Category: War

Snuffy Smith: The Ball Turret Screwup Who Saved Six by Will Dabbs

Post author By Grumpy
Post date March 11, 2026
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A handcuffed enlistee, a burning B-17, and a stubborn ball turret gunner who just wouldn’t quit. Maynard “Snuffy” Smith was flawed, fiery, and absolutely fearless.

From Pedestals to People: Why Flawed Men Still Do Great Things

Maynard Harrison Smith portrait; WWII Medal of Honor ball turret gunner known as Snuffy Smith — Maynard Smith was a perennial screwup, but he was also incredibly brave. Public domain.

We expect way too much out of our pastors and our heroes. We put those guys on pedestals that we ourselves could never successfully occupy. To hold such folks to an unreasonable standard simply invites disappointment.

History is littered with examples. The Israelite King David killed a man and stole his wife, yet was described in scripture as a man after God’s own heart.

Martin Luther King defined the Civil Rights movement with his mantra of non-violence, and was likely the sole reason our great nation did not dissolve into anarchy. However, King was also a serial philanderer who plagiarized significant portions of his doctoral dissertation.

Charles Dickens was history’s alpha novelist, yet he was terribly abusive to his wife and children.

Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence by day and made babies with his slaves by night.

William Shockley invented the transistor and was the father of the modern computer, yet was an unrepentant racist and a strident proponent of eugenics. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That’s in the Book…

Mother Teresa receives the Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan in the White House Rose Garden — Mother Theresa is shown here receiving some sort of award from President Ronald Reagan. Yep, she was horrible, too. Public domain.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: We all suck–Every. Last. One. Of. Us.

If ever I felt otherwise, those flawed assumptions were thoroughly put to rest the moment I became a physician and started trying to fix other people’s many manifest problems. Everybody on Planet Earth is just a hot mess. That includes your sweet grandmother and Mother Theresa.

As a result, have reasonable expectations as regards the people in your life. Don’t be surprised when everybody else in the world struggles with the same stuff you do. Tragically, that’s just part of being human.

Origin Story: From Courtroom to Cockpit in Wartime

Maynard Harrison Smith enlists in the US Army Air Corps in lieu of prison; archival NARA image — When Maynard Smith enlisted in the US Army Air Corps, it was in lieu of prison. NARA photo.

Maynard Harrison Smith was born on 19 May 1911 in Caro, Michigan. His Dad was a lawyer, and his Mom taught school. From the very beginning, Maynard was a difficult kid. He sought out trouble at every opportunity. This earned him a billet at Howe Military Academy in lieu of High School.

Like most such broken souls, Maynard Smith found it impossible to stay married. He wed Arlene McCreedy, but that only lasted three years. Two years after that, his Dad died and left Maynard a little money. The young man subsequently quit his job with the US Treasury Department and lived off his inheritance. In 1941, Maynard married Helen Gunsell and fathered a son. They split up about a year later.

Maynard supposedly refused to pay child support and was subsequently dragged before a judge. With war brewing, the magistrate gave him the option of jail or the Army. When the local newspaper ran a patriotic photograph of young men being inducted into the military, Maynard Smith was in the background in handcuffs being escorted by the local sheriff.

Uniform On, Trouble Still: Into the 306th Bomb Group

US Army Air Corps flight school class photo with author on right; training era image — My time in the military was great for me. I’m the skinny guy with the big ears on the right.

A great many folks have entered military service and discovered both maturity and depth. My time in uniform played an outsized role in my own success later in life. However, sometimes that stuff just doesn’t take. Maynard Smith was a First Sergeant’s nightmare.

Smith was a short-statured man. After basic training, he volunteered for aerial gunnery school. Prior to 1947, the US Army owned what would eventually become the Air Force under the auspices of the US Army Air Corps.

Smith volunteered for the Air Corps because he knew that would mean faster promotion and more money. After gunnery school, Smith was shipped to Bedfordshire in Southern England to join the 423d Bombardment Squadron of the 306^th Bomb Group.

Ball Turret Hell: Cold, Cramped, and Nowhere to Run

B-17 ball turret position; ball turret gunner’s exposed seat under the bomber — The ball turret was the most craptastic duty on board an exceedingly dangerous airplane. Public domain.

Things didn’t get any better once he got to his unit. Maynard soon developed a reputation for being both obnoxious and stubborn. At some point, he earned the nickname “Snuffy” Smith, no doubt a reference to the popular period cartoon strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Because of his modest height, Snuffy Smith drew the duty as a ball turret gunner.

