At 11:47 a.m. on May 29th, 1943, Captain James Hartwell settled into the pilot seat of a bomber unlike any he had ever seen. The ground crew at RAF Falcon Barry was just slamming the ammo bay doors shut, having loaded the last belts of 50 caliber ammunition for the bombers 16th gun. Hartwell was only 26 years old, but in the skies over Europe, that made him an old man.

He was a veteran with 42 combat missions under his belt, but he had zero experience in the aircraft. He was about to fly. This was the Y b 40, and it weighed 4,000 pounds, more than any flying fortress he had ever touched. It felt heavy on the tarmac, sluggish and wrong. But it was also on a cold, clear day in May.

The Eighth Air Force’s last best hope in the three months before this day, from March to May, the Eighth Air Force had lost approximately 120 B-17s over Europe. That’s more than 1200 men. Most of them weren’t shot down on the way the target. They were massacred on the way back. The problem was simple, and it was deadly.

The American fighter escorts, the P-47 Thunderbolts and the British Spitfires, they just didn’t have the legs for it. They could fly with the bombers across the channel. They could protect them over the French coast. But deep in the heart of the Reich, their fuel gauges would hit the red line. One by one, they would waggle their wings and peel off, heading for home.

For the bomber crews, it was the loneliest, most terrifying moment of the war. They were left alone, deep in enemy territory, with hours of flying left to do. And the Luftwaffe knew it. German fighter pilots flying their fast, lethal Fokker Wolf one 90s and Messerschmitt 109 would wait. They would orbit just out of range, watching the little friends turn for home and then the moment the sky was clear of escorts, they would pounce. They called this deadly stretch of sky Gantlet.

The B-17 was called the Flying Fortress and it was tough, but it was not invincible. The German pilots were smart. They were veterans of the Battle of Britain, the Eastern Front. They learned the B-17s weaknesses. The most dreaded attack was the 12:00 high. Wolf one 90s would position themselves above and in front of the formation.

Then they would dive, cannons blazing at a speed so high the B-17s two flexible nose guns, just couldn’t track them fast enough. They would rip through the cockpit and pilot and be gone before the other gunners could get a bead. The 100 and nines preferred a different tactic. They would dive right through the tight box formations, forcing the bombers to break apart. And then, like wolves, they would hunt the stragglers.

The damaged planes. The slow planes. The ones that fell behind. For a B-17 crew falling behind the formation was a death sentence. Half of the crews didn’t make it to their 25 mission tour. The Eighth Air Force was being bled white and morale was cracking. Something had to be done. The solution, dreamed up by engineers at Wright Field back in Ohio, seemed obvious.

Almost brilliant. If the fighters couldn’t escort the bombers all the way, why not turn a bomber into a fighter? The idea was to create a flying destroyer, a B-17 that would fly with the formation disguised as just another bomber. But this one would be different. It would carry no bombs at all. Instead, it would be packed nose to tail with guns, ammunition, and armor.

It would be a porcupine, a gunship designed to fly into the hornet’s nest and clear the sky, protecting its bomb carrying brothers all the way to the target and all the way home. It was a radical idea, and the engineers at the Army Air Force’s Materiel Command went to work. They took a standard B-17 F model and performed radical surgery.

The first thing to go was the one thing. A bomber was built for the bombs. The bomb bay was stripped out. The heavy bomb racks were removed. The bombardiers station. The famous Norden bomb site. All of it gone. In its place, they installed the very first brand new power operated Bendix chin turret.

This was a revolution 250 caliber machine guns aimed forward and controlled remotely by a gunner inside. It was designed specifically to meet that deadly 12:00 high attack. But they didn’t stop there. They looked at the top of the plane. The standard B-17 had one dorsal turret right behind the cockpit. The engineers decided that wasn’t enough, so they installed a second dorsal turret, a modified B turret, right behind the radio room.

This gave the plane 360 degree protection on its upper side. Then they moved to the waist. The B-17 F had two single 50 caliber guns, one on each side, operated by gunners who stood shoulder to shoulder. The Y B 40 team ripped those single mounts out. They reinforced the fuselage and installed heavy duty twin mounts.

