[Simon Trew]

Thanks Nick, I'll look at that too.

Just by way of an update.

Of the 130 PW (excluding the Me 410 recce survivor):

22 were pilots.
30 were observers.
35 were wireless operators.
15 were Bordmechaniker (not a role identified for Ju 88 crew, therefore not possible to be a Ju 88 Bordmechaniker prisoner).
28 were air gunners (bearing in mind that He 177 had two, not one of these).

Of the 59 planes from which they originated:

32 were Ju 88.
13 were Ju 188.
8 were Do 217.
6 were He 177.

This is just the raw data. Much more analysis is needed to make any sense of this, and some of that is more than difficult. For example, one would need to know precisely how many sorties were carried out by each type of aircraft during 'Steinbock' in order to establish the ratio of PW survivors per type of aircraft per loss (Ju 88s were most common but some units switched plane types during Steinbock and lots of Ju 88s were switched to Italian operations in late January). I doubt that it is possible to establish that. And as noted above, the data for Bordmechaniker prisoners is rather affected by the fact that Ju 88s didn't have them (at least, insofar as British interrogators were concerned). And some Ju 88s were S-1s with only three, not four crew. And so on.

Still, a superficial glance suggests that since every plane had a pilot, observer and wireless operator, plus at least one air gunner, being a pilot was the 'least survivable' position to occupy in a stricken aircraft, whereas being a wireless operator was possibly an enhancement to survival chances. And since more than half of all aircraft from which survivors originated were Ju 88s, the proportion of Bordmechaniker who survived also seems (at least in relative terms) quite high. Wireless operators and air gunners seem to have been somewhere in-between, and since He 177 had two of these I'd be inclined to guess that it was marginally better to be a wireless operator than an air gunner.