MPN11 (your #84),
...perhaps you missed the Balbos?...
Frankly, yes. All the sorties I flew on 110 were lone sixes, except for the very first (Akyab Jail), where they put six of 82 and six of 110 together, all going to the same place (but as two boxes of six a mile apart - if we had been jumped by 'Oscars', each box would fight its own battle, as it were). All 8 Sqdn trips I flew were just six at a time. Don't think they ever put 12 up.
...Plt Off or Fg Off manning the solitary tail gun? As you noted previously, their utility was limited: so why put officers in charge of a solitary 0.5? Were they doubling up as Navigators, to complement the pilots' implicit skills??...
The make-up of the RAF VV crews was an
ad hoc affair dictated by circumstances (cf p.129 #2571 on "Pilot's Brevet"). We pilots had to work with what was there: the ex-Blenheim back-seat men who'd come out in '42 (I don't think there was ever another Nav, Wop/Ag or Ag posted in). The pilots were a mixture of the old Blenheim men who were left in India when the junior ones had gone back to ME with the Blenheims, plus an infusion of brand-new Hurricane and Spitfire pilots, fresh from OTU and green as they come (inc yours truly).
The 0.50 Browning was peculiar to the Mark IV, and we didn't have any of those. All earlier Marks like ours had a twin 0.303 installation and it was pot-luck who came with them - officer or NCO, Nav or Gunner. I was lucky - a Wop/Ag chose
me as his pilot ! (Navs were under a bit of a cloud [cf p.132 #2630] - Peter C. Smith tells me this one was KIA later on - so
de mortuis nil nisi bonum).
It was all a bit complicated !
Danny.