The Ju 88 did have a dorsal gun, but it was essentially a pod fixed to the bottom of the fuselage. The operator would be at risk of being killed in a belly landing with undeployed gear.

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The more common rumor of this nature actually comes from the B-17. The ball turret on the bottom can only be entered and exited from a door in a fixed position, so you needed to rotate the turret so the guns were pointed straight down to line up with the hatch into the plane interior. If the turret was to become jammed and the plane's gear unable to be lowered for landing due to damage, there would be no real way to land without killing the gunner.

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There's one known incident from Andy Rooney, who served as a war correspondent:

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The Eighth Air Force had a disastrous day when it bombed Regensburg deep inside Germany, and I was at a base waiting to interview some of the fliers when they came back.

It was the custom for concerned ground crews and flight crews that hadn’t been assigned to go out that day to gather in front of the control tower shortly before the bombers’ ETA.

All of us on the ground that day were relieved as specks appeared in the sky over the Channel. As the specks grew to dots and the dots grew to spots, radio reports started coming through and it became certain the ordeal wasn’t over. There were dead and dying men on board half a dozen of the group’s bombers. There was a frantic call from one radio operator. The ball-turret gunner was trapped in the plastic bubble hanging beneath the B-17. The gears that rotated the ball to put the gunner in position to shoot and then returned him to the position that enabled him to climb out and back up into the aircraft had been hit and were jammed. The ball-turret gunner was caught in a plastic cage.

Two of the engines of the B-17 were stopped, about 3,000 pounds of dead weight hanging from the wings. The plane was losing altitude fast and flying at barely 135 miles an hour, close to stall-out speed. The pilot ordered the crew to unload everything on board.

“Everything!” he yelled in a command that reached the control tower over the radioman’s open microphone. The crew started pitching out machine guns, .50-caliber ammunition tracks, oxygen tanks, and every instrument they could tear loose in an attempt to lighten the load and keep the foundering plane in the air.

The hydraulic system was spewing fluid where the tubing that conveyed it was shot full of holes. The gas tanks were leaking. Nothing worked. The wheels, folded up into the bomber, could not be brought down without its hydraulic system and a belly landing was inevitable.

There were eight minutes of gut-wrenching talk among the tower, the pilot, and the man trapped in the ball turret. He knew what comes down first when there are no wheels. We all watched in horror as it happened. We watched as this man’s life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber.

I returned to London that night, shaken and unable to write the most dramatic, the most gruesome, the most heart-wrenching story I had ever witnessed. Some reporter.