My recent trip to New Mexico on behalf of Chicago’s Pritzker Military Library included visits with two veterans who had separate but related roles in the winning of World War II.
A drive to the town of Los Alamos brought me to the home of Bill Hudson. As we sat down to discuss his recollections, he told of going ashore on Iwo Jima as part of one of the first waves on D-day, 19 February 1945. The strategic objective of the U.S. Marines’ invasion was to facilitate attacks on the Japanese home islands by B- 29 bombers based on the island of Tinian in the Marianas. The battle for Iwo Jima is notable in the heritage of the Corps because of its ferocity, the heavy casualties suffered, and Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi.
The words that Bill Hudson used in describing his experiences told of the horrific realities behind the Marines’ victory. After going ashore in an amphibious tractor, he found himself in a killing zone targeted by Japanese mortars, machine guns, and artillery. He saw fellow Marines killed and mangled and was himself wounded shortly before the final victory. Initially, Hudson felt satisfaction in killing a Japanese soldier. Later his satisfaction came merely from surviving a night with little sleep and being granted another day of life.
Still later, Hudson developed a sense of revulsion because human beings were treating each other so inhumanely. Unable to believe in a God who would let such things happen, he lost his religious faith. Since then, he said, he has lost his composure on several occasions when the ghosts of his Iwo Jima experience emerged in response to external stimuli.
Through it all, Hudson retains a tremendous pride in the Marine Corps and his service in it. He honors his lost comrades of long ago with a simple statement: “They gave up their future so we could have one.” He has visited Iwo Jima twice in recent years—both to remind himself of what his younger self accomplished in 1945 and to build bridges with Japanese veterans, whom he no longer views as the enemy.
Hudson later took me to tour Los Alamos’ Bradbury Science Museum. It includes a chronology of the nearby laboratory’s work to develop the atomic bombs used against Japan. One of its displays is a full-size replica of the Fat Man bomb that struck Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
Seeing that replica was the perfect segue for the day’s second visit, which was to the home of Vice Admiral Frederick “Dick” Ashworth in Santa Fe. He has been a friend since I interviewed him for a Naval Institute oral history nearly 15 years ago. His welcome was congenial, and his memory, at age 93, is still as sharp as when he recorded his recollections in 1991.
We talked again about the events of 9 August 1945. A crew of Army Air Forces personnel flew the B-29 that executed the second atomic bomb mission. Commander Ashworth, who had been involved in the bomb’s development at Los Alamos, was the Navy weaponeer on board. Three days earlier, Colonel Paul Tibbetts had flown the Enola Gay on her attack against Hiroshima. That was deemed a textbook mission, but on 9 August Murphy’s Law plagued the B-29 dubbed Bocks Car.
Even before the flight began, the crew discovered that a fuel transfer pump was not working properly; 600 gallons of fuel in the tanks would not be available. The Army crew nevertheless decided to fly the plane. Once airborne, the B-29 was to rendezvous with a communications plane and an instrument plane. One of them was late, and because of the need for instrumentation, Ashworth told the pilot of the Bocks Car, to wait. After the B-29 had burned fuel for 45 minutes—with the third plane still not in sight—Ashworth directed the mission to go ahead.
The destination was Kokura, Japan. The explicit orders called for visual identification of the target, and the fact that clouds covered Kokura saved it from destruction. Ashworth then gave the order to head for the secondary target, Nagasaki, where there were also clouds. He credits the bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, with doing a brilliant job of using a brief break in the cloud cover to deliver the weapon on target. That bomb exploded into history. Ashworth considers the use of it necessary to change the minds of Japanese who until then had been unwilling to surrender. Bocks Car landed on Okinawa with only a few gallons of fuel left.
For many years, Ashworth told me, Tibbetts has criticized him for his conduct of the Nagasaki operation. He has no desire to argue the matter, merely to state the facts. His vindication came in a letter written years later by Major General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bombs. Groves explained that his habit was not to be a Monday-morning quarterback after a successful mission. Bocks Car's crew dropped its bomb on target, and the war ended a week later.
Bill Hudson and Dick Ashworth were two of the millions of servicemen who contributed to that victory in the Pacific 60 years ago.