"We just got out of the way in time - otherwise we would have been roasted." "Picture I took as we were getting out of the way when the 'mushroom' came up higher than was anticipated," Bierman wrote.
He produced some of the first images of the mushroom cloud, pictures that Bierman's son, Mitchell, has hanging in his home in Randolph, with a handwritten note from his father. On the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki, no one who was aboard planes is alive - although their story is preserved through oral histories maintained by the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, and in the piles of letters, newspaper clips and heirlooms kept mainly by the children of the Atomic Age.īierman, who served as a tail-gunner aboard on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, was one of the crew members charged with taking pictures after the explosions. Like the other 67 Americans who participated in the Hiroshima mission, Lewis and Bierman are long gone. In the cockpit of the Enola Gay and serving as co-pilot was Lewis, only 26, a Ridgefield Park native who only a few years before had led his high school football team to the state championship.Īs the mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, Lewis scribbled into his flight log the words that still haunt 75 years later: It may be the greatest single factor to make the Japs surrender unconditionally." 'Nobody wins at war'īierman, 23, was a tail gunner aboard the Necessary Evil, one of two support planes that accompanied the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb that morning. "It’s a dream mission, the mission that any American man would be proud to be of. “Tonight, I am going on a mission that will go down in history," he wrote to his parents.
He was young: just five years before, he'd graduated from Passaic High School, a member of the History and Drama clubs. But when Tibbets died at age 92, he requested cremation with no headstone – and no funeral - military honors or not.Bierman, the Jewish son of a clothing retailer from Passaic, knew something was up, although he couldn't -or wouldn't - say what. His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. His family was also a proud military family. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. He proudly named his airplane Enola Gay after his beloved mother. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces. It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.