Tailgunner.

This is coolbert:

 "Why exactly was the tail gunner duty so much more dangerous than other forms of military duty? I don't have your military expertise, but the only reason I can think of is I guess you'd be an easy target to pick off..."

I have no answer to this. Maybe some research will provide an answer.

I have more thought of tail gunners not so much as toward survival as toward effectiveness.

Most of those World War Two [WW2] era aircraft equipped with a tail gunner had a man firing a single thirty [.30] machine gun.



These aerial battles between tail gunners and attacking enemy fighter aircraft must have been a one sided affair for the most part.

Modern combat fighter aircraft of the WW2 were formidably armed. Twenty [20] mm cannon or fifty [.50] caliber machine guns [up to eight fifty calibers on a P-51 for instance].

The saga of the U.S. Navy torpedo plane squadron attacking the Japanese armada at Midway is the stuff of legends. Fifteen planes attacked without air cover. Jumped from above by the diving Zero aircraft of the Japanese fleet. Tail gunners nothwithstanding, all fifteen topedo planes went "kerplunk" in short order. Of the thirty crewmen on the fifteen planes, only ONE survived the battle.

"They all died, save the wounded Ensign Gay, because their lumbering Douglas TBD-1 "Devastator" aircraft were easy prey for both enemy fighters and ship's gunners. Armed only with a wholly inadequate .30-caliber machine gun firing to the rear, the TBDs never had a chance. None of their torpedoes hit the enemy ships."

The IL-2 PILOT flew in an armored "bathtub". The tailgunner was left to his own valor for survival. NOT enough!

I guess the philosophy there would be that pilot takes time to train, a gunner does NOT!

coolbert.