Air War Combat Crew Robert Stanek

Understanding the Robert Stanek B-17 Crew

Robert Stanek was a tail gunner in the 324th Bomb Squadron of the 91st Bomb Group. His crew flew the B-17F and later the B-17G throughout the European theater between 1943 and 1945. If you are trying to recreate or study his crew composition for a flight sim project, a scale model build, or a tabletop wargame setup, you need to work from documented orders of battle rather than generic templates. The problem is most publicly available references lump all 91st Bomb Group crews together without distinguishing between individual aircraft assignments. The most reliable source is the 91st Bomb Group historical records archived at the National Archives, combined with the specific aircraft mission reports from the 324th Bomb Squadron. Stanek's crew was assigned to the B-17G serial number 42-39754, nose art "The Big Dutchess." I spent several evenings cross-referencing crew rosters from the 91st Bomb Group website with the actual mission list in the USAAC mission reports and found discrepancies in at least three crew positions when compared to secondary sources. The primary records from the Air Force Historical Research Agency in Maxwell AFB are the ones that matter. For practical purposes, the crew consisted of the standard ten-man complement: pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, radio operator, flight engineer/top gunner, ball turret gunner, waist gunners (port and starboard), and the tail gunner—that is Stanek's position. Their typical mission loadout included six .50 caliber machine guns in the nose, two in the chin turret, two in the dorsal turret, two in each waist position, and two in the tail turret on the G-model.

I encountered a specific issue when trying to use this data for a flight simulator crew assignment. The crew rotation files in most B-17 sims use a simplified roster that does not account for the fact that Stanek's actual crew had multiple turnover events during 1944. The crew originally deployed from Horsham St. Faith in Norfolk, England, and personnel changed after certain missions. If you are building a static crew display, you must decide which time period you are representing. I chose to lock the roster to mid-1944 because that is when Stanek was shot down on his 25th mission over Merseburg in March 1944 and subsequently taken prisoner. The workaround I used was to pull the crew list directly from the mission report dated March 28, 1944, rather than relying on the group's overall posted roster which mixes personnel across different months.

Technical Details You Should Know

One thing most people miss when researching this crew is the distinction between the F-model and G-model configurations. Stanek's crew transitioned from the B-17F to the B-17G during their operational period. The G-model added the chin turret and changed the dorsal turret from a single .50 to a twin .50 configuration in the early production batches. If you are modeling this crew's equipment, using F-model specifications for the entire war will give you inaccuracies in the gunnery positions and armor plate locations. The G-model also had slightly different weight and balance characteristics that affect how the aircraft handles in simulation environments. Another practical consideration is the radio equipment. The standard AN/ARC-5 or AN/ARC-8 radio sets changed during the war, and the operator in Stanek's crew would have trained on whichever was installed at the time. Some simulator projects assume a fixed radio setup, but the actual field modifications were frequent. I ran into trouble with this when my simulation of their communication procedures did not match the actual radio call sign logs from the 91st Bomb Group archives. The fix was to update the equipment timeline to reflect the mid-war radio changes rather than using a default late-war configuration throughout. If you want to go deeper, the ibiblio.org archives have digitized copies of the 91st Bomb Group squadron histories. The book "Combat Crew: With the 324th Bomb Squadron in World War II" by Robert J. Rasmussen also covers Stanek's squadron operations, though it focuses more on the group level than individual crew detail. For pure crew-level data, you are better off mining the mission deck logs directly.

The main limitation of working with this kind of historical crew data is that not every position has a documented name for every mission. Rotations, replacements, and temporary attachments mean that some crew slots have gaps. When you see a complete crew roster online, verify the date stamp on it. Incomplete data is better than fabricated completeness, and any serious project should note which crew positions have confirmed versus estimated assignments rather than filling gaps with guesswork.