THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 5, 1995 TAG: 9508050266
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: The Atomic Age Turns 50
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
In August 1945, Orville Wayne Mohler was a Navy petty officer assigned to the 10th Marine Division on Saipan Island. He was an armed guard in a support unit for the American B-29 bombers that were pounding the Japanese mainland in the last days of World War II.
One day he learned that an old school buddy was stationed on nearby Tinian Island, and sought him out to catch up on old times. On the way back to his outfit, Mohler passed rows of B-29s lined up on the airstrip, their bombs sitting on dollies nearby, waiting to be loaded aboard.
All the bombs were exposed to view except one, which was shrouded in canvas. Mohler wondered why. He asked a guard posted beside the plane.
``He said that this one was special, and that I would hear about it the next day,'' Mohler recalled recently.
``I said, `It's a big deal, huh?'
``And he assured me that the news would be forthcoming.''
Mohler returned to his outfit, wondering what was so special about the payload of the Enola Gay.
Sure enough, he found out.
At 8:16 a.m. on Aug. 6, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb, dubbed ``Little Boy'' by its builders, on the industrial city of Hiroshima, leveling the city in a blinding blast of 12,000-degree heat.
The intended target was a bridge, but the plane's aim wasn't that precise. A hospital turned out to be at the epicenter of the blast. Nearby was a school.
Witnesses later told horrific stories of bodies piled along the riverbank and of dazed survivors wandering the streets in excruciating pain, their facial features melted away by the intense heat.
Estimates of the dead ranged from 80,000 to 130,000. A second bomb dropped three days later on Nagasaki killed as many as 70,000 more.
Scores more are still dying each year from the delayed effects of radiation exposure, which caused various kinds of cancer, cataracts and chromosome abnormalities, as well as mental retardation among babies exposed before birth.
Mohler, now retired and living in Norfolk, heard the news on the radio. For him and his brother, who was stationed on nearby Okinawa, it meant the end of the war was near and they wouldn't have to risk their lives in an Allied invasion of Japan. Another Mohler brother had been killed in Italy in 1942.
The atomic bombing ``saved a lot of lives,'' Mohler said.
That was the view of U.S. veterans groups who protested bitterly last year when they learned of a planned Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
As a result of their protests and those of sympathetic members of Congress, the exhibit that opened in late June was vastly scaled down from the original proposal. It focuses on the plane and its crew, but says little about the consequences of the bomb or the moral questions surrounding its use. The controversy cost the museum director his job.
Since it opened, the exhibit has been the target of protests by those who hold the opposing view: that the Enola Gay is a symbol of man's inhumanity to man and should not be in a museum commemorating human achievement.
Mohler believes the bombing was a justified response to Japan's aggression.
``We didn't ask for this thing to happen to us at Pearl Harbor,'' he said. ``We were attacked.''
Paul Tibbets, the Army Air Corps colonel who piloted the Enola Gay, told an interviewer years later he ``never lost a night's sleep'' over it.
But not everyone involved in the bombing was so sanguine.
Robert Lewis, the Enola Gay's co-pilot, came to have grave misgivings about nuclear weapons as he reflected on his role in the birth of the atomic age.
Lewis, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native who moved to Smithfield after his retirement, told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1983: ``I'll never forget that feeling. You could see a good-sized city, then you didn't see it anymore. It was simply gone.''
At the end of the flight, Lewis scribbled this entry in his notes:
``My God, what have we done?'' MEMO: Coming Sunday: A visit to the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Orville Wayne Mohler
KEYWORDS: ATOMIC BOMB by CNB