Every Seat, Every Station

One Mission, Ten Wars

If you had flown the same raid as the man three feet away from you, would you have lived through the same war?

You probably wouldn't have. On a B-17, the bombardier sat in a glazed nose and, on the bomb run, steered the aircraft through the autopilot while flak burst ahead. The ball gunner hung below the fuselage, folded into a turret about 44 inches across by most measurements, chosen for the job partly because of his size. The tail gunner knelt on knee rests at the far end of a crawl that felt like a pipe.

To move between them, men in bulky flying gear crossed a bomb bay catwalk roughly ten inches wide, between loaded racks. At bombing altitude the temperature could be around minus 40, and the waist, ball and tail felt it most.

In a Lancaster at night it was different again. The navigator worked behind a blackout curtain and saw almost nothing of the raid. The rear gunner sat alone with his parachute stowed in the fuselage behind him. To bail out, he had to turn his turret to the beam and drop out backwards.

Top speeds and bomb loads tell you what the aircraft could do. This book tells you what each man in it actually lived through, seat by seat, from briefing to bailout.

Same aircraft, same sky. A different war at every station.

Look Inside

Real pages from the book. Tap one to see it full size.

What’s Inside The Book

The book walks each aircraft nose to tail in words and tables, using fixed reference points like the nose, flight deck, bomb bay, wing spar, waist and tail. It then takes you station by station, follows a day mission and a night mission, and ends with escape, casualty data and your own research.

• A clear line between fact and judgment — Documented figures and qualitative comparisons are labeled as such throughout, and the variants covered are named: B-17F/G, B-24D/H/J/L/M, Lancaster I/III. p. 7
• Who did two jobs at once — A comparison table of crew positions by aircraft, from the B-17 engineer in the top turret to the Lancaster bomb aimer in the front turret. p. 19
• The B-17G built in words — Every compartment in order, the doors and hatches between them, and a table of each station's neighbors and nearest exit. p. 35
• Why head-on attacks changed the nose — How German head-on attacks from late 1942 reshaped life for the bombardier, navigator and pilots, and what a quarter inch of curved Plexiglas did and did not stop. p. 50
• Alan Magee and Maynard Smith — Magee's fall over Saint-Nazaire in January 1943 and Smith's Medal of Honor action in May 1943, told from the documented record. p. 67
• Belly landings and the trapped ball gunner — Unbolting the ball before touchdown, the Sir Baboon McGoon case, and why trapped-gunner stories outnumber documented cases. p. 67
• B-17 versus B-24, compartment by compartment — How the Liberator's deep fuselage and high Davis wing produced a different layout, routes and set of exits. p. 84
• The retractable ball turret — What retraction solved for takeoff, landing and drag on the B-24, and what it did not solve for the gunner inside. p. 97
• Over the main spar in the dark — Why moving from one end of a Lancaster to the other was harder than in either American bomber, with an oxygen bottle and a parachute. p. 113
• The corkscrew as a crew maneuver — How the Lancaster pilot flew alone, with the flight engineer as his second pair of hands, and how the whole crew worked the evasive corkscrew. p. 128
• Three tail positions side by side — Lancaster rear turret, B-17 tail and B-24 tail turret compared for guns, sight, view and exit. p. 144
• Every gun position in one table — Weapon, turret maker and arc for the B-17G, B-24J and Lancaster I, plus the blind spots each aircraft left open. p. 160
• Two missions, hour by hour — A composite B-17 day mission from the 3 a.m. wake-up and a composite Lancaster night operation, both clearly marked as reconstructions. p. 190
• Every exit in every aircraft — Parachute types, hatches, ditching drills, and what wartime RAF escape analyses found, with the reasons their figures differ. p. 224

There's much more besides: cold, oxygen and heated suits, the B-29, Halifax and a German contrast, an honest look at the 'safest to deadliest' rankings, and checklists for visiting surviving aircraft and tracing the men who flew them.

Meet Inside the Steel

Inside the Steel is a YouTube channel that explores the war from inside the machines, through the people who crewed them. Its best-known videos put viewers in the B-17 ball turret, the B-17 tail position and the Lancaster's lonely rear turret, and rank crew positions from safest to deadliest. In this book, Inside the Steel goes deeper and slower, and takes a careful look at those rankings too, including the channel's own.

Inside WWII Bombers

First edition · 2027 · Instant download

• The full 280-page book
• A nose-to-tail walk through the B-17, B-24 and Lancaster, built in words and comparison tables
• Every crew station's duties, equipment, view, working space and conditions
• A day mission and a night mission followed from briefing to debriefing
• Every exit and escape arrangement, plus checklists for visiting aircraft and researching aircrew

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