#VeteranOfTheDay Army Air Corps Veteran Darrell Johnson - VA News

SPC Bill Bailey - The 91st BG's B-17G "Lucky Gal" after bellying in with the wounded ball turret gunner trapped inside his badly damaged turret.

MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. - He's lucky the left main gear is still down, had it not been, well ............ The ball would have either been crushed, ripped off or ground down, none of which would have made for a happy ending for the gunner.

SPC Bill Bailey - Those planes took a pounding and kept flying. A high school buddy of my Dad was a gunner in them and had some really scary stories of flights. He suffered real bad PTSD from his time in the air.

Maj Wayne Crist - The things they saw & did would give most men PTSD. Things not even an infantryman would see. An infantryman would go into combat several times in WW 2 for a period of time then get a break, rotate out to the rear for recovery and get new guys and equipment for a few weeks. A bomber crewman would do it several times in each flight for hours on end at times, then repeat it 2 or 3 times each week until he either finished his tour, got out on a medical, got shot down or got killed. Bomber crewmen had some of the worst combat conditions of the war with some of the highest casualties. Watching the friends you just had breakfast with in the plane next to you vanish in a fireball, 10 men, gone in a flash, or watching some poor guy that bailed out go through a prop and come out a bloody mist and chunks. They saw this and more on almost every mission, I wouldn't be surprised if most if not all of them didn't have PTSD.