Stand to Your Glasses Steady

The first day of class we discussed which format provided the best backdrop in which to tell the experiences of war using a B-17 Ball Turret Gunner as an example. We used a Wikipedia entry, the short poem “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell, and a short clip from the Ken Burn documentary “The War” which featured an interview with a veteran of a ball turret. The purpose of the lesson was to understand how different media can be used to illustrate the same point.

Of the examples given, I found the interview with the veteran told the most poignant story because this was a man who had been there and experienced it himself. The wikipedia article, on the other hand, was relatively useless (no surprise there really) because it dealt only with the technical workings of the turret itself. The poem I would class somewhere in between because although the author (Jarrell) had enlisted in the Army Air Corps during WWII, he served stateside as a control tower operator.

Even more poignant to me, however, are the two ball turret gunners I have had the pleasure of speaking to myself. One served on a B-24 “Liberator” in the Pacific and the other on a B-17 “Flying Fortress” in Europe. While Burns’ snippet’s of interview were good, it was still only pieces of the whole story. There is nothing that can compare to speaking with a person face to face while they reminisce about everything from their down time and the “flack farms” to the sheer hell they experienced hanging 5 miles above Germany with nothing but a piece of plexiglass and metal between them and a German 109 (fighter plane).

Jarrell’s poem does provide the striking mental image of having to wash a dead gunner out with a hose because there was so little left, but even that doesn’t compare with a story and photograph I came across in writing a paper for my class on WWII. For me, the imagery was nearly as poignant as actually speaking to a person. I forget the exactly details now, because the book isn’t sitting in front of me, but it can be found in its entirety in Masters of the Air by Donald Miller.

The story was of a bomber that had been damaged over Germany. The ball turret was stuck in firing position and could not be moved to allow the gunner out. The landing gear had also been damaged and wouldn’t go down. The only option for landing was to set the plane down directly on its belly and pray for the best. Hanging underneath, the unmoveable ball turret would be the first thing to hit the ground followed by another 40,000 lbs worth of plane:

Although this is not the same image, it gives a person a good idea of what happens to the ball turret of a plane that lands without landing gear. Now imagine what happens to a person in there at the time… Not to mention the remaining crew members, helpless to rescue their buddy who’s only feet away yet still in radio contact with him as he’s about to die…