Atom-Age Martyr

THE HIROSHIMA PILOT by William Bradford Huie. 318 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Deep in the heart of Texas is a man who has become even more of a martyr than the heroes of the Alamo. He is Major Claude Eatherly, who, according to ban-the-bomb legend, led the atomic raid on Hiroshima, repented what he had done and, racked by guilt, turned to a life of petty crime to punish himself. Between times, he discoursed on the total sin of the atom bomb. Wrote Edmund Wilson: "He seems to have been unique among bombers in having paused to take account of his responsibility and in attempting to do something to expiate it." Echoed Bertrand Russell: "The steps he took to awaken men's consciences to our present insanity were actuated by motives which deserve the admiration of all who are capable of feelings of humanity." British Poet George Barker was inspired to verse:

And in and out of the nuthouse

That dupe and scapegoat's led

With a mushroom as big as America

Growing out of his head.

Hunger for Attention. William Bradford Huie, a freewheeling writer who has made a career of debunking, did what no other authority on Eatherly has done: he went to the records of the Air Force, checked with the Veterans Administration and interviewed Eatherly's friends and family. He found little to inspire hero-worship.

Eatherly never dropped a bomb in World War II. He served Stateside until his 509th Composite Group was picked for the atomic raids. He was assigned to be weather scout on the Hiroshima run. He checked the visibility over Hiroshima, then radioed the go-ahead to the Enola Gay, carrying the bomb. Returning to base without seeing the explosion, Eatherly was virtually ignored, while the crew of the Enola Gay got all the glory.

Eatherly was nettled. Far from feeling guilty, he hungered for recognition, according to his crew mates. He tried out for the postwar Bikini tests but lost out in competition. He was refused a regular commission in the Air Force, and after enrolling in the U.S.A.F. meteorological school, was eased out of the service for cheating on an exam. While being mustered out, he got mixed up in a harebrained scheme to invade Cuba and make it a 49th state. Federal agents discovered a cache of arms and the plot was aborted. Eatherly received a suspended sentence.

"Save the Children!" Eatherly then took a more prosaic job as a Texaco salesman in Houston. Legend has it that he was tormented by a recurring nightmare in which he woke up screaming, "Bail out! Save the children!" (His wife says he slept like a log.) After his wife had a miscarriage, he was afraid radiation might have affected his spermatozoa. He began to drink heavily and pass bad checks. In 1950, he made a halfhearted attempt at suicide and was admitted to the VA hospital in Waco, Texas.

He was in and out of the hospital like a yoyo. When he was out, he committed attention-getting crimes like holding up a grocery, then leaving without the cash. A Fort Worth reporter got wind of him and played him up as a hero who had fallen on bad days. A psychiatrist treating Eatherly declared that he was suffering from a guilt complex for bombing Hiroshima.

After this, there was no stopping the "professional exaggerators," as Huie calls them. NBC televised a show in which Eatherly was made out to be a football star. A Hollywood script was written in which Eatherly repents of Hiroshima at his dying mother's bedside. (Robert Ryan or Audie Murphy was considered for the part of Eatherly.) A prominent German pacifist, Gunther Anders, corresponded with Eatherly, then had the letters published in European newspapers. Communists chimed in with their own fulsome praise of this "prisoner" of the capitalists.

The Hero & The Villain. Eatherly began to enjoy the fuss that people were at last making over him, and he embellished the legend: he had passed the Texas bar; he took part in the raid on Nagasaki; the Air Force had pressured him to stop propagandizing against the atom bomb. "All over the world, I'm the Hiroshima pilot now," he told Huie in a moment of hubris. "A hundred years from now I'll be the only American anybody thinks of in connection with Hiroshima. Maybe they'll remember Truman too. Eatherly and Truman. The hero and the villain."

Huie deserves credit for destroying the Eatherly myth. But he enjoys making the kill a little too much. He browbeats poor Eatherly throughout most of the book, insinuates that Eatherly is an artful con-man who planned the whole hoax from the start. Actually, Eatherly seems more used than using. He fell into fame by chance and was exploited. Today he lives in gratifying notoriety in Galveston. Without Hiroshima, he would undoubtedly have been just one more anonymous neurotic, wishing somebody somewhere cared.

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