rates show, the Superfortress was anything but a
fortress. Because of the pressures of the war, it
was rushed into production and had many
mechanical glitches that cost its crews dearly.
The biggest problem, according to Stewart Hal-
sey Ross, was that the engines were liable to
catch fire, ‘‘warming up on the ground prior to
takeoff, in the air at all altitudes, but most often
during acceleration on takeoff at full power.’’
If this happened, the entire crew would be killed.
More B-29 crewmen died from failures of the
airplane than by enemy action. Even Major-
General Curtis LeMay, commander of the bomb-
ing campaign against Japanese cities, admitted in
his later recollections that the B-29 was ‘‘the bug-
giest damn airplane that ever came down the
pike’’ (quoted in Ross). A total of 414 B-29s
were lost during the war; 147 of those were lost
in combat. The B-17s, the famous Flying For-
tresses, were less unreliable, although hundreds
of them were shot down over Germany. The
American government liked to present a rosy
picture to the public of the almost indestructible
nature of the B-17s, but as Paul Fussell notes, the
truth was rather different, and ‘‘before the war
ended the burnt and twisted bits of almost 22,000
of these Allied bombers would strew the fields
of Europe and Asia, attended by the pieces of
almost 110,000 airmen.’’
This is the background for Jarrell’s poem
‘‘Losses.’’ During the war years he must have
been witness to training accidents of the kind
described in the poem (although none of his
surviving letters from the period describes any
such incidents), and he took careful note of the
young men who did go off to fight, many of them
never to return alive. It is this observation of the
actual men who fought—their daily routines in
training, their attitudes to the war—that gives
his war poems their authenticity. Jarrell may not
have been there himself, in the air over Europe or
Japan, but he knew those who had been, and he
used his poetic gifts to give them a voice in his
poems.
Today, World War II is often referred to as
the ‘‘good war,’’ fought by the ‘‘greatest genera-
tion,’’ as opposed to the war in Vietnam, the
muddled war in which right and wrong, good
and evil, were not as clear-cut as they supposedly
were in the earlier conflict and from which the
United States did not emerge victorious. But this
understanding of World War II is not apparent
from ‘‘Losses.’’ These speakers are not gung-ho
fliers eager for the fight and the danger, reveling
in their exploits, becoming living heroes or
meeting heroic deaths. There is nothing glamor-
ous about the killing that is described. Instead,
‘‘Losses’’ records the voices of those who are
caught up in a conflict they do not understand
and for which they are woefully unprepared.
Jarrell’s letters written during the war pro-
vide much insight into his views at the time and
serve as interesting glosses on the poem. In
August 1945, he wrote to his fellow poet Robert
Lowell, who had commented about the ‘‘typical
protagonist’’ of Jarrell’s poems. Jarrell explains
how he regards those who found themselves
caught up in the war:
I’ve met thousands of people who’ve killed great
quantities of other people and had great quanti-
ties of their companions killed; and there’s not
one out of a hundred whoknowsenough about it
to kill a fly or be stung by a fly. Talking about a
slaughter of the innocents! And those are the
soldiers, not the civilians.
The ignorance of the fliers in ‘‘Losses’’ is one
of the most noticeable aspects of the poem. They
have gotten caught up in the great war machine,
and they do what they are told and what is
expected of them. But they show no understand-
ing at all of why they are doing it. Only at the last
do their flat statements turn into a question,
asked by one individual flier, about the purpose
of it all.
One reason for the men’s ignorance is their
extreme youth. The fliers in ‘‘Losses’’ are barely
out of high school. With little experience of life
beyond their families and hometowns, they are
suddenly thrust into this disorienting situation in
which they are asked to kill and be killed. Jarrell
himself, at thirty years of age, was older thanTHE MEN SEEM TO DISSOCIATE FROM THEREALITY OF WHAT IS HAPPENING TO THEM AND TO
THOSE WHO BECOME THEIR VICTIMS. THEY ARE
MERELY COGS IN THE PITILESSLY TURNING WHEEL
OF WAR AND HAVE NO POWER TO LEAVE THEIR
APPOINTED PLACES, EVEN IF THEY WISH TO.’’
Losses