Serving as a bomber crewman was the most dangerous job in the US military during World War 2. Fully one-fifth of all US aircrew perished in the skies above Europe and the Pacific. Of all the jobs on board US heavy bombers, that of the ball turret gunner was statistically the most hazardous.

Inside the Sphere: What a B-17 Ball Turret Demanded

Sperry ball turret interior with twin M2 .50 caliber guns; gunner curled in fetal position — It took a short-statured contortionist to thrive as a ball turret gunner on a B-17. Public domain.

Duty in the ball turret was unlike anything else in the Air Corps. The ball turret was designed to defend B17 and B24 bombers from attack directly underneath the aircraft. The Sperry ball turret was roughly 3.5 feet in diameter and weighed 850 pounds. It was constructed predominantly of transparent Plexiglas and included a pair of M2 .50-caliber belt-fed machine guns. The ball turret gunner sat in the fetal position, wrapped around the two weapons. He controlled the orientation of the turret via a firing yoke.

Duty in the ball turret was, by its nature, terribly isolating. While most of the rest of the crew could interact with each other directly, the ball turret gunner was sealed inside his big plastic sphere.

Because the turret was so small, there was no room for a parachute. Entry and exit were through the back of the contraption. To egress a disabled aircraft, the ball turret gunner had to orient the thing guns-downward such that the hatch faced the interior of the aircraft, unstrap, climb out, locate and attach his parachute, and then find his way to an exit door. That’s a big ask when the plane is shot up, on fire, and plummeting earthward.

Given its direct exposure to the rarefied high-altitude slipstream, the ball turret also got incredibly cold. Gunners were equipped with electrically-heated suits, but this was 1940’s technology. Those suits not infrequently failed. It took a special sort of soldier to thrive in a ball turret in combat.

Snuffy Goes to War: St. Nazaire, the Original Flak City

German U-boat pens at St. Nazaire; heavily defended coastal target called flak city — The U-boat pens at St. Nazaire were some of the most heavily-defended real estate in Europe. Bundesarchiv.

Six weeks after he arrived at his unit, Snuffy Smith flew his first combat mission. The target was the Nazi U-boat pens at St. Nazaire on the Bay of Biscay in France. The Germans knew this facility to be strategically critical and defended it accordingly with a dense array of flak guns and fighters aplenty. Allied aircrews called St. Nazaire “flak city.”

Aerial navigation in the days before electronic navaids was a sketchy proposition. Somebody made a mistake, and Snuffy’s B17 approached the heavily-defended French city of Brest at around 2,000 feet. Exposed and at low altitude, the big bomber was easy meat for German fighters and anti-aircraft artillery.

When Everything Went Wrong: Fire, Fighters, and a Choice

Maynard Snuffy Smith on a B-17 waist gun with .50 caliber; 423d Bombardment Squadron — This is Maynard “Snuffy” Smith, manning a .50-caliber waist gun in a B-17. Public domain.

Smith’s plane was hit hard. A fuel tank ruptured and caught fire. With the fuselage now aflame, three of the plane’s ten crewmen bailed out. Smith clawed his way out of the ball turret and turned his attention to two remaining buddies who were too badly wounded to parachute.

Smith could have jumped himself, but not without abandoning his mates. Instead, he dressed the injured men’s wounds while also manning the bomber’s waist guns against attacking German fighters.

The fire became so hot that it melted through the Fort’s aluminum skin. Smith expended all of the plane’s fire extinguishers and discarded as much flammable material and ammunition as he could through the gaping holes burned in the plane’s fuselage. With nothing left to throw on the fire, Smith dropped his trousers and urinated on it.

Ninety minutes later, Smith’s plane landed at the first available airfield on British soil. The massive bomber broke in half immediately upon touchdown. Ground crews counted 3,500 holes from German bullets and shrapnel.

The three crewmen who bailed out were never heard from again. Snuffy Smith’s selfless actions had saved the lives of the remaining six. Journalist Andy Rooney was present at the air base where Smith’s plane landed and penned a front page story about the obstinate ball gunner’s exploits. Smith was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor.

Medal of Honor Day… and KP Anyway

Medal of Honor ceremony for Maynard Snuffy Smith at RAF Thurleigh with Secretary of War Henry Stimson — Here we see Snuffy Smith about to be awarded his Medal of Honor by US Secretary of War Henry Stimson. He had been on KP that very week for disciplinary infractions. Public domain.

