Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima

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Early in September 1945, Tibbets, Ferebee, and van Kirk flew to Japan to inspect Nagasaki. After touring the city—a journey which had little emotional impact on Tibbets—he wound up shopping. “I bought rice bowls and wooden carved hand trays,” he recalled. “So did Ferebee, and we became typical American tourists.”

In America, Tibbets found himself a controversial figure. Unlike some members of the crew, he hated the publicity. He was glad to be sent to the Air War College in Alabama, where he could study war tactics. He wrote a thesis on “the employment of atomic bombs,” used by the Strategic Air Command, America’s answer to the Soviet Union’s takeover of Eastern Europe.

In the late 1950s, Tibbets served as a senior officer with NATO in France. He returned to the United States and the Strategic Air Command, once again in a flying job he liked.

He remarried. This time the marriage was successful.

In May 1965, at the age of fifty, a brigadier general, Tibbets was appointed deputy director of the U.S. Military Supply Mission to India. Almost twenty years had passed since he flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, but within a week of his arrival in New Delhi, Tibbets was greeted by virulent headlines in the pro-Communist press, labeling him “the world’s greatest killer.”

He was given a Gurkha bodyguard, but nobody could protect him from the continued newspaper harassment. An embarrassed State Department recalled Tibbets and closed down the mission.

Back in Washington, Tibbets was given a desk job. He believed his career in the air force was over. After thirty years in the service, he retired, convinced he was an “expendable victim” of a changing public attitude toward what he had been ordered to do over Hiroshima.

Withdrawn, even within his family circle, he has stayed close to his first love—airplanes. He is president of an executive jet company in the Midwest and still regularly flies Lear jets and, when the rare occasion arises, a B-29. He has arranged that when he dies, his ashes will be scattered in the sky.

Claude Eatherly, the flamboyant Texan whose off-duty conduct would have cost him his place in the 509th had he not been such an accomplished pilot, never adjusted to civilian life. His path was strewn with worthless checks, a conviction for forgery, post-office burglaries—interspersed with stays in Veterans Administration mental hospitals. His wife left him, and, after years of patient loyalty, even his brother Joe refused to put up with his drunkenness and penchant for petty crime. How, then, did this ne’er-do-well become a martyr, the American Dreyfus, the Hiroshima pilot who went mad because of his guilt over the bombing?

A reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, on the hunt for a human interest story, came across Eatherly in a routine check of the jail. The headline on his front-page story on March 20, 1957, read: WORLD WAR II HERO IN TROUBLE. The first sentence read: “The Air Force pilot who led the world’s first atomic bombing mission into Hiroshima was in Tarrant County Jail Wednesday—charged with a crime against his country.” The story, further on, clarified Eatherly’s role as the pilot of one of four (sic) reconnaissance planes, but the harm was done. Eatherly was a “hero,” and he had “led” the bombing mission. The next day’s page 1 headline read: HERO TO PLEAD INSANITY IN POST OFFICE BREAK-INS.

The April 1, 1957, issue of Newsweek picked up the story; its research staff had not checked the facts. The Eatherly myth went national and international. Several European writers seized on a new cause: Eatherly was being punished because he had proclaimed his guilt over Hiroshima. Quickly the Texan became a figurehead for “Ban the Bomb” groups. Eatherly loved the publicity. A hero at last, he found himself repeating the views attributed to him before he ever pronounced them.

In 1964, William Bradford Huie, a distinguished reporter, published a book, The Hiroshima Pilot, that documented the fabrication of the Eatherly myth in the greatest detail. But myths are not subject to clarification. People believe what they want to believe.

In 1974, a throat malignancy robbed Eatherly of his voice, but in 1976, at the age of fifty-seven, remarried, the father of two young daughters, he seemed to have found his idea of serenity. He lives on social security and a disability pension in a modest cottage near Houston, Texas, a graying man in a straw hat and cowboy boots. He likes to watch television, fish, and play pool.

The crew of the Enola Gay go their separate ways. Since 1945, they have continued to receive hate mail, which peaks every year on August 6. From time to time, the police are called in to investigate death threats. For the most part, the fliers have learned to live with the anonymous insults and recriminations.

Beser still regrets “that I didn’t get to drop the bomb on Berlin because of what the Germans did to the Jews.” He spends a good deal of his time organizing the 509th reunions, which are held every three years.

Lewis auctioned his log in 1971 for thirty-seven thousand dollars. The money helped him buy marble, from which he sculpts religious motifs. Thirty years after Hiroshima, in 1976, he still felt it was “my plane” and “my crew” that flew the mission.

Van Kirk returned to college and got a degree in chemical engineering, with honors. In 1950, he joined DuPont and has been with the firm ever since.

Nelson lives in California. Caron collects memorabilia of the atomic missions, but has so far failed to make any real money from selling color prints of the Enola Gay.

