"To his dying day, he didn't know why he was selected," his son Mitchell recalls. "The Army never told him, and he didn't ask.
He was initially assigned to an Infantry unit at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, until he was mysteriously plucked from his unit and put on a train bound for Miami. One of them was Bierman, who dropped out of NYU to join the Army when the war broke out. Then Tibbets named the plane the Enola Gay, after his mother. To add insult to injury, Tibbets took command of the B-29 that Lewis was flying, and even replaced some members of the crew. Lewis had flown hundreds of missions but had no combat experience, and the Army put Tibbets in command of the Hiroshima mission. Lewis had once flown with Charles Lindbergh on a newly minted B-29 Superfortress and received the famed aviator's approval. Lewis was considered one of the best and most daring pilots in the Air Forces, a man who twice had crash-landed but saved his crew both times. Tibbets, whom the Army selected over him to pilot the plane that dropped the bomb. In the years after Hiroshima, Lewis had a falling out with Col. I hope it has become a deterrent force, and maybe we won’t have so many wars,” he said. “Today I’m pleased the bomb hasn’t been used again. Lewis added that the ensuing nuclear arms race had effectively led to a stalemate. What good is it going to do us to talk about it?” he said. “The bombing of Hiroshima is something that is over with. Lewis never publicly regretted the bombing, but it appears that he did get tired of having to defend it. He expressed his frustration in a 1975 interview with The Record, 30 years after Hiroshima.
North Jersey: Former WWII veteran, author Robert Leckie honored with banner in downtown RutherfordĬolumn: From opposite worlds, two soldiers forged a friendship - and saved each other's lives He worked at the Henry Heide Candy Company in New York and for Estee Candy Company in Parsippany, making sweet confections in between attending the occasional reunion with the Hiroshima crew. While Bierman sold dresses, Lewis returned home from the war to sell candy. Those casualties could have been our casualties. But he felt that if the enemy got the bomb, they were going to use it. Not that he was basking in the glory of having been part of that. Mitchell said his father regretted the tremendous loss of life, "but felt that in that time, and in that place, it was the right thing to do. In their writings, Bierman and Lewis remained convinced that two atomic bombs that initially killed more than 200,000 people ultimately saved more lives by forcing Japan to surrender. Once the nuclear genie was out of the bottle, the world never be the same, and the arms race was on. Like many veterans, Bierman didn't talk much about the war, but was proud of his role in it. The son also keeps his father's uniform and the Air Medal he received for the A-bomb missions in a glass case. Mel, who died in 2013 at age 91, put together a 90-page memoir that Mitchell now has. "My mother worked in the back, doing the books." "My father worked in the front of the store, doing all the schmoozing and hiring," Mitchell said. His parents were partners in the clothing business, and the family lived a comfortable middle class life on Idaho Street in Passaic.
He was the youngest of three children born to Mel and Carol Bierman - Anne being the oldest, followed by Louis. Mitchell was born in 1962, 17 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mel Bierman came home to Passaic to the family business, selling clothes - and became quite successful, opening Stage III shops in Passaic and Upper Montclair, and later buying Ginsburg's, a high-end ladies' store downtown on Main Avenue. The war effectively ended five days after the bombing of Nagasaki, when Japan surrendered. "We just got out of the way in time - otherwise we would have been roasted." "Picture I took as we were getting out of the way when the 'mushroom' came up higher than was anticipated," Bierman wrote. He produced some of the first images of the mushroom cloud, pictures that Bierman's son, Mitchell, has hanging in his home in Randolph, with a handwritten note from his father. Bierman, who served as a tail-gunner aboard on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, was one of the crew members charged with taking pictures after the explosions.