Now each waist gunner was firing a pair of 50 calibers. The rate of fire from the sides was instantly doubled. They kept the flexible, cheap guns in the nose. They kept the ball turret on the belly. They kept the twin guns in the tail. When they were done, the plane bristled with 16 heavy machine guns. To feed this beast, the ammunition capacity was tripled, not doubled, tripled.

A standard B-17 carried around 3900 rounds. The Y b 40 was packed with 11,200 rounds of 50 caliber ammunition. The airframe groaned under the weight, and finally, as if it wasn’t heavy enough, they welded thick, heavy armor plating around all the crew positions. The cockpit, the turrets, the radio room. This wasn’t a fortress anymore.

It was a flying battleship. They called it the Y B 40. The Y designation meant it was a prototype, a test vehicle. The crews, however, called it the Flying Destroyer. Back in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a long way from the war, the Douglas Aircraft Company completed 25 of these conversions, of which 12 were deployed to England for combat testing.

By March of 1943, they were ready and the first batch was rushed across the Atlantic, assigned to the 92nd bombardment Group at RAAF Alcan, Bury in England. Colonel William Reid, the group’s commander, knew this was a critical test. This wasn’t a mission for rookies for the new crews just arriving from the States.

He handpicked his most experienced, most grizzled veterans to fly these new gunships. He needed men who wouldn’t panic, men who knew how to fight, and men who could give an honest, clear eyed assessment. Captain James Hartwell, with his 42 missions, was a natural choice. He was assigned to aircraft for 257, three eight. His crew with that dark gallows humor that soldiers have, took one look at the plane, bristling with all those guns, and nicknamed it Hedgehog. The plane fell wrong. Hartwell was a superb pilot.

He knew the B-17 like the back of his hand. He could feel its every vibration, every quirk. But this new machine, this was something else. It weighed 4,000 pounds more than a B-17 F at its maximum takeoff weight, and that 4,000 pounds was permanent. It wasn’t bombs. You could drop over the target to lighten the load. It was guns, armor and ammunition.

The difference was staggering. A standard fortress could climb to its bombing altitude of 20,000ft in about 25 minutes. The y b 40. It needed 48 minutes. It wallowed through the air, fighting for every foot of altitude. The control yoke felt heavy, like steering a truck through mud.

The test pilots who had flown it at Wright Field had warned them the center of gravity was dangerously far forward, with thousands of rounds of ammo stacked in the old radio room behind the old bomb bay. The plane was terribly unbalanced. It was nose heavy and sluggish on the controls. It didn’t want to turn. It didn’t want to climb. But the guns. My goodness, the firepower.

Hartwell and his crew checking their stations must have felt a surge of grim confidence. That new chin turret operated by the bombardier could tear a wolf to pieces before it even got in range. The two dorsal turrets, the twin waist guns, the tail. For the first time.

Every single angle of attack was covered by overlapping fields of fire. It was a porcupine of 50 caliber led. They finally had an answer. The engineers who designed this believed it was the solution. It’s exactly this kind of ingenuity, this relentless drive to try anything to protect the crews that we find so compelling. It’s the spirit of innovation under the most extreme pressure.

If you value these stories and want to help us keep them alive. A quick click on that subscribe button is the best way to do it. It tells us you’re here and it ensures you never miss a single story. The mission brief for May 29th was simple. The target the German U-boat pens at sans air on the coast of France. This was a critical target.

The wolf packs of U-boats sailing from this base were strangling Britain, sinking thousands of tons of shipping in the Atlantic. Taking out those concrete pens was a top priority, and because it was a priority, the Germans defended it with everything they had. The plan was for the 7YB 40s in the formation to be the protectors.

They were positioned in the coffin corners, the most vulnerable spots in the entire formation. They flew low. They flew in the trail element. They flew on the edges. All the places that German fighters loved to hunt. The YB 40s were the bait and they were the trap. At 1:25 p.m., Captain Hartwell started the engines. The four big right cyclone engines coughed to life one by one, roaring in the damp

English air. At 1:50 p.m., the control tower gave the green light. Hartwell pushed the throttles forward. Hedgehog lumbered down the runway, gathering speed, fighting its own weight. It lifted off, followed by 168 other B-17s climbing slowly into the sky. Target time was 4 p.m.. The massive formation, a river of aluminum in the sky, crossed the French coast at 3:30 p.m..

