I was sitting with an old soldier named Ray Gallagher. He held in his hands a small doll. The doll’s name was Marianne and it was the doll that he took with him to war. It had been given to him by his niece, Margaret Gillund, and on Aug. 9, 1945, Marianne and Gallagher, an assistant flight engineer, boarded a plane named Bockscar along with 12 other men and a bomb called Fat Man and headed for the skies over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
They dropped the atomic bomb. In an instant, tens of thousands of people were reduced to ash. This was three days after another plane, the Enola Gay, and its crew dropped an atomic bomb named Little Boy on Hiroshima and, in an instant, tens of thousands more were ash. Accounting for those who died from the effects of radiation, it’s estimated that as many as 70,000 died in Nagasaki and 140,000 in Hiroshima.
T.S. Eliot famously called April the “cruelest month,” but for me and many others, August grabbed that title in 1945 when the world was changed. Or, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in his 1963 novel “Cat’s Cradle,” “The day the world ended.”
Those who fought in World War II, or who worried for their loved ones who were fighting in WWII, are a diminishing crowd. And soon there will be none.
But there were plenty in 1995 when I met Gallagher. He had come to the Union League Club to talk to some kids about the war. They were from local schools, gathered on a frigid Saturday morning to hear Gallagher say, “War is awful, oh God. There’s so much to be lost. When you go to war, you’re not a hero. Everybody who goes to war would like to be brave. But you can be a coward. The whole idea of war is to get in and get out. Even now, when I enter a room, I’m looking at the windows and the doors … looking for the way to get out.”
He came home from the war late in 1945, married his wife Mary, had two children, and settled into a quiet life in the Gage Park neighborhood and a long career with General Electric. (My father, a Marine, came home from fighting in the Pacific, too). There was a documentary film crew in the library. “This is living history,” whispered a teacher in the room. It was the 50th anniversary year, memories from white-haired soldiers filled the pages of newspapers and TV screens.
But by 1995 it was becoming increasingly controversial to mark the bombings with celebratory flag-waving. The dropping of those atomic bombs ushered in the chilling concept of doomsday, and in the ensuing decades, the dropping of the bombs ceased to be what Winston Churchill called “a miracle of deliverance.”
The film being made was called “The Men Who Brought the Dawn.” Its director and producer, Jon Felt, said, “(We work to) put the viewer into the context of the times surrounding World War II and its final days, and hope to inform the public about the attitudes and personalities of the men who flew these missions. We do not get involved with ethics or moralities, politics or judgments. It is focused on the deeds of men.”
Gallagher is in the film. He died in 1999, but is in my memory every August. He was 73 when I met him. Not a trained public speaker, he told what was essentially a series of anecdotes, random but potent. Eventually, it came time for questions, and a forest of tiny hands rose.
“Did the doll give you any luck?” asked a girl.
“It gave me the feeling of home,” Gallagher said, the doll cradled in his gnarled hands. “If I wasn’t thinking of home at the time all I had to do was look at Marianne. She always told me, ‘You still have a home.'”
Marianne went with him to an air base in Utah. He carried the doll with him on every training mission and to the island of Tinian in the Marianas, base of operations for the 509th Composite Bomb Group. Marianne was there in the sky over Nagasaki.
After the bomb was dropped, after the war was over, Gallagher came home. Marianne came too and when Margaret Gillund grew up and became a school teacher, and when her history classes got around to World War II, Marianne went to school and was used as a powerful show-and-tell.
Gillund was there at the Union League Club, along with Gallagher’s wife.
They heard him answer the question, “Do you have regrets? Do you feel guilty?”
Answer: “I’d be lyin’ if I didn’t say I did. My wife Mary and myself have been invited back to Japan many times. I wouldn’t go. I think we done a lot of good but we done a lot of bad … But we done what we were supposed to do.”
Felt, the filmmaker, whispered to me, “Ray is the most human gentleman I know.”
Another question: “Fifty years later, is it appropriate to reassess the decision to drop the bombs?”
Gallagher answered: “If someone hit you with a steel pipe would you shoot them with a gun? You had to live those years and walk those miles.”
At the program’s outset, Felt tried to help the kids’ understanding by offering some musty statistics. He told of a Gallup Poll taken in late August 1945, weeks after the bombings. The poll asked people whether they approved or disapproved of the decision to drop the bombs.
“Eighty-five percent approved,” said Felt.
He called an end to the question-and-answer session and asked that the kids remain in place so the crew could film a few more shots. Gallagher took a sip of water and received a loving pat on the back from his wife.
One boy shouted, not a question but a statement: “You were a killer.”
Gallagher said, “We had to drop ’em. There was a monster loose and that monster was war and we had to kill the monster.”
With that, he removed himself from the wooden chair in which he had been sitting for three hours. He started to walk toward his wife and niece but stopped, turned around and walked back to a table on which the doll Marianne had been lying. He picked up the doll and asked, “Was it OK? Did I do good?”
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