Smith was on punitive KP duty the week he was awarded his nation’s highest award for valor for arriving chronically late for command meetings.

His medal was awarded by US Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Snuffy Smith flew four more combat missions after receiving his award, but was ultimately grounded due to battle fatigue. Smith was made a unit clerk but was subsequently reduced in rank to Private because he sucked so bad at it.

Private Smith went home on 2 February 1945. Despite his checkered record, his hometown threw him a rousing parade and greeted him as a hero. Smith left the military three months later.

Whenever interviewed about his time in the military, Smith had nothing but disdain for the experience. His propensity for being difficult followed him everywhere he went. Smith bounced from job to job and suffered perennial legal problems.

The Rest of the Story: A Flawed Man, A Lasting Legacy

Smith married his third wife, Mary Rayner, in 1944. He and Mary met at a USO dance in Bedford, England, and eventually had three sons and a daughter. Snuffy Smith, the deadbeat hero, eventually settled in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he died of heart failure at age 72. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Audie Murphy portrait; most highly decorated US soldier of WWII — Audie Murphy was the most highly decorated soldier in US history, but he wasn’t much to look at. Public domain.

True heroes seldom look the part. Audie Murphy weighed 112 pounds when he tried and failed to enlist in both the US Marines and the Airborne, yet ended the war as the most highly decorated soldier in American history.

Maynard Smith enlisted in handcuffs and left the military under a cloud. However, he was still nonetheless a hero of the highest order—a flawed man who did some truly amazing things.

Quick Facts: B-17 Ball Turret and Mission Details

Role	Ball turret gunner, B17
Unit	423d Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bomb Group
Ball Turret Diameter	3.5 feet
Ball Turret Weight	850 pounds
Armament	2 x M2 .50-caliber machineguns
First Combat Target	St. Nazaire U-boat pens
Aircraft Damage	3,500 holes from bullets and shrapnel
Lives Saved	Six crewmen

Pros & Cons — Hard Truths of a Ball Turret Gunner’s War

Pros: Raw, human story of courage; vivid technical detail on ball turret life; keeps all dates and numbers; powerful, relatable voice.
Cons: Grim imagery; not a gear review; heavy subject matter for sensitive readers.

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Fighting Mad! One Allied Soldier Stopped A German Panzergrenadier Regiment

Post author By Grumpy
Post date March 10, 2026
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Medal of Honor Heroes in World War II

Post author By Grumpy
Post date March 10, 2026
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War

Iran’s Military Is Weirder Than You Think

Post author By Grumpy
Post date March 10, 2026
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Interesting stuff War

An interesting theory

Everyone’s missing what the Iran war is REALLY about – and it’s not Israel. This is the real reason America has chosen to strike now. But as HAVIV RETTIG GUR writes, once you understand, everything else makes sense…

By HAVIV RETTIG GUR

The war in Iran is threatening to split the conservative movement, dividing it between those who see it as Donald Trump’s breaking of a promise against new wars and those who see it as a necessary confrontation long overdue.

Progressives, predictably, frame it as another Middle Eastern adventure driven by Israel. Anti-war libertarians call it regime change in a new dress.

And across the world, from Brazil to Beijing, London to Karachi, the argument is the same: America is fighting Israel’s war.

But this isn’t true. And the confusion matters, because if you misread what this war is actually about, you will misread everything that follows.

This is not a war about Israel. This is not a war for Israel’s sake. Israel is a beneficiary, a capable and willing local partner, but it is not the reason America is in this fight. America is playing a much bigger game, about more than what happens in the Middle East. The subtext, that Israel exercises outsize influence or ‘drags Americans into wars they don’t want’, borders on the conspiratorial.

This isn’t one war, but two.

There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis. All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighbourhood.

But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out: whether the American-led global order survives, or whether China displaces it. Every American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars to the posture in the Pacific, is ultimately a move on this board.

America is in this fight because of China. Specifically, it is about dismantling the most significant Chinese forward base outside of East Asia.

America is in this fight because of China (pictured: President Donald Trump with Chinese president Xi Jinping in October 2025)

Haviv Rettig Gur, a top Middle East analyst, talks about the real reason America has chosen to strike now

Iran, for most of its history as an adversary of the United States, existed only on the smaller board. It was a headache. It was a regional destabiliser. It funded terrorism, harassed shipping, threatened America’s allies, and kept the Middle East expensive and unpredictable.