Almost immediately, the sky ahead filled with black puffs of smoke. Flak. The German 88 millimeter anti-aircraft guns on the coast were finding their range. The radio crackled to life with the voices of the fighter escorts. Achtung! Indiana bandits climbing. German fighters were scrambling from airfields near ran. The Gantlet was about to begin.

Hart s flight engineer. Technical Sergeant Paul Morrison, a 31 year old veteran with hundreds of hours maintaining B-17s, was already watching his gauges. He reported to Hart well over the intercom. Fuel consumption was tracking higher than they’d been briefed. The y b 40, with its immense weight, was burning far more gas just to stay in formation and climb to altitude.

This was a bad sign. At 4:02 p.m., Saturn there appeared through a break in the clouds. Bomb bay doors open. The call came from the lead bomber across the formation. The B-17s opened up and thousands of pounds of high explosives fell away, whistling down toward the concrete U-boat pens. And then the call bombs away.

Closed doors turning for home. This was the moment. The instant the bombs were gone, the entire formation changed. Each standard B-17 was suddenly 10,000 pounds lighter. They became more nimble. They accelerated, and they began to climb, gaining speed for the long run home. But Captain Hartwell and Hedgehog had no bombs to drop. He was just as heavy as he had been at takeoff.

 

He pushed his throttles to the firewall, demanding everything the engines had. It wasn’t enough. The standard B-17s, light and fast, pulled away 160mph. Hartwell, at maximum continuous power, could only get Hedgehog to 148. He was falling behind.

Sergeant Morrison, the flight engineer, scrambled down from the top turret, his face creased with worry. He checked the engine instrument panel again. It was just as he feared. The number three engine cylinder head temperature gauge was climbing deep into the red. The extra weight and drag were forcing the engines to work harder than they were ever designed for. They were overheating, threatening to seize or catch fire.

Morrison had no choice. He had to save the engine. He reached up and throttled back the number three. Hedgehog immediately slowed 142mph. The main formation was now three miles ahead. Then four Hartwell could see the other six wiBw 40s. Tiny specks in the distance. All of them lagging at the rear of their assigned groups.

The protectors had, in the span of five minutes, all become stragglers, and every man in that sky, American and German, knew what happened to stragglers. Bandits. 4:00 high. The call came from Staff Sergeant Frank Delaney in the Waste. He’d spotted them. Fokker Wolf, one 90s from youngest rider to the rigid Hoven wing, the elite. They were here and they were hunting.

Hartwell keyed the intercom, his voice comm. All gunners track targets. The chin turret gunner reported good visibility. The ball turret rotated smoothly, scanning the sky below. Both waist gunners confirmed their twin mounts were loaded and tracking the first 190 dove from 5:00 range 1200 yards. The tail gunner, Staff Sergeant Raymond Kozak, opened up at 800 yards.

Tracers from his twin 50s walked across the sky. The German pilot, perhaps stunned to see that volume of fire coming from a single bomber and from so far away, didn’t press his attack. He broke hard left and climbed away without firing a single shot. It worked. A surge of hope must have gone through the crew.

The second attack came almost immediately. 11:00 high. The classic deadly attack to fog. Wolf’s and trail formation. Diving straight for the cockpit. This was the why before. His entire reason for being the chin turret gunner laid his sights on the lead aircraft and squeeze the trigger. A four second burst of twin 50 caliber rounds ripped through the air.

The gunner watched his tracers stitch a line right across the one 90s engine cowling. Black smoke poured from the German fighter. It snapped, rolled inverted and plunged into a terminal dive toward the channel. From the waist position, Delaney confirmed it. That’s a kill. He’s not pulling out the second fake wolf.

Seeing his leader disintegrated, broke off his attack so hard his wings flexed. He ran for home for six minutes. The y B40 was everything the engineers had promised. It was a flying destroyer. Three more German fighters approached from different angles, and three more times seeing the hurricane of lead erupting from the hedgehog. They broke off early.

The overlapping fields of fire from 16 guns created a wall that no pilot, no matter how brave, wanted to fly through. But this victory was hollow. Hedgehog was still slowing down. The main formation was now a tiny cluster of specks six miles ahead. Then seven. Hartwell could barely see them against the afternoon sky. Morrison reported the fuel state. It was bad.

