The next picture showed the children sprawling in agony. The next picture showed one parachute and two airplanes, silver silhouettes unlike the broken hulk in the Smithsonian warehouse. The children might have been illustrations in a first-grade reader: See the airplane. One of them was pointing, maybe at the parachutes which carried sensing devices to measure the blast. The earlier drawings had shown two boys and a girl, schoolchildren, looking up. He turned to a color drawing of a mushroom cloud. I was right under the explosion but I didn't know what it was." His translator said: "When I was 12, I remember airplane coming. He held up a book he published, It had color drawings that were too small for the crowd to see. Thirty-five years ago, Shimodoi was 12, a schoolboy, he had told the 509th Composite Group the night before at a cocktail party. Shimodoi, at 47, last Friday, stood at attention, and was slightly potbellied. He stood by the name Enola Gay while his personal photographer flashed away at him. Surio Shimodoi was the first man to reach her. The aft part of the fuselage was broken off from the bomb bay. It lay on mattresses on top of wooden cradles.
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It was a dingy, a broken, wingless fuselage. The buses unloaded and they all came walking in to look at the Enola Gay. Much like the electronic flashguns that strobed and flipflashed and sizzled away on Friday in the gloom of the Smithsonian warehouse. "From where I was sitting in the plane, the fireball was like an electronic flashgun, that was all," says Beser, a short man with a gray goatee. Then the bomb demolished the sky, Hiroshima and the sleep of the world for the rest of civilization. There were American planes in the sky all the time, and this time there were only three, one of them being Enola Gay. Later on, the guys were rolling oranges back from the cockpit to hit me and wake me up."Īnd in August 1945 it had been an ordinary morning for Surio Shimodoi, too, given that particular time and place. Those wheels weren't off the ground 10 seconds before I was asleep. Ordinary: Beser, 59, an electromechanical engineer in Baltimore, who flew as a radar man on the Enola Gay, said: "I'd worked for 27 straight hours before we took off. It was too incredible, it was too ordinary. It wasn't like that, they all kept saying.
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They didn't even have any ironies to offer. Surio Shimodoi, head of the Hiroshima Survivors Association, had come to Washington to be with the men of the 509th Composite Group as they convened here for a reunion over the weekend. The western Pacific or a Smithsonian warehouse in Silver Hill, Md. Thirty-five years ago and last Friday, both, Jacob Beser climbed aboard the Enola Gay, the B-29 chosen to drop the first atom bomb.Īnd Surio Shimodoi stood looking at it, a citizen of Hiroshima watching a silvery glint in the light of an August morning. But it wasn't like that - either 35 years ago or last Friday. You listened for tales of madness, lost souls, cursed lives and nightmares.