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Why U S Gunners Fired Behind Their Targets — And Shot Down Twice as Many Planes | The War Files | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Why U S Gunners Fired Behind Their Targets — And Shot Down Twice as Many Planes
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The development and implementation of "position firing," a counter-intuitive aiming technique based on physics, revolutionized aerial gunnery during World War II, transforming raw recruits into highly effective defensive marksmen and significantly impacting combat outcomes.
October 3rd, 1943. 30,000 ft above the
cold gray waters of the North Sea, the
freezing metal of a 50 caliber Browning
machine gun pressed against a waste
gunner's cheek as he tracked a Messers
Schmidt BF 109 slicing through the
bomber formation 200 yd out. His breath
fogged the gun sight, his gloved fingers
trembling not from fear, but from what
he was about to do. Every instinct
screamed to aim directly at the enemy,
to put the reticle squarely on the
German's nose and pull the trigger. But
he didn't. He aimed six aircraft lengths
behind the fighter, squeezed the
trigger, and the gun thundered to life.
2 seconds later, the Messor Schmidt
disintegrated in a burst of fire and
falling metal. In that instant, this
gunner proved something that defied
every instinct and common sense. When
shooting from a moving bomber at a
moving target, aiming directly at the
enemy meant missing every time. The
secret to survival was aiming where the
enemy had already been. It was a
revelation born not from luck, but from
years of study, physics, and training, a
technique that would turn frightened
gunners into the deadliest defensive
marksmen of the war. And that revelation
had begun 3 years earlier in a place no
one expected. The barren desert outside
Las Vegas, Nevada. January 25th, 1941.
Colonel Martinez Stenith stepped out of
his car into 60 square miles of absolute
nothing. Sand, scrub, and wind stretched
to the horizon. This desolate wasteland
would soon become the most important
aerial gunnery school in American
history. The problem facing the Army
Airore was both simple and terrifying.
The United States had no schools
dedicated to training aerial gunners.
Not one standardized curriculum. Not one
set of proven methods to teach farm boys
how to shoot from a moving aircraft at a
target moving hundreds of miles hour.
Without trained gunners, the entire
strategic bombing campaign would
collapse before it began. Heavy bombers
like the B7 Flying Fortress carried 1350
caliber guns, but without men who knew
how to use them, they were useless. The
British had learned that lesson in
blood. Their gunners, trained only on
ground targets, were slaughtered by
German fighters in the night skies over
Europe. The Americans were determined
not to repeat that mistake. Construction
crews arrived in March, transforming the
desert into a base of barracks.
classrooms and firing ranges. By June,
over a hundred instructors had arrived,
facing the monumental challenge of
teaching a skill no one in the country
truly understood. 2 days after Pearl
Harbor, the orders came down. The base
was to be activated immediately. The war
had begun and America needed gunners
fast. The first trainees arrived at Las
Vegas Army Airfield just before
Christmas, and their journey began with
shotguns and clay pigeons. They learned
to shoot moving targets from stationary
platforms, practicing the age-old art of
leading a target. But the moment the
instructors mounted those shotguns onto
the backs of moving trucks, everything
they knew fell apart. The clay pigeons
sailed through the air untouched, no
matter how carefully they aimed ahead.
Confusion swept through the ranks. They
were doing exactly what their instincts
told them. Why were they missing? The
answer lay in a truth so
counterintuitive that even experienced
instructors struggled to explain it.
Sergeant Robert Hayes, a Texan with a
knack for physics, stood before his
students and drew a simple diagram. A
bomber moving at 300 mph. A fighter
closing from the side at the same speed.
a bullet leaving the barrel of the gun.
The students assumed the bullet traveled
straight. It didn't. It carried the
bomber's forward motion with it, curving
through the air in a diagonal path. The
faster the bomber flew, the more
pronounced the curve. To hit a fighter
attacking from the side, a gunner had to
aim not ahead, but behind. Hayes
demonstrated with a string and weight,
walking forward as it swung. The weight,
he explained, behaved just like their
bullets. It didn't drop straight. It
carried forward. The lesson was clear.
When you're moving and your target is
moving, the rules flip. To hit your
mark, you must shoot where the target
was, not where it is. By 1942, this
principle became the foundation of what
would be called position firing. Instead
of firing instinctively, gunners were
trained to calculate deflection, to
predict where the fighter and bullet
would meet in space. Charts, diagrams,
and mathematical tables filled
classrooms. Gunners memorized radians of
deflection, each representing the
angular distance they needed to aim
behind the fighter. At a 90° attack,
that might mean aiming as much as 12
aircraft lengths behind the enemy. It
sounded insane, but it worked. And by
the summer of 1942, Las Vegas was
producing 600 new gunners every 5 weeks.
