He completed the design in 1918, and it entered service in 1921 as the water-cooled Model 1921 WC. Browning scaled-up the M1917’s design to chamber the new cartridge. cartridge to produce the 12.7x99 mm-known today as. Pershing requested the development of a larger-caliber gun, and Frankford Arsenal quickly scaled-up the. Its short-recoil-operated, belt-fed design was a success on the battlefield, albeit only during the closing weeks of World War I. The B-32s that flew that mission were armed with 10 AN/M2. 18, 1945, mission to photograph the Tokyo Bay area, is shown below. A Consolidated B-32 Dominator, like those of the 386th Bombardment Squadron that flew the Aug. He was the last American to be killed as a result of enemy action during World War II.Ī side-by-side view shows the differences in size of the AN/M2. One B-32 suffered multiple hits that damaged the aircraft and fatally wounded 20-year-old Sgt. Through 10 separate firing passes, the Japanese fighters strafed the big American bombers, which fought back with their AN/M2s, firing more than 4,000 rounds of.

It mounted Sperry A-17 turrets in the nose and tail, a pair of Martin A-3F-A dorsal turrets aft of the cockpit and a single Sperry A-13-A ball turret in the ventral position. During the two-hour-long aerial engagement, gunners aboard both American bombers fought off their antagonists with heavy volumes of effective machine gun fire the B-32 was a particularly well-armed aircraft.

At first, the B-32s drew “heavy and inaccurate” anti-aircraft fire as they passed over the airfield at Miyakawa, but, shortly thereafter, they were intercepted by 17 Japanese fighters. Technically the war had ended three days earlier, so the mission was supposed to be routine-until the Japanese attacked. At 05:43 hours, a pair of B-32s took off from Yontan Airfield, Okinawa, to photograph various locations around Tokyo Bay.

Handheld 50 cal machine gun