On the Lufthansa Airlines cover displayed here, Jacob Herschel Beser has handwritten what constitutes a complete and definitive statement of his role in America’s nuclear action against Japan that ended World War II: “Jacob Beser, former 1st Lt. USAF, crew of Enola Gay 6 July 45 (Hiroshima), crew of Bock’s Car 9 Aug 45 (Nagasaki).”
Beser (1921-1992) was the only crewman to have flown on both the atomic bombing missions over Japan that effectively ended World War II and brought the world into the nuclear age. (Most people do not know that there was a third bomb and that Beser was scheduled to fly a planned third mission over Nihama, but the operation became unnecessary when Japan surrendered.) He served as the radar specialist aboard both the Enola Gay, when it dropped the “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and aboard Bock’s Car, when “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. The 24-year-old radar specialist, who had designed the “proximity fuse” (a critical trigger component for the bombs), was tasked with ensuring that the A-bombs exploded at an altitude that would create the greatest destruction (which, at Hiroshima, was 1,850 feet). He was also charged with broad responsibility for electronic countermeasures that would protect the bombs against the possibility that a radio broadcast could accidentally trigger the electronic fuses.
Beser’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe with deep roots in Judaism and its cultural traditions, and he grew up in Baltimore in a home that valued education, religious observance, and community involvement. He regularly participated in religious ceremonies, attended synagogue, and was educated in Jewish principles and ethics. Characterizing himself as “a religious person,” he was very active in Jewish communal affairs throughout his life. He served on the board of the Jewish Family and Children’s Service; as president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of Baltimore and of the Associated Jewish Charities; on the board of directors of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, the oldest established synagogue in Maryland; as commander of the Maccabean Post of the American Legion; and as an adult leader with the National Jewish Committee on Scouting, which awarded him its Shofar Award. He also donated the Jacob Beser Collection to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which included the minutes of meetings from the German-Jewish Children’s Aid, Inc., a Baltimore organization that sought to bring German-Jewish children to the United States during the Nazi era, with the hope of ultimately reuniting them with their birth families.
Though his grandparents had emigrated from Germany almost a century earlier – his grandfather fought with the Union army during the Civil War and his father fought against his own Jewish cousins while serving with the American Expeditionary force against the Germans in World War I – Beser still had close relatives in Germany and France who were victims of the Holocaust. His mother had been taking in German refugee children, and the family had Jewish relatives in Europe. When the British entered World War II, Beser wanted to join the RAF to “kill some Nazis,” but he respected his parents’ wishes that he remain at Johns Hopkins University to complete his mechanical engineering degree. However, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he overcame parental opposition and dropped out to enlist in the U.S. Air Force.
Beser became one of the service’s highest-rated radar officers at a time when radar technology was new and growing in importance, and, because of his training and educational background, he was sent to Los Alamos, where he worked on the Manhattan Project with Neils Bohr and Enrico Fermi in the area of weapons firing and fusing. Ironically, shortly before being assigned to his historic mission, he had requested a transfer to a combat unit to avenge his family in Europe who had already become Holocaust victims.
Even seventy years later, when many have become somewhat inured, maybe even a bit complacent, about the idea of atomic warfare (see, e.g., Barack Obama’s deal that all but ensured an Iranian nuclear weapon until Israel invaded Iran and President Trump took decisive action to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities), it is absolutely spine-tingling to read Beser’s description of his experience at Hiroshima the moment the bomb dropped:
I wasn’t watching the radar screen. I had my own instrumentation I was concerned with. I saw the fuse come on after the bomb separated from the aircraft, fixed time delay of about 10 seconds, give it time to clear. I saw the fuse come on to get the whole thing rolling and then the thing disappeared. At the same time it disappeared there was this big flash which illuminated the inside of the airplane. I was busy analyzing the environment making sure there was nothing [unplanned] happening. I was looking for the presence of signals… When I got to the window two, three minutes later, the cloud was already up there, the mushroom that you see. It was still boiling and changing colors and I looked out and couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked like – you get down here at Ocean City and you get about two feet out in the water and you start stirring up the sand and how it billows? Well, it was like the whole [***] ground was doing it. And I could see new fires breaking on the periphery all the time.
