Military Community, Marine Corps Community, military installations, discussions, blogs, photos, videos - Marine Corps Times

Today’s aerial gunners join mission dating to WWII

When he climbs into his HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter at Balad Air Base, Iraq, Staff Sgt. Daniel Sipel is following in a tradition as old as the Air Force.

Sipel is an aerial gunner.

“The reason I came into the Air Force was I always liked airplanes and always liked to fly,” said Sipel, 31, of Easton, Pa. “I talked to a couple of people and learned about the gunner field, which was then a special duty for weapons loaders.”

The aerial gunner’s job is now a separate career field. According to an official history of Air Training Command, 130,000 Americans became aerial gunners during World War II. Today, the Air Force has about 375 serving on HH-60Gs and fixed-wing gunships.

I’ve been interviewing aerial gunners for a book I’m writing. Today, it’s still possible to get personal accounts from the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Former Staff Sgt. Erwin B. Casebolt arrived over the Hawaiian islands from the mainland that morning aboard a B-17C Flying Fortress. Casebolt’s crew found the sky filled with Japanese warplanes.

“I was dumbstruck,” Casebolt said.

The dozen Flying Fortresses arriving that morning were carrying machine guns packed in Cosmoline, used to keep weapons from rusting. The bombers carried no ammunition.

Casebolt later had a chance to use guns, but at Pearl Harbor he had no opportunity to shoot at anyone. “My dream was to be in a fair fight,” he said. “It didn’t happen that day.”

Former Staff Sgt. William E. Kirby, tail gunner of a B-29 Superfortress during the Korean War, told me of shooting at a Soviet MiG-15 in the middle of the night high over North Korea in 1952. “I don’t know if I hit him,” said Kirby. “I might have scared him off, which achieved our purpose.”

During the latter years of the Vietnam War in December 1972, two tail gunners aboard B-52 Stratofortresses were credited with shooting down North Vietnamese MiG-21s. They join a long tradition of gunners who’ve fired on our enemies on the air and on the ground.

A 2003 Air Force news release about the service’s first female aerial gunner, Airman 1st Class Vanessa Dobos, said she had “little in common” with gunners from the past. But a photo of Dobos with a GAU-2 7.62mm mini-gun looks little different from a 1942 snapshot of Casebolt with his .50-caliber Browning M2 machine gun.

Used on land, at sea and in the air, the M2 entered service in 1919 and is the longest-serving U.S. weapon. According to lore, M2 ammunition belts were originally 27 feet long, prompting the expression “the whole nine yards.” Today’s GAU-18 is a modern variant of the M2.

Tech. Sgt. Jerrod H. Morse, 34, now on Okinawa, Japan, told me of a difficult mission as an aerial gunner in Afghanistan. He was aboard a helicopter that rolled on the ground.

“The engine was making a high-pitched whine because the rotor head was beating into the ground and the rotor blades were breaking apart,” Morse said.

Morse performed well in the middle of a war but said he drew more satisfaction from 2004 tsunami relief missions in Sri Lanka. As for being an aerial gunner, Morse said others might enjoy his largely overlooked career field.

“We don’t think there’s a better job out there,” Morse said.