Hiroshima Day: Major Eatherly's remorse

The Hiroshima pilot’s suffering for his sanity symbolises the human sickness of our age -- an anxiety of being 'guiltlessly guilty'

On the morning of August 6, 1945, a sudden terrifying flash and then a giant mushroom cloud covered the clear skies over the Pacific above the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The first witnesses to the mushroom cloud and its indescribable colours of annihilation were perhaps the pilots who dropped the bomb themselves. While the first-ever use of a nuclear weapon brought relief to the Allies in the anticipation that this would end World War II, one person bore the guilt of that catastrophe, the Hiroshima pilot Major Claude Eatherly, who flew one of the accompanying planes that fateful morning. His story is both fascinating and troubled.

Eatherly expressed remorse for his role in the bombing. He was declared by the establishment as mentally insane for his outbursts and moral indignations, and was confined in a mental institution. He turned a pacifist and anti-nuclear activist, and struggled for his freedom from detention to propagate his views against nuclear weapons. The Texan pilot’s suffering for his sanity symbolises the human sickness in the atomic machine age, of a constant search for responsibility for actions whose effects are no more humanly controllable -- an anxiety of being “guiltlessly guilty.”

In one stroke, the cities of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki and their people were blown to pieces. The justification for the bombings has been largely self-serving. Besides the versions of history written about this massacre, acts of mass human destruction raise insoluble moral questions about the obligation of individuals executing these terrible acts, even if admittedly in this case it was not a pogrom but in the course of a war. Should they blindly obey orders, or ought they instead to exercise individual conscience?

“Morality…not my business”

Colonel Paul Tibbets had been specially recruited to command the mission to drop the bomb from a B-29 airplane taking-off from a US airbase in the western Pacific Ocean. The mission comprised a squadron of pilots and engineers who trained intensively for months together in isolation even as the scientific development and testing of the bomb was still underway. This was a first-of-its-kind experiment in warfare: there was no previous data surrounding the bomb; a model airplane had to be specially made to carry something as heavy as 9,000 pounds; the target had to be aimed at from an altitude of 30,000 feet; and finally, the planes had to be manoeuvred out in time so as not to be caught in the explosion. From received accounts, none of the pilots had any real idea about the bomb’s destructive potential, but they knew they were part of a historic mission, delivering a final blow to a bloody war.

When asked later whether he felt any regret for his role in it, the self-assured Tibbets emphatically stated that he “never lost a night’s sleep thinking about it”; the morality of dropping that bomb, he said, was not his business. He’d not hesitate advocating nuclear weapons if he had another chance, “I’d wipe ‘em out!” Three days later, Major Charles Sweeny led the mission to drop a more powerful bomb over Nagasaki. Even if Sweeny’s reflections about atomic weapons seem more sobering than Tibbets’, Sweeny, like the rest of the crew members of the mission, saw it as America’s exemplary redemption for future generations.

Conscience stricken

Major Eatherly piloted the weather reconnaissance airplane over Hiroshima which signalled the “go ahead” to release the bomb. After the war, he was tormented by guilt for the role he played in the tragedy. He rebelled by committing various petty acts, such as sending envelopes containing currency notes to Hiroshima, forging a cheque for a paltry amount, attempted robberies where he strangely did not steal anything, and tried to commit suicide on more than one occasion. The courts declared him insane and confined him for treatment in a mental hospital. It was not until he began what is a remarkably thoughtful and moving exchange of letters with the philosopher and pacifist Gunther Anders that he could make sense of his own victimhood in new light (Burning Conscience, 1961). The dialogue bears testimony to the transformative power of friendship. Eatherly went on to exchange letters with the real victims of Hiroshima as a way of reconciliation, and spread his message of freeing the world of nuclear weapons and war.

The correspondence draws on the human incapacity in the machine age to reflect on the consequences of one’s actions. Anders explained to Eatherly that his desperate attempts to prove his own guilt was a way of trying to master his condition. What makes this new kind of guilt peculiar, however, is that the technology of weapons of incalculable destructive force have led to a vicarious moral existence, wherein we have invented objects to clinically destroy what matching face-to-face strength could not imagine in the pre-nuclear age. Modern violence is invisible, routinised, and systematically reproduced in society through its norms and structures. As a result, we are in a perpetual guilt complex despite no fault of ours, since our actions are parasitic on a machine, which soon becomes autonomously acting.

These complex interactions underlie the military, legal and political establishment’s predisposition to treat Eatherly’s pangs of conscience as a form of deviance that needed isolation and correction. It was Anders who put his petty criminal acts in perspective by observing, “only the abnormal do not behave abnormally in such situations”. The letters reveal Eatherly’s measure of agony as well as hope to be set free from hospital confinement. Not surprisingly, both Tibbets and Sweeny dismissed Eatherly’s mental suffering as spurious, calling him a “loose cannon”.

A preliminary response to the larger question of responsibility can be gleaned from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who coined the famous phrase “banality of evil” after she witnessed the trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Otto Adolf Eichmann in 1961, for crimes committed during the Holocaust. She contended that the prosecution's attempt to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster was wrong, for Eichmann was an “uninspired bureaucrat” who simply sat at his desk and followed orders. The upshot of this is that ordinary people, by thoughtlessly doing their job, and without any hostility from their side, can cause greater havoc than any evil genius can.

As the nuclear weapons powers clamour to increase their nuclear arsenals, the Eatherly case is a reminder that violence that individuals carry is produced by society, and ultimately makes everybody a victim. Man in the atomic age is unable to morally reflect on ends because the nature of our knowledge prevents us from knowing how to act well. Claude Eatherly’s moral response did not resolve these puzzles, yet it is his extraordinary care for the human condition that make him Hiroshima’s first victim and activist, who dared to cry “no more Hiroshima”.

(The writer teaches at OP Jindal Global University)