Chief Warrant Officer Imai, having been in hiding on Tinian for well over a year, gave himself up in September 1945, the last man in his cave to do so. He is now president of a large builders’ association in Tokyo.
Today, Tinian has Commonwealth status within the U.S.–administered Trust Territories of the Pacific. The jungle has obliterated almost all signs of its wartime role. Some seven hundred Tinianese live in tin shanties in San Jose, the island’s only village. A white-robed and -hooded Capuchin priest takes care of their spiritual needs in an imposing pink Catholic church. Its tabernacle and baptismal font are U.S. Navy World War II thirty-gallon smoke tanks. The inside upper walls of the church are made of plasterboard taken from the 509th’s Tech Area.
On December 14, 1970, General Curtis LeMay was given a citation from the grateful people of Tinian for the “outstanding service” he had rendered them, “working untiringly to improve the welfare and living standards.”
Six years earlier, LeMay had been decorated by the Japanese government with the First Class Order of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, for helping them build their postwar air-defense force. The award was criticized in the Diet, but Minoru Genda, who had masterminded the Pearl Harbor raid, defended the decision.
Genda himself received in 1962 the coveted U.S. Legion of Merit, conferred by President John F. Kennedy. In 1976 Genda was a senator in the Japanese Parliament.
Hiroshima today is a bustling hodgepodge of a city with a population near nine hundred thousand, almost three times what it was before the bomb. The citizens seldom talk of August 6, 1945. Those who still show signs of their injuries tend to keep to themselves, often suffering guilt that they lived while so many died. The A-bomb dome has been left standing as it was in all its gruesomeness as a terrible reminder. Seeing it, sightseers shudder, avert their eyes, and pass on.
In October 1976, Paul Tibbets again hit the international headlines when the highlight of an air show in Texas was a simulated atom bomb drop from the restored B-29 Tibbets was flying. U.S. Army engineers provided explosives to make a mushroom-shaped cloud.
Many people were appalled. The Japanese government protested, and the American government apologized.
Tibbets thinks the fuss was “ridiculous.” He, along with the organizers of the display, maintains that “the demonstration was simply a reenactment of history, similar to many such events held regularly all over the world.”
Some years ago, the Department of Defense deeded the Enola Gay to the Smithsonian Institution. In 1977, the Enola Gay lay scattered in several pieces over the floor of a hangar in Silver Spring, Maryland, waiting to be reassembled one day and exhibited in the new Aeronautics and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Illustrations
