Our First Atom Bomb
An All-American Story
by
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This story of the dropping of the first atom bomb got going for me again when the fight broke out at the National Air and Space Museum. It happened when they were preparing to unveil the restored forward fuselage of the Enola Gay and an exhibiit to go along with it. At first it was the curatorial staff and a few of the veterans with their supporters who were battling back and forth. The plan for the exhibit included something of the human side of the death and destruction at Hiroshima along with aspects of the politics and ethical concerns about this mission. Several of the pictures and descriptions from Japanese survivors were pretty hard to take. It wasn't long before General Tibbets and other veterans, followed by the Air Force Association and its magazine and the American Legion and a good number of politicians complained about what they called historical revisionism and a lack of balance. After that just about everybody with an opinion joined in. The Senate even passed a Sense of the Senate motion. They did not want the exhibit to question what they saw as the authoritative understanding that the first atomic bomb has helped to end the war and save lives. That was the only story they believed should be told. The exhibit, they maintained, should rightly and proudly stick to those facts. When the director had to resign and efforts were made to limit the the exhibit to that basic story, a number of historians weighed in on the opposite side. That was far from the whole story, they insisted. Nor was it even all the facts. Those who wanted to omit ethical concerns and other parts of the story were, as they put it, lacking a moral compass. There ought to be a way to help people see and hear the story in all its human and moral complexity. It was during that argument that I felt I had run into another All American kind of hero who was trying to get a handle on the significance of what happened in his life and the life of our country. I think I knew that the Enola Gay's bombardier was gone by then, but he insisted he need to talk with me. It clearly was someone like him, though, I supposed, also different, raising other possibilities about that August day in 1945.
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About the Book
What could it have been like to press the switch that dropped the world’s first atomic bomb? What might have been going through the head of the All-American young man who had that responsibility on the Enola Gay? Complete with interviews with people like Colonel Paul Tibbets and those who knew Curtis LeMay and Tokyo Rose, this re-creation tells of the entire six hours that the mission took, from take-off at Tinian to that awesome moment over Hiroshima.
From an interview with Dr. Theodore McCluskey S.J.:
“I try to imagine being in his front seat position. Can you imagine putting anyone into that position? Making any human being responsible for that? Such power over death and life? No wonder he was mixed up. No wonder he wanted to think up a plan B, or, how did he put it?—to try to reshuffle the cards. I can understand why you and he would want to imagine things differently. Imagination is needed if we are going to see other possibilities in time of war.”
About the Author
With degrees from Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Birmingham (U.K.), Frederick Borsch has taught at several theological schools in the United States and abroad, and at Princeton University and Yale Divinity School. He lives both in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. He was ten when the first atom bomb fell.