But it was not, in any direct sense, a threat to American primacy on the global stage. It was Israel’s problem, the Gulf states’ problem, and only tangentially Washington’s.

That changed when Iran made one of the most consequential strategic miscalculations of the century.

Squeezed by decades of American sanctions and increasingly isolated, Iran turned to China as its economic lifeline. The relationship deepened rapidly.

Today, roughly 90 per cent of Iran’s crude oil exports go to China, processed through Chinese refineries that operate beyond the reach of American sanctions enforcement.

That oil revenue supplies around a quarter of Iran’s budget, a huge portion of which is spent on its military forces. Without Beijing, the regime cannot pay its security forces, cannot subsidise basic goods, and would soon face the kind of internal collapse that its own ideology has spent 40 years trying to prevent.

In other words, Iran has become – has made itself – utterly dependent on China.

China, for its part, was not being charitable. It was being strategic. Iranian oil, sold cheaply because Tehran has no other buyers, has helped Beijing build a strategic petroleum reserve exceeding a billion barrels, enough to sustain the Chinese economy for roughly 100 days in the event of a naval blockade.

China’s single greatest vulnerability is the American Navy’s ability to interdict its energy imports, especially at vulnerable choke points like the Malacca Straits. Iranian oil, flowing outside American oversight, was a direct hedge against that vulnerability. (So, by the way, was Venezuela’s, another US operation that was ultimately about containing China.)

‘Iran has become – has made itself – utterly dependent on China,’ Haviv writes (pictured: Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, left, and Xi Jinping)

But the energy relationship was only part of the picture. China was also arming Iran with systems designed to threaten commercial and American military assets.

Reports emerged in February of a near-finalised deal to supply Iran with supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3 and engineered to evade the Aegis defence systems deployed on American carrier strike groups.

China was replacing Iranian government and military software with closed Chinese systems, hardening Iran against CIA and Mossad cyber operations. Joint naval exercises between China, Russia, and Iran in the Strait of Hormuz were becoming regular events, building real-time operational familiarity between the three navies.

Iran had switched from the GPS system to the Chinese BeiDou system. And Iran was providing China with the port at Jask, as part of China’s ‘string of pearls’ base system in the Indian Ocean.

The picture that emerges from all of this is, as I have said, of a Chinese forward base, a lynchpin of the country’s naval architecture; cyber efforts; an economic Belt and Road influence programme – every element of Chinese power projection and empire-building – positioned at the throat of the global oil supply, armed with weapons designed to penetrate American defences and kill American sailors, and embedded in a strategic architecture whose explicit purpose is to constrain American military freedom in any future conflict over Taiwan.

When Iran began to look like that, it stopped being Israel’s problem and became America’s.

The administration itself has struggled to explain this, and it’s not clear why. On March 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that the US had launched pre-emptive strikes against Iran because the administration knew an Israeli attack was imminent and wanted to prevent ‘automatic’ Iranian retaliation against American bases. He said intelligence showed Iran had pre-delegated orders to military commanders to strike US assets the moment the regime was attacked by any party.

How many have been killed in the war on Iran

United States

Six US service members killed

Eleven people killed, including nine in an Iranian

missile strike on Beit Shemesh on March 1

Israel

At least 77 people killed by Israeli attacks

since Monday

Lebanon

One person killed after a fire broke out in Bahrain’s

Salman Industrial City following a missile interception

Bahrain

Four people, including two Kuwaiti soldiers, killed

in Iranian attacks on the country

Kuwait

One person killed after a projectile hit a Marshall

Islands-flagged product tanker off its coast

Oman

Three people killed

UAE

At least 1,230 people killed

Iran

Reports emerged in February of a near-finalised deal to supply Iran with supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3

Rubio emphasised that the US chose to destroy Iran’s offensive capabilities first rather than ‘sit there and absorb a blow’ that would have resulted in higher damage to American personnel.

It’s hard to take this explanation at face value. If the trigger was simply an Israeli strike, America could have told the Israelis to sit tight. It’s done it before, repeatedly and even recently.

And it doesn’t fit the nature of the war. For one thing, American media reports tell us that America, not Israel, chose the timing.

Reliable sources tell us the CIA, not Mossad, tracked Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to the Saturday meeting of Iranian military leaders struck by Israel, and Trump, not Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pulled the trigger on the joint attack.

The Americans went to war together with the Israelis because that’s the best way to fight a war like this.

