I have scanned in images that my that my father took on or about August 9th 1945. No one outside my immediate family has ever seen them and my father rarely, if ever, talked about them. I found them in an old photo scrapbook that he kept from the war.

Why am I placing these images on the Web now, you may be asking yourself? Because I feel that I need to share these images with the world-wide community. It's my small way of sharing some of my pain at the loss of my father to cancer and for all the people of Hiroshima who were killed, either directly or later, from the effects of the bomb.

My father was a member of the U.S. Army Air Corp. serving with the bomber group that dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima. The story he used to tell me about that period was that before the bomb was dropped, the end of the base in Tinnian that held the Enola Gay was off-limits to all personnel except a special detatchment of air crews. My father variously served as a Ball-Turret gunner, Radio operator/gunner, Air-Sea rescue, and G-2 photographer. He even served, for a short time, in a P-61C Black Widow Night-Fighter. Being night-blind, though, was a handicap the Army hadn't taken into account with him.

At the time of the bombing, he was a Ball-Turret gunner on a B-17 called the Till Then . He called it a B-17J, but I've never been able to find any reference to such a designation ever being used in any theater of World War II

(Note 2011:More research and help from his squardons historian helped clarify this issue. He flew in a B-17G which was modified with a massive radar dome under the nose and a Higgins Boat was loaded into the bomb bay.)

He was also a photographer for G-2 (Military Intellegence), doing print work for the group. He even invented a way to use a rifle stock with a camera. A few days after the bomb was dropped, he and a number of men from his group were taken to mainland Japan and put on a "sealed" train that just had curtains on the doors and windows for protection. They were never warned about the danger of radiation. They were simply told not to get off the train. The train stopped somewhere near Hiroshima, at some point. My father, being just 19 wanted to get off and take a look around.

So, he and several friends parted the curtains and stepped onto what had once been Hiroshima. And they took pictures and souvenirs from Ground Zero.

Created: 4 July 1995 by Michael Kivetz
Last modified: January 15, 2011

All rights reserved © Michael Kivetz 1995-2011