Leonard Dowling of DeLand was a ball turret gunner on the doomed bomber aircraft. It was September 1944, and he was 19. The bomber was shot down over Karlsruhe, Germany.

Leonard Dowling, a turret gunner on a B24 bomber shot down over Germany in 1944, and liberated in a 700-mile march, celebrated 100 on June 21.

The gunner has to curl up in a fetal position to fit inside the ball turret, which is approximately 3 feet in diameter and mounted in the belly of the bomber. For some, the space can be claustrophobic ...

He remembers being thrown across the plane by an explosion. By the time he was pulled from the wreckage by the ball turret gunner, a fellow airman who ultimately didn’t survive, five of his crewmates, ...

The non-Quaker who served in the military and wrote the poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” had asked to be buried among Quakers.

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