They had burned 800 gallons more than brief during the climb, and the combat at this power setting, they had 90 minutes of fuel left to reach out and bury the main formation. Lighter and faster would be on the ground. Crews drinking coffee in 70 minutes. They were going to be cutting it dangerously close. Then another pair of wolves appeared at 2:00.

These pilots were different. They weren’t rookies. They didn’t dive. They didn’t attack. They just circled. Staying just outside the YB 40 is effective gun range. They were like sharks circling a bleeding swimmer. They had figured it out. This heavily armed bomber couldn’t keep up. It couldn’t run. They didn’t need to attack it now. They could just wait.

Wait for it to fall farther behind. Wait for it to burn more fuel. Wait for the right moment to coordinate an all out attack from multiple vectors at once. Hartwell pushed the throttles forward again, trying to squeeze out every last ounce of speed. The number three engine temperature immediately climbed back into the red. Morrison watched the gauge, his hand on the throttle and said nothing.

The escort bomber, the $5.6 million flying destroyer, the plane with 16 guns, had become the one thing it was designed to protect. It had become the target. The attack came at 4:43 p.m.. It was coordinated, professional and deadly. Three Wolf’s at the same time from three different vectors high right, low left and one flown by.

A pilot with ice in his veins came straight in at 12:00 level. Hartwell couldn’t evade the why B40 with all that weight turned like a freight train. He just held steady and level all gunner’s fire. Hedgehog exploded. The entire aircraft shook violently from the combined recoil of eight heavy machine guns firing at once.

The chin turret tracked the frontal attack. The top turret swung right. The ball turret rotated left. Both waist gunners, with their twin mounts were firing through their opposite windows. The noise inside the fuselage must have been deafening. Spent brass 50 caliber shells hot and smoking, cascaded into the fuselage by the hundreds.

The lead wolf, the one at 12:00, flew straight into the chin turrets. Fire. Its canopy shattered. The fighter rolled violently to the right and fell away, trailing smoke, the high attacker seeing the fate of his comrade, broke off early, but the low attacker coming from the 7:00 position pressed his run. He got through the barrage and fired a two second burst. Thump thump thump.

20 millimeter cannon shells punched through hedgehogs. Right wing where? Hit. Where? Hit the waist! Gunner Delaney shouted over the intercom. Hydraulics! I see fluid spraying all over the window. One of the cannon rounds had severed a main hydraulic line. Delaney called out the damage. Right. Landing gear. Hydraulic system is out. We’ve lost all pressure. Heart wells. Heart sank.

If they made it back, they would have to manually crank the heavy landing gear down by hand if they made it back. Morrison, ever the professional, checked the fuel gauges again. 72 minutes to Alcan. Barry, the main formation was now eight miles ahead and pulling away.

They were completely, utterly alone over occupied France with German fighters circling around a damaged plane. Then a lifeline. The radio crackled. How, Barry. Straggler, this is 741. I fallen behind. Requesting to form up. It was another wiBw 40. Captain Richard Hayes, flying aircraft 425741. His gunship had also failed to keep pace to flying destroyers. Both crippled. Both separated, limping together. Hayes suggested they form up.

The combined defensive fire from 32 guns might be enough to keep the Germans at bay. Hartwell agreed. Hayes descended from 21,000ft to match hedgehog’s altitude at 19,500. The Wolves circled wider. Now four were visible, maybe six. They weren’t attacking two gunships flying in close formation, but they weren’t leaving either. They were just waiting.

At 5:07 p.m., Hartwell crossed the French coast outbound. The gray, cold, beautiful English Channel stretched out below them 53 miles to the English coast. 41 minutes of flying time at their current agonizingly slow ground speed. But Hedgehog was still in trouble. The number three engine was running hot. Morrison had pulled the power back twice already.

They couldn’t hold altitude. The plane was in a slow, forced descent, 19,000ft. 18,800, 18,600. Then Hayes radioed again. His voice was tight. Hartwell, I’m losing oil pressure on number two. It’s dropping fast. He had to throttle it back to prevent the engine from seizing completely. His.

