Luftwaffe gun camera footage

[brm_3k]

Hi

Partly. There were unofficial use of 50 cals, and some officially mounted in rear turrets, and the RCAF use as I mentioned.

Don't forget that Lancs/Halifaxes were optimised for taking max. bomb load to Central Europe at night. Waist gunners/guns/ammo etc would have been a waste of weight 99.9% of the time.

Ventral turret might have been of use, but would have involved other compromises, and by the time the RAF was using H2S there was nowhere for a turret. The main reason though was the lack of perception of potential threat from below.

Large numbers of aircraft and crews lost to Shrage-musik before the RAF had any inkling of this form of attack. Majority of attacks were fatal to the aircraft, and even if crew escaped they were usually PoWs, and those that made it home often had no idea what had happened. Other crews couldn't see what was happening either - reports were simply of other planes exploding or the wingtanks being set on fire by flak.

Interesting to read the histories and look at the stats for German Nachtjagd, relatively few numbers of the pilots accounted for vast majority of kills. Skill level and determination must have been very high for these few crews, whereas the majority achieved little but managed to survive due to lack of fighter opposition - until an accident took it's toll.

Radar in WW2 was only able to give opportunity to acquire a visual, no-way could it be used to control fire

Regards
Alex