A jury found him “not guilty by reason of insanity” and he was released.Įatherly’s guilt fascinated Anders because it provided him with a glimmer of hope for humanity - a path forward for nuclear peace activists through the Promethean gap. In carrying out these petty crimes, what Eatherly actually wanted was punishment.
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At his trial for the post-office burglaries, Eatherly’s psychiatrist testified that his patient suffered from a guilt complex stemming above all from his role in the bombing of Hiroshima. But his crimes were so poorly executed - at least once he fled the scene, leaving the money behind - that his psychiatrist and one of his defense attorneys separately reached the conclusion that Eatherly must have intended to get caught.
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hospital in Waco, had served time in a New Orleans jail for forging a check and had been involved in a series of stickups at small-town grocery stores.
It described a tattered postwar life: Eatherly had been in and out of psychiatric treatment at a V.A. In April 1957, Newsweek ran an article: “Hero in Handcuffs,” which reported that Eatherly was in a jail cell in Fort Worth after breaking into two post offices in rural Texas. Unlike Tibbets, Eatherly reported suffering from nightmares about the bombings, and his guilt drove him into a spiral of self sabotage. Under these circumstances, it was possible to be “guiltlessly guilty.” On the other hand, as participants in and witnesses to the violence, these men came closer to connecting with the physical consequences of and responsibility for their actions than any others. If one of them were to decline the assignment, someone else would have stepped up to fill his shoes. capability and commitment to winning the war. They were couriers sent to deliver a deadly message about U.S. servicemen were cogs in the atomic machine.
service members tasked with dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the prime example of people caught in the Promethean gap. In the Greek myth, the gods punished Prometheus with eternal torment.įor Anders, the U.S.
With fire, humans were launched on the road to evermore powerful inventions - a cascade of technological advances that would also unleash new forms of death, destruction and exploitation. The discrepancy between the tremendous power of humanity’s inventions and the limited ability of any single person to comprehend, let alone control the moral and practical implications of that power, is what Günther Anders, the postwar German-Jewish philosopher and antinuclear activist, called “the Promethean gap.” Prometheus is a character from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. His role in the bombing would haunt him for the rest of his life. Eatherly, then an outgoing 26-year-old Texan, piloted the advance weather plane tasked with assessing target visibility over Hiroshima, giving the go ahead to drop the bomb that day. Claude Eatherly, came forward to publicly declare that he felt remorse for what he had done. In the ensuing decades, only one of the 90 servicemen who flew the atomic bombing missions, Maj. “It contained a dozen colors, all of them blindingly bright.” Just when it appeared that the explosion was subsiding, “a kind of mushroom spurted out of the top and traveled up, up to what some say was a distance of 60,000 or 70,000 feet.” They watched as fire swallowed the city whole: “It was like no ordinary fire,” a crew member later recalled. 6, 1945, were witnessing a man-made cataclysm unlike anything seen in the previous history of human warfare. The American airmen who flew the mission to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.
Looking down, they saw the fireball unfurling. A loud clap broke around them as the first of three shock waves hit, causing the plane’s aluminum body to vibrate violently. More than one noted a strange metallic taste in his mouth. The explosion lit the plane’s interior with a brilliant flash, so bright that some of the aviators momentarily thought they had been blinded. The B-29 bomber banked hard to avoid the blast. After years of being arrested for petty crimes, he became a high-profile antinuclear activist. The latest article from “ Beyond the World War II We Know ,” a series from The Times that documents lesser-known stories from the war, looks at Claude Eatherly, an American pilot involved in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.