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The ventral turret was used in tandem in the Convair B-32, successor to the B-24. Ball turrets appeared in the nose and tail as well as the nose of the final series B-24. The Sperry ball turret was 3 and a half feet in diameter in order to reduce drag, and was typically operated by the smallest man of the crew.
Jarrell, who served in the Army Air Forces, provided the following explanatory note: . A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17, B-24, B-25, B-32 and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man.
Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, Magee joined the United States Army Air Forces and was assigned as a ball turret gunner on a B-17 bomber.. On January 3, 1943, his Flying Fortress—B-17F-27-BO, 41-24620, nicknamed "Snap!
Ball turret gunner Alan Eugene Magee (13 January 1919 – 20 December 2003), though suffering 27 shrapnel wounds, bails out (or is thrown from wreckage) without his parachute at ~20,000 feet (6,100 m), loses consciousness due to altitude, freefall plunges through glass roof of the Gare de Saint-Nazaire and is found alive but with serious ...
Sperry also was the creator of the Ball Turret Gun mounted under the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, as commemorated by the film Memphis Belle and the poem The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.
Maynard Harrison "Snuffy" Smith (May 19, 1911 – May 11, 1984) was a United States Army Air Forces staff sergeant and aerial gunner aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber in World War II, received the Medal of Honor for his conduct during a bombing mission over France on May 1, 1943.
The aircraft on which Sgt. Mathies was serving as flight engineer and ball turret gunner was attacked by a squadron of enemy fighters with the result that the co-pilot was killed outright, the pilot wounded and rendered unconscious, the radio operator wounded and the plane severely damaged.
A gun turret (or simply turret) is a mounting platform from which weapons can be fired that affords protection, visibility and ability to turn and aim. A modern gun turret is generally a rotatable weapon mount that houses the crew or mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon and at the same time lets the weapon be aimed and fired in some degree ...