The b-26 didnt have "waist" guns. Forward facing fired by pilot, dorsal turret and tail turret. But no waist guns.

@@BlutoandCo-Remarkable! I’ve got his service records. He definitely flew the missions in B-26s. He self-identified as a B-26 waist gunner. I’ve gone to bomb group reunions and watched him with his peers. I’ve read USAAF crash records for B-26s where he and the pilot brought a plane back after the rest of the crew parachuted. No idea why he called himself a waist gunner. I never looked at photos carefully. Too late to ask him today.

@@BlutoandCo Ventral and Waist Guns A flexible mount for a single .30-caliber designed to fire through the rear crew entry hatch was introduced in the earliest B-26 models, the so called "tunnel" gun. This was in response to complaints about the lack of downward defensive firepower. Two waist .30-caliber waist guns were also added to the earlier models. The "B-26B-1" did away with the single ventral gun and had waist positions augmented. Waist windows were located on each side of the aft fuselage. Each window now had a single .50 Browning M-2 Machine gun. The guns were mounted on swivels. Ammunition canisters were mounted on the fuselage ceiling with the belts running down to the guns. Sliding hatches covered the waist openings when not in use. With the B-26C-5-MO, the side waist gun doors were enlarged and moved one station aft to improve the angle of fire down and to the front. Also with this model, a single larger circular scanning window, replacing the two smaller ones, was located above each waist door to give the gunner a better view.

Your father: "Mr. nohphd"??? Liar!

Well the B-26G at the United States Air Force Museum has waist guns…

Gun teams were bullet magnets.

Looks beautiful on a warm dark night on the ranges.

@@kevinkane7667 dark damp foggy cold morning on the range

Murphy's Laws of Combat: tracer bullets work BOTH ways.

Murphy's rules of combat, tracers work both ways.

Thanks for serving!

What cal.are u talking about ware u a machine gunner cause I thought the ap for 5.56 were greentip and black for 30-06

@@rambler2885 No.. greentip is standard NATO 5.56 black tip is AP

@@felixthecat265 Greentip is Light Armor Piercing.

@@Jamesbrown-xi5ih Well it is and it isn't.. US "Greentip" is 5.56x45mm NATO to the newer (SS109) specification. This is not officially considered to be an armour piercing round although it does have a steel pin "Penetrator" beneath the jacket. The SS109 bullet was adopted as a replacement for the original .223 Remington bullet which was used in the M16. The original Remington 55gn .223 round, known as the M193 was used in the original M16 rifles. The SS109 bullet was adopted by NATO in 1970 to replace the 7.62x51 round as a NATO standard. The Belgian SS109 round had the same dimensions as the M193 round but used a heavier and longer bullet that was more stable and had better penetration than the M193 which was notoriously unstable. The new SS109 round was known as the M855 round in the US. The steel pin in the bullet was not designed as a penetrator as in a conventional AP round with a tungsten penetrator. The idea was that by putting a lighter steel section in the front of the bullet the weight was moved back and the stability improved. The overall weight of the bullet was increased to 62gn and the length of the bullet increased. This produced a bullet which remained stable out to 800m and was capable of penetrating a standard steel helment at that range, which the M193 failed to do because it had tumbled by that distance. The longer bullet however needed to be spun faster than the barrel of the original M16 rifle did to remain stable, so the US had to rebarrel their M16s to the new, faster twist specification. For a time there were both slow and fast spin barrels in service, so there had to be a way of showing the difference between the old M193 ammo and the new M855 ammo which you could only use in the faster spin barrels. This was done by giving the new M855 ammo a green tip. M855 is classified as a "full metal jacket ball round" not Armor Piercing (AP) ammunition. 5.56 AP ammuntion does exist, has a tungsten penetrator and a black tip which designated AP in NATO standard marking. Sorry for the long explanation, but it is not a simple answer!

Thanks for explaining something the video didn't!

The 94mm LAW had 9mm spotting rounds, very useful and easy to spot the flash to adjust as you only have one rocket.

Cool. What Sqn was he in?

@@stopspammandm The 47th fighter squadron. Their planes were all named for characters in Al Capp's L'il Abner, he flew a P-51 named "Clamwinkle McSlop". There are photos of it online.

@@leek2278 So was my Dad!. I remember him seeing a picture of LiL' Butch and saying he flew that once. I have PDF copies of all of the 47th Mission Reports for it's time on Iwo and found the name Kiggins several times including on on 7/20/45 when he was in the same Flight as my father. I'd be happy to send them to you if you'd like.

