Dad said something to me once -

[Joe for Clark]

That when a bomber got hit- it wasn't just the plane -

Sometimes when they got it - it was just more than that - just didn't go down right away.

Sometimes - arms and heads and legs came out of it before it went down.

And they had to watch it.

My dear god - they did this for us.

We owe them.

Joe

[Lucinda]

1. 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

- Randall Jarrell

[Joe for Clark]

2. THAT HAPPENED -

Those poor little batards in B-17s.

My god - how brave - I have no words for this.

What can you say???

Joe

[Lucinda]

4. Yup...

My heart can get around it but my brain just spins.

[aquart]

3. My uncle was so lucky.

He was a bombardier doing daylight skip bombing in World War II. In his unit, they were all second looies, my mom said. Because they didn't die.

[Lucinda]

7. So glad he made it home.

Luck and skill probably did it.

[aquart]

13. And help.

There was bigotry in his unit. The leader (I don't know the rank) wouldn't give him a permanent crew. He assigned him to fly tail end Charlie for 13 missions. Then a pilot noticed. He asked why Abrams wasn't assigned. The answer was the equivalent to "because he's a Jew." The pilot said, "Then he's mine." And that was the pilot my uncle flew with until they went home. We still have the article he wrote about that pilot (not talking about the bigotry because it was in a comic book).

As for the luck, I have to agree. He was so lucky that he took final flights for other bombardiers who were scheduled to leave. We know his official number of flights, but we have no idea how many flights he took that were credited to the men on their way home.

As for making it home, I thought he had. Then we went thru his papers after he died. I don't know if he ever really came home.

[murielm99]

5. Randall Jarrell is my favorite poet.

:thumbsup:

[Lucinda]

8. I didn't discover him until maybe 1995...

Powerful stuff.

[baby_mouse]

6. To what is this thought connected, Joe?

What do you owe them?

[Vidar]

9. I didn't really understand my mother's dislike of Germans until

late in her life. She was from a small town which lost 13 of its boys, all of them pen pals of hers, in B 24s & B 17s.

[Norrin Radd]

11. My great-grandfather emigrated from Germany to the US as a teen.

He was drafted for both WWI and WWII to fight against other Germans.

[Vidar]

12. I don't share my deceased mother's feelings on Germans.

I enjoyed Germany second only to Italy when I was studying in Europe & had a number of German friends.

[Love Bug]

10. The guys in tanks didn't have it much better

My father had 5 tanks destroyed from under him. Because he was the guy who sat with his head sticking out of the top he was able to get out first. Sometimes the other guys inside the tanks weren't so lucky.

Yeah, we owe them a lot.