Testing the Top Turret Interrupter

Today I turned to the last page of the September 2003 Marauder Thunder. There I learned more than I ever knew about "The 250 Deck Turret". Interesting!

A Bit of background - I reported to the US Army Air Force Representative's office at the Glenn L. Martin plant, Middle River, Md., in August of 1941, as a brand new 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve. (I was non-rated). I left in March 1943 for flight training. My administrative duties were light and I could usually "get away" if my room mate or any of the other Army Air Force Acceptance pilots had an interesting flight coming up. The pilots also handled the original French light bomber (conventional gear) which would eventually be given the US designation of A-30. Martin's designated range for testing bomb dropping and live firing of guns was over the Atlantic Ocean, east of Rehoboth Beach, Del. (Guns could only be fired to the east, of course.) I was on a number of missions to the test range. On other flights I had the opportunity to operate the unloaded deck turret.

On 15 June 1942 I was in the right seat on a mission to check out the new interrupter for the deck turret. The third member of our crew was the Martin engineer who had designed and tested the new interrupter in the "butts" on the ground at Martin's. Over the Atlantic Ocean, we turned west and the engineer fired a burst while sweeping across the stabilizer. The result was seven holes in the stabilizer and terrible shuddering of the B-26. It was all the two of us in the cockpit could do to keep us on a straight course into the west wind. After we had preceded west over land a bit, the pilot ordered us to the rear and to jump out the bomb bay. He hit the jettison button and the extra fuel tank and any thing else in the bomb bay dropped. I stepped out. The engineer demurred and the bomb bay doors slammed shut. The stabilizer snapped off then or shortly after and the plane went into a flat spin. The pilot dropped the landing gear and both men succeeded in exiting through the wheel well before the plane crashed into a woods in Maryland. The vertical stabilizer was found in an open field, also in Maryland. We were the first crew of a B26 to successfully exit a B-26 in trouble. This was just shortly after Martin's Chief Test Pilot and co-pilot at the Omaha plant had been killed attempting an exit out of the top of the cockpit.

The tale of another B-26 that shot off its tail during turret testing was news to me. I served in the HQ of Air Research and Development Command in Baltimore and At Andrews AFB in the 1950,'s. I would have thought that I would have heard of another B-26 shooting its tail off in testing. From my experience, I have difficulty in accepting that a tailless B-26 would permit its crew to safely exit and "continued to fly serenely" a hundred or so miles East and out into the Atlantic Ocean.