Bullets and Poetry in the Desert

War teaches many lessons. Are we wise enough to discern the ones worth remembering?

A Trip to the Palm Springs Air Museum

Since moving to the San Bernardino Mountains in February of 2020, my husband and I revel in the strange power our location affords us to change seasons within 45 minutes. Last week, we decided to make a short drive to escape the snow. The Palm Springs Air Museum was my idea. My husband lives and breaths all things mechanical, me not so much, but I find airplanes interesting enough. Off we went.

The PSAM website advertises itself as

a living history museum dedicated to educating the public about the role Air Power played in preserving American liberties and way of life. The Museum preserves, exhibits, and flies aircraft from World War Two, Korea, and the Vietnam Wars. Most of the aircraft are in flyable condition.

In the WWII hangar, many of the most famed airplanes of the era were on display: the Grumman F4F Wildcat, the North American B-25 Mitchell Bomber, the Douglas SBD Dauntless, and most eye-catching for me, the Curtis P40 Warhawk with its toothy shark grin, and the Grumman Avenger with its foldable wings. (My husband explained that the folding feature made it possible to stow Avengers on aircraft carriers.)

Bullets and Poetry

Amid the exposed engines, turbines, and machine parts in that enormous space, I could not bring myself to feel more than mildly interested. Then something remarkable happened.

I came upon “Miss Angela,” the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, and stood for several moments, transfixed by the sight of the 1,200-pound ball turret on her underside. In a Proustian moment of remembrance, I drifted back to a poetry class in my freshman year of college, where I listened to the professor read Randall Jarrell’s “ultimate poem of war” (Robert Weisberg):

The Death 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.

I had no idea that the unknown gunner’s voice speaking after his death would make such a lasting impression on me.

When he joined the Air Force during WWII, Jarrell was an established poet and academic, but his time as a trainer in the Air Force ripened latent poetic instincts that profoundly influenced his aesthetic. As Hayden Caruth observed, “When the war came he already possessed a developed poetic vocabulary and a mastery of forms. Under the shock of war his mannerisms fell away. He began to write with stark, compressed lucidity.”

It is, perhaps, that lucidity that stuck with me. The metaphorical imagery of the poem relies on the location of the ball turret, in which the gunner would literally need to assume a fetal position. The poem thus describes a kind of gestation followed closely, in the words of Jonathan Galassi, by a “gorgeously terrible description” of the gunner’s gruesome death.

Carried by the pathos of the poem’s imagery juxtaposed with the fact of the matter at the museum, I was motivated to learn more about the ball turret feature of B-17s. Whose brainchild was this suicide pit of a contraption? I imagined learning the name of the manufacturer (Sperry Corporation, as it turns out) while sucking my teeth with disgust at war profiteering’s callous disregard for life. And so on.

A Flying Fortress With Little Armor

What I learned about B-17 bombers surprised me, though it should not have. As it turns out, all ten members of a WWII heavy bomber crew, who were just 21 years old on average, were on a suicide mission each time the plane took to the sky. As the speaker explains in a Planes of Fame video on the B-17, the shell of the “Flying Fortress” was thin and poorly armored. The average cruising altitude was 27,000 to 32,000 feet, so temperatures were well below freezing. Men could don a wearable electric blanket called a “bunny suit” to stay warm. Soldiers also used free-standing oxygen tanks to ward off hypoxia.

In a word, the comfort level during bombing missions was low. In addition to the fear that loomed ever-present, heavy bombers were freezing, deafening, and suffocating.

Of all combat stations, the ball turret is the most likely to inspire awe because of its apparent vulnerability. But the ball turret gunner position was not the most dangerous, statistically speaking. The gunner was protected almost entirely by metal armor encasing the turret, and was, for this reason, the least likely member of the crew to be wounded. On the other hand, the turret was too small for the average man to wear a parachute. If the plane went down, the gunner was the most likely to die.

People assume that ball turret gunners had to be small, but at least one expert, Taigh Ramey, founder of Stockton Field Aviation Museum, disagrees.

“There are a few myths about the ball turret, one of which is you had to be a teeny person to get in there. Not true. You sit kind of in a fetal position. Your legs are up and you actually site through circular glass between your legs…it’s actually very comfortable.”

Ramey should know. Several years ago, his museum acquired an actual ball turret and restored it to working condition. The museum also owns a B-17 and B-24 and will take paid visitors on a simulated bombing mission. His museum is open year-round, but its yearly summer offering of “Bomber Camp” is where the story of ball turrets, warplanes, and nostalgia for WWII get interesting.

Bomber Camp, an opportunity to “Live Your Dream”

The Stockton Field Aviation Museum, which hosts Bomber Camp once yearly during the summer, grew from Ramey’s vision to provide an immersive experience as a WWII heavy bomber crew member. On the landing page of Bomber Camp website, his passion for the enterprise is palpable. The program promises to deliver a WWII adventure in which participants “step back in time to train for a bombing mission and then to fly it, for real.”

