the hiroshima pilot

A Pocket cardinal edition, 1965. Mass-market paperback. Fair. No dust jacket. The Hiroshima pilot (A Pocket cardinal edition) (Mass Market Paperback) CONDITION fair-1ST PRINTING 1965-344 PAGES William Bradford Huie (Author). 344 p. The Hiroshima pilot (A Pocket cardinal edition) (Mass Market Paperback) CONDITION fair-1ST PRINTING 1965-344 PAGES William Bradford Huie (Author) The Hiroshima pilot (A Pocket cardinal edition) (Mass Market Paperback) CONDITION fair-1ST PRINTING 1965-344 PAGES William Bradford Huie (Author) BOOK REVIEW; The harrowing story of Claude Eatherly, a veteran of 33 traumatic combat missions who flew the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima. Claude Eatherly, who was tormented by such terrible guilt in the following years that it unbalanced his mind, turning him into a criminal who refused to touch his disability pension because he felt it was tainted blood money, and who took to committing robberies in order to send money to the survivors of the Hiroshima attack. Claude Eatherly, whose noble story was filmed and whose martyrdom on the cross of militaristic intolerance was taken up by such prominent pacifists as Gunther Anders and Bertrand Russell. Except the story wasn't true. Any of it. Eatherly's story was fabricated by journalists hungry for sensational stories, hacks who distorted "facts" and invented others where it suited them, never bothering to check the actual records that showed Eatherly's story to be a complete fabrication. Eatherly didn't fly the Enola Gay-he flew a B-29 which flew ahead of it just to check that the weather was suitable for bombing. He never flew one combat mission in his life (most of his operational career consisted of flying routine patrols over the Caribbean), and of the handful of missions he flew over Japan prior to the big day, none involved even the remote possibility of combat with the Japanese, since they had by then lost all ability to fight in the air (by then, all the B-29s flying over Japan had had most of their defensive armament removed as it was no longer necessary). His wife, family, colleagues (wartime and post-war) and friends all attested that he had never displayed any symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (such as the prolonged sleeplessness and terrible nightmares he claimed to have experienced-everyone says that he always slept like a baby), and bank records make it clear that he spent his pension the moment it appeared in his bank account. He actually wanted to stay in the USAF until his retirement, but was discharged after his behaviour became erratic and his conduct unbecoming (inter alia, he got someone else to sit an exam for him because he couldn't be bothered to do the work for it, and got caught out). So tormented was he by the thousands of innocent lives that he was responsible for taking that, a couple of years after the war, he took part in an abortive coup against the Cubans which would have seen him bombing defenceless civilians in Havana, had it got that far. A compulsive liar who thought nothing of leaving his family in penury so he could finance his drinking and gambling habits and who didn't hesitate to get his colleagues into trouble if it meant he could cover his own mistakes or just get his own way, he was quite clearly a psychopath (he cared nothing for others, or about the consequences of his actions, and never learnt from his mistakes-classic features of psychopathy). To be fair to him, most of the stories invented about him after the war were actually fabricated by others and didn't come from himself, but this never stopped him using other people's inventions to promote himself or aggrandise his ambitions. No films were ever made about him, but he raised money and credit on the story whenever he could. He got away with it all-not just the lies and neglect of his family, but the armed robberies, burglaries and assaults-mainly because of the political imperatives that made it easier for everyone if he was kept in the psychiatric rather than the judicial system, and because of the gullibility of psychiatrists who repeatedly found him to be insane but treatable when he was clearly neither. But that's another story...Huie has done an admirable job of deconstructing the myth of The Hiroshima Pilot; inevitably he has come in for criticism from the credulous and suggestible, but as...