On the heavy bombers the role of the crew members was symbiotic. The pilot needed the flight engineer to fly; the navigator got the plane to the target, and it was the bomb aimer that delivered the ordinance.
Wartime films give the impression of the bomb aimer's job being simply to look through the bombsight and press the button to release the bombs at the right time. In actual fact, their job is much more sophisticated. They aided the navigator, took readings to be dialled into their computer connected bomb sight, and often they might also be expected to man a machine gun in the plane's nose.
In this episode I’m joined by Colin Pateman. If you recall in episode 76 I talked to Colin about Flight Engineers. Well, he’s been busy since then and has just completed a new book Aiming for Accuracy which focuses on bomb aimers in the RAF.
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68 Go Betweens for Hitler
67 - Luftwaffe Night Fighter ‘Ace’, Wolfgang Thimmig
66 - Northrop P-61 Black Widow
65 Lt Col William Edwin Dyess
64 - The Early Guadalcanal-Solomons Campaign 1942
Strafbattalion: Hitler's Penal Battalions
Betrayed: The Buchenwald Airmen
61 - RAF Liberators Over Burma
60 Alarmstart: German Fighter Pilots in Europe
59 - Case Red: The Collapse of France
58 Lost Warriors: Seagrim and Pagani of Burma
57 - The 110th Holds In The Ardennes, 1944
56 - Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion.
Darkest Hour
55 - The Flemish Waffen SS
54 - The Bataan Death March
53 - Her Finest Hour: Diana Rowden, SOE Agent
52 Shadow Over the Atlantic
51 The German Airborne Threat to Britain & the Psychological Impact
50 - Operation Tonga
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