Why be 40 now? Effectively, on three engines slowed even more. 138mph. Both aircraft were struggling. Both crews were watching their fuel gauges tick relentlessly toward empty. Both were praying the German fighters wouldn’t follow them over the water. Their prayers were not answered. At 5:22 p.m.. Two new bandits appeared. 6:00 high Messerschmitt 109.

They had followed the stragglers out over the channel, hungry for an easy kill. The tail gunners called out the intercept range 1000 yards. 800 and closing. The fighters drove their cannons opened fire at 800 yards. Hartwell was trapped. He couldn’t climb, he couldn’t accelerate, and he couldn’t turn hard enough to throw off their aim.

The Y B40, the ultimate protector, had become a flying target with empty sky all around the tail gunner. Staff Sergeant Raymond Kazak, a 24 year old former skeet shooting champion from Cleveland, fired first. He had never tracked targets moving this fast. The lead 109, close to 600 yards. Kazak walked his tracers across empty sky. The German pilot was good.

He jinked left, then right, then drove 20 degrees. His wingman followed. Both fighters opened fire at 400 yards. Cannon shells tore through hedgehog’s tail section. One round exploded inside the horizontal stabilizer. Another punched through the fuselage, just two feet behind Kazakhs position. The entire aircraft shuddered from the impacts.

Hartwell felt the controls go soft, like mush in his hands. He tried to adjust the trim. Nothing. Morrison, the engineer, climbed back to check the damage. The elevator cables, miraculously, were still intact, but the trim tab mechanism was jammed solid for the rest of the flight. However long that might be.

Hartwell would have to physically fight the control yoke, using pure muscle to keep the plane’s heavy nose from diving into the channel. The one oh Nine’s pulled up triumphant, backing around for another pass, but as they did, Captain Hayes’s y B40 opened up with its dorsal guns. The combined firepower from both gunships, 32 guns in total, filled the sky with tracers.

The German pilots, not expecting this, broke left and circled back to altitude. And then, at 5:31 p.m., a miracle for new contrails from the northeast. But these weren’t 100 nines. They were big, barrel chested and beautiful. Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, a long range escort flight returning from a sweep over Belgium, had heard the desperate radio calls about stragglers under attack.

The Thunderbolts dove on the Messerschmitt. The German pilots, seeing the American fighters, knew the game was up. They turned east and fled back to France. The P-47 didn’t pursue. They formed up on the two crippled y b 40s and waggled their wings. They were the escort home. The cavalry had arrived. Hartwell checked his fuel. 37 minutes remaining. 29 miles to landfall.

They would make it. Barely. But as he fought the heavy controls, a cold realization set in. The concept was broken. He could see it with perfect clarity now. The y B40 worked perfectly as a gun platform. 1650s could shred any fighter that got close. That chin turret had changed the game for frontal attacks. But the weight. The weight made it all useless.

As soon as the standard B-17s dropped their bombs, they became lighter, faster and climbed higher. The Y b 40, still carrying 11,000 rounds of ammunition and extra armor, was left behind. That 4000 extra pounds of protection was dragging them down, making them slow. Making them the target instead of the protector. At 5:47 p.m., Hayes radioed a final time.

My number two engine has seized. Oil pressure zero. Feathering the prop. His y b 40, now definitively on three engines descended through 15,000ft. Morrison ran the numbers. Hayes wasn’t going to make it back to Alcan. Bearing his fuel consumption on three engines was too high. He might not even make it to England. The English coast appeared at 5:53 p.m..

Hayes aimed for the very first airfield he could find, RAF Manston on the Kent Peninsula. He called the tower, declared an emergency and was cleared for an immediate landing. Hartwell watched his wingman drop away toward the emergency field. One gunship limping home on three engines. Hartwell. His own fight wasn’t over. At 6:18 p.m., Hedgehog was over.

Alcan bearing Hartwell gave the order. The crew in the waist began to frantically turn the heavy manual crank for the landing gear. Down in the nose, the bombardier cranked the nose wheel. It was a brutal, physical task with just 15 seconds to spare before touchdown. The green light blinked. Gear down and locked. Hartwell brought the heavy, damaged bomber in. It touched down safe.

Ground crews began to count the holes 16 20 millimeter cannon holes in the fuselage and wings. One severed hydraulic line, one jammed trim tab, one heavily damaged horizontal stabilizer. Colonel Reed was waiting for him on the hardstand. He wanted Hartwell assessment immediately. This was the first combat test of the flying destroyer. The weapon that was supposed to save the Eighth Air Force.

