Greatest Tail Gunner Highlights! World War II Dogfighting Flight Sim IL2 Sturmovik Great Battles 

In one of the sequences you depict the tail gunner making a nearly 90-degree defilade shot with his sights on the enemy fighter rather than leading it as he would have to in order to make a successful kill.

Yeah I'm basically a trend setter. Lol

I'd like to see some ball turret kills that would be sick

I do not think so... In warthunder, you can aim with the third person view, you can control your plane and your gunners simultaneously, and you can also train your crew to make the gunners infallible. At least in IL-2 you don't have all these possibilities, making it much more difficult.

@@celesteorsa3918 yeah well in war thunder fighters can also shoot in third person view and the game tells you where the bullets go and in il-2 you don't worry about switching between gunner and pilot you can just get your own gunner, but anyway both of them can't be compared because one is semi-arcade and the other is realistic

I feel like there was a way to control the turrets with the joystick but its been a while since I changed the settings. I'm sure there probably is! I just use the mouse because I find it easiest

I have also thought this! I would LOVE this. The most adventurous part of many airmen's tours was not the combat, but their incredible journeys and stories after being shot down behind enemy lines.

Of course

They were highly effective in bombers used in Europe but the U.S. created a defensive maneuver called the "Thach Weave" that made them no longer worth the added weight of an extra man.

@@danielebrparish4271 ?

None in WWII because they had a firing interrupter when the gun was pointed at the tail.

@@danielebrparish4271not necessarily - for primitive swivel-mounted trigger-fired MGs they didn't. And guard rails were not used on many installations either because many such guns had more degrees of freedom, so guard rail couldn't account for the whole range of gun's possible positions. Here's a He-111 example ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wnPuHpSLo_w.html .

It did in the WWI era. They even had mechanisims in 1915 that prevented the guns from shooting off the propeller when they shot through the propeller while it was spinning. It's a fairly simple device to create and install. What they couldn't prevent is getting shot up by friendly planes. That was a problem for the planes flying in formation but It seems to have been a rare occurance. There were no enemy planes to shoot at when the flak was flying and the enemy planes tended to concentrate on wounded stragglers as they come out of the flak areas. It seems that the only gun that could be in a position to shoot a bombers tail would be the top turrent which I don't think did much shooting toward the back because the rear tail gun was something that all enemy fighters tried to avoid. The ball turret guns were designed so the gun would bump up aganst the top of the slot and couldn't shoot above the 90 degree position. @@MorangRus

@@danielebrparish4271 you're talking in the first part about the synchronization gear for the fixed guns that acts quite differently from the safety interruptors for powered turrets. I'm aware of both. But neither were used for simple swivel-mounted, trigger-fired, percussion primed defensive guns like some seen in this video where the gunner changes his saddle magazine by hand (also true for "lens" mounts with circular frame favored by Luftwaffe early in war). And I'm sure that in their attempts to track a fast crossing target or to hit a bandit loitering in the blind spot behind the tail some gunners did hit their own aircraft.

I assume AI is piloting the plane

It was the luck of the draw for those in the Army. In the Navy they took radio operators for rear gunner positions and they also had flying controls back there in case the pilot was incapacitated.