To this day, President Truman’s use of the nuclear option remains a polarizing event. As a Jew whose people had faced persecution and extermination during the Holocaust and throughout history, Beser uniquely understood the complexities of using a devastating atomic weapon, and he wrestled with the justification of the bombings as a means to end the war. However, he ultimately became firm that it was the correct decision at the time, given the great American casualties certain to result in an invasion of Japan, and he made a compelling argument for the propriety of America’s having used atomic weapons:
One has to consider the context of the times in which decisions are made. Given the same set of circumstances as existed in 1945, I would not hesitate to take part in another similar mission. No, I feel no sorrow or remorse for whatever small role I played. That I should is crazy. I remember Pearl Harbor and all of the Japanese atrocities. I remember the shock to our nation that all of this brought. I don’t want to hear any discussion of morality. War, by its very nature, is immoral. Are you any more dead from an atomic bomb than from a conventional bomb?…
If someone is looking for an apology for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you won’t get it from me. I am proud of my role in missions that ended World War II… My one regret is that the bomb was not available for the final subjugation of Germany. I think the German people earned the right to that honor more than the Japanese people did… As far as our country was concerned, we were three years downstream in a war, going on four. The world had been at war, really, from the ’30s in China, continuously, and millions and millions of people had been killed. Add to that the deliberate killing that went on in Europe, [and] it’s kind of ludicrous to say well, geez, look at all those people that were instantly murdered.
In November of 1945 there was an invasion of Japan planned. Three million men were gonna be thrown against Japan. There were about three million Japanese digging in for the defense of their homeland, and there was a casualty potential of over a million people. That’s what was avoided. If you take the highest figures of casualties of both cities, say, 300,000 combined casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, versus a million, I’m sorry to say, it’s a good tradeoff. It’s a very cold way to look at it, but it’s the only way to look at it… The use of atomic bombs, despite revisionist objections, shortened the war and saved both American and Japanese lives.
Nonetheless, Beser, also believing that the decision to defer the issue of post-war control of nuclear weapons was a serious mistake, supported the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Shown here is a rare item, a reproduction of the Treaty, signed “Jacob Beser, 1st Lt. USAF, Enola Gay & Bock’s Car.”
After World War II, Beser seriously considered serving in the Israeli air force and contributing to the founding of the State of Israel. Upon his arrival at the army discharge base at the end of the war, he saw a recruitment table for the Haganah, which was seeking air crews to smuggle displaced Jews from Europe to Eretz Yisrael. However, he decided to remain in America, where he worked for the Army Corps of Engineers in the construction of the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which were later used by the Atomic Energy Commission for weapons research. He went on to become a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, where he helped to develop a pump used to circulate blood during heart surgery.
Beser worked for AAI Corp. (1951-1956) before beginning his career at Westinghouse, and he retired from its Defense and Electronic Systems Center in Linthicum as deputy program manager and subcontracts manager of the defense meteorological satellite program. He was buried according to the Jewish ritual in the Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery in Baltimore.
Recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth caused a stir when, pursuant to President Trump’s long overdue purge of content deemed to promote DEI, he absurdly flagged the name Enola Gay for removal, apparently because the name contained the word “gay” (sigh). In fact, the Enola Gay was named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets.
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Technical Sergeant George Robert (“Rob”) Caron (1919-1995) was the tail gunner aboard the Enola Gay during its bombing of Hiroshima, in which capacity he was the only defender of the twelve crewmen aboard. Facing the rear of the B-29, his vantage point made him the first airborne person to witness the mushroom cloud over the Japanese city and, as the only photographer aboard, he took historic photographs with his hand-held as the mushroom cloud rose. Although the image of the mushroom cloud shows nothing of the vast destruction it caused, it remains one of the seminal, most powerful, and haunting images of the Second World War.
Caron gave the following description of the explosion:
I kept shooting pictures and trying to get the mess down over the city. All the while I was describing this on the intercom… The mushroom itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-grey smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside. As we got further away, we could see what looked like a few-hundred-foot layer of debris and smoke and what have you. I was trying to describe the mushroom, this turbulent mass. I saw fires springing up in different places, like flames shooting up on a bed of coals. I was asked to count them. I said, “Count them?” Hell, I gave that up when there were about fifteen, they were coming too fast to count. I can still see it – that mushroom and that turbulent mass – it looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city, and it seemed to flow outward up into the foothills where the little valleys would come into the plain, with fires starting up all over, so pretty soon it was hard to see anything because of the smoke.