@@leek2278 I also ran across this History Channel episode of Dogfights when they featured a 47th mission over Japan that your Dad was on. Based in the Mission reports the Flight covered in the episode is YELLOW FLIGHT and your father was in GREEN FLIGHT. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/atOifsV7lbbQnHU.html

@@stopspammandm This is cool! Hope you and Kiggins made contact!

On the positive side, the crews had a good incentive to do the process correctly...

Are you certain about this? I saw WWII factory footage of an automated machine assembling belt links and 50-caliber rounds into long belts streaming out rather quickly.

@@riproar11 Welcome to the military. How many times throughout my career I thought "isn't there a machine that does this?"

@@CDSAfghan I saw the ammo belt assembly machine footage in a WWII-made film about the heavy bomber campaigns. Maybe such machines only existed then because there was so much war bond money being raised as a result of these films. I saw this back in the early 1990s on The History Channel so it never even was a thought to me that ammo belts were hand-assembled. Those A-10 and anti-missile systems ammo belts must be machine-assembled.

@@riproar11 The GAU-8 gun uses a linkless feed system.

On the topic of flying personel age, there was a Finnish pilot (eventual flying ace) called Yrjö Turkka who was around 30 when the war started in 1939. He got the nickname of "Pappa", meaning grandfather in Finnish.

the night tracer also would be minengeschoss

Why they did this?

@@bbrother92 Because night fighter’s greatest asset was stealth, something their radar allowed them to do perfectly. Removing tracers means you can remain unseen by your target and other nearby bombers even when firing. Schrägemusik was probably the next greatest asset. The radar & upward cannon combo killed hundreds (thousands even) or Commonwealth aircrew in the night offensive. Often aircrew had no idea what had happened, as a routine operation suddenly, in an eye blink, becomes a blazing, crippled deathtrap without anyone ever seeing the fighter responsible.

@@HydroSnipsto me it seems so hard to aim these Schrägemusik cannons while flying.. i guess it is something you get used to. but it seems confusing to me..

Its not actually correct. Tracer ammuntion can never follow ball ammuntion accurately. For a start the weight of the bullet is constantly changing and secondly the tracer efflux has the effect of reducing the drag. Tracer will usually always fly high over ball. The other issue with tracer is that it has considerably lower lethality than solid rounds, again because of the reduced mass. Only ever use tracer to give a target indication and never as the basis for aiming.

In my 22 years service I found if zeroed at 300m point of aim at 400m tracer could fly higher up to head height whilst ball would be chest high. Tracer is a great aid to indicate targets and on mg belts the upcoming barrel change to the crew.

I would imagine that tracers are more useful in an AtG role, as the fact that you are shooting at something on the ground means you can't have the "it looks like you are hitting the target, but the bullets are actually going behind it" problem.

We always announced to the other aircraft in our formation that we were performing a test fire, to avoid any confusion, and that everyone got into trail formation at that time.

I would not say on all aircraft, as on fighters they are absolutely essential to have a chance in hell hitting another fast moving target.

I've done a lot of competition long range shooting. With some practice, you get darn good at watching the "trace" (really just the atmospheric distortion) and following it down onto the target @ 200-1500 yards. FWIW, the very best tool I've used for watching trace is a pair of image-stabilized binoculars...Better than the best Swaro or Zeiss spotting scopes, better than the very best riflescopes... While I'm on the topic, I was once out plinking with some pals on a cold, blustery day. We were on one hilltop, shooting at steel targets on another hill. Ranges were 400-1100 yards. What I'm getting at, is the bullets were flying very high above the ground/valley - and were thus exposed to a LOT of wind. Atmospherics that day were perfect for REALLY seeing the trace - and it was just crazy seeing the trace/wake shed off the bullets in high wind. The wind was going left to right, and you could CLEARLY watch the trace shed off the bullet from left to right; as the bullet obviously weathervaned into the wind.

@@GroovesAndLands The image stabilized binoculars are truly amazing for seeing bullet vortexes. Makes it easy to see them.

What were you? In the army I was never issued tracer except in the belt for an mg.

I was issued 5.56 tracers in the Army National Guard only for night fire qualification and familiarization firing with "gas mask" on (since proper shouldering and sighting of the M16A2 with that on was impossible).

Did you carry empty m1 clips to throw against the ground as well? Rofl.

