"You didn't know where you were going until you went to the briefing," he said. The targets often varied, ranging from oil refineries and factories to railroad yards and submarine pens. Stationed at an airbase about 90 miles northwest of London, Buczak flew in 33 successful missions over Holland, Denmark, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Germany. "Every time we'd go through flak, I'd shut the turret off and I'd have my hand on the release door. So in case we got hit, I could roll right out of the turret," he said. "I trained myself to get a parachute in the turret with me. Since space was limited, most ball turret gunners only wore flak jackets to protect themselves against anti-aircraft fire, but no parachutes. "You couldn't see above the plane, so the would have to let you know if something was coming," Buczak said. With a limited line of vision, enemy fighters attacking from 12 o'clock would often seem to come out of nowhere. "It was like suicide going in there."Īside from being in an extremely vulnerable position, the ball turret gunner could only see under the bomber. "I was the smallest, so I was elected," he said. His diminutive 5-foot-5-inch frame made him a lock for the job. 19, 1943, Buczak was just 18 the first time he crawled into a ball turret. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."ĭrafted on Nov. "I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream life," the poem reads. "I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. He'd be crushed."įor those manning that station death was indeed a particularly gruesome affair, as detailed by poet Randall Jarrell in his famous verse "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner." Everybody else in the plane understood that the was a dead man. "There were many instances, and they are pretty horrific, where the ball turret was stuck and the bombers have had to make crash landings. "The good news was you had the best view of any other crew member the bad news was that if the plane took a hit and there was damage to the mechanism that raised and lowered the ball turret, you were on your own," Lewi said. Armed with two 50-caliber machine guns and capable of rotating 360 degrees, the ball turret gunner was responsible for protecting the otherwise-exposed underbelly of the flying fortress. Made of Plexiglas and about four feet in diameter, the ball turret was a sphere attached to the bottom of B-17s. "You really had to have pretty tough nerves to be in there." "You literally had your knees up to your chest and in between you had the machine guns," said Gary Lewi, spokesman for the American Airpower Museum based at Republic Airport. While anyone who flew on a B-17 bomber during World War II had a pretty dangerous job, the ball turret gunner was undoubtedly put in the most-precarious position. Every time a plane went down, you lost nine or 10 men." Percentage wise, we lost more men," he said, recalling one mission where 52 bombers were shot out of the sky. "Our losses were greater than the Marines were in the South Pacific. "You usually never finish your tour after you ditch, because you either get killed or you become a prisoner of war," he said.Īs a ball turret gunner aboard the "Duchess," a B-17 bomber in the 8th Air Force's 457th Bombardment Group, death was something Buczak faced constantly. In fact, Buczak is fortunate the only casualty was his watch. Yet it's doubtful that the situation seemed funny at the time. "It was supposed to be water-proof," the 78-year-old East Meadow native joked during a recent interview before Veterans Day. Its hands have been permanently fixed at 10 minutes to 6 o'clock ever since J- when the then B-17 ball turret gunner and his crew wound up drenched in the North Sea after ditching their bomber, badly damaged during a dangerous mission over Munich.
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