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The Japanese were going to fight tooth and nail if we had to invade Japan. “Listen, I don’t want to argue the point with you,” said Fred Kopka, who worked in the 509th mess hall. They wanted to reminisce about beer parties and wild Army nurses. Most of the men Sherwood approached just wished he would go somewhere else with his tale. “After 45 years, who can say? Go with his story,” Tibbets said. Tibbets, who has written a book about the mission, could not remember Sherwood’s reconnaissance flight, but neither could he remember that it did not occur. 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. 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.
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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.