Having a capable and loyal local ally willing to deal damage and absorb blowback lowers the costs to America and increases the chances of success. If America ever finds itself in a kinetic fight with China, it presumably expects Japan and Taiwan and South Korea to play a similar role in the fighting.

But American forces have used this operation to target Iranian military positions and assets that have nothing to do with the Israeli-Iranian face-off.

In the first 24 hours of the war, American strikes, as confirmed by US Central Command (CENTCOM), focused on Iranian naval vessels, submarines, ports, and anti-ship missile positions along the southern coast.

It was the CIA that tracked Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (R), and it was Trump who pulled the trigger on the joint attack

The port of Bandar Abbas, headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, was hit. So was Jask, which China had hoped would become a permanent naval foothold on the Indian Ocean. Isfahan and Tabriz, hubs of ballistic missile production and drone assembly, were struck.

The goal, explicitly stated by US officials, was not merely to degrade stockpiles but to destroy the industrial base from which those weapons are produced, so China cannot spend the next few years quietly rebuilding it.

President Trump announced the operation in terms that could not have been more direct, explicitly mentioning elements of Iranian power – the navy, the missile production sites – that would serve as that second front in a war with China.

One of the more revealing subplots of this war has been the behaviour of Iran’s supposed allies. Russia signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran in January of last year. China has been Iran’s economic patron for years.

And yet when the bombs started falling, neither moved.

Russian radar systems in Syria went dark, transponders reportedly switched off, apparently to avoid accidentally drawing American or Israeli fire. China issued statements. Neither fired a shot in Iran’s defence.

This matters beyond the immediate moment. The entire architecture of the alternative world order that China has been constructing – BRICS (the Belt and Road Initiative), the network of partnerships meant to demonstrate there is a credible alternative to American-led institutions – rests on the assumption that China is a reliable partner.

Every government, from Central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America, is now watching China leave its closest Middle Eastern ally to burn. That is a blow to Chinese soft power that no diplomatic offensive can easily repair. It is an American success that will be felt for years, irrespective of how the Iran operation turns out.

America, meanwhile, has demonstrated something important: that it retains both the will and the capability to act decisively when its core interests are genuinely threatened. Not Israel’s interests. Not abstract liberal internationalist ideals. American interests, defined coldly and specifically.

None of this means the war is without risk. Strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure, Houthi threats to close the Bab el Mandeb Straits, the escalation in Lebanon: these are real dangers, and the costs of miscalculation are enormous.

Iran, aware that it is facing an existential moment, is doing what cornered regimes do, setting as many fires as possible in the hope that the pain forces a negotiated exit. And we cannot forget the risk shouldered by Israeli civilians.

But the logic of the American position is not difficult to follow once you’re looking at the right chessboard. Iran embedded itself so deeply in China’s strategic architecture over the past couple of years that removing it became a prerequisite for American freedom of action in East Asia.

This is also why President Trump seems to be pursuing a strange sort of regime change – something very different from what George W. Bush or the neocons meant by the term.

Trump doesn’t care one whit about democratisation, or, as Venezuela showed us, about changing any element of a regime that doesn’t stand in America’s way.

He’s interested in regime change in Iran only because it is, in its founding theology, unswervingly anti-American. It is thus not swayable from the Chinese orbit by any other means. He doesn’t need a democratic Iran, he just needs a not-anti-American Iran.

It must be said: Israel is also at war with Iran, and has focused its strikes on Iranian targets that specifically threaten Israel, such as the ballistic missile launchers.

But there are nevertheless two different wars underway in Iran, each taking place on very different strategic scales.

The best-case scenario that could emerge from this war is a stable, democratic-leaning, US-orientated Iran, a more secure Gulf, a weakened Hezbollah and thus a more stable and successful Lebanon, a more secure Israel – and above all, a China less able to threaten America’s Pacific allies.

None of that is nation-building. There is no Marshall Plan in the wings, no democratic project, no idealism of the kind that animated the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is colder and more coherent. So why can’t Secretary Rubio say it? Why hem and haw?

One obvious answer: they don’t want to push the Chinese to more overt responses. One should always give one’s enemy an excuse not to respond in kind. It’s a sensible ambiguity on the world stage, but it’s causing damage at home. It may be time for the administration to speak clearly on its strategy – in articulated statements that answer the good-faith questions of many Americans.

Once you understand the real reasons for America to strike now, everything else about this conflict clicks into place. The loudest voices in the debate are still arguing about the smaller chessboard. The war is being fought on the larger one.