@@ret7army Served under the Army, Marines, and Navy. long story. We got everything, including SOCOM gear. It was a weird set if circumstances for my unit whenever we got deployed. Totally out of our control, but made for great deployments.

@@ShortArmOfGod Nope, no M1s. We had M16A4s, M4s, M9s, and we customized our rifles to the gills (custom triggers, custom stocks, rails, slings, grips, magpul mags, custom sights and selectors, etc.). We had Aimpoint, EoTech and Trijicon optics (everyone got to choose which they wanted as we had enough for everyone to have all three), as well as thermal scopes, helmet mounted thermals, night vision optics, laser designators, all our M240 and M2 had thermal scopes, etc. We were told we were given priority for gear behind only SOCOM, as our job was considered vital, and we were accomplishing a lot.

This channel often includes in the description a link to a Google Drive location which includes the documents shown in the video. Unfortunately, such a link is not included in the description for this video. That said, I think the document can be found at the "Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library" (if you search for that name you should find the site easily). It hosts numerous WWII-era U.S. military publications. Put "Battle Experiences" into the search bar at the top right of the site and the first result should be the document shown in the video (the cover appears to match).

I added a link to the slides shown in the Video. See the video description.

Interesting comment

@@tagscientist see flyboymb below, his comment seems to bear me out in that his units personnel had a prejudice against tracer. It should be noted that Afghanistan engagements were fought at ranges far outside the thinking that had been considered as “normal” for infantry from WW1 on wards. Military planners do always plan for the last war it seems, even the venerable AK47 was designed to be used under 300 metres, compare that to the design of the SMLE which was designed at the time of the Second Boer War and was “good” out to 600 metres (but shitty up close). Then look at the AR 15 (a real piece of crap), really designed for point blank work in the jungles of Vietnam.

I remember reading in a book on Vietnam by a veteran he would do the same thing plus use it to show gunship helicopters which direction they needed to put their rockets .

You can see that on you tube. Mini guns at night.

@@raywhitehead730 Thanks for the reply. I will check around KZfaq.

ALL tracers and a every 10th won't look any different to the human eye at those rates of fire. The optic nerve endings don't repolarize fast enough to detect the gaps and the total brightness of the existing tracer mix is already enough to saturate the retina. This is why movies can run at only 24 still pictures per second and you only see motion or why you can't tell which lightbulb in the office ceiling is brighter, just by staring at them.

@@kg4lod Thanks for comment.. I just learned something new today. My mission to learn 1 new thing a day just got a check mark. Thanks again.

There's a video you can get from Dillon Precision, "Machine Gun Magic" last few minutes is night fire at drones flown across the range. Mountains make great backstops.

Time for custom belts 😌 I used to be against it but can’t get any more broken 😂

Good one😊

Interesting

The german JU-52 flew a lot of mission with gasoline in drums. An Army soldier told, that the crew was totally relaxed on the mission he was passenger. He was frightend. Then the pilot told him that the drums were full. Flying back with empty drums would be an suicide mission.

I remember reading somewhere that pilots/gunners liked incendiary because there's a visible flash when hitting. Shooting ball ammo at a rapidly moving target behind a thick armored windscreen I'd guess it'd be very hard to see whether you hit or not.

@@jbepsilon whilst also getting shot at yourself

... 250 of course ought mean about 30 - 32 tracer rounds per each ammo belt, I believe? Sure not 250 per each belt (even more so 500), since on P-47s one single belt was made up of 425 rounds in total.

I thought B-52's had 20mm tail guns?

@@richardjames1812 The H models had the 20MM vulcans and some of the b models had the 20mm M39s. However every other ones had 4 AN2 50 Cal Mgs.

@@beverlychmelik5504 Got it, thx!

Thanks for the contribution to the channel, it is appreciated!

Mix up whatever you want.

Thanks for the channel donation, it is much appreciated.

War weary but yeah good question

Basically it’s because at some range, you can’t tell anymore, if the bullet overshot or undershot the plane. All you see is the bullet ark up and down in front or behind the plane without any indication how close the bullets are to the plane. On the ground you are more likely to see, whether the tracer hit the target or hit the ground in front or behind it.

Understood, new mic came in today. I will try it out on next video.

I remember a book by American fighter ace (I believe it was Gabresky) quoting using just API in which he also concluded that if he misses he does not want to warn the enemy of the fact he is shooting at him. If he hits, the API shows it well on the target.

Some such as the 56th FG put them at the end of the mg ammo belt to indicate they would be about empty