Enola Gay 60th Anniversary Reunion in the CNMI

pueo, I doubt very much any animosity remains in the Japanese people. Since the end of the war, both the Japanese and Americans who fought on many Pacific islands came together and shook hands. It's also true of Tibbits; he was following orders like everybody else in the military.

veterans of the battle of saipan remembers invasion

enola gay pilot speaks

It's a heck of a thing to have to celebrate the deaths of so may, yet Tibbits did it to end even more deaths. As was said on Star Trek, years ago, "The good of the many outweigh the good of the few." I guess it's about the same thing.

I remember making a decision in Vietnam, that could have cost over an hundred lives, if I'd only done something for one man. I've lived with that for over 36 years, yet I know I saved lives by making that decision and the individual would agree with me on it...if he were alive to say to.

It was one of the most gut wrenching things I had to do over there, but like I said, it saved over an hundred lives. However, I never will forget May 12, 1968 in A Shau Valley.

All I can say is, Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be paratroopers. I think, I'll change my avatar again.

the issue of "saving lives" is, at best, debatable, at worst, a damnable lie when it comes to "dropping the big one" but that's just my opinion.

Dys,

If they ever do push that red button, deep inside "The Mountain", we can all forget about seeing another day. With the overkill abilities of the US alone, nothing will be left to live for.

Divng under our desks, like in grade school sure won't save us!

pilot recounts flight

from the new york times

By JAMES BROOKE

Published: June 16, 2004




SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands, June 15 - Sixty years after they charged onto beaches here, aged American veterans strolled past tourist hotels on Beachfront Street on Tuesday in a parade marking the start of the 60th anniversaries of a series of battles that they describe as the "D-Days of the Pacific."

On June 15, 1944, thousands of United States marines poured off a floating city of steel and launched a bloody 25-day battle here that set the stage for the end of Japanese power in the Pacific.

Washington dignitaries could not make it. The Marine Corps Band had other commitments. The biggest out-of-town press team was The Pacific Daily News, from Guam.

"It's the old story: out of sight, out of mind," Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets of the Air Force, who is retired, said Tuesday on this remote island 3,700 miles west of Hawaii. "The world knew about Normandy right away."

As a tropical drizzle fell on the veterans' parade, the 89-year-old general, a former bomber pilot, rode in the passenger seat of a white golf cart. The last time he was in the Northern Marianas, almost 60 years ago, he piloted the Enola Gay, a B-29, on its Aug. 6, 1945, sortie to Hiroshima, the world's first nuclear bomb attack.

After a week of Atlantic D-Day television specials culminating with the June 6 gathering of heads of government in Normandy, many Saipan veterans and their supporters gathered here on Tuesday said that just as in World War II, the American popular mind continued to relegate the Pacific theater to second-class status.

"I used to say that everyone was willing to cross the Atlantic to honor the European theater, but no one was willing to cross the Potomac to honor the Pacific theater," Robert A. Underwood recalled Tuesday of a badgering campaign he waged 10 years ago as Guam's Congressional representative to cajole high-ranking officials in Washington to turn out for a Pacific theater wreath ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Jerry Facey, co-chairman of the Saipan's 60th Anniversary Committee, said that during two years of organizing Tuesday's events, he received a long series of "no's" from Washington politicians and Pentagon brass who were invited to attend the ceremonies. Recalling the last big commemoration that he organized, he said: "It is just like the 50th, we were overshadowed by Normandy. We are so remote, people just forget."

On July 21, Guam will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its liberation from Japanese military rule. Although the battle for Tinian started three days later, Tinian and Saipan are jointly marking the 60th anniversaries of their liberation this week. Guam, Saipan and Tinian are focusing events on honoring the returning foot soldiers and on educating younger islanders about the Japanese occupation and the American liberation. They no longer hold out much hope for national attention from the news media and high-level visits.

"We are disappointed, but we don't think our veterans necessarily are insulted by the lack of attention because they know in their hearts what they have done," Mr. Facey said of the fight over this 72-square-mile island, a raging battle that left 30,000 Japanese dead, 3,144 American soldiers dead, and another 10,952 Americans wounded.

In Guam, where the fighting and carnage was often equally intense, Tony Lamorena, an organizer of its anniversary event, said Tuesday by telephone: "We are not necessarily going to get CNN or any of the major networks to cover us, but we are going to get 200 actual veterans for sure. We want to say thanks to our liberators and to teach our young people about what they did."

