Return to Tinian

Sixty years before, the island in the Marianas served as the home base for the fateful flight of the Enola Gay.

By ARIN GREENWOOD
Published December 12, 2004

[AP photos]

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, signs copies of his 1998 book, Return of the Enola Gay, on June 10 at the decommissioned battleship Missouri in Honolulu. In front is a model of the bomb that was dropped.

	Col. Tibbets, then 31, stands beside the B-29 superfortress Enola Gay in 1945. He piloted the flight that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, during World War II. The plane was named after Tibbets’ mother.

"This is what the weather was like when we invaded Tinian," said John Eardley, who 60 years ago was one of the first Americans to land on Tinian - an island in Micronesia - for the island's World War II battle. "It was awful weather."

But on this day last June, we were on a catamaran traveling across 3 stomach-churning miles of rough ocean from Saipan, another island, to Tinian. We were headed to see retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, on Aug. 6, 1945.

Tinian is the island from which the atomic bombs were flown, and we were traveling to see Tibbets speak at Tinian's North Field airstrip. From there he had taken off with the bomb named Little Boy on board the Enola Gay , about 2:45 that August morning.

On our catamaran were several local beauty pageant winners, their handlers, a film crew, Eardley and his family, and some hangers-on (myself included).

Saipan and Tinian, which are close to Guam in the Northern Mariana Islands but far from everywhere else, were home to two of the Pacific theater's shortest but bloodiest battles. The Battle of Saipan took place from June 15-July 9, 1944, and the Battle of Tinian from July 24-Aug. 1 that year.

Lee Marvin, the late actor, fought on Saipan and later starred in a movie about the experience, Hell on Earth .

This past June, about 50 veterans returned to these two remote tropical islands for their battles' 60th anniversaries - their Normandy.

These returning veterans might have enjoyed the beaches of Saipan and Tinian much more this time if it had stopped raining long enough to let them go outside. As it was, during the anniversary parades, speeches, dinners and other events, umbrellas, raincoats and waterlogged tents were ubiquitous.

Like most of the other vets, this was Eardley's their first time back in this part of the world since the war. He said he had not been sure what to expect. After all, the fighting had killed nearly 1,000 locals - as well as more than 3,000 Americans and an estimated 30,000 Japanese.

Saipan itself was largely defoliated during the war; the current jungle is mostly new growth. Tinian, though, still has most of its original foliage, which is thicker than that on Saipan.

Eardley was startled by the warm reception he and the other veterans had received from Saipan's residents.

"I feel like my T-shirt says "Hero' on it," he said, getting enthusiastic. "The people out here have been just wonderful."

The theme of the anniversary celebration was "Our Grateful Islands Remember."

Why are the islanders so grateful? The short explanation is that as a result of the war, the people of the Northern Mariana Islands are self-governing for the first time in more than 500 years. They are also U.S. citizens.

These two facts make for a much-desired status, one that is directly credited by the islanders to the battles of Saipan and Tinian (not to mention the tremendous negotiation skills the islanders displayed when they later accomplished these things during several years' worth of talks with the United States).

Here's an example of how much the battles and being American mean to these islanders - and how complicated all this is, too:

July Fourth is celebrated around here a lot like it is in the United States, with parades, marching bands, barbecues, fireworks, and lots more beauty queens in tiaras. But here, July Fourth is called Liberation Day instead of Independence Day.

The holiday celebrates both the liberation of the Mariana Islands from the Japanese and the liberation of the islanders from the internment camps the Americans put them in after the war. The islanders were released from those camps July 4, 1946.

"That's where we landed," Eardley said calmly as the catamaran passed Chula Beach, a white strip of sand amid Tinian's thick jungle.

After the catamaran arrived at Tinian, we got on buses that took us to the Tinian Dynasty - a flashy casino and hotel on the south part of the island. The rest of tinian is filled mostly by beaches, trees and cows.

The beauty queens were hustled into rooms to freshen up: their tiara-ed presences were to add glamor to the events. After lunch we took buses to see Tibbets return to North Field.

Recognizing that Tinian is roughly the size and shape of the island of Manhattan, the Seabees who built Tinian's roads in 1944 laid them out to mirror some in Manhattan. Thus, Tinian has a Broadway, an Eighth Avenue and an 86th Street, roughly located where the originals are in Manhattan (there aren't any Starbucks on Tinian, however).

Our buses drove up Broadway and stopped at what would have been around 110th Street near Columbia University.

Ignore the irony that it was at Columbia where the Manhattan Project - to develop an atomic weapon - was started and that Tinian played a key role in it being put to use.

This island was chosen for the attacks on Japan because its relative proximity to that nation made for a shorter flight to the target than previously used bases in China.

On this day a peace monument was to be unveiled on Tinian. Tibbets spoke for a while about why he had come back to the Marianas: He disclosed that he had not planned to return but decided he wanted the islanders to see what he looks like.

"I wanted them to see I don't have devil horns and a tail," he said. (Actually, the retired general looked remarkably fit for a man 89 years old.)

Tibbets told his audience what had been on his mind as the Enola Gay , named for his mother, flew that fateful mission:

"It was the most damn boring flight I ever made! It's true. Nothing happened that wasn't supposed to happen, which is very unusual."

After the bomb detonated more than 6 miles from the plane, Tibbets said, the sky seemed to be like a rainbow, "like when the sun shines through rain."

Then, he said, he put his parachute behind his head, put his co-pilot in charge of the homeward flight and took a nap.

At the end of the speech, the audience cheered and gave the general a standing ovation.

Tibbets did not entertain discussion of whether dropping the bomb was a morally ambiguous act - he had previously said he had no regrets.

The rain had stopped during his speech and the sun shone brightly. After his comments and the unveiling of the monument, the audience went to examine the atomic bomb "pits" - specially engineered holes in the ground that held Little Boy and Fat Man, the bomb later dropped on Nagasaki, before they were loaded onto the planes and flown to Japan.

For years after the war, these pits had been filled with dirt and trees. Only recently had they been dug out, by hand, and covered with pyramid-shaped glass domes.

It was odd beyond words to look into these holes and try to get your mind around what had been there and what had happened here.

After the commemoration, the buses took us back to the Dynasty. I sat next to one of the beauty queens, who said she preferred Saipan to Tinian: "Tinian has too many trees."

At the casino, a table held stacks of Tibbets' book, Return of the Enola Gay . For $60, the general and the two other surviving members of the Enola Gay's crew, Theodore Van Kirk and Morris Jeppson, who also had returned for the anniversary, would sign the book.

For $30, the three would sign anything you gave them.

When I left to take another rough boat ride back to Saipan, a line of people snaked from the table through the room.

In 1898 at the end of the Spanish-American War, Germany bought the Mariana Islands except Guam, which was bought by the United States. Germany was a far kinder colonial ruler, but in 1914 Japan captured Saipan, Tinian and the other 12 islands comprising the Northern Marianas. Japan turned them into military stations and sugarcane production outposts staffed by thousands of Korean and Okinawan slaves.

After the war, the United States received a United Nations trusteeship over these and other Micronesian islands, called the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The point of the trusteeship was for the United States to usher these former colonies into self-governance.

In the 1970s, the United States and the Northern Mariana Islands negotiated the details of the current political relationship: the Northern Marianas have a great deal of local rule, with the United States governing some aspects of political life.

[Last modified December 10, 2004, 12:32:05]