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Skriven 2005-08-09 15:48:20 av Alan Hess
Ärende: A-bomb crews didn't die from guilt
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contrary to the belief of some.  
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.olesker09aug09,1,7682780.column?
coll=bal-local-headlines
Bomb dropped Pikesville man into history
Michael Olesker



August 9, 2005

ROUGHLY THREE decades ago, when Jerry Beser was a student at Pikesville High
School, his history teacher delivered a lecture about the dropping of the
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The teacher said there were no
survivors from the crews of the two American bombers.

"All the men died," the teacher said, "because they were so consumed by guilt."

Jerry Beser raised his hand and declared, "Nobody told my father that."

His father was Jacob Beser, who lived without guilt or apology for many years
thereafter. He was the only man to fly on both atomic bomb missions, whose 60th
anniversaries we mark this month. Hiroshima was three days ago, and Nagasaki
today. Jacob Beser was a graduate of Baltimore City College who dropped out of
the Johns Hopkins University to join the war, then served as the radar man on
both missions that finally brought an end to the organized killing.

"I'm thinking about him right now," Sylvia Beser, his widow, was saying
yesterday morning. They were married for 43 years. She's still in touch with
Paul Tibbetts, the pilot of the Enola Gay, which flew the Hiroshima mission,
and with crew member Dutch Van Kirk.

They were all part of the 509th Composite Group of the 20th Army Air Forces.
They climbed aboard the Enola Gay in the darkness of 2:20 that Aug. 6 morning
on the island of Tinian in the Pacific and prepared to remove the first of the
two doomed Japanese cities from the face of the Earth. The other crew members
are gone now, but it was old age or infirmity that took them, Sylvia Beser
says, and not guilt.

"There's so much misinformation about these men that's still out there today,"
she says. "Jake was sustained by people who came up to him through the years,
guys who fought in the war, who told him, 'Thank you. You saved my life. If it
hadn't been for you, I'd have gone to the Pacific.' But there were the others,
yes. He was so annoyed with the people saying we shouldn't have done it, that
it was wrong to kill so many people. And he certainly had no guilt over it."

She's heard the arguments about morality for more than half a century now, from
those who draw a distinction between killing by degree and killing all at once,
and has her ready answer to it.

"Japan said they would fight us to the death," she says. "Thousands more would
have died if they hadn't dropped the bomb. How long would it have been before
Japan would have had an atomic bomb of their own?"

Sixty years after the end of World War II, we still wrestle with such
questions, still aware that, in the moments Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
obliterated, their destruction foreshadowed all manner of future possibilities
that haunt humanity today.

Once, when the Enola Gay crew gathered for a reunion years after the war, a Ban
the Bomb demonstration was held nearby. One man confronted Beser: "Didn't you
have any feeling for all those Japanese youth?"

"What do you think we were?" Beser replied. "We were children, too."

If the bombs hadn't been dropped, he always maintained, then thousands on both
sides of the conflict would have died from conventional weapons. Humanity never
runs out of the means to kill. You do not need atomic bombs to dynamite subway
systems or fly airplanes into tall buildings.

Beser always said it was pointless to debate the morality of the bombs. They
did what they were supposed to do: kill the enemy, just as millions around the
globe had already been killed; and save Americans who might have had to invade
Japan; and end the awful bloodshed at last.

He spent his life explaining why the bombings were necessary. Sometimes there
were angry late-night telephone calls from strangers. Sometimes, face-to-face
confrontations. Beser was not insensitive to legitimate argument, but he never
backed down.

"War itself is immoral," he said repeatedly over the years. "If you're out to
kill a man, it doesn't matter whether you do it with a gun or a bomb."

But he became a part of history by sheer numbers - the thousands killed by the
bombs, and the thousands more who died in the atomic fallout aftermath - and by
the terrors of the nuclear age that it introduced.

Thirteen years since Beser's death, at 71, his widow and children continue to
be startled by his life. When Sylvia Beser moved, months ago, from their
longtime home in Pikesville, she discovered a memoir her husband wrote, and
some old letters and film. The family's trying to organize what she calls "a
lot of archival material, stuff that's really historical."

The world marks the 60th anniversary of the bombings with sobriety. And,
hopefully, with a moment to remember Jacob Beser's sentiments: War itself is
immoral. The means of waging it are only incidental.

Copyright + 2005, The Baltimore Sun | Get Sun home delivery

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