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You have got to leave the moral issue out of it.” Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. That was the thing that I was going to do the best of my ability. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. The doctor explained to Tibbets that the reason some of the doctor’s classmates had washed out was because “they had too much sympathy for their patients.” Tibbets thought, “I am just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. Those are not soldiers.” But then he thought back to a lesson he had learned during his time at medical school from a doctor friend. In 1989, recording his reflections on Hiroshima for the Voices of the Manhattan Project, an oral history project of the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the Los Alamos Historical Society, he recalled thinking on his first bombing mission, “People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. “Actually, Major Eatherly did not take part in the attack and did not see the bomb blast that was supposed to have haunted him through many sleepless nights.”Īpparently, Tibbets was never haunted by his part in the destruction of more than 100,000 people. Although he commanded the weather B-29 that scouted Hiroshima about an hour ahead of the Enola Gay, he had already returned to base when the bomb was dropped. At least twice he attempted suicide by drugs, committed forgery, held up banks and post offices without taking anything, served a little time in jail and more time in VA psychiatric wards, and for a while spoke out for the abolition of nuclear weapons.Ĭolonel Paul Tibbets, who commanded Eatherly’s B-29 squadron and piloted the Enola Gay, wrote that he couldn’t understand why Eatherly felt so guilty. Shortly after discharge, he joined an abortive plot of private adventurers to overthrow the Cuban government. Air Force in 1947 with the rank of major and a Distinguished Flying Cross was that of a deeply disturbed man. The behavior of Claude Robert Eatherly (1918–1978) during the three decades after being discharged from the U.S.