The B-17 Flying Fortress was one of the main offensive weapons used during WWII. Here's who designed and built it, and where ...

Kuhl was a ball turret gunner. A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24 bomber. It carried two .50-caliber machine guns and one man, who was usually short and small.

Flying a B-17 was a very risky job since they were huge, slow and therefore easy targets for enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft defences, who always marked them as primary targets. Out of the entire ...

Crackle! Pop! was 24-year-old Staff Sergeant Alan Magee in the position of ball turret gunner. Magee was on his seventh and last combat mission during which he was sucked out of the B-17 at an ...

Boring was shipped to England in 1944, serving in the Eighth Army Air Force in the 368th Bombardment Squadron as a waist gunner on a B-17 called “The Ruptured Duck,” flying missions over Germany.

One set was identified as belonging to the B-17’s top turret gunner, but the other three could not be identified, the DPAA states. Those remains were buried as unknowns at Normandy American ...

There was sufficient clearance with the B-17 for the turret to be in the lowered position when the plane landed. When a B-24 landed a lowered ball turret was scraped off taking the gunner with it.

This Plexiglas ball hanging from the bottom of the B-17 or B-24 was a heavily armed bubble just big enough to hold a small man and two 50-caliber machine guns. He sat between the guns with feet in ...

Offered the U.S. Army Air Corps, Fred became a ball turret gunner on a Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” in October of 1944. Posted on the underbelly of the plane, his job was considered a particularly ...

(Later, they would receive a second B-17, "Pretty Baby II.") Their first combat mission, in the spring of 1944, was a bone-chilling experience, which Stanley-in his capacity as his plane's ball turret ...