Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

lastcathar
Mar 1, 2015
2 min read

The beat poet Randall Jarrell fought a war all his life with technology. Jarrell felt that what we call progress, the rise of mechanical power, technical abilities and military mobility, was in fact empowering the animal side of our species while ignoring the moral, the humane side of what it means to be human.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

by Randall Jarrell

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.

Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is perhaps Jarrell’s most well-known poem. Written in 1945, the poem uses only five short, rather harsh lines to tell its tale. Today, the significance of those lines is lost on a generation that does not catch some of his references. These were understood in 1945, but need some explanation today.

The B-17 "Flying Fortress" bomber was tiny by B-52 standards, and slow, an easy target for fighter planes and anti-aircraft flak. The plane had machine gun positions all around for self-defense, mostly manned by airmen dressed in heavy fur-lined flight suits in the wet, high altitude cold.

On its underside, for defense against attack from below, a Sperry ball turret held a gunner strapped in an awkward, hunched, semi-fetal position between a pair of .50-caliber machine guns. The turret could swivel and turn freely to allow the gunner to track a target. The ball turret was the worst post in the flight crew, uncomfortable, isolated, and disorienting.

Jarrell saw in this position a symbol of mankind stripped of humanity, reduced to an animal unborn, trapped within a machine, suffering, dreamless, and ultimately meaningless, soon to be washed out with a hose.

Jarrell’s final act of poetry was wordless. He committed suicide in 1965 by throwing himself in front of oncoming traffic. One could say he stood against the machine to his dying day.