The war effectively ended five days after the bombing of Nagasaki, when Japan surrendered. 'We just got out of the way in time - otherwise we would have been roasted.' 'Picture I took as we were getting out of the way when the 'mushroom' came up higher than was anticipated,' Bierman wrote. He produced some of the first images of the mushroom cloud, pictures that Bierman's son, Mitchell, has hanging in his home in Randolph, with a handwritten note from his father. On the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki, no one who was aboard planes is alive - although their story is preserved through oral histories maintained by the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, and in the piles of letters, newspaper clips and heirlooms kept mainly by the children of the Atomic Age.īierman, who served as a tail-gunner aboard on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, was one of the crew members charged with taking pictures after the explosions. Like the other 67 Americans who participated in the Hiroshima mission, Lewis and Bierman are long gone. As the mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, Lewis scribbled into his flight log the words that still haunt 75 years later:
