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Various articles published in the United States, Europe and Japan also said he was the man who picked Hiroshima as the target city, and that furthermore he was part of the atomic mission over Nagasaki, three days after Hiroshima. Putnam and Sons, April 1964 Pocket Cardinal edition, April 1965)įor a time in the 1950s and 1960s, a former Army Air Forces officer was portrayed in some international press reports as being the Hiroshima pilot - the aviator who was in command of the aircraft that released the first atomic bomb used in combat over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. “The Hiroshima Pilot” by William Bradford Huie (G.P.
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Photo courtesy of the United States Air Force 9, visit Herb Rothschild’s column appears in the Tidings every Saturday.Some of the flight and support crew of the B-29 Superfortress Straight Flush: Top row, from left: 2nd Lt. For information about the events from Aug. The only way to do that is to abolish them, which our government, absent grassroots pressure, will never do. Instead, it encourages us to take responsibility for making sure nuclear weapons are never used again. The annual Hiroshima-Nagasaki Observance in the Rogue Valley doesn’t focus on the vexed issue of whether the U.S. On the contrary, I believe that we are rapidly approaching a situation in which we shall be compelled to re-examine our willingness to surrender responsibility for our thoughts and our actions to some social institution such as the political party, trade union, church or State.” In the past it has sometimes been possible for men to ‘coast along’ without posing to themselves too many searching questions about the way they are accustomed to think and to act - but it is reasonably clear that our age is not one of these. In contrast, during his period as a peace activist, Eatherly wrote, “I have for some time felt convinced that the crisis in which we are all involved is one calling for a thorough reexamination of our whole scheme of values and of loyalties. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it.” Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. That was the thing that I was going to do the best of my ability. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. The doctor explained to Tibbets that the reason some of the doctor’s classmates had washed out was because “they had too much sympathy for their patients.” Tibbets thought, “I am just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. Those are not soldiers.” But then he thought back to a lesson he had learned during his time at medical school from a doctor friend. In 1989, recording his reflections on Hiroshima for the Voices of the Manhattan Project, an oral history project of the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the Los Alamos Historical Society, he recalled thinking on his first bombing mission, “People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. “Actually, Major Eatherly did not take part in the attack and did not see the bomb blast that was supposed to have haunted him through many sleepless nights.”Īpparently, Tibbets was never haunted by his part in the destruction of more than 100,000 people. Although he commanded the weather B-29 that scouted Hiroshima about an hour ahead of the Enola Gay, he had already returned to base when the bomb was dropped. At least twice he attempted suicide by drugs, committed forgery, held up banks and post offices without taking anything, served a little time in jail and more time in VA psychiatric wards, and for a while spoke out for the abolition of nuclear weapons.Ĭolonel Paul Tibbets, who commanded Eatherly’s B-29 squadron and piloted the Enola Gay, wrote that he couldn’t understand why Eatherly felt so guilty. Shortly after discharge, he joined an abortive plot of private adventurers to overthrow the Cuban government. Air Force in 1947 with the rank of major and a Distinguished Flying Cross was that of a deeply disturbed man. The behavior of Claude Robert Eatherly (1918–1978) during the three decades after being discharged from the U.S.