peter robinson
our recalling the flimsy planes in which the pilots, without parachutes to encourage
pluck(though parachutes were issued to those who manned artillery observation
balloons), flew their sorties.^22 The high percentage of losses and the fact that they
are not ground-attack planes help occasion the poem’s frail lament—and Hill’s
piece might itself be responding to the lack of poetry about these losses. War poetry
is, in this sense, dependent upon there being serious risk for the combatants. Poems
about fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain dwell upon the equal fates of friend and
enemy, deaths by fire trapped in tiny cockpits, and in this respect repeat the antique
epic encounter, though at further distance, of Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’.^23 Among
the memorable poems written about the crews of the American 8th Airforce,
perhaps the best known is Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’, in
which the individual humanity of the flyer is established by the association between
a mother’s womb and the ball turret of a B17 where the gunner is crouched like
a foetus. There he wakes ‘to black flak and the nightmare fighters’, and his death
is treated as one might deal with a miscarriage: ‘When I died they washed me
outoftheturretwithahose.’^24 Jarrell is able to focus this single fate precisely
because, again, we have a military encounter—a battle between the gunner and the
nightmare fighters. Another poem, a memoir text called ‘World War II’ by Edward
Field, begins: ‘It was over Target Berlin the flak shot up our plane|just as we were
dumping bombs on the already smoking city.’ This eloquently blunt account of
their purpose and predicament is also plainly reiterated at the end:
This was a minor incident of war:
two weeks in a rest camp at Southport on the Irish Sea
and we were back in Grafton-Underwood, our base,
ready for combat again,
the dead crewmen replaced by living ones,
and went on hauling bombs over the continent of Europe,
destroying the Germans and their cities.^25It is less difficult to make poems about the fates of individuals than about ‘the
Germans and their cities’. When Geoffrey Hill first touched on the topic, alluding
to ‘Christmas Trees’, the flares dropped by British pathfinder bombers, he did it by
focusing attention on the fate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a German prison.^26 Richard
Eberhardt’s ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’ names two individuals in its final
(^22) Geoffrey Hill, ‘To the Nieuport Scout’, inCanaan(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 27.
(^23) See e.g. John Pudney, ‘Combat Report’, in Brian Gardner (ed.),TheTerribleRain:TheWarPoets
1939–1945(London: Methuen, 1966), 76–7.
(^24) Randall Jarrell, ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’, inThe Collected Poems(New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1981), 144. The evocative positioning of the ball turret gunner evidently inspired
the poet, though the waist gunner of a B17 was twice as likely to be killed. For Jarrell’s poems about
‘Children and Civilians’, see ibid. 189–96.
(^25) Edward Field, ‘World War II’, in Harvey Shapiro (ed.),Poets of World War II(New York: Library
of America, 2003), 195 and 200.
(^26) Geoffrey Hill, ‘Christmas Trees’, inCollected Poems(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 171.