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I retired in ’84 and since then I have still stayed away from Bell, but I am still in the communications business. I went to work for Bell in 1945 and I was with them for 38 ½ years. Ray, you were with the telephone company for a long time. Rosenberg: What kinds of lives have you two guys had? You were both Chicagoans. We would write letters, but as time went by, we did not forget one another. Gallagher I would say it is unusual but for its reason, I cannot come up with an answer. Rosenberg: Is that unusual, would you say? But outside of that, we did not see any of the enlisted men there. Captain Van Pelt, he came to the last one. Rosenberg: So that roster of guys that we ran down, those who were on Bock’s Car on the Nagasaki flight, these eleven men or so do not get together very often? As far as the crews themselves are concerned, there are not too many that come all together and are meeting at the same time and talk about our experience, as far as the mission goes. This year it will be in Boston, at the end of the month. Olivi: We have our semi-annual reunion every two years. Has that happened with the 393 rd Bomber Squadron?
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Rosenberg: Most military outfits, especially in victorious armies, even in armies that are not victorious, then develop a camaraderie which lasts for twenty, thirty, forty years after the war. Olivi: Maybe about 1,500 in the entire group. Rosenberg: But there were support people as well? Olivi: Well a crew consisted of eleven men, I think. That would have meant how many men, roughly? Rosenberg: What has happened to the 393 rd Bomber Squadron? How many planes were in it originally, about twenty or thereabouts? To my way of thinking, if it saved American lives and also Japanese lives, I feel that it did a service in ending the war. Somehow or other, we were going to play a part in going into Japan.įred Olivi: I think that dropping the second atomic bomb was necessary, because during the invasion or the planned invasion of the Japanese Empire, they expected a million casualties. Even though we were on the crews that dropped these bombs, we still realized before the war was over that we were still going to go on and go into Japan. Gallagher: For use in the Japanese invasion. Rosenberg: They had been minted for use in the Japanese invasion? So if we had enough of those that were minted in World War II, we certainly must have analyzed, the loss must have been going to be something fantastic. For the Bronze Star, it is given for battles.
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Now Purple Hearts are given for wounds or for death. Little was it realized, but it was a known fact that the Purple Hearts that were printed during World War II and the Bronze Stars, there were enough of them to be issued for the Korean War and for the Vietnam War for the Purple Hearts. Now the reason I say it had to happen is, because it was analyzed that we were going to lose an awful lot of people. But as you get into your years and you see pictures of these different situations and people at the memorials, your heart goes out and you say, why did it happen? But it had to happen. Likely, in all honesty, I can say I did not think about them maybe until about a month or so later. I did not think about them the two days that we made the trips. Ray Gallagher: Since it has happened, I have often thought about the people who were on the ground. What were your own thoughts, not necessarily a few days after the mission, but since then? It has been forty-three years since then. You are two participants and surely you have wondered and thought about this in later years, because the world was very responsive to these bombing missions and continued to question whether they should have been done. You have heard the kind of speculation we have had from the historians. Is this trip necessary? Were these particular bombing missions necessary? Robert Messer has just been revealing for us the historical analysis and debate and offering his own views in response to the basic question, were these trips necessary? Ss they used to say I think during that war. Fred Olivi was the co-pilot on Bock’s Car, the second-the plane that dropped the bomb over Nagasaki. Milton Rosenberg: As we are tonight talking about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, whose 43 rd anniversary comes this weekend, we are talking with Robert Messer, Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago and with two participants in those missions. Here once again is your host, Milt Rosenberg. Announcer: You are listening to Extension 720.