The Q-View

I am not going to pretend that serenely cruising over Pennsylvania countryside on a beautiful August day in the Nine-O-Nine was anything close to what a combat flight in a B-17 was like.

For us, there was no trepidation the bombs would explode before we even got off the ground. We did not fly eight hours in the body-numbing below-zero cold of high altitudes. There was no need for oxygen masks.

Nobody was trying to kill us as we neared the target. No flak. No Luftwaffe attacking from all angles.

No worries about being separated from the group and trying to limp home on one or two shot-up engines.

How did these men, whose positions we were touring, cope with knowing that they stood a 30% or more chance of not living until the end of the day? And, if they survived, doing it again the next day?

One station we could not get into was the ball turret which protected the bottom the plane. We sat ten feet from the hatch that the gunner entered to get into the turret. He hung outside the plane in the fetal position, separated from eternity by plexiglass, trying to ward off enemy fighters.

And if the electronics were so shot up that he could not get back into the plane for landing?

It happened.

Randall Jarrell summed up the horror of “The Ball Turret Gunner”:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.