian surgeon placed a metal plate over the exposed section of Moran’s skull.

He spent the next 17 months in captivity.

He was moved between camps in Germany, Poland, and Russia.

Between February and April of 1945, as the war collapsed around the Third Reich, Moran was forced on a 600-mile march with other prisoners.

On April 26th, 1945, American troops reached Bitterfell, Germany, and liberated the camp.

Moran weighed 128 lb.

He was not the only tail gunner who fell from the sky and lived.

3 months before Moran’s fall over Bremen and 3 months after it, another man rode a severed tail section to the ground.

He did not have a damaged parachute.

He had no parachute at all.

On January 11th, 1944, 21 B7s of the 15th Air Force took off from Italy and headed for Pereas Harbor in Greece.

Sergeant James Allenley was in the tale of a bomber called Skippy, leading the second squadron of the 3001st Bomb Group.

He had been in the army since 1935 and had transferred to the air forces in 43.

He loved the tail gunner position.

It suited him.

The formation climbed through heavy cloud cover.

Visibility dropped to almost nothing.

Pilots could barely see past their own wing tips.

The trailing squadrons followed procedure and flew off course for 2 minutes to create spacing.

It was not enough.

Two B7s from the 97th Bomb Group flew nearly headon into the 3001st formation.

The collision triggered a chain reaction.

Aircraft, debris, and men began falling through the overcast.

Eight B7s were destroyed in the span of minutes.

64 airmen were killed.

17 survived.

It was not the enemy.

It was the weather and the impossible geometry of flying blind in formation.

felt what he described as a hell of a jolt.

The 12-oot tail section of Skippy was sheared clean off the rest of the aircraft at 19,000 ft.

The cockpit, wings, and engines, everything forward of the tail, went one direction.

Went another.

He was crammed between his two machine guns and several hundred rounds of ammunition.

There was no room to move.

His parachute was nearby, but he could not create enough space to strap it on.

The escape hatch nearest to him was damaged and pinned shut.

There was nothing he could do.

The tail section began to spiral.

Watched flashes of blue, green, and brown cycle past as the wreckage rotated.

He had no way to know if the rest of the aircraft was still attached.

The spinning and the time it took to fall made him think the whole plane was intact and corkcrewing down.

He estimated later that the fall lasted 10 to 15 minutes.

At 19,000 ft with the drag of the spinning tail section slowing the descent, that estimate was plausible.

[snorts] He prayed.

He thought about his family.

He had grown up on a farm in Kentucky, the eighth of nine children.

He told himself that in another few minutes, he would be dead.

The tail section struck a cluster of trees on a mountain side.

The branches absorbed some of the impact.

The wreckage stopped.

Was alive.

His chest was sore.

He could move his arms and legs.

He worked himself free from the ammunition surrounding him, found the bulkhead door, the escape hatch was still jammed, and crawled out through it.

He stood on the mountain side and looked around.

There was no plane, just a piece of tail section wedged into the trees, nothing else.

He navigated from tree to tree down the steep slope until he reached a trail.

It started to rain.

After a few hours, he heard voices and called out.

Greek civilians found him and took him to an Orthodox monastery where priests were sheltering Allied servicemen.

Of the 17 men who survived the mid-air disaster that day, was the only one who did it without a parachute.

After recovering, returned to duty.

He went back to the tail.

He flew more missions.

When the war ended, he kept serving Korea, then Vietnam.

He retired as a lieutenant colonel.

After the war, he visited the families of every crew member who had died aboard Skippy.

He later married Lorraine Linberry Sudal, the widow of Skippy’s co-pilot, Second Lieutenant Henry Sudal.

He wrote an autobiography called I Fell 4 miles and lived.

He died in 1999 at the age of 82 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Eugene Moran went home to Wisconsin.

He married, had nine children, and returned to the life he had left behind on the farm.

In 2008, the town of Soldiers Grove named a street after him.

He died on March 23rd, 2014 at the age of 90.

A friend named John Armster told his story in a book called Tail Spin.

Larry Stevens went home to Alhhamra and never talked about the war.

His neighbors knew him as a fire captain.

It was not until decades later when his granddaughter helped him write his memoir that most people around him learned what he had done at 20 years old.

The book carried a title that doubled as advice.

It only takes one.

Three tail gunners.

Three different wars inside the same war.

One beat the odds by flying 35 missions and walking away.

One fell four miles inside a broken airplane and kept fighting on the way down.

One rode a severed tail through the clouds without a parachute and lived to serve in two more wars.

None of them chose the tail because it was safe.

They chose it or it chose them and they did the job.

20,000 rear gunners did not come home.

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I want to ask you something.

Of all the positions on a heavy bomber, tail, ball turret, waist, nose, which one would you have chosen? [music] Or would you have chosen none of them? Tell me in the comments.

And if you know the name of someone who served as a gunner in the war, a grandfather, an uncle, someone from your town, leave it below.

Their names matter.

They still do.