![is any of the enola gay crew still living is any of the enola gay crew still living](https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/YEYeRB2O1nHrfzYv54hMsrc_vo4=/fit-in/1600x0/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/a8/ef/a8ef861e-78e2-4eb7-a5d4-4e904f4bc725/nasm-si-2004-57996-028b.jpg)
If Japan had an A-bomb we might have dropped it into New York. This was during the war, when people become mad to kill the enemy. Would he have dropped the A-bomb? 'I tell American people I don't think we can blame you. It's very hard to win this war." At the same time I never believed in surrender either. Big smoke had covered the whole city, rising up, and I thought, "Hey, the Americans invented a real tough weapon. When I walked out of the city I could see both sides of the river burning phosphorus. 'All Japanese boys wanted to join the military in those days. When I think of these boys and girls, I can't stop the tears.'Īnd yet Mr Matsushima, whose brother, Kanngo, was a Zero fighter pilot, said he too had craved the fight against America. I saw many 12- and 13-year-old boys and girls heavily burnt among those victims. 'Without exception they stretched their arms out in front of them and were walking very slowly, marching like ghosts.
#Is any of the enola gay crew still living skin
Their skin was peeling off and you could see red muscle. Their whole bodies had been smoked to almost charcoal and their clothes were singed or torn. Mr Matsushima, a fluent English speaker and frequent visitor to America, was at school in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945: 'I remember thinking, "Did they drop thousands and thousands of fire bombs in a moment?" People's hair was sticking up, or they had lost their hair. He is expected to come face to face with US veterans who crewed the warplane that day, though Tibbets himself cannot go due to ill health. The issue will be hard to duck on 6 August when Keijiro Matsushima, 76, a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb, visits Tinian Island, the US base in the Pacific, to commemorate the Enola Gay's flight 60 years before. Whether they would have done the same as Tibbets in his position is a question some cannot, or will not, answer. Yet many acknowledge that in 1945 they were ready to fight to the death with bamboo spears, and dreamt of joining Japan's military machine, perhaps as Zero fighter pilots, kamikaze suicide bombers. As might be expected, nearly all of them condemn the use of the A-bomb as unethical. Many of the Japanese children who felt the wrath of the bomb, Little Boy, when it exploded are still alive, too. The Enola Gay's mission over Hiroshima was so secret that Tibbets was given cyanide pills, one for each of the crew, so they could commit suicide if they fell into Japanese hands. "I think we should definitely realize it just can't happen again.General Paul Tibbets, who commanded the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress he named after his mother, is now 90 and living in Columbus, Ohio. "We should look back and think just what one bomb did, what two did and think about what just one hydrogen bomb would do," Ferebee said in the 1985 Sentinel interview. He thought of the bombing as a necessary duty that would help end the war, not as an act that would kill, she said. "He was pleased that high school and college students were interested in that part of history," Mary Ann Ferebee said. Hicks served as historian and coordinating producer for a film documentary on the Hiroshima bombing, titled The Men who Brought the Dawn, in 1995.įerebee spoke about the mission and WWII to students at Rollins College in Orlando and answered letters and e-mail inquiries on a regular basis. Hicks, executive director of the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pa. The crew members have remained close, said George E. Van Kirk said he met Ferebee in the nose of a B-17 in 1942 at Sarasota where they were training and became best friends, flying together in Europe as well as on the Hiroshima mission. All I said was they must have had a very, very large pickle barrel." "The Norden bomb sight was supposed to put a bomb in a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet. "He was like a magician with that bomb sight," Van Kirk recalled, noting the device was imprecise by present standards.