Historians say that the American victories in Saipan, Guam and Tinian irrevocably turned the tide against Imperial Japan's military.

"With the capture of Saipan, the U.S. forces could put long-range bombers on it, and the end of the Japan was inevitable," Daniel Martinez, historian of the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial in Hawaii, said here Monday during a break in a day of historical seminars, referring to Japan's defeat in World War II.

Speaking of Saipan's close neighbor, Tinian, about 1,250 miles south of Tokyo, Mr. Martinez added: "This is where the massive air raids were launched against Japan. This is where the two B-29s took off with the bombs against Japan."

F. Haydn Williams, a retired diplomat with long service in Micronesia, sent a message to the veterans: "The fate of the free world was just as much on the line here in the Marianas, as it was at the cliffs of Pointe de Hoc, St. Lô and Caen in Normandy."

On Sunday, a memorial was dedicated to the 933 indigenous people who died in the World War II battles and their aftermath.

On Tuesday, this new monument was at the end of the short parade, which saw some of the octogenarian veterans walking, others riding while standing in the backs of two balky World War II-era military trucks.

"It's changed a lot, but we sure love it," Hal Olsen, a Navy veteran from New Jersey, shouted down from one truck, referring to Saipan, and perhaps to the open-air thrill of riding in the back of a truck. In World War II, Mr. Olsen won a rapt following among airmen for the scantily clad women he painted on the nose cones of American bombers. Six decades later, his cult-like following was so strong that he gave a well-attended lecture Tuesday on "Nose Art and Air Corps Morale."

For the veterans, the return to Saipan has been a cocktail of emotional highs and lows.

"So many of the young fellows did not come back, so many good young boys," David McCarthy, a former Navy medical corpsman, said Monday night while nursing a beer at the bar of the Pacific Island Club, a resort built on Chalan Kanoa, one of the beaches where marines first stormed ashore.

something different, but the same.......

WWII nose artist returns to Marianas

By Katie Worth; [email protected]
Pacific Daily News

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SAIPAN -- Since World War I, when planes were first used to drop bombs and perform other operations against enemy forces, aircraft crews have used nose art as a type of heraldry to distinguish and personalize their aircraft.

And in World War II -- a time when planes were flying into enemy fire and not always coming back -- the crews' morale was in great need of uplifting. Usually portraying nude pin-up girls or some other image believed to be good luck for the crews, nose art was used to help lift morale.

One of the great nose artists in the Pacific, naval aviation mechanic Hal Olsen, who was stationed in Tinian late in the war, returned to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands for the 60th anniversary of the Battles of Saipan and Tinian.

Olsen explained the importance of nose art.

"It inspired the crews, to personalize their craft, to identify it as more than a number," he said. "Normally, a bomber is a killing machine that is impersonal and vicious, and this personalizes it more, so it creates a feeling of comradeship and team effort among the crew."

Olsen stumbled into nose artistry on Tinian when the island's paint locker was bombed by the Japanese and all the paints of the resident nose artist were lost. Olsen had brought with him a $50 set of oil paints and offered to paint the nose of a Navy bomber for free.

Soon after, dozens of pilots began asking Olsen to paint their aircraft, who charged $50 a plane. Before long, he was spending his entire spare time painting the planes.

To pay for the nose art, the crews would put a pot together and each contributed $5 to get their planes painted. There was very little else for the troops on Tinian to spend their money on at the time, he said.

Much of the art were illustrated pin-up girls or cartoon figures, or whatever else the crews dictated, Olsen said. Usually they would choose something they thought would bring them luck.

"They'd usually select everything from a calendar," he said. "They'd say, 'There's Miss January, we want her.' And so I recreated her and painted her in."

All in all, Olsen painted more than 100 nose art paintings, only one of which still exists. Some exist in photos while others, shot down by enemy fire, will never be seen again.

Olsen's artistry is being featured in an Arizona Memorial Museum Association traveling exhibit of nose art, now in Saipan, that will soon be brought to Guam and Hawaii.

The exhibit features a reproduction that Olsen made of a nose art he painted that was featured in a 1948 National Geographic article.

The money he earned painting planes in Tinian paid for a three-month honeymoon for him and his wife, who traveled with him to Saipan for the commemoration.

"It paid for my honeymoon in New Hampshire -- for three months we were in a cabin in New Hampshire," Olsen said. "And we lived happily ever after."