No crew position captured the strangeness of the air war like the ball turret. On the belly of a B-17 or B-24 hung a Plexiglas sphere barely three feet across, and into it folded the smallest man on the crew — knees to his chest, two .50 caliber guns between his legs — to spin and track the fighters coming up from below. There was no room inside for a parachute; it waited in the fuselage above, and reaching it meant rotating the turret just so and being hauled out by a crewmate. If the hydraulics failed or the belly wheels would not drop, the gunner could be trapped. The poet Randall Jarrell needed only five lines to fix the horror of it in memory.

The figure shows the gunner out of the ball and crouched on the deck, in leather flight helmet, shearling-collared jacket, yellow Mae West and harness — the layered kit of a man who worked in the cold at altitude. He completes a heavy-bomber crew diorama: set him with the Heavy Bomber Crewman and the U.S.A.A.F. Bomber Captain, all under the early-war command of Lt. Col. James Doolittle.

W. Britain model 10133. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Single foot figure on a sculpted base. Boxed.