14-12  Howard J. Galusha

They didn’t tell us what it was at the time, but it turned out to be the atomic bomb.  There were specialists there and they trained us to go on bomb runs.  We never did know why they picked our squadron.

We were sent to Tinian Island in the Marianas Group.  One of the twelve airplanes I was assigned to there was the Enola Gay.  I did maintenance on the planes and flew in them all to detect any problems.  The night before the Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima I was on guard duty.  There are two big bomb bays in each B29.  I slept on a cot under one of the bomb bays on the plane next to the Enola Gay.  The next morning, August 6, 1945, the crew left for the mission.  

When the Enola Gay came back the crew described how they had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.  They didn’t know they had dropped the atomic bomb until they saw the giant mushroom cloud.  They were flying at around 39,000 feet, at least, and still had to maneuver the plane to avoid the mushroom.  They knew they had a direct hit but didn’t know the extent of the damage until later.  They had no Japanese Zeros after them so they came right back to Tinian, which was probably a ten hour flight.  They were all so happy and excited, we all were.  It’s hard now to describe that excitement.  We knew the war was over and when they dropped the second one on Nagasaki two days later, there was no doubt about it.  There was no remorse at the time, that all came later.  Though there was a pilot from another plane that was so emotional about it, he had to be grounded.  He didn’t fly anymore.  We realized that we had won the war and that’s all that mattered.  There’s still no remorse on my part, I’m glad we won the war, though I am glad that America and Japan are friendly now. 

After the war ended our base was still active but we weren’t going out on any bomb missions or doing any repairs, so we just played pinochle in the barracks.  We thought we’d be going home soon, but we were on Tinian until the 1^st of November.  Since I was on the ground crew I was fortunate to be able to fly over, but I had to come back by ship which took 17 days and that wasn’t so great. 

I am 85 now and this happened when I was 28 years old.  I still think about my time on Tinian and the one wish I had was to be on the flight crew of one of those planes.  I did the repairs, fixed whatever went wrong, but I would have loved to be on one of those missions. 

Howard J. Galusha