Like the other 67 Americans who participated in the Hiroshima mission, Lewis and Bierman are long gone. In the cockpit of the Enola Gay and serving as co-pilot was Lewis, only 26, a Ridgefield Park native who only a few years before had led his high school football team to the state championship.Īs the mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, Lewis scribbled into his flight log the words that still haunt 75 years later: It may be the greatest single factor to make the Japs surrender unconditionally.' 'Nobody wins at war'īierman, 23, was a tail gunner aboard the Necessary Evil, one of two support planes that accompanied the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb that morning.
'It’s a dream mission, the mission that any American man would be proud to be of. “Tonight, I am going on a mission that will go down in history,' he wrote to his parents. He was young: just five years before, he'd graduated from Passaic High School, a member of the History and Drama clubs.
Bierman, the Jewish son of a clothing retailer from Passaic, knew something was up, although he couldn't -or wouldn't - say what.
