What It Was Like to Fight Inside a TBF Avenger's Gun Turret

MechFront "In the gun turret of a Grumman Avenger, the gunner sat facing the tail, inside a glass ball with armor plate and a heavy machine gun swung by electric motors. There was no room in there for his own parachute.

"This is the turret from the inside, in the order its gunners met it: gunnery school, the climb in from underneath, the catapult ridden backward, the cold, the armor, the torpedo run, two hundred rounds in one can, the fighters, a dead intercom, the parachute he could not wear, the water, the deck coming back, and the turret's first battle, at Midway on June 4, 1942, when six new TBF-1 Avengers flew out and one came back. "It is told from the men who sat there and the papers they were trained from: the Navy's 1944 Aircrewman's Gunnery Manual, the memoirs of turret gunners from the Franklin and the Enterprise, Harry Ferrier's own account of Midway, the Naval History and Heritage Command's histories of the Midway detachment and of George Bush's shootdown over Chichi Jima, and the Navy's wartime combat statistics." More.

More on this plane which future President GHW Bush was shot down in when only he survived.

Gunner Loyce Deen died at his Avenger's gun.