Their 6-week training course became a
model of precision and intensity. Week
one was ground school, learning the
Browning machine gun, aircraft
recognition, and the physics of
ballistics. Week two, they climbed
aboard trucks to shoot moving targets,
forcing their brains to unlearn
instinct. Week three introduced
manipulation trainers, mock turrets,
where students tracked wire suspended
dummy planes through the sky. Week four
brought the Waller trainer, an early
flight simulator projecting enemy
fighters onto a curved screen, recording
every shot and teaching split-second
decisionmaking. By week five, trainees
took to the air in real bombers, firing
at towed targets. Their ammunition was
color-coded so instructors could track
who hit what. By week six, only the best
remained. Those who passed earned their
silver wings and joined bomber crews
already flying combat missions over
Europe. By mid 1943, over 57,000 aerial
gunners had graduated from American
schools. But training was one thing,
combat was another. On August 17th,
1943, 376 B17 bombers flew deep into
Germany towards Finefort and Reaganburg.
The Luft Dwafa threw over 400 fighters
against them. In brutal running battles
through clear summer skies, the bombers
lost 60 planes, a devastating 20%. But
they also shot down 27 German fighters,
an outcome that stunned both sides.
Waist gunners trained in the Nevada
desert used their deflection charts and
position firing instinctively. They
aimed not at the fighters but behind
them trusting their training and their
bullets found their marks. Those who
ignored their training, who aimed
directly, missed. For the first time,
mathematics had proven more powerful
than instinct. But as the war
intensified, so did technology. In late
1943, the British introduced a new tool,
the Mark 2 Gyro gun site. It used
spinning gyroscopes to calculate
deflection automatically. The Americans
quickly adapted it for their own
aircraft, creating the K14 and similar
systems for bomber turrets. With dual
reticles, one fixed, one moving, the
site showed gunners exactly where to
aim. All they had to do was keep the
moving reticle on the target. In tests,
hit accuracy doubled almost overnight.
It was a revolution that freed gunners
from the mental strain of calculating
angles in the heat of combat. By mid1
1944, thousands of bombers carried these
sites or simpler compensating versions
that adjusted automatically for air
speed and altitude. Training also
continued to evolve. New methods like
Operation Pinball brought realism to
unheard of levels. At Las Vegas,
instructors flew armored Bell RP63 King
Cobras, brightly painted and equipped
with sensors that lit up when hit by
special frangible bullets. Students
fired at real maneuvering aircraft for
the first time. The effect was
transformative. Accuracy improved by up
to 40%. And trainees gained confidence
that no simulator could provide. By
early 1945, the seven gunnery schools
together had trained over 200,000
gunners. When the B-29 Superfortress
entered the Pacific War, it carried an
entirely new innovation. Remotec
controlled turrets linked to computers
that automatically calculated deflection
and bullet drop. Gunners sat inside
pressurized compartments guiding their
turrets through periscope sights. The
computers did the math. The gunners
focused on tracking the target against
fast Japanese fighters. The system was
devastatingly effective. It was the
ultimate expression of the lesson first
learned in Nevada, that human instinct
could not outgass physics, but
technology and training together could.
By the end of the war, over 214,000
men had graduated from America's gunnery
schools. Las Vegas alone produced 44,000
of them. They had learned a lesson that
went against every natural urge to aim
not at the enemy but behind. The
statistics are difficult to measure, but
the evidence was clear. Properly trained
gunners were twice as effective as
untrained ones. Their survival depended
not on courage alone, but on their
ability to think like mathematicians in
the chaos of combat. They were the
living embodiment of disciplined
precision. men who had reprogrammed
their instincts to trust in science. The
lesson outlasted the war. The principles
of position firing carried into Korea
where B29 gunners use them against
Soviet Mig 15 jets. Even today, fighter
pilots rely on the same physics, though
computers now perform the calculations.
The old Las Vegas Army airfield is now
Nellis Air Force Base, home of the US
Air Force Weapons School and the
Thunderbirds. The desert ranges where
those first students once fired from
truck beds are long gone. But the
principle they learned still stands.
When you're moving, you don't aim where
the target is. You aim where it was.
It's a lesson that speaks to more than
war. It's about the human capacity to
learn what feels wrong and trust what
works. Those young men who once fumbled
shotguns in the desert became the
defenders of the skies because they
learned to let go of instinct and
embrace calculation. They learned to
trust in equations written on
blackboards, in the words of instructors
who told them to aim behind when
everything in them screamed to aim
ahead. And when the bullets flew and the
enemy closed in, that trust saved their
lives. The story of position firing is
not just about physics. It's about faith
in reason, about the triumph of training
over instinct. In a world where chaos
ruled the skies, they learned that
survival often means doing the opposite
of what feels right. They aimed where
the enemy wasn't. And because of that,
thousands of them came home. Physics
doesn't care what feels natural. It only
cares what works. And over the
battlefields of World War II, what
worked was the impossible idea born in
the Nevada desert. To hit a target in
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