Frontal turret - yes or no?

[Romantic Technofreak]

One of the most criticized weaknesses of German bombers was the defensive armament, especially the lack of moveable gun turrets. I often imagine how German designs would have looked with turrets equipped. But the turrets had not only advantages. I had to learn that they caused extensive drag, thus slowering the bombers considerably. So what would you prefer - a frontal turret or none?
In the following, I would like to give an overview of the situation on different airplanes how it shows up to me:

Short Sunderland: first encounter of a completely turret-defended airplane to German pilots. Subsequently they told it "flying porcupine"!

Vickers Wellington: Frontal and rear turret, but no dorsal and ventral ones. Aircraft looks sleek, but is one of the slowest medium bombers.

Handley-Page Halifax: Turret had to be removed, because the airplane was too slow.

Avro Lancaster: no problems, turret was left where it is.

Boeing B-17: A chin turret had to be installed, because the airplane was considered too weakly defended against frontal attacks.

Convair B-24: Installation of a frontal turret in later versions.

Piaggio Pi-108: Stronger engines than its allied counterparts, but weaker speed performance (look at the three-stepped side silhouette).

Boeing B-29: Rounded glass front installed like in German bombers. Forward dorsal and ventral turrets look like being able to do the job.

Heinkel He 277: The installation of a frontal turret was discussed, due to the experiences of the marine bombers that frequently got frontally attacked by Allied carrier based-airplanes. I wonder how this would fit with the rounded cockpit silhouette.

Your comments please!

[GregP]

Turrets ... OK, here goes.

Depends on the speed of the bomber. The slower the bomber, the more it needed turrets.

A fast bomber needed defense mainly from behind below and behind above. This would be the 330 mph and faster aircraft. The defender would get, maybe, one pass and then could not turn and catch the bomber. This category includes the B-29 and it didn't really need most of its armament since Japanese fighters were hard-pressed to even keep up.

Then came the 250 mph to 330 mph bombers. They needed front, rear, drosal, ventral, and side gun positions. This category included the B-17, B-24, Lancaster, etc.

Bombers slower than 250 mph needed to be robustly built with all the defensive firepower they could carry. Strangely enough, the designers of these aircraft usually put in machine guns of rifle caliber, so they typically were "meat on the table" for a fighter.

Bombers that were strong and maneuverable usually needed fixed, forward-firing armament plus some rearward defensive guns.

I think the He 277 (with 4 engines) would have been a good strategic bomber if it had armament forward, rearward, dorsal, and ventral. The extra weight and drag of side-facing guns were probably not necessary. In the case of the He 277, I'd have wanted the reaward guns to be 15 - 20 mm with plenty of ammunition.

Most of the rest of the Nazi bombers would have had their performance adversely affected by the addition of more weight. The Germans never did make a good 2500 - 2800 HP-class bomber engine in large quantities like the Americans did with the R-2800, R-3500, and R-4360. They generally stuck with inline engines with 1850HP or less, so a twin was limited by the weight it could carry at an effective speed. If you added a lot of guns and ammunition, then the fuel, bomb load, speed, or range was severely affected.

Since this was the case, I am surprised the Nazis didn't come up with more 4-engine types. The He-111 could have been reworked with a new wing and larger size to handle 4 engines. The Dornier 217 series could have been enlarged and made into a 4-engine type. Messerchmitt COULD have made the "Ural Bomber."

Then again, the Nazis could have fielded the He-100, too. And they didn't. They could have fielded the He-112 with its easy takeoff and landing characteristics compared with the Bf 109 ... and didn't. They COULD have fielded many hundreds of Me 262 fighters much earlier and didn't.

So, my guess is that the Reich Ministry had to make the same decisions as the Amercians when it came to "improvements." That is, "How long will the production lines be interrupted to get this new type in service ... and can we afford to do that?" After 1942, the answer was probably "No!", so any new types not in production at the end of 1942 were probably "out of luck" if they involved interruption of production unless they had a "sponsor" in the Reich Ministry procurement section. So ... if Galland, Moelders, Goering, Milch, or Udet ... or someone like them liked it and made a case for it ... then MAYBE it had a chance. If no "sponsor" was forthcoming, it probably died stillborn due to wartime production expediency.

