The temperature was 40 degrees below zero when fighter planes screamed out of the clouds, puncturing the fuselage with a spray of machinegun fire and sending the bomber beside them into a death spin. This was followed by intense flak, as a hundred cannons on the ground tried to blow them out of the sky.
When they finally made it back to the base, another enemy awaited them: homesickness, crushing boredom, relentless cold, and more mud than they could imagine.
Bert Ibelle was a 19-year-old freshman at Dartmouth College when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps to fly dozens of bomber missions over Nazi-occupied Europe and win the Purple Heart.
Through his letters home, Ibelle describes his harrowing experiences as a B-17 waist gunner on board the Flying Fortresses flying missions from Italy over Germany in the book Into the Inferno: The Story of a B-17 Gunner Over Nazi-Occupied Europe written by his son Bill Ibelle.
A B-17 Gunner Roughest mission
January 21, 1945
‘Vienna. 26,000 feet. 1,200 miles. Roughest mission yet. Flak very, very accurate. Several holes. One piece picked up in ammo box in radio room. Temp. −58 degrees. Almost froze to death in ball. Bends. Flak smoke split round ball. Two bomb runs, 50 minutes. Mickey bombing. 3 ships missing. One headed for Russia. Ben out—anoxia. One man froze to ball. 9 out of 10 ships hit in squadron. Our element leaders missing. Many frosts bitten. 9 hours.’
The “ball” Bert refers to is the ball turret. In the spirit of understanding the job of every crew member, Bert swapped positions with Alvin “Casey” Stengle on this mission and was flying in what had to be one of the most spectacular, terrifying, and bizarre positions for any soldier in any war.
‘There is no question that the war looked different depending on where one was standing. This was true even though we were only a few feet apart. The best views of the action were from the bombardier’s seat and the ball turret.’
The ball turret
The ball turret is a plexiglass and aluminum sphere, less than four feet in diameter, positioned on the bottom of the B-17 so that three quarters of the sphere is exposed. It was designed to be as small as possible to reduce drag, so there was just enough room for two large machine guns and a human folded nearly in half. The gunner climbed down into the ball from inside the plane feet first, slid into a fetal position, and locked the door above himself.
Then he rotated the ball so he was lying on his back parallel to the ground, with his feet in the air at the same height as his head. He was now looking through a gunsight that was positioned between his feet. His job was to protect the underside of the plane from enemy fighters and he had controls that could rotate the ball 360 degrees in the horizontal and 90 degrees in the vertical.
There was no room for a parachute, so if an emergency occurred, the gunner had to hope there was time to rotate the ball, unlock the door above, climb out, and grab his chute, which was hanging in the main fuselage. If the hydraulics were damaged by enemy fire, he was trapped in that hamster ball and had to pray that his crewmates had time to rotate the ball manually from inside the plane. But when a B-17 was in a fiery death spiral, there wasn’t much time, so many ball turret gunners went down with the aircraft. This was one reason the mortality rate among ball turret gunners was double that of other crew members. This was not a comforting thought as Bert headed into a flak barrage.
50 minutes without heat
The view was, indeed, spectacular, though it did leave a person feeling a tad exposed. The 360-degree panorama included flak exploding all around and enemy fighter planes racing at you with their cannons firing. Ball turret gunners were known to get shot right out of their see-through eggshell and fall to their deaths.
The day Bert flew in the ball, they had to make two runs at the target—a railway repair yard in Vienna—which extended the time without heat from 20 minutes to 50 minutes. That’s a long time at 58 degrees below zero. So, Bert wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote, “Almost froze to death in the ball” in his wartime diary. He also experienced the bends, an excruciating pain in his knees caused by nitrogen buildup in the blood while at 26,000 feet. In another plane on the same mission, the ball turret gunner froze to the side of the ball and lost an ear.
A second run at the target
On this mission, the dense cloud cover forced them to abort the first bomb run and fly the entire formation in a 360-degree turn so they could make a second run at the target. As they approached the target a second time, the Germans unleashed a barrage of flak, some of which narrowly missed the ball.
‘One could watch each burst come closer to the nose of the plane and then, with a slight momentary lift of a wing, the fourth burst would be slightly off to the side. Sometimes, the fourth burst would be far enough ahead that there would be no evasive action and the smoke from the explosion would split around the ball. Interesting!’
In his retirement-age recollections, Bert described the ball as a “rather lonely and isolated spot.”
It was a brutal mission, with nine of the 10 planes in his squadron hit, including his own. According to Bert, they lost 17 bombers during that mission.