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 bomber, your ship.

Ricky Tikitavi was on its fourth [music] 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 12-oot 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.

4 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 B17 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 [music] was completely cut off.

He could not see a single member of his crew.

The nearest man, the closest waist gunner, was 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 Quiterbitchen 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 bombers’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 B7 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 arc, and a head-on closing speed of over 500 mph that gave the bombers gunners almost no time to react.

From the front, four or five well-placed shells could destroy the 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.

[music] The Luftvafa developed a specific attack pattern known as the tail gunner’s headache.

Fighters would position themselves on both sides of the formation, [music] roughly 2,000 m out, then take turns 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 [music] simultaneously.

Later in the war, the storm boa 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, 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 [music] built.

One in three flying fortresses produced in American factories never 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 3/4ers of everyone who joined Bomber Command was killed, captured, [music] 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 B17 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 Meyers, Florida, where 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.

[music] In December 1943, he was assigned to a 10-man B7 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.

[music] 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 B17G 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.

[music] the farthest back, the most exposed, the first target a trailing fighter would see.

If the formation came under attack from behind, Full House 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 Ubot.

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.

Fullhouse bombed submarine pens, airfields, and V1 [music] and V2 rocket factories.

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