He says he was attached to another wing, flying with the 509th only briefly as a replacement pilot. Few recognized Sherwood, which did not surprise him. He looked like most of the men at the reunion, where aging soldiers peered through bifocals at name tags to jog their fading memories of old wartime buddies.
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His thick brown hair has thinned and whitened. More recently, he organized a vacation-exchange program between Americans and Soviets.Īt 66, his sharp pilot’s eyes have dimmed somewhat but still are as blue as the desert sky. Sherwood has protested the MX missile and participated in peace walks in the Soviet Union. In 1981, at the urging of his Methodist minister, he became more active in peace issues, hoping to find what he calls “sanction” for his World War II involvement. He married, finished college, and got a job with the city’s water department.īut the memories stuck. “I felt so cannibalistic, I could scarcely accept what I saw.”Īfter the war, Sherwood returned home to Salt Lake City and tried to forget. Sherwood recalls “an utter chaos of squirming human destruction” and still breaks into tears at the memory. Stone walls glowed red, and rivers clogged with floating bodies. Up to two miles away, the heat charred skin. Directly beneath the blast, people were vaporized. When the atom bomb exploded above Hiroshima, it created a fireball that leveled 62,000 buildings and killed 80,000 people. “Tibbets would have a different feeling if he had been 150 feet over that destruction and saw what I saw.” He has no regrets, no remorse, and no patience for those who question the rightness of using the bomb.Īrriving at the reunion, Sherwood had little patience for the general. Truman’s burden-but today he is the bombing’s most outspoken defender, saying it brought a quick end to World War II and saved more lives than it cost. He didn’t make the decision-that was President Harry S. Tibbets piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Tibbets, former commander of the 509th and still its spiritual leader. And best of all, they’d get to see retired Brig. They’d be able to visit their old air base, now abandoned. A monument to the 509th would be unveiled. War, by its very nature, is immoral.There were three big attractions. I don't want to hear any discussion of morality. "I remember the shock to our nation that all of this brought. I remember Pearl Harbor and all of the Japanese atrocities." He was a radarman on the Enola Gay and performed the same duties on Bockscar.īeser would later write that "No, I feel no sorrow or remorse for whatever small role I played. Jacob Beser would be the only one to see the aftermath of both explosions. 9, when a B-29 called "Bockscar" dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki.Īrmy Air Forces 2nd Lt. The crew also hoped that the bomb would never be used again but it was, three days later on Aug. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life." Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, of Northumberland, Pa., later said that "I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run, but I pray no man will have to witness that sight again. troops who were then preparing for the invasion of Japan.Ĭapt.
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It had hastened the end of the war and saved the lives of U.S. Lewis, Caron and the others, however, would later say they had no regrets about dropping the bomb. "I honestly have the feeling of groping for words to explain this or I might say, my God, what have we done?" Everyone on the ship is actually dumbstruck even though we had expected something fierce." ''If I live a hundred years, I'll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind. He was keeping a log of the flight, scribbling on the backs of old War Department forms. It was about that time that Tibbets turned the airplane around, so that everybody could get a look at it." Flames in different spots would be springing up.
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"And fires, I could see fires spring up through this undercast, or whatever you would call it, that was covering the city. It looked like bubbling molasses, let's say, spreading out and running up into the foothills, just covering the whole city." I could see the city, and it was being covered with this low, bubbling mass. "As we got further away, I could see the city then, not just the mushroom, coming up.