And turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn’t different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make). 20
We read our mail and counted up our missions—
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen. 25
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, ‘‘Our casualties were
low.’’
They said, ‘‘Here are the maps’’; we burned the
cities.
It was not dying—no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead, 30
And the cities said to me: ‘‘Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?’’Poem Summary
Stanza 1
The first stanza of ‘‘Losses’’ is narrated in the
first-person plural. The collective speakers are
members of the American bomber crews of
World War II who seem unable to accept the
reality that many of their number died during
the war. They seem to experience death as an
anonymous, impersonal thing, something that
happens all the time and does not have any emo-
tional impact on them. They look back to their
training days. There had been many crashes
then, and men had died in them. The newspapers
were informed of the deaths, letters were written
to the families of the dead, and the number of
casualties rose. In line 6, they start to give details
of the many ways in which death came to them
on these training expeditions. Sometimes it was
because of faulty navigation, the failure to read
an almanac correctly. This error could lead them
many miles astray, and they would crash into a
mountain. Other maneuvers could get them
killed, too, such as engaging in mock combat
with friendly planes or making an error when
they dived onto targets laid out on a farm. Some-
times, as line 9 indicates, the planes simply
caught fire. But there seems to be no meaning
or real significance in the deaths, which register
with them like the news of the deaths of a distant
relative, or a pet. A parenthetical sentence,
spread over the last two lines of the stanza,
makes it clear that the bomber crews are very
young, just out of high school, and have little
experience of death.
Stanza 2
This stanza begins as the bombing crew recall
more of their training missions, ones in which
they were not killed. The planes were new, as
were the crew. They practiced their missions on
specially built ranges in the desert or on presum-
ably deserted areas of the shore. They also prac-
ticed hitting a moving target. Then they waited
to see how their instructors assessed their grow-
ing skills. Eventually, beginning in line 4, they
get called up for real combat action because of
the losses that the air force has suffered. The
young men travel to England, which is allied
with the United States in the fight against Nazi
Germany. (During the war, the United States
maintained air force bases in England.) From
England, they go on bombing missions over
Germany, much the same as they had done in
their training missions. Some of them would be
killed, but their deaths would be described as
resulting from a mistake on their part but not a
mistake of which they should be ashamed.
During their time between bombing mis-
sions, they would sit around at the air force
base in England reading the letters they received
from friends and family and keeping a tally of
how many missions they had flown. Beginning in
line 10, the collective narrator then comments
on the missions themselves. They had flown
in airplanes that had been given girls’ names
(a common practice in the U.S. Army Air Forces
during World War II), and they bombed cities
(in Germany and other nations allied with Ger-
many or under German control) that they had
read about when they were school students.
They had done this until their luck, and their
lives, had run out. Those who were killed, shot
down by enemy planes or anti-aircraft fire from
the ground, ended up lying with the dead in theMEDIA
ADAPTATIONSA long-playing gramophone record,Randall
Jarrell Reads and Discusses His Poems Against
War, was released by Caedmon (TC 1363) in
1972 but is currently unavailable.Losses