Hartwell shut down the engines. The sudden silence was a relief. He climbed out his flight suit, soaked with sweat. His arms aching and hands still shaking from fighting the controls for the last 90 minutes. He looked at his colonel, and he said the three words that would end the entire program, sir. It can’t keep up. Colonel Reed, needing to be sure, ordered seven more test missions.

He thought maybe the first test was an anomaly. Maybe different tactics would work. Maybe positioning the YB 40s in the lead of the formation would solve the speed problem. It didn’t. The second mission launched on June 15th. All four wiBw 40s fell behind after the bomb drop. The third mission June 22nd target the synthetic rubber plant at Hills 11 wiBw forty’s were dispatched. One was lost to a combination of flak and fighters.

The remaining ten struggled home landing hours after the main formation. Engineers at the maintenance depots tried everything. They adjusted the waste gun feeds. They changed ammunition. Loading. Trying to move the weight forward to fix the center of gravity. Nothing worked. The fundamental problem wasn’t mechanical. It was simple physics. The math was inescapable.

A B-17 f weighed 65,000 pounds at takeoff. After dropping its bombs, it weighed 48,000 pounds. The YB 40 weighed 68,000 pounds at takeoff and after a long running fight. It still weighed 64,000 pounds. It was always carrying 4,000 pounds of guns and ammunition that it could not get rid of. It was permanently a straggler on June 28th. 6YB 40s attack sent us air again.

They claimed one German fighter destroyed. All six fell behind the formation. On the return leg. One crew reported they had been all alone over France for 43 minutes. And alone meant vulnerable. The aircraft, designed to protect bombers, needed protection itself. The Eighth Air Force compiled the final statistics after nine combat missions. 48 sorties flown.

Five confirmed German fighter kills, two probables, one y YB 40 lost. And in every single mission, every single aircraft had fallen behind its formation. After the bomb drop, the average separation distance was seven miles. The average time spent alone over enemy territory was 38 minutes.

The Luftwaffe of fighter chief, the legendary Adolf Galland reviewed the intelligence reports from his pilots. The Germans had figured out the YB 40 almost immediately. They looked different. They had that extra turret. They had no bomb bay doors. They always flew in the most vulnerable positions.

And most importantly, after the bomb drop, they became stragglers. German fighter doctrine was simple focus. All attacks on the stragglers. Gallons assessment was brutal and precise. The y b 40 kills were insignificant. His pilots, he noted, would rather attack the flying destroyers than avoid them. They were easy targets. They were slow, heavy, and couldn’t run.

On July 28th, the last y b 40s flew their final combat missions. The target was the submarine yards at Kiel. Both aircraft fell behind. Both required fighter escort to reach England. Both landed at emergency airfields short of their home base. Low on fuel. After the last mission in late July, operations wound down with the aircraft retired by October 1943.

The surviving YB 40s were returned to the United States starting in late 1943. Most became gunnery trainers used to teach new gunners how to shoot. Four were stripped of their armor and guns and converted back into standard bombers. The concept died after just three months of combat testing. The Army Air Forces had spent approximately $400,000 per aircraft on the conversions. Total program costs were around $5 million in 1943.

Dollars for a weapon system that made bombers more vulnerable, not safer. One of the YB 40 aircraft, 425736, was so unceremoniously discarded that it ended up in a scrap yard seen in the 1946 Academy Award winning film. The Best Years of Our Lives. A forgotten failure rusting in a field. But the story doesn’t end there. Because in war and in life, failure is often the best teacher.

Back at right field, the engineers didn’t see a $5.6 million failure. They saw a $5.6 million worth of data. And as they studied the combat reports from Hartwell, Hays and the other crews, they noticed something. They noticed that while the plane was a failure, one part of it was a spectacular, unqualified success.

The Bendix chin turret, every single wiBw 40 that engaged German fighters from the front had stopped the attack. Cold Heart Wells crew had proven it. The turret worked. It solved the 12:00 high problem completely. That turret design was immediately taken from the YB 40 program and rushed to Boeing in September 1943. It entered full scale production.

