Customer Reviews

Gunner: An Illustrated History of World War II Aircraft Turrets and Gun Positions

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have to agree with the previous reviewer - the quality of the photographs of gun stations and aircraft interiors (in modern day color!) is rare and truly gives the reader a different perspective. While not presenting exhaustive histories of the different airplanes featured - it is more a "coffee table" book than a technical reference - they authors have presented an enjoyable overview of the history, characteristics of the planes, fleshed out with personal anecdotes of the gunners who served. Many rare archival documents and photographs are also featured. A good companion volume to "Cockpit" (which I also own)

When I went through this book the first time I immediatly noticed a difference with other books of this genre. The amazing quality of the pictures in this book is stunning. Close up fotography is something special and the authors of this book have braught this up to a new level. They took pictures of planes that I've seen in real life as well and these pictures took me back to that moment. The anekdotes of World War 2 veterans make this book even more worthwile and in combination with a similar book (Cockpit) by the same authors this book is a must for airplane and World War 2 enthousiasts. Now you can try to imagine what it was like being a gunner on one of these airplanes, having only a few seconds or less to shoot down your enemy. I hope that there will be more books like these to follow because the quality is rare...

For those of us intrigued with seeing and understanding the interiors of places like aircraft gun positions, this book is both wonderful and disappointing. While there are some incredible modern photos and plenty of interesting archival information, illustrations and photos (the astonishingly complicated remote control gun system on the ME410, for example) I wanted the photographer to show me more. The book could easily have had twice the number of pages and gone into more detail on each aircraft. But as one reviewer has written, it's a coffee table book.

There are also a number of typos, even misplaced photo captions, but that seems to be a common problem in recent books. Have publishers cut out the copy editor position as a cost saving measure!?

Nevertheless, Gunner is a magnificent book that provides more information and photos and does so better than any other I've seen. It presents more than 20 aircraft from the US, Germany, UK, and Italy as well as an interesting section on the development of aerial gunnery in WWI.

Well worth adding to your collection, especially considering the reasonable price.

Perhaps I should have known better than to expect a volume this slim - in terms of page count - to address a topic so broad and diverse. What I had expected/hoped this book to be was a comprehensive discussion of the gun positions on World War Two aircraft. This conviction was supported somewhat when - reviewing the sample pages offered by Amazon - I saw a wiring diagram for the Bendix chin turret on the B-17G.

Upon receiving the book, I quickly had my hopes dashed. Another reviewer using the term 'coffee table book' to describe it was completely correct. What you get are a melange of photographs of selected gunnery positions on several aircraft that are divided the number of engines on any given example. This approach leaves one a bit disoriented and more-or-less uniformed about the strategies, doctrines and design behind placing guns on bomb-carrying aircraft. So great is the superficiality of this approach that it is only with the single engine aircraft (the Douglas Dauntless and Bolton-Paul Defiant, for example) that all positions are addressed. For the two- and four-motored bombers, coverage is sporadic and haphazard.

There is virtually no discussion of the evoluation of defensive armament on bombers. You are not informed why the US moved from .30 caliber machine guns to .50 caliber while the British did not. You get no sense of how and why powered gun positions came into use.

There is no discussion on turret design and change. You do not learn that the B-17 had two different types of tail gun configurations, as well a two types of top turrets. You receive no information on why different US bombers had turrets in the same position made by different manufacturers.

I came away with the feeling that this book was not conceived and written by someone interested in the topic so much as someone seeking to use photographs to evoke an sense of atmosphere.

Good stuff. Informative, well illustrated and well written.