One of the “propaganda reels” (“Let Freedom Ring”) gives a concise overview of what participants can expect for the $3,400 price tag affixed to a complete, day-long adventure. Following ground training, soldiers-for-a-day take to the sky in a B-17 or B-24, where they experience “the sights, the sounds, and the smell of battle…dropping bombs, manning crew stations, firing machine guns, and relying on ground training to achieve a successful mission with your fellow crew members.” In this way, each person is promised to become “a part of living history, working with your crew to put your bombs on the target.”

Dream or misguided curiosity?

Cradle of Aviation Museum Historian and Curator Josh Stoff interviewed Taigh Ramey for a YouTube piece on the ball turret. At the close of the article accompanying the video, Stoff muses on Ramey’s project: “Of course,” he reflects, “this also begs the question of why anybody would need a fully operational Ball Turret.”

A good question, which brings to mind the scene in Jurassic Park featuring Dr. Ian Malcolm, an expert who has been invited to Jurassic Park by its creator John Hammond. Hammond hopes to receive validation for his reanimation of dinosaurs, but Malcolm cannot provide it.

Dr. Ian Malcolm: I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it…

John Hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before…

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

My mental model for the ball turret gunner disinclines me to accept Ramey’s, Bomber Camp challenge, but I can speculate on the motivations of those who do, eagerly and repeatedly. (Bomber Camp mentions that return visitors are common.)

A deeper hunger for magnificence and nobility

Weapons are metaphors for personality factors and experiences our culture applauds and worships. In the hands of comic book superheroes, good-guy rogue cops, or war heroes, we suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment and buy into the power of bullets and bombs to provide a shortcut to safety, power, triumph, honor, and renown.

Like millions of viewers, I sat on the edge of my seat as I watched Steven Spielberg’s depiction of U.S. soldiers storming the beach at Normandy on D-Day. I cringed to see bullets cut through the water to kill soldiers hoping to find some cover there. I abhor guns and war, yet felt taken into the pathos and magnificence of the scene in which Captain Miller, school teacher-turned-soldier, is filmed in slow motion to cinematically reveal his shock. He pauses on the beach in a moment of utter bewilderment and trauma at the carnage that surrounds him. Using war as a metaphor, the scene depicts duty, nobility, bravery, and sacrifice.

War as an extreme sport

However worthy and essential U.S. involvement in World War II was to help preserve “the arc of the moral universe,” our role in that conflict ended over 75 years ago. Ramey’s stated intention to honor “the men and women of the ‘greatest generation’” is clear, but Bomber Camp muddles metaphor with steel by interpreting the “theater of war” too literally.

Reanimating the intensity of decisive action and deadly force minus all traces of feelings that such missions inspired — the terror, drudgery, and despair that soldiers felt “for real” — does not honor those who suffered and died in fact. Far from inspiring appropriately solemn gratitude, Bomber Camp reframes war as an extreme sport, concealing its brutal reality for what it is, an ugly and disgusting necessity.

Parting thoughts

In researching this article, I learned that “Death of the Ball Turrett Gunner” is an example of War Poetry. British poet Vernan Scannell observes that while the dominant ethos of the genre was condemnatory, some poets focused on the silver lining:

Many [war poets] find something [in war] to celebrate or affirm, if it is only the intensity of response to emotional situations which, in time of peace, would have been taken for granted and whose poignancy scarcely felt, the anguish of farewell and separation, and the ecstasy of brief reunion with ones beloved, the enrichment of love and of life itself by the proximity of danger and possible — even probable — death, the value of courage and the consolations of comradeship, the unifying power of shared ordeals.

Scannell is on point for what is worth learning and remembering about war. His thoughts verbalize a legacy of war that we can pass on to our children.

When my own son was just a few months old, I declared that he would never have toy weapons or play war games. My friend, herself a mother of three children, nodded thoughtfully, but a look passed across her face ever so briefly, like disappearing ink. It said good luck with that.

A few years later, mothers of boys in my son’s playgroup lamented that keeping the interest in weaponry at bay was daunting. One mother had put her foot down and banished all toy guns that had wormed their way into the house. Then one morning, feeling satisfied with the purge, she noticed her 4-year-old son idly biting his toast into the shape of a handgun.

Children readily absorb the symbolism of weapons in our cultural psyche and are drawn to it, just as we are. Let’s make sure that we are ready to help them interpret what they sense, to help them learn the most worthwhile lessons from war, and to prepare them to seek out a more peaceful future.

If we could reanimate the ball turret gunner, with his memories intact, would he be interested in “enlisting” in Bomber Camp?

Thank you for reading. I hope you found the article worthwhile. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, especially if you are a veteran.