Claude Eatherly

The Boeing B-29 "Straight Flush" commanded by Claude R. Eatherly

Claude Robert Eatherly (born October 2, 1918 in Texas , USA , † July 1, 1978 in Houston , Texas) was a major in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II . He researched the weather conditions over Hiroshima on the day of the nuclear bombing.

Life

Eatherly flew his Boeing B-29 “Straight Flush” weather reconnaissance aircraft on August 6, 1945 and reported good weather conditions. He was on the return flight at the time of the nuclear drop and 225 miles from the explosion. Eatherly later claimed to have flown through the atomic bomb cloud. Enola Gay's pilot , Colonel Paul Tibbets , specifically stated that Eatherly had no decisions to make that morning.

In 1940 Eatherly joined the Air Force and became a pilot. At first he mainly flew long-range reconnaissance flights against enemy submarines. He was considered a precise and conscientious pilot and was promoted to captain in 1943. After using nuclear weapons, Eatherly initially remained with the Air Force, but was no longer considered in the nuclear weapons program as a pilot. His attempted fraud in a written aptitude test for the weather service (meteorology school) ended his military career in 1947.

After the war, he was repeatedly delinquent in check fraud, burglary and a series of bizarre robberies (in which he did not use real weapons and left the stolen money on the scene) and had to undergo psychiatric treatment.

Eatherly's scruples about Hiroshima were discovered by a journalist in 1957. Newsweek ran a report on the handcuffed hero , and a television game took up the subject. Günther Anders read the Newsweek article and began exchanging letters with the pilot. This bestseller and the other, uncritical, representations of Eatherly could not be affected by the educational work of the investigative journalist William Bradford Huie. Huie foresaw:

“The readers of this book will be numbered in thousands, and many of them will believe I was hired by the militarists to smear you… You [Claude Eatherly] became what you are because by 1960 most of the human race wanted you to be the Hiroshima pilot. "

G. Anders called the committed civil rights activist Huie a military-bought novelist.

Claude Eatherly died of cancer in 1978.

literature

• Claude Eatherly and Günther Anders: Burning Conscience . 1961. German edition
  • Robert Jungk (Ed.): Off Limits for Conscience. Correspondence between Günther Anders and Claude Eatherly. Rowohlt, Rowohlt Paperback , Reinbek 1961.
• William Bradford Huie: The Hiroshima Pilot . Putnam 1964. Translation:
  • WB Huie: The Hiroshima pilot . Vienna, Hamburg 1964.
• Rolf Schneider: Trial of Richard Waverly (1963). In: Rolf Schneider: Pieces . Berlin 1970.
• Ronnie Dugger: Dark Star . 1967.

Web links

• Dieter E. Zimmer: The Hiroshima Bomber Pilot , In: Die Zeit , August 28, 1964
• David Johst: The legend of the penitent pilot , a more critical summary. In: The time of August 6, 2015