When the crew of the Enola Gay returned to its base on Tinian Island, they were celebrated as heroes; “For them this had been a truly awe-inspiring experience, and not only for them, but for many generations who have since come into contact with images of the bomb.” In a letter to his wife upon his return from the Hiroshima mission, he wrote: “It seems our crew and airplanes made history or something. When they let us write about it from here, I’ll be able to tell you all about it. Our picture will probably be all over the States before we can say anything.”
Indeed, in the United States, the image was first shown in the New York Times on August 15, 1945, only a few days after the Japanese offer to surrender, and the broader public likely saw the photograph for the first time in the August 20, 1945, issue of Life. Indeed, the image became an icon of the American victory over Japan and the crewmembers of the Enola Gay became instant heroes.
In May 1995, Caron published the book Fire of a Thousand Suns, The George R. “Bob” Caron Story, Tail Gunner of the Enola Gay about his “eye-witness account of the momentous event when the world was catapulted into the Atomic Age, the introduction of atomic capability, the technical development of the B-29, and the events that put him into the tail gun turret of the Enola Gay.”
In this November 25, 1992 correspondence to a Jewish friend, Caron evidences strong pro-Israel feelings; credits the Jews for “making the desert bloom”; and prays for peace in the Holy Land. After explaining that he did not know about the Holocaust until the end of World War II, he expresses outrage at Holocaust deniers and takes off on “those Neo-Nazi punk kids” who “ought to have their [***] kicked cross-country:”
Your package arrived Monday in the middle of our big blizzard. What a touching, wonderful gift all the more so because it’s not a tourist item as you say and coming from a Jewish friend. I’ll bet talking to the priest was interesting for both of you. I’m not as devout a Catholic as my sister and from your studies, I’ll bet you know more about Catholicism than I’ll ever know.
I still have the rosary my Mother gave me when I enlisted and it flew with me on my missions over Japan. Your rosary & mine will set side by side in the box. Will take yours with me the next time I fly FIFI. May as well give it some B-29 air time. My sincere thanks for such a thoughtful gift and also for the picture post cards.
About 5 years ago my sister & brother-in-law made a trip to the Holy Land with a church group and was very touched. They thought it was a wonderful country to visit. Too bad there can’t be peace there. If it wasn’t for the Jews that part of the world would still be a useless desert.
You asked if I knew about the Holocaust. No, we hadn’t heard about it until the Allies got to the camps and then just what the news media wrote about it. What gets me now is these nuts that say there never was a holocaust. Then there are those Neo-Nazi punk kids that ought to have their [***] kicked cross-country. Sometimes I think the First Amendment should have limitations tacked on.
You ask a lot of questions about growing up in Brooklyn. It would take a book and you know me and the length of my letters. My whole working life was in engineering where reports had to be short & sweet. We lived in a lot of areas of Brooklyn, some poor sections and others nicer; all depending on how my Dad’s work went. He was a carpenter and during the depression his “career” was like a yo-yo. They didn’t have welfare in those days but we never went hungry.
Sounds like the refugee business keeps you busy. Must be interesting. Thank goodness there’s guys like you.
Well, Doug, it’s starting to warm up outside and a good time to dig out the cars. They sort of got buried in the snow. Have a kid that shovels my walk as this ‘ole back can’t do it anymore. So take care and hope you have a nice Thanksgiving being back with your family. Thanks again for the rosary – it’s priceless.
Finally, Caron discloses that he carried his mother’s rosary aboard the Enola Gay and he thanks his correspondent for the gift of a rosary, which he intends to take with him aboard FIFI, a former Navy Boeing B-29 Superfortress owned at the time by the Commemorative Air Force and flown, since 1971, in air shows. FIFI was also used in the filming of The Right Stuff, Roswell and the 1980 film Enola Gay: The Men, The Mission, and the Atomic Bomb.
