My Great-Uncle Hank was a ball-turret gunner on a B-29 in the Pacific Theater. Shot down and captured, he spent time in a Japanese prison in Rangoon. What he must have gone through between when these photos were taken, we can only speculate as from what I can remember, he didn’t talk much about what happened, and I don’t blame him. Grandpa Windholz went through his own war on the other side of the planet, and he didn’t talk much about that either.
I recommend reading extensively about this war as there is no shortage of great books about it, and it is in no way a chore to do so. To understand what ball-turret gunners had to experience… it was already a nightmare to be up in those planes, much less in a glass ball underneath while being shot at by men trained and committed to killing you. And he was captured by men from a militaristic culture where you just weren’t a prisoner, you were less than human because you were captured and didn’t die in battle.
We would be better off with fewer streaming services and more time spent reading about things like this as it is the least we can do, living in such luxury and safety in comparison with what these guys experienced.
