Ball Turret Bill

Excerpts from publication on Web Site by Glen Daly, San Diego Aviation - the story of one of our 390th veterans, Bill Ellett.  The Web Site story can be found  under Yahoo as “Ball Turret Bill”

Among the 10 members of the crew was his best friend, Harold MacGregor, the radio operator.

"Mac and I probably were the two closest of the whole crew - we did everything together: going out on dates, together, going to town, together, gettin' loaded ... and whatever you did in those days.

On Bill's second mission, the 390th Bomb Group, contributed 18 of the 264 B-17's that the Eighth Air Force had ordered into the sky to attack Munster, Germany on Sunday, October 10, 1943. Estimates were that the Luftwaffe had over five hundred fighters available to defend the target, and three hundred of them ripped another unit, the 100th Bomb Group, to shreds - in forty-five minutes the 'Bloody Hundredth' lost 12 of its 14 aircraft before ever reaching the target. In twenty- five minutes, the 390th lost 8 of its 18 aircraft. Along with Me-109's, 110's and Fw 190's, there were Ju-88's and Dornier's flying parallel courses, firing air to air rockets at the B-17's.

The fighters attacked until the bombers neared the target, then skedaddled when they were within flak range. "They won't come in and fight with you over the target - they'll stay out of the flak, too," Bill said, with a smile. "The fighters are scary, but what's really scary is the flak. You can't do anything about that, when you're on your bomb run and you're flying flat and level as you can, no evasive action possible." And over heavily defended targets like Munster and the Ruhr Valley, the flak was so thick, " ... You'd think you could get out and walk on the smoke from the shells bursting."

It was after they had dropped their bombs, with the bomb bay doors still open and the bombardier still flying the airplane, that the worst began. "A direct burst of flak hit behind the number two engine, Bill said, "And left a round hole about three and a half feet in diameter in the wing - it was huge. It winged us over - knocked us right on our back - and the plane started to go down in a spin. Later, Sabel (the pilot) said he rang the bail out bell - he didn't think he could get it under control - but nobody could hear it, the flak had wrecked the communications, too. Of course, it threw an awful lot of shrapnel as it burst up through the fuselage and out."

By the time Sabel regained control of the aircraft, they had fallen considerably below and behind their bomb group and the collective, defensive firepower it held. Bill noticed three chutes below him and concluded that they had come from his plane. He struggled out of the turret, but it took a long time.

"I was crawling out of the turret as fast as I could," he said, "And I finally got out of there and noticed that the waist gunners were gone - I could see back through there and the tail gunner was gone, too. So I thought, 'Well, they're all gone, I'm here alone - I'd better get the hell out of here'." He scrambled to the already jettisoned door, strapped on a chute and prepared to jump. "I was leaning in the door, and was kind of dizzy ... in fact, I was very dizzy," he said. He had been without oxygen for some minutes and hypoxia had already kicked in.

About then, Bill heard the twin-fifties from the top turret and realized he wasn't alone - only it took a while to comprehend just how much company he really had. "I had sense enough to think, 'Well, the guns are firing up there,'" he said, "They were shaking the ship - I could feel it. So, I rolled back into the waist and plugged into the waist gunner's oxygen outlet and got to breathing and got straightened up ... and there were fighters all around us, coming at us from all directions."

The German fighter pilots were no dummies - they'd look at an airplane to see where the guns were operating and attack where they weren't. Said Bill, "If the ball turret is moving around, they know somebody's in there watching for them, and if the waist guns are moving, they would know. Since those guns were all stationary, they were attacking from the back and the sides and the bottom. So, I started firing the waist guns, and I went from waist gun to waist gun, and even went back to the to the tail gun, and I was firing there, too. I don't know, it was such a confusing time ... I know I hit some, but whether I knocked any down, or not, I'm really not sure. Then, the fighters began concentrating underneath - they could see the ball turret's guns straight down - so I went to see if I could do something there."

There, he found that the inside of the ball turret had been destroyed, when one or more 20 mm shells had stuck it. The gears were shot up and the sight glass, behind which he would have been sitting, was smashed. "One side of it had a big hole in it, and ... ," he said, then paused - and chose not to state the obvious: had he remained in the turret, he would have died. "So, I stayed with the waist guns and my tail gun until we got back over water ... probably a couple of hours of that."

Once they reached the English Channel, the fighters departed and, with his aircraft at an appreciably lower altitude, Bill believed he could relax. "So I took off my mask and started up front," he said. "That's when I discovered Mac in the radio room. He'd been hit in the face with a 20mm shell." Bill struggled with the memory. "We were like brothers," he said. When I went up into the radio room and I saw him lying there, like he was ... it just made me so sick ... I had to swallow a few times and ... force myself to be able to get him covered up. That bothered me ... I didn't sleep very well for quite a while - then for years afterward it would bother me."

Up front, Sabel and the copilot struggled to keep the battered bomber airborne as it crossed the channel but, said Bill, "The plane had just been shot up so badly that they had no intercom, no aileron control, no rudder control. There were one or two cables hanging on ... the columns were just ... (he makes a rough shaking motion with his arms) ... going like that, and the poor co-pilot had wrapped his legs around the column, and his arms around it, trying to hold it, while Sabel did some kind of manipulation with the trim tabs and [tried to] fly it that way. We were losing altitude all the time, so we headed for the 100th Group field, which is right over the southern coast of England, near Hastings."

"We made it," said Bill, "And there were none after that that were as rough, but there were enough losses every time you went out that, when you started figuring the odds, you thought 'God, I've got 23, or 22, or 20, more of these? I'm not gonna make it.' Not very many did at that time in the war." In the four days before and after Munster, the aforementioned 100th Bomb Group lost 19 flight crews, and 20 of its 21 operational aircraft.

Of the three crew members who had bailed out, Bill was told that Joe Tolan had died in a German hospital from the wounds he sustained in the attack, but the other two, Leon Tennant and Marvin Cox, survived the rest of the war in a German POW camp.

“As a history teacher before retiring I began to think, when we talked about WWII, that relating some personal experiences to the kids would be good for them. It'd be interesting, and not only that, but it might improve relations - they might think of me as more of a human being instead of a teacher. So, I began to tell them stories, occasionally, when we got to that unit on WWII. Jeez, it got so that I was famous in the Grossmont District for telling stories about the Eighth Air Force. Other teachers would substitute another class for me, while I came to their history class and spent a day or two with their kids. And so, I did that quite a bit, until I retired. And the kids really enjoyed listening to it."

Editor’s Note:

Bill Ellett served his 25 missions as the ball turret gunner with his first mission to Emden on 2nd of October 1943 and his last to Hannover the 21st of February 1944. His second mission to Munster was the 390ths highest percentage loss encountered by the group in losing 8 out of 18 bombers.

“Rusty Lode”, 42-5984, flown by LT, Robert W Sabel on this Munster mission, had over 750 holes in her fuselage, huge gaps in both wings, rudder and left aileron and both flaps shot away.  Engineering officers declared that the feat of bringing her back was nothing short of a miracle'. The airplane went through major repairs and wasn’t available to fly another mission until 3 months later.