Answering Nature's Call during Battle: Cod’s Urine Relief Tube

[SoonerP226]

Years ago, I read a memoir called The Lucky Bastard Club: A B17 Pilot in Training and in Combat, 1943-45 by Eugene Fletcher. Among the stories he related included tales about his first trainer, a Stearman biplane. For the student pilot to communicate with the instructor pilot, they had a device called a gosport, which was basically a hose with a funnel on each end. One man would hold the funnel on his end up to his face and yell into it while the other held his end up to his ear.

When they moved up to the next trainer (I forget if it was multi-engine or just had an enclosed cockpit), they had electronic headphones and mics for communications, but they still had what appeared to be a gosport. Fletcher couldn't figure out why they had a gosport in a plane with electronic communications equipment, but he didn't think much about it until one day when he and one of his buddies got done with their flying for the day. They both landed around the same time, so Fletcher waited for him, but he didn't show and didn't show and didn't show. Finally, the guy showed up, very green around the gills, and told him what'd happened. He'd tried to use the gosport, which involved holding the funnel up against his face, only to learn that it wasn't a gosport.

It was a relief tube.

Yeah, he'd just spent the last half hour puking his guts out over that mistake.

 

[Duncandl]

We had a “Sound-powered phone” on the H-3 for communicating to the ground crew…well, at least during Air Shows.

The son of the Skipper of the USS Blue Ridge may have fell victim to some ornery-arse Sailors back in the Mid-80’s.

 

[cowadle]

my uncle was a flight engineer on a B17. he said that any time the relief tube was used it was logged. he always laughed at a story where a woman ferry pilot was delivering a B17 and when she landed the crew noticed the tube had been logged..... he said he always wondered just how that all went.

 

[SoonerP226]

my uncle was a flight engineer on a B17. he said that any time the relief tube was used it was logged. he always laughed at a story where a woman ferry pilot was delivering a B17 and when she landed the crew noticed the tube had been logged..... he said he always wondered just how that all went.

In Martin Caidin's book Flying Forts, he reported that the British had problems with the early B-17's bomb bay doors not opening over the target. They'd work fine on the ground before and after the missions, and they were having a hell of a time figuring out what was going wrong until the Americans sent an engineer on a flight with them.

It turns out that the British crewmen were relieving themselves into the bomb bay as the bomber was climbing, and the urine was freezing at altitude, which was just enough to freeze the bomb bay doors closed. Once they broke them of that habit, the problem disappeared.

A friend of mine knew a B-17 navigator, and he said the guy told him that they would pee into plastic bottles. When they got to altitude, the urine would freeze solid and they'd toss the bottles overboard over Germany. He said he always wondered if those "p*ss bombs" melted before impact and if they ever hit anyone.