POST-WAR REACTIONS OF A-BOMBER PILOTS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29384, 10 December 1960, Page 10

POST-WAR REACTIONS OF A-BOMBER PILOTS

Hiroshima And Nagasaki (From a Reuter Correspondent) LONDON. r THE different post-war reactions of the United States airmen who took part in the first atomic attack on Japan are spotlighted in a new book just published here. The book, “No High Ground,” by two American journalists, Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey, tells in great detail the story of the planning and the execution of the atomic bomb raid on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Their story is based on numerous interviews with people able to tell the “inside story,” and on hitherto secret documents.

But, the authors theft add: “More deeply affected than any other American who flew over Hiroshima was Major Claude Eatlierly, pilot of the aircraft which signed the city’s death warrant with its weather report. “Twelve years later, Eatherly, his mind disturbed, was arrested for the robbery of two Texas post offices. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. “A Veterans’ Administration psychiatrist who testified at the trial said that Eatherly’s ‘feeling of_guilt’ over Hiroshima had contributed to his mental troubles.” Another officer who flew in one of the aircraft involved in the Hiroshima operation is also shown in the book to have become critical of the action. He is Captain Ellsworth T. Carrington, co-pilot of a weather aircraft over the secondary target of Kokura that morning. But most of the airmen who took part in the attack on Hiroshima believe that it was necessary to end the war and perhaps save more lives. As Captain Theodore Van Kirk, navigator of the B-29 which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, put it “What’s the difference—one bomb or thousands?” Major Charles Sweeney, who carried instruments over Hiroshima and dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki, found it diffi-

cult “to differentiate between the napalm which killed over 78,000 in Tokyo and the uranium which killed about the same number in Hiroshima.” The authors have traced meticulously the momentous decisions leading up to an operation which changed the destiny of the world. For the average reader of 1960, however, the main interest in the book may be their revelations of the feelings of the men who flew in the aircraft which were over Japan that morning.

Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, who piloted that B-29 which dropped the bomb, was by this year still in the service as commander of the 6th Air Division of the Strategic Air Command, at Mac Dill, Florida, and is still, in the words of the authors, “What he had been in 1945: the epitome of cool stability.” Of his co-pilot, Captain Robert A. Lewis, they write: “In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, and later, he reached the conclusion that it had to be done.

“Perhaps, he thought, the sacrifice of Hiroshima would not be in vain, because it showed that the new weapon’s threat was so great that the world could not possibly afford another war.” Years later. Captain Lewis went on . television to help to raise money for the medical treatment of • girls disfigured by the bomb which he helped to deliver.”