TWENTY-THREE

ON NOVEMBER 14, I lifted off from the runway at Tinian for the last time. The entire 509th was being rotated back to the United States lock, stock, and barrel. Our new base would be at Roswell, New Mexico. I brought The Great Artiste around for one last look and then headed to Kwajalein, on to Hawaii and then to Sacramento on our three-day hopscotching route back to the West Coast.

It was about nine P.M. when I set down at Mather Field in Sacramento. We had crossed over the bright lights of San Francisco, a sight that had been denied Americans for over three and half years because the city had been kept in darkness in case of an air or sea attack by the Japanese. During the early stages of the war, some parts of the West Coast had been shelled from submarines. In 1944, over two hundred balloons carrying bombs had been floated over the western United States. Some started fires in the heavily forested Pacific coast of Washington State and Oregon. One explosion killed six people in Oregon, another killed a woman in Montana. The more ambitious plan to float balloons over our cities with canisters of deadly biological agents to spread epidemics of virulent diseases in our cities or destroy our livestock industry never came to fruition, although the testing of biological agents on prisoners of war had netted the Japanese valuable data. But all that was behind us on this starry California night.

We were almost home. All that remained was to be officially processed back into the United States. Each airman and airplane was checked in and much of our equipment was taken back into inventory. Emergency rafts from the airplanes, side-arms, and some weapons issued to the crews were logged in and returned to the supply depot. For most of the fifteen hundred men of the 509th, Roswell would be a brief stopover to civilian life.

Dorothy had moved down to Roswell, and we would settle there for the time being. Since all returning combat veterans were given forty-five days of rest and recreation, all expenses paid, we decided to go home.

We took a train from Albuquerque that was packed with servicemen. The good old days of having my own airplane were gone forever. But I must admit that what the train lacked in speed it made up for with a continuous rolling party. The celebrating aboard our club cars had its peaks and valleys, but it never stopped. The first leg was thirty-six hours to Kansas City, then on to Chicago for a four-hour wait to board the Twentieth-Century Limited to New York’s Grand Central Station. In New York, we picked up a small commuter train to White Plains, where we stayed a couple of days with my old friend Bill Kelley.

The nation and the military were on an emotional high. Everything seemed possible; the future was bright and unobstructed. When we arrived home there were hugs, kisses, hand shakes, and solemn thank-yous from my neighbors. I was invited to speak to local civic groups and, because I was in uniform, paying for a meal or a drink proved to be a battle I always lost.

For my family, there was relief that I had made it through. I hadn’t really considered exactly how comforting it would be to be home with the war over. For the past five years, my first years of adulthood, the military and the war had been the core of my life. I had grown up, physically and emotionally, within the military in time of war. No matter what I had done for those five years, it all came back to my duties as a pilot in wartime. And, as any serviceman will attest, you never think you’re going to be the one who’s going to die. It’s always going to be the other guy. Yet there’s always a part of your subconscious that says maybe you won’t see your family again. In my mother’s kitchen once more, I could soak in the warmth of home and family for the first time in years, knowing I would see them again tomorrow. And in our future, Dorothy and I would have ten beautiful children, who would, at last count, give us twenty-one grandchildren.

The press started to call shortly after my return. “What was it like?” “Was there a big bang?” “Did the airplane rock?” “Were you frightened?” “What were you thinking?” The reporters were polite, attentive, and anxious to hear my pearls of wisdom. I didn’t view myself as a celebrity or even much of a hero. I had come home in one piece. I explained that I had done my job, like millions of other veterans, to end the war. Because in 1945 the events of the war were seared into the consciousness of the nation and the world, I wasn’t asked any questions about whether it had been necessary to drop the atomic bombs.

Overnight the 509th became the hottest unit in the military. Every officer wanted assignment to our group. It was the place to be if you were on a military career fast track. In the short month and a half I had been gone, the entire group had been restaffed to operational levels. Everywhere I looked at Roswell I saw strangers. Paul Tibbets had been moved over as “technical adviser” to the commanding general, Roger Ramey. The new group commander was Colonel Butch Blanchard, Curtis LeMay’s operations officer in the Pacific. Blanchard was a West Pointer, as were most of the other officers filling in the new organizational chart. These were all career push guys. With the war over, the professional officer corps wanted their military back, and, in particular, they wanted this elite unit back in normal channels.

I was not a regular army career guy. My path to the military had been set because of my love of flying. And my service during the war had been a call to duty, as it had been for fifteen million other Americans.

Although we were training the new crews, the few of us remaining from the original 509th became the proverbial fifth wheel. Most of us were not integrated into the operations of the group at any level.

Toward the end of January 1946, Paul Tibbets and I were extended an invitation by Curtiss-Wright, the manufacturer of the B-29 Cyclone engines, to be its guests in New York City for a week. The brass liked the idea of us doing a little public relations for the new air force and sent us on our way east.

The company put us up at the Waldorf Astoria, the most exclusive hotel in Manhattan. We were wined and dined in the lap of luxury. Each night we attended private parties with the elite of New York’s society and its arts community. At the very posh Stork Club, we were routinely ushered into the ultraprivate Cub Room, where we mingled with the likes of Walter Winchell; Sy Bartlett, a scriptwriter and producer for Twentieth Century Fox; and the upper crust of society like the Rothschild family. Actually, I had known Sy from Grand Island, where he served on General Frank Armstrong’s staff. He would immortalize General Armstrong with his screenplay Twelve O’Clock High.

Months later, when I was in California as a technical adviser on an MGM film about the Manhattan Project, Sy Bartlett invited me to attend a party with him at the home of Norma Shearer. Howard Hughes, Gary Cooper, Alice Faye, Phil Harris, Fred Astaire, Hume Cronyn, Brian Donlevy, and Dana Andrews were some of the stars there. I was partying with the very same movie stars I had idolized as a teenager. Sy introduced me around as the pilot who had dropped the atomic bomb. I was congratulated on the success of the mission and thanked for helping end the war.

Orders were cut for me to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to be processed for discharge the first week of June 1946. The air force promoted me to the rank of lieutenant colonel as I moved from active service into the Reserve Officers Corps.

The rest of my life lay ahead of me, and I was anxious to get started.