Paul Barber (@yellow10)
I think you are spot on with your ideas of waiting until things feel right before you tackle the PE stuff. I remember watching Howard Hughes B&W movie from 1930 named "Hell's Angels" that had a similar looking zeppelin in it. The low hanging observation basket and the MG nests on top of the zeppelin made me think about that too... Plus the crew even volunteered to jump overboard through the bomb bay doors to save the airship when it began losing altitude. This was most likely a Hollywood adaptation.
Those men must have been exceptionally brave to man their post and return fire at attacking Allied fighters. Let's just say they had to have "big brass one's" and let it go at that ! It's not something that I would want to do either.
The closest thing I have ever came to doing something like this was during our tank gunnery training.
Just prior to going down range to qualify our tank using live 105 MM main gun ammunition, we regularly would mount a Browning M-2 "ma deuce" on the gun tube, just behind the bore evacuator. The M-2 was set so that it would only fire a single round when the butterfly trigger was depressed... and it was loaded with a belt of tracer rounds. So each time it was fired, the impact would be visible on the target.
There was a person needed to fire the M-2 when the fire command from the tank commander was given, and the gunner announced "On the Way !". At this very instant, who ever was supposed to fire the M-2 would depress the butterfly trigger.
This saved a lot of money on main gun ammunition.
But it also required that a person would sit on the searchlight mount, while straddling the main gun tube... in order to fire the M-2.
It was quite a rush to sit out there and fire the MG... especially when the tank was moving and the turret was swinging around. Once I made the mistake of looking down... and saw that I was directly in line with the tracks if I were to accidentally fall off... and we were travelling cross country at about 30 MPH.
Young, foolish and dumb... but boy what a ride ! I don't know if I would do that again... but back then I had a blast doing it and would regularly volunteer for the duty.
Maybe these young German gunners felt the same way... It's hard to tell.
