Word: gunners
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...Besides the cook there was a kid from Texas-he was only 18-who died from salt water. They would foam at the mouth, a kind of cream-colored foam, and their tongues would curl, and swell up in their mouths and their lips turn inside out. A gunner's mate died from injuries. Four others died of thirst: they just went out of their heads-they didn't drink salt water...
...example - Technical Sergeant Edwin N. Rees. Not so long ago he was "the best office boy we ever had" (the U. S. at War Editor speaking). Now he is a rear gunner-and somewhere in Britain this week he wears a just-won Distinguished Flying Cross awarded for "extraordinary heroism" in bombing missions over Germany...
...central figure of the story; as Lawson, Van Johnson proves that in addition to having a deceptively easy manner, this gentleman can really act. Phyllis Thaxter, a relatively new lady of the screen, delivers a genuinely convincing performance in the part of Lawson's young wife. Lawson's tail-gunner, Robert Walker, again portrays Robert Walker and again well...
Control of the B-29's guns can be interchanged, passed around from gunner to gunner like a basketball and with split-second speed. Thirty different combinations of guns can be aimed and fired from different sighting stations. A gunner lets go control of his guns by simply dropping the firing switch. Another gunner can instantly pick up secondary control and bring his own and his colleague's guns to bear on a target...
Other advantages of the remote-control system, developed by General Electric and Air Forces experts: turrets need be only large enough to house gun mounts, thus reducing the speed-killing drag which would be set up by turrets big enough to accommodate both guns and gunner; the job of aiming by hand in a rushing slipstream is taken over by powerful machinery ; the gunner can be warm and comfortable at his work inside the B-29's cabin, insulated from the shock and noise of his rattling armament...