ABSTRACT

The popular romantic visions of Second World War military aviation in films and popular literature have largely focused on the bravery and sacrifice of the pilots and aircrew, with death a constant but discrete presence. The poignantly empty dining tables of Dambusters contrast starkly with the visceral brutality of Randall Jarrell’s poem The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: ‘When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose’ (1984: 277). Jarrell brings to our attention one of the most horrifying aspects of modern industrialised warfare: the fragmentation or obliteration of the human body by explosives, fire and high-speed impact (Moriarty 1995: 8; Smith 2003).