Descendants Corner
by
Marcia Balmut Ward

Paul J. Caruso was a ball turret gunner and toggelier with the 571st Squadron of the 390th Bomb Group.  He trained and flew with the Earl M Armstrong crew on the Mairzy Doats. On June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day, Caruso was ill and did not fly with his crew. The aircraft was shot down that day. Armstrong and the engineer/top turret man were killed; the rest of the crew ended up as POW’s. Caruso flew another 14 missions with the Horton, Gallagher, Fairchok, Moody, Greene, Strate, and Gilbert crews. Paul remained in the Air Force until retirement, as a Master Sergeant, in 1958. His time included duty in Korea during that conflict. He died in 1972.

Ouida and Paul Caruso - 1945

L to R: Beka Caruso; Paul G. Caruso,
 (Paul’s grandson); Bill Caruso, (Paul’s son).

Paul’s son, Bill Caruso, is a descendant member of the 390th Memorial Museum Foundation. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Paul attended the 1993 reunion in St. Louis where he met Everett Ludwig, one of the Mairzy Doats crewmen, shot down on June 5, 1944. Bill’s son, Paul G. Caruso, was named for his ball turret/bombardier grandfather, whom he never had the chance to meet. Young Paul is a Class of 2008 cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO, majoring in Space Operations. For an English class, he wrote a paper in response to the reading of The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, by Randall Jarrell, a southern poet who taught at Kenyon College in Ohio and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Jarrell was in the Army Air Corps and later in the Army during World War II. For a time he was involved in control tower operations, where he learned much about the air war. Many of his poems reflect this period of his life. Following is the poem:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarrell
(1914-1965)

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.

In response to these poignant words, young Paul Caruso penned the following words:

My ball turret gunner

Paul Caruso
Major McGuire
English 211, M3
9 March 2005

When I first read Randall Jarrell’s poem “The death of a Ball Turret Gunner,” I was reminded of someone about whom I had not thought in a long time: my grandfather and the source of my name, Paul J. Caruso. He was a sergeant in the Army Air Corps during World War II and served as a ball turret gunner aboard a B-17 in the dangerous skies over Europe. More Americans died during the air campaign against Hitler’s Fortress Europe than were killed in all aspects of the Vietnam War. Reading this poem and remembering how hazardous the missions over France and Germany were made me realize that, despite the awesome power of our Air Force and the relative ease with which we conduct operations around the globe, aerial combat is still a life threatening endeavor. After being inundated over the past few months with “we are the world’s greatest air and space force,” and the fact that no Air Force aircraft have been shot down in more than 6 years, I had begun to develop a feeling of invulnerability regarding my future profession. Jarrell’s words, however, snapped me out of it. The speaker’s use of the metaphor of birth into a world at war and the vivid imagery of his remains being washed from the ball turret were especially powerful in altering my perspective on aerial warfare.

The vivid imagery in Jarrell’s poem brought to mind the time a B-17 was flown to the airport near my house and put on display. I was able to walk around the inside of the aircraft and actually sit inside its ball turret. The speaker in the poem says, “I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.” Hunched is an appropriate word for the position a ball turret gunner assumed for the duration of an eight or nine hour flight. There were twin .50 caliber machine guns occupying most of the space in the turret, so I had to brace my feet on the glass in front of me and reach between my legs to work the guns.

I was just a little kid when I sat in that ball turret, but I’ve since learned a great deal from my dad about what his father experienced in the mid-1940s. For instance, the little Plexiglas bubbles were so small that ball turret gunners were unable to wear their parachutes while in position. Another disconcerting characteristic of the enclosure was that the ball’s guns had to be rotated into the downward position if the gunner needed to exit the turret. If power to the turret were lost, the gunner would be trapped inside unless another crew member could manually open the hatch. Every gunner’s worst fear was that his bomber, with no power to operate either the turret or the landing gear, would have to make a belly landing, smearing him all over the tarmac as the plane slid to a stop. The speaker’s closing line of being “washed out of the turret with a hose” is no exaggeration; this actually happened on several occasions.

The speaker applies imagery to the world outside his turret as well, saying that he “woke to black flak and the nightmare of fighters.” In all the movies and pictures I have seen of the enormous bomber formations over Europe, the sky is dotted with what appear to be harmless puffs of black smoke. However, each of those puffs was an exploding artillery shell, flinging shards of molten copper in all directions. The “nightmare fighters” were even more terrifying, often attacking bombers head-on so as to kill the pilots and break up their tight formations. These words paint as real a picture of the horrific nature of war as any I have ever read and do nothing to dilute the raw fear that probably coursed through the veins of a gunner as he took in the battle raging around him.

The speaker makes use of another poetic element, a metaphor that extends throughout the first three lines of the poem. He compares the life of a ball turret gunner to that of a fetus, being sealed inside a closed space in roughly the same position. The words “wet fur” apply to both situations: the downy hair covering a newborn child and the thick flight jacket worn by a gunner to keep him warm in the subzero temperatures high in the air. The two lives juxtaposed by the metaphor are polar opposites of one another. Once it enters the world, the infant has a warm blanket and a caring mother to look forward to. The ball turret gunner, separated from the real world (and a six mile drop) by a mere half inch of plastic, is much better off inside the womb of his aircraft. The comparison to an infant speaks to another aspect of the air war: the ages of the men who were flying the bombers and operating the machine guns. Jarrell joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, when he was 28 years old. While most would still think of him as a young adult, he would have been an old man to the lieutenants and sergeants who routinely flew into combat over Europe. Many of these young men experienced the figurative birth of leaving the comfort of their homes and high schools for the cockpits and turrets of a bomber, thrust into action against German fighters and flak.

Jarrell never qualified to be a flyer with the Air Corps, but served as control tower operator. As such, his days were just as tedious and nerve-wracking as those of a gunner in the thick of combat. Anyone who didn’t fly had the unenviable duty of waiting for hours on end and then counting the aircraft as they returned from their missions. In such great movies as Twelve O’clock High and Memphis Belle there are scenes of the crew chiefs sitting around, playing cards, smoking nervously, and hoping to catch a glimpse of their aircraft among the ones that make it back. Jarrell’s position overlooking the airfield would have enabled him to see the waiting ground crews, planes crashing and burning on landing, and emergency crews hosing the remains of dead airmen from their damaged aircraft. His purpose in writing “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and other poems about World War II was to convey not only the violence and loss experienced during the war, but also the helplessness of waiting on the ground or hanging precariously from a ball turret.

Jarrell’s poem has shaken my outlook on the profession of air combat, which I will embrace in a few short years. My grandfather survived the war in a most incredible manner, falling ill on the day that his crew was shot down over Germany. His luck has helped create in me a sense of invincibility, which I hope does not carry over into my Air Force career. The media has always painted a romantic image of military pilots, never showing the ones who must be washed out of their cockpits. The Academy has bombarded me with how well it does its job and has minimalized the dangers involved in this profession. With a needed breath of reality, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” has reminded me that although wars have gotten shorter and smaller in scope, airmen can still die in such a gruesome manner as Jarrell’s unfortunate gunner.