[andyo2000]

I personally believe the front turret, if it existed at all, is completely useless unless equipped with at least 4 high-power guns. If a fighter is approaching a bomber head-on, at full speed, and the bomber is going at cruise speed, there is not much time at all for a front gunner to find the enemy, aim, and tear it to shreds. This stands for all aircraft, not just German ones, although the German tactics allowed Allied bombers to use less guns more effectively. In any case, I believe the advantages of that extra armament is outweighed by the disadvantage. The lack of a front turret would significantly improve performance.

[simon]

Apparently the designers at Boeing who came up with the "G" series of the B-17 Flying Fortress would disagree...

Your comment about the front turret existing at all confuses me slightly, nose turrets were used on the B-17G, the Lancaster, Stirling, early Halifaxes, Sunderland, Emily flying boats, B-24 Liberators, Whitley and Wellington, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

The advantage of a turret or barbette mount for guns over the manually aimed systems of most early war Luftwaffe aircraft is simple, with a turret system you have the full weight of the turret mechanism to abosrb the recoil of the gunfire, with manually aimed pintel mounted weapons the recoil is absorbed by the gunner decreasing the accuracy of the defensive fire.

Your logic regarding head on attacks is flawed I'm afraid, as much as there was little time to aim and fire, that didn't stop Luftwaffe aircraft from using this as a highly effective means of engaging US bomber formations away from the main weight of fire to the rear, and if the fighter pilot who has to physically alter the course of his aircraft to get the bomber into his aim can do so, the nose gunner can certainly put a few seconds burst of gunfire into his path to try and stop him.

GregP, you discount the Rifle Caliber machine gun too easily, true it was not as effective as a Heavy Machine Gun or 20mm Cannon, however it had a high rate of fire, lower recoil (Only worth considering if these were pintel mounted) and even a rifle caliber round into a nice liquid cooled engine will put an end to a fighter pilot's mission pretty quickly. As I said elsewhere, the RAF fought the Battle of Britain with only rifle caliber machine guns, if they were that bad, we would not have won!

A 4-engine He111 was on the drawing boards, however the major proponent of the type was killed in an accident and the project faded into obscurity, so the Luftwaffe concentrated on twin engine planes. The reason was that in the immediate pre-war years the German military needed to look good, in terms of impact on the war effort for every 2 four engine planes you could build between 3 and 5 two engine planes, which is going to look better in a flypast or parade?

The same logic was applied to other aspects of the military as well, the Panzer II was produced in numbers that far outstripped its usefulness as a piece of military equipment mainly because it was cheap, quick to manufacture and looked good in parades en-masse.

Pre-war the Nazis were out to impress the world, if they could (And they did!) out-bluff the Allies into not starting a war purely on the strength of their army on the parade ground then they could win battles without a shot being fired.

[Romantic Technofreak]

So what would you recommend to arm the He 277? First, I am glad that somebody produced a good looking model:

http://www.motionmodels.com/ww2luft/mmc-868.jpg

But this model shows a more or less conventional chin turret. If you look on the line drawing in the Virtual Aircraft Museum:

http://www.luftfahrtmuseum.com/htmi/itf/he277.htm

you see, that it might have two "lower cheek" turrets?!

Supposed to use the He 277 as a day bomber, maybe accompanied by Do 335s, it might have to encounter any allied fighter type of 1944/46, including jet planes like the Gloster Meteor. You can work in this experiences about the use of B-50s in the Korean war encountering early MiGs. What defensive armament looks proper in your eyes?

[andyo2000]

In any case, the frontal turret could have been replaced with something better. If you moved the top turret forward, it might double as one, but, on most planes, this is impossibly without having the gunner stand on the controls. Well, I haven't read up much on British and Russian bomber formations, but American formations, which staggered the planes in altitude, would allow a top or ball turret gunner to pretty much have the same effect as the front turret.

There are distinct diasadvantages to having a front turret. As was already mentioned, any gun that sticks out of the aircraft creates drag. I would presume that the front turret causes the most drag, as it has the most surface area facing forward. Something else, which is much more minor, is that the openings in front turrets, at least on the earlier models of front-gun equipped models, let in extreme cold. This was fixed later, of course. Front turrets require an extra crew member, when really, that person's job could be covered by the two gunners I already mentioned, the top and ball turret gunners.