Boeing designated it the Bendix Model A 250 caliber Browning Em two machine guns remote controlled by the Bombardier 300 rounds per gun. Douglas aircraft installed the new turret on the last 86 B-17 F models coming off their production line. These bombers deployed to England in October. Their crews called it the answer before the chin turret, German fighters attacked B-17 formations from dead ahead.

With horrifying success, the bombardiers position in the B-17 F only had two flexible cheek guns mounted on the sides of the nose. They had a limited field of fire and couldn’t aim straight ahead. This created a massive blind spot. Luftwaffe pilots would fly straight at the bombers, firing their 20 millimeter cannons right through this gap, killing the pilots and destroying the cockpit.

Fokker Wolf one 90s killed more B-17s with frontal attacks than by any other method. The chin turret eliminated that gap. It gave the B-17 a full clear field of fire dead ahead. The bombardier just tracked the attacking fighter through a simple gunsight. Press the firing button and sent a stream of 50 caliber rounds right into the closing fighter.

German pilots who had grown comfortable with these had on passes, suddenly found themselves flying into a buzzsaw. They couldn’t avoid the combat. Reports from November 1943 showed the immediate change. The 91st bomb Group flew the new turret equipped B-17s on a mission to Gelsenkirchen. They reported 12 frontal attacks. Ten of those attacks broke off early, the pilots diving away in panic.

The other two pressed through and took heavy hits. One Fog Wolf was confirmed destroyed. The number of bombers lost to frontal attacks on that mission. Zero. Boeing immediately incorporated the chin turret into its next and most famous production model, the B-17 gee. The first B-17, G rolled off the line in December 1943.

This G model became the definitive Flying Fortress. Boeing, Douglas and Vega planes all across America began building them. Production ramped up fast. By June 1944, they were building 230 B-17 G’s per month. In total, 8680 B-17 G’s were built before the war ended, and every single one of them carried the chin turret that was born from the failed Y B 40 program.

The difference it made was night and day. We often talk about the bravery of the crews, and rightfully so. But this piece of technology changed the very math of survival. The 303rd bomb Group transitioned to the B-17 G in February 1944. Their loss rate from frontal attacks dropped from 12% to 3%. The 379th bomb Group reported similar numbers from 11% down to 4%.

The 384th bomb Group tracked their data meticulously in the six months before they got the chin turret. They lost 43 bombers to frontal attacks in the 12 months after they got the chin turret. They lost only 14. The chin turret taken from the Y b 40.

Significantly reduced the effectiveness of frontal attacks, with bomb groups reporting loss rates from such attacks dropping from around 12% to 3 to 4% in individual units. By VE day, 1536 B-17 G’s were in combat simultaneously on any given mission day. The YB 40 program lasted three months, flew 48 sorties, and claimed five kills. It was a failure, but the chin turret from those 12 failed gunships flew on 8680 Flying Fortresses.

It protected crews on more than 290,000 combat sorties. The chin turret is credited with saving hundreds of bombers from being shut down by deterring frontal attacks. That is, thousands of crew members, thousands of sons, husbands and fathers who came home. And that still wasn’t all the YB 40 had. Two other secrets hidden in its design.

Lessons learned from its failure. The engineers studying the combat reports noticed that the YB 40 crews had fewer complaints about the waist gun positions on the standard B-17 F the two waist gunners stood directly across from each other in the fuselage. In the chaos of combat, with fighters attacking from both sides.

They were constantly in each other’s way. They would bump shoulders, get tangled, and block each other’s field of fire. Later production models of the B-17 G featured staggered waist gun positions, with one gunner positioned slightly forward of the other to provide more room and reduce interference during combat.

This allowed each man to move freely, swinging his gun through its full traverse, and fight without colliding with his crewmate. Boeing incorporated this staggered waist position directly into the B-17. G. The 94th bomb Group document the change before staggered positions. Their gunners average engagement time was 12 seconds before they interfered with each other.

After the change, it was 27 seconds of continuous, uninterrupted tracking. A simple change in geometry learned from a failure that more than doubled their combat effectiveness. The third and final improvement came from the tail. Sergeant Hartwell, Harwell’s, tail gunner on that first mission, had reported limited visibility.

