Journalists wrote detailed books and articles examining his claims and motives. The more visible Eatherly became as a symbol of peace and disarmament, the more heated the debate was about the sincerity of his experiences and feelings. “We have learned to feel towards you a fellow-feeling,” they wrote, “thinking that you are also a victim of war like us.” “I asked them to forgive me.” Thirty “girls of Hiroshima,” young hibakusha, or atomic bomb victims, left alive but scarred by the blast, responded. “I told them I was the Major that gave the ‘go ahead’ to destroy Hiroshima, that I was unable to forget the act, and that the guilt of the act has caused me great suffering,” Eatherly reported to Anders. With Anders’ encouragement, Eatherly sent a message to the people of Hiroshima. Anders saw in Eatherly’s behavior a person attempting, in his own way, to be held accountable for his actions rather than finding ways to disclaim or reject responsibility. Yet, he still appeared to feel, and suffer under, the enormity of his role in the atomic bombings. Logically, he knew that if it had not been him, it would have been someone else to give the go ahead to drop the bomb. In a 1961 interview with reporter Ronnie Dugger, Eatherly explained that he was not convinced by the orthodox explanation about the atomic bomb as a war winning weapon the Japanese were putting up so little resistance by early August that Eatherly believed the war would have ended even without the nuclear devastation. You may be the man, if I can be of any help to you, count on me.” “Through writers like yourself,” Eatherly wrote in one of his first letters to Anders, “someone will … give a message that will influence the world toward a reconciliation and peace. Anders was eager to co-opt the pilot’s story in the service of generating political will to eliminate nuclear weapons, casting Eatherly as “a symbol of the future.” For his part, Eatherly quickly developed the hope that Anders would provide the platform that he lacked. In 1959, Anders wrote to Eatherly and they struck up a correspondence. For Eatherly, his dutiful service and the standard justification that the atomic bombings saved lives by ending the war, were not enough to quiet his conscience. A jury found him “not guilty by reason of insanity” and he was released.Įatherly’s guilt fascinated Anders because it provided him with a glimmer of hope for humanity - a path forward for nuclear peace activists through the Promethean gap. In carrying out these petty crimes, what Eatherly actually wanted was punishment.
#CREW OF ENOLA GAY HIROSHIMA TRIAL#
At his trial for the post-office burglaries, Eatherly’s psychiatrist testified that his patient suffered from a guilt complex stemming above all from his role in the bombing of Hiroshima. But his crimes were so poorly executed - at least once he fled the scene, leaving the money behind - that his psychiatrist and one of his defense attorneys separately reached the conclusion that Eatherly must have intended to get caught.
#CREW OF ENOLA GAY HIROSHIMA SERIES#
hospital in Waco, had served time in a New Orleans jail for forging a check and had been involved in a series of stickups at small-town grocery stores. It described a tattered postwar life: Eatherly had been in and out of psychiatric treatment at a V.A. In April 1957, Newsweek ran an article: “Hero in Handcuffs,” which reported that Eatherly was in a jail cell in Fort Worth after breaking into two post offices in rural Texas. Unlike Tibbets, Eatherly reported suffering from nightmares about the bombings, and his guilt drove him into a spiral of self sabotage. In the Greek myth, the gods punished Prometheus with eternal torment. With fire, humans were launched on the road to evermore powerful inventions - a cascade of technological advances that would also unleash new forms of death, destruction and exploitation. The discrepancy between the tremendous power of humanity’s inventions and the limited ability of any single person to comprehend, let alone control the moral and practical implications of that power, is what Günther Anders, the postwar German-Jewish philosopher and antinuclear activist, called “the Promethean gap.” Prometheus is a character from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.
His role in the bombing would haunt him for the rest of his life. Eatherly, then an outgoing 26-year-old Texan, piloted the advance weather plane tasked with assessing target visibility over Hiroshima, giving the go ahead to drop the bomb that day. Claude Eatherly, came forward to publicly declare that he felt remorse for what he had done. In the ensuing decades, only one of the 90 servicemen who flew the atomic bombing missions, Maj.