Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (1945)

Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was born in Nashville, Tennessee. He earned his BA and MA at Vanderbilt University and taught at Kenyon College. In 1939, he went to teach at the University of Texas. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942 and served in World War II. He trained as a flying cadet but did not qualify as a pilot; instead, he worked as a celestial navigation tower operator and trainer, spending most of the war in Tucson, Arizona. After the war, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Jarrell’s fame and influence as a deft and acerbic literary critic is as great as his reputation as a poet.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is from Jarrell’s first book, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945). It was inspired by his service in the war and is perhaps his most famous poem. Jarrell provided this explanatory note:

A ball turret was a Plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside down in his little sphere. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.

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.

(1945)