They Laughed at His ‘Crazy’ Mirror Rig — Until It Tripled B-17 Tail Gun Accuracy

Описание: He was never supposed to survive.
By late 1943, B-17 tail gunners had less than an 8% chance of hitting incoming fighters—and almost no chance of surviving all 25 missions. German pilots attacked from dead astern, tearing apart America’s “Flying Fortresses” with deadly 20mm cannon fire. On October 14, during the disastrous second Schweinfurt raid, 60 bombers were lost in a single day.

But one 22-year-old factory worker from Pittsburgh, Staff Sergeant Michael Romano, refused to accept the failures that were killing his friends.

Cramped inside a freezing tail compartment at 25,000 feet, Romano battled with outdated iron sights that gave him tunnel vision and no feedback. Mission after mission, he fired hundreds of rounds with zero confirmed kills—until a simple moment of frustration sparked a revolutionary idea.

Using mirrors salvaged from wrecked aircraft, a reflector sight from a crashed P-47, and aluminum scraps, Romano secretly built an illegal, improvised aiming system that let him track both the enemy and his own tracer stream in real time. Regulations banned such modifications, but Romano installed it anyway.

On the very next mission, his invention proved itself: he shot down a Bf 109 with precision rarely seen from a tail gunner—using fewer rounds than ever.

What began as a forbidden field modification would eventually influence official tail-turret design, dramatically increase B-17 survivability, and help thousands of airmen make it home alive.

This is the untold story of the kid who broke the rules…
and changed the air war forever.