Word: gunner
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...Shells Come In. Staff Sergeant William E. Williams of Jasper, Fla., the tail gunner, winged the first German. Another Fortress crowded close to the stricken Pappy and swung its guns on the Germans. But Pappy was the wounded duck. The 1905 pressed home for the kill. Said Captain Williams...
...They splashed at us from behind and above and whipped past so close you could have snatched the swastika from their sides. Our ship was lurching under their wallops like a beaten boxer. One shell plowed into the top turret and went off in the face of the gunner, Technical Sergeant K. R. Aulenbach of Reading, Pa. Between attacks the crew dragged him out and laid him down for first aid but he was already gone; he died soon after we landed...
...attack went on. Two shells hit alongside each other in the left wing and exploded. Each ripped a jagged hole about four feet square. Two more landed, in the right wing this time. The radio operator -Technical Sergeant Eddie F. Espitallier of Clovis, Calif.-and the waist gunner knocked down another...
Master Sergeant Louis T. ("Soup") Silva, aged 47, who won the Distinguished Service Cross for shooting down at least three Japanese Zeros over Java (TIME, April 20), had long been considered No. 1 anomaly in an Air Force whose combat crews' average age is under 25. After fabulous Gunner Silva's death in the accidental crash of a Flying Fortress in Australia last July, oldsters apparently lost their toe hold in the Air Forces. But last week in London a lean, grizzled, Fortress tailgunner aged 44 turned up: Staff Sergeant Merril W. Gilger, World War I Field Artillery...
...except that there were no falls. It was like flying over England, only more beautiful. People on the ground seemed stunned by the great flock of Lancasters and the noise. We saw no fighters on the way, but a duck came through the windshield with a wallop. My front gunner's turret was filled with feathers and the hole in the windshield let in an awful draft." And so precise was the R.A.F. timing that the first planes hit Le Creusot at 6:09 and the last dumped its load seven minutes later...