Duzenbury and Stiborik live quietly and have long since put the mission behind them. Shumard died in April 1967.

Parsons became a rear admiral. He died on December 5, 1953. His assistant over Hiroshima, Morris Jeppson, is now a scientific consultant.

Ferebee remained in the air force and, after a stint in Vietnam, retired. He divides his time between selling real estate, cultivating his one-acre flower and vegetable garden, and occasionally camping out. Although he found his visit with Tibbets to Nagasaki “horrible,” he also remembers the hundreds of kamikaze planes he saw hidden in camouflaged hangars. He looks back on his experience as the world’s first A-bombardier without regret, believing it “was a job that had to be done.”

After the war, Field Marshal Hata was tried as one of the twenty-five major Japanese war criminals. He was found guilty in 1948 and sentenced to imprisonment for life. He died in 1962.

Lieutenant Commander Hashimoto, too, found himself involved in a trial—the court-martial of the captain of the Indianapolis, Charles McVay. Hashimoto’s impending arrival in the United States was announced by the navy on December 8, 1945, the day after the fourth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The barrel-chested submarine commander received a cool reception. He understood a little English and did not like what he heard. During the trial, he often felt his evidence was being incorrectly translated.

McVay was found guilty of negligence and was demoted; his sentence was later remitted. Hashimoto became a merchant ship’s captain, often calling at U.S. and British ports. Now retired, he is head priest at a Shinto shrine in Kyoto.

Lieutenant Colonel Oya was interrogated by the Americans about the way he had treated prisoners of war. He tried to conceal the fact that ten POWs were murdered after the war’s end at Fukuoka on Kyushu; he told his interrogators the prisoners had died in Hiroshima along with the others held there. When the questions became difficult, Oya simply pointed at his injured neck and said, “Ever since the bomb my memory has gone.” In 1976, Oya was alive and well, a frequent visitor to the United States.

After the war, the hero of Pearl Harbor, Mitsuo Fuchida, was converted from Buddhism to Christianity. He toured the United States as a “flying missionary” and was not always welcomed by his audiences. He wrote a booklet entitled No More Pearl Harbors, and was annoyed by the military medals and citations he continued to receive. Fuchida died on May 30, 1976.

Flying instructor Matsuo Yasuzawa, who had flown his bent plane from Hiroshima, was barred by the occupying forces from flying again until 1952. By then, his eyesight had deteriorated and he was afflicted by a constant cough. He was unable to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a civilian airline pilot, and today lives frugally on a small disability pension.

Chief Warrant Officer Imai, having been in hiding on Tinian for well over a year, gave himself up in September 1945, the last man in his cave to do so. He is now president of a large builders’ association in Tokyo.

Today, Tinian has Commonwealth status within the U.S.–administered Trust Territories of the Pacific. The jungle has obliterated almost all signs of its wartime role. Some seven hundred Tinianese live in tin shanties in San Jose, the island’s only village. A white-robed and -hooded Capuchin priest takes care of their spiritual needs in an imposing pink Catholic church. Its tabernacle and baptismal font are U.S. Navy World War II thirty-gallon smoke tanks. The inside upper walls of the church are made of plasterboard taken from the 509th’s Tech Area.

On December 14, 1970, General Curtis LeMay was given a citation from the grateful people of Tinian for the “outstanding service” he had rendered them, “working untiringly to improve the welfare and living standards.”

Six years earlier, LeMay had been decorated by the Japanese government with the First Class Order of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, for helping them build their postwar air-defense force. The award was criticized in the Diet, but Minoru Genda, who had masterminded the Pearl Harbor raid, defended the decision.

Genda himself received in 1962 the coveted U.S. Legion of Merit, conferred by President John F. Kennedy. In 1976 Genda was a senator in the Japanese Parliament.

Hiroshima today is a bustling hodgepodge of a city with a population near nine hundred thousand, almost three times what it was before the bomb. The citizens seldom talk of August 6, 1945. Those who still show signs of their injuries tend to keep to themselves, often suffering guilt that they lived while so many died. The A-bomb dome has been left standing as it was in all its gruesomeness as a terrible reminder. Seeing it, sightseers shudder, avert their eyes, and pass on.

In October 1976, Paul Tibbets again hit the international headlines when the highlight of an air show in Texas was a simulated atom bomb drop from the restored B-29 Tibbets was flying. U.S. Army engineers provided explosives to make a mushroom-shaped cloud.

Many people were appalled. The Japanese government protested, and the American government apologized.

Tibbets thinks the fuss was “ridiculous.” He, along with the organizers of the display, maintains that “the demonstration was simply a reenactment of history, similar to many such events held regularly all over the world.”

Some years ago, the Department of Defense deeded the Enola Gay to the Smithsonian Institution. In 1977, the Enola Gay lay scattered in several pieces over the floor of a hangar in Silver Spring, Maryland, waiting to be reassembled one day and exhibited in the new Aeronautics and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.