The standard tail position had small windows and restricted his view, especially for fighters approaching from 6:00 low. So the Army Air Force contracted with the Cheyenne Modification Center in Wyoming to redesign the tail. The result was the Cheyenne tail. It had larger wraparound windows for much better visibility and improved gun mounting system and enhanced armor protection.

This too became standard on all late production B-17 GS three innovations the chin turret, the staggered waist guns, the Cheyenne tail. All three came from a program that was by every official metric, a complete and total failure. All three were incorporated into the B-17, G and all three saved lives on every single mission for the rest of the war.

Captain James Hartwell flew 16 more missions in standard B-17 F’s. He completed his 25 mission tour in October 1943. He had survived. He went home to Pennsylvania and he never flew a YB 40 again after that first harrowing mission to San Luis Air. But in December he returned to Canberra as a training officer.

By then, the first brand new B-17, GS were arriving at the base. Hartwell watched the new crews. The 19 year old pilots and 18 year old gunners walking around the new bombers. He saw them pointing at the new chin turret, asking how it worked, where it came from. Hartwell would tell them the story the story of the Hedgehog. The story of the flying destroyer that couldn’t keep up.

The gunship that became the target. The three month program that failed so badly was canceled before the summer even ended. And then he would show them the turret. He explained how the bombardier operated it. He demonstrated its field of fire. He walked them through the ammunition loading procedure. The crews listened carefully. They understood the piece of metal that would protect them.

The gun that would stop the 12:00 high attacks. It came from an aircraft that failed. An expensive mistake that cost $5.6 million. One young pilot asked Hartwell. Captain, was it worth it? Worth all that money? Worth the effort. Worth the risk to the crews who flew those 12 planes, knowing they’d fall behind.

Hartwell looked at the new B-17, G gleaming in the weak English sunlight. He thought about the frontal attacks. He thought about the fog. Wolfe’s diving through the formations. He thought about the bombardiers, who for the first time, finally had a weapon that could stop them. He thought about the 8680 bombers that would eventually carry that turret.

Worth it. He said, every mission, every dollar, every bullet hole and hedgehog’s fuselage. The why? Before he taught us how to fail forward. The last Y b 40 mission flew on July 29th, 1943. By August, the program was officially canceled. By November, all 12 surviving aircraft had returned to the United States. No y b 40 survived the war intact.

No museums preserved them. No restoration projects brought them back. The flying destroyer disappeared from history, a forgotten footnote, but its innovation, its soul, lived on. It lived on. And every B-17 g that flew over Europe. It lived on in every bomber crew that survived a frontal attack. It lived on in every pilot who made it to 25 missions.

Because of Wolfe, he broke off early. When those Chinn turret tracers found their target, the Eighth Air Force flew more than 290,000 combat sorties with B-17 G’s. The chin turret fired in anger on an estimated 114,000 of those missions. Conservative estimates, based on the 71% reduction in losses, suggest it directly prevented 2300 bombers from being shot down. That’s 23,000 crew members who came home.

Today, if you go to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, you can see a beautifully restored B-17, G. Her tail number is 4483514. Her name is shoo, shoo, shoo, Baby. The chin turret gleams under the museum lights. A small plaque next to it mentions that this turret was standard equipment on all G models.

The plaque doesn’t mention the Y B 40. It doesn’t explain where the turret came from. It doesn’t tell the story of 12 aircraft that failed so completely. Their program lasted only three months. History remembers the successes the B-17 g that helped win the air war. The Flying Fortress that became an icon.

The bomber that could take unbelievable damage and still bring its crew home. And history so often forgets the failures. The YB 40 that couldn’t keep up the $5.6 million mistake. The flying destroyer that needed protection instead of providing it. But those failures are precisely what teach the lessons that successes never can.

The Y B40 proved that a good idea, even when its poorly executed, can still contain good ideas. It proved that expensive mistakes can generate priceless innovations. That three months of combat testing can produce improvements that last for years and save a generation. The Boeing engineers didn’t see the Y. B40 as a failure. They saw it as research. They did what all good engineers do.

They took what worked and they fixed what didn’t. The chin turret worked, the extra weight didn’t. So they kept the turret and they dropped the weight. It was simple. It was effective and it was life saving. If this story of innovation born from failure moved you the way it moved us, please do us a favor and hit that like button and be sure to hit subscribe and turn on notifications.