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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. 'I never heard the words 'atomic bomb.’ We were only told what we needed to know, and keep your mouth shut. Jacob Beser would be the only one to see the aftermath of both explosions. Gackenbach, now 95, was the navigator of the assignment which was carried out by three strike planes: the Enola Gay, which held the bomb, and two observation aircraft, the Great Artiste and the Necessary Evil. 9, when a B-29 called "Bockscar" dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki.Īrmy Air Forces 2nd Lt. even though they had no connection with the atomic bomb, I dont think. The crew also hoped that the bomb would never be used again but it was, three days later on Aug. Dutch Van Kirk, the navigator from the B-29 Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped. 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. It had hastened the end of the war and saved the lives of U.S. In order to finish it, they had to bomb them into surrender or invade them. Lewis, Caron and the others, however, would later say they had no regrets about dropping the bomb. This was not a war the Americans started.
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"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. A professor of mine took some students to visit Truman before he died, one of them asked if he had second thoughts. 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. "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.