Guns and Ammo Thread

[SampsonandDelilah]

Can’t even imagine sitting in that on the underbelly of a superfortress at 10,000 feet for hours on end. Truly the greatest generation.

I bet those 500 rounds per gun went pretty damn quick

[almostgone]

Can’t even imagine sitting in that on the underbelly of a superfortress at 10,000 feet for hours on end. Truly the greatest generation.

I bet those 500 rounds per gun went pretty damn quick

A single M2 can swamp you with brass in a hurry if there's no place to kick it away. Two of them is definitely double trouble.

[Beetlegeuse]

Hell, fiddy-cal brass ain't shit. Try being a loader in a tank making a gun run. The main gun ejects the empties into the floor of the turret, right where the loader does his business. At the end of a gun run there might be 12 or 15 105mm casings (now it's 120mm) rattling around under his feet. And it's his job to throw them out the loader's hatch, which he can't do until there's a lull in the action.

Plus the stench of cordite. That's what they use for propellant and it smells like someone's trying to burn ammonia. The M1 Abrams was the first US tank with a ventilation system effective enough to do a reasonable job of evacuating the gunsmoke. Before the Abrams you just had to live with it.

Can’t even imagine sitting in that on the underbelly of a superfortress at 10,000 feet for hours on end....

More like 25,000. Sometimes 35,000. And the airplane was unpressurized so everybody had to wear an oxygen mask above 10,000 feet.

Being unpressurized also meant it was as cold inside as it was outside, which in winter was as low as -50ºF. At -50 and with the added wind chill for the waist gunners, exposed skin could get frostbitten in seconds. Even in summer it was -20ºF (-ish) at altitude. So they wore shearling-lined leather suits with electric heat. Everybody was tethered to both an oxygen hose and the power cord to their electric suit.

I remember how shitty portable electric stuff like flashlights and electric socks were when I was a kid in the 1960s. A 1940s electric suit probably was better than freezing to death, but not by much.