and the ways in which their lives and thoughts have gone since then. Yet a third school holds them to be martyrs, doomed to an eternity of nightmares over a world they never made.Ī few weeks ago I was assigned to find and visit some of the first atomic bombers and ask them to talk about their memories of August. Because, in a few split seconds, they killed or wounded a quarter of a million people, most of them defenseless and unwarned civilians, they are regarded by others as the war's greatest criminals. Because, in those two furious mornings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they brought an end to the most terrible war ever fought, they are regarded by some people as the war's greatest heroes. Partly due to Claude Fatherly’s often proclaimed and well-publicized sense of guilt, the men who flew to Hiroshima and those who flew three days later to destroy Nagasaki with another atomic bomb have acquired, in the seventeen years since, a set of myths and images unique in all history. “it was just another mission that I was assigned to.” “As far as I’m concerned,” he told me when I met him recently in Cieorgia. Tom Ferebee, who made the bombing run, lined up the sights and dropped the bomb, has much the same philosophy. “I might answer with a question: How do you feel? We're all living in the atomic age together.” “People still ask me, ‘How did you feel?’ ” he wrote afterward. Paul Tibbets, who formed and trained the A-bomb squadron anti personally piloted the first bomb to Hiroshima, has a vastly different attitude. “I feel / killed all those people,” he has said. He’s always claimed his motive was to destroy the public
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For a while he turned to crime - holding up filling stations with toy guns and cashing bad checks. was soon so deep in remorse that he’s been in mental hospital nine times, seven times at his own request and twice by forced committal. Major Claude Eatherly, who piloted the weather plane that sent the final signal to go in. "My God, what have we done?” Captain Bob Lewis, the copilot, shouted as he saw the plumed wreckage boiling and leaping up at them above its 80,000 dead. Threw the big plane around at an angle of 150 degrees and plunged it down to gain speed while the two observation aircraft behind him did the same.Īs they’d known would happen no matter how quickly they turned and ran, two massive shocks hit them from the blast of their bomb below but the three planes righted themselves and lurched on home. The difference was that now his life, and others, hung on the result. Tibbets repeated a manœuvre he had practised as long and carefully as a baseball player practising a bunt just inside the third-base line. When the bomb bay opened Ferebee shouted: “It’s clear!” and turned the controls back to Tibbets. Little Boy was the first atomic bomb ever dropped in anger and when it exploded fortythree seconds after its release all the history and all the prospects of the human race underwent a change beyond all reckoning and beyond all guessing. The bomb known as Little Boy, sometimes called Thin Man, would be on the way to Hiroshima. It was a small bridge, and when two dots came together in the sight Ferebee knew the rest would happen automatically. Was locking for in the cross-hairs of his Norden bomb-sight. Ten miles and two minutes from their destination the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, silently turned over the controls to his bombardier, Major Tom Ferebee.Īlmost at once, because he had a good radar man behind him and even though they were six miles high. The seventh and most important aircraft was one named the Enola Gay, in honor of the mother of its pilot. A fifth carried cameras and a sixth bore other instruments to weigh and measure what was about to happen on the ground below. A fourth, standing by for emergencies, dropped off at the intervening island of Iwo Jima. Three of the planes went thirty minutes ahead, to scout the weather. ON AN AUGUST MORNING IN 1945, very early on a day that turned out to be a warm and sunny one, seven United States Air Force B-29’s left the Pacific island of Tinian and began a six-hour journey northwest to Japan. The men who destroyed Hiroshima describe their later lives and tell how they feel now about DUTY, GUILT, THE NEXT BOMB