Position Firing | B-17 Gunner Training Film (1944)

United States Army Airforce training film TF I-3366. An instructional film for B-17 bomber gunners on how to aim at attacking aircraft. Animated drawings depict a fighter's curve of pursuit and motion imparted to a bullet by a forward movement of a bomber. Applications of rules of position firing are illustrated by moving diagrams.

[papajon]

The paperboy analogy is sobering. It wasn’t long ago in these brave young men’s lives that they were paperboys….

[MichaelPelestano-itym]

This is history these have to be preserved 😊

[justtherecord]

I wonder how they don’t hit the other bombers in formation by mistake

[wakkowarner]

Why'd you crop it to widescreen? There's another copy out there with full 1:33 aspect ratio.

[retepsnikrep]

When you say remastered what processing exactly do you do on them. Thanks.. AI restoration?

[lineshaftrestorations]

The animation bears the distinct mark of Warner Bros. loony tunes style.

[PrimarisBlackTemplaDraven]

Watching this cause it helps me win in war thunder.

[Caratacus]

Loved that. Just been reading Middlebrook's Schweinfurt book. The B-17s on that raid were carrying 4, 500 .50cal machine guns between them. But this vid shows how difficult it was for air gunners. Unfortunately the fighters attacking the un-escorted Schweinfurt raid used head-on attacks. So the air gunners couldn't bring their guns to bear at all. They (and the crew) could only sit and wait and pray very hard indeed. 60 B-17s were lost in that disaster.

[briannicholas]

These training videos were excellent, especially given the age of most of the recruits.
These were kids, fresh out if high school, they watched cartoons, read comic books, and played sports, so the various services learned quickly that if you prrsented to necessary information like it was advanced trigonometry, it wasnt going to stick. Hollywood could make these training films by the ton for any topic. And they worked. These young kids learned, and didnt just fall asleep in class.
For all their other beurocratic faults, the services learned how to adapt as they fought for real and put that to work teaching each new group of recruits.
Thanks for sharing these with us.

[theapostatejack]

I knew they had to lead the target, but it didn't occur to me until now the right reason why. Interesting!

[jonsguitarbarn]

I'm building a B17G model kit right now so have been soaking up any info I come across. This is a little out of the norm and not totally relevant but interesting none the less. Hats off to those men who maned those guns, I'm sure no amount of imagination can begin to fathom the true reality of those moments in the air.

[mrpistonrecaro]

Waist gunner the best position if you wanted out of this world 🌍

[redskindan]

Ah...my uncle became a waist gunner on a B-17. He was about seventeen years old then. They were all so young. My dad, a USN Aviation Machinist's Mate, who had joined the USNR at fifteen, was nineteen when called to active duty early in 1941. Thinking about it, he must have been about eighteen when he served aboard a four-stacker Clemson-class destroyer "inviting" German ships to get away from the US Atlantic coast during the summer of 1940...a "reserves training cruise". So these gunners were not much older than the paper-boys that the film mentions.

[ronhudson]

No comment on the drop of the bullets during flight. Was that a factor at the usual ranges?

[robertmarsh]

Great video, but interesting that it doesn't include any compensation for gravity and the resultant bullet drop. What kind of ranges are we talking for the 0.50 cal to be effective? 300 yds or less?