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. Nobody wins at war." Return to North Jersey 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. View Gallery: Hiroshima 75 years later | Photos 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. On the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki, no one who was aboard planes is alive - although their story is preserved through oral histories maintained by the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, and in the piles of letters, newspaper clips and heirlooms kept mainly by the children of the Atomic Age.īierman, 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. Like the other 67 Americans who participated in the Hiroshima mission, Lewis and Bierman are long gone. In the cockpit of the Enola Gay and serving as co-pilot was Lewis, only 26, a Ridgefield Park native who only a few years before had led his high school football team to the state championship.Īs the mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, Lewis scribbled into his flight log the words that still haunt 75 years later:
It may be the greatest single factor to make the Japs surrender unconditionally." 'Nobody wins at war'īierman, 23, was a tail gunner aboard the Necessary Evil, one of two support planes that accompanied the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb that morning. "It’s a dream mission, the mission that any American man would be proud to be of. “Tonight, I am going on a mission that will go down in history," he wrote to his parents.
He was young: just five years before, he'd graduated from Passaic High School, a member of the History and Drama clubs. Bierman, the Jewish son of a clothing retailer from Passaic, knew something was up, although he couldn't -or wouldn't - say what.