'It’s a dream mission, the mission that any American man would be proud to be of. “Tonight, I am going on a mission that will go down in history,' he wrote to his parents. He was young: just five years before, he'd graduated from Passaic High School, a member of the History and Drama clubs. So in the final hours before take-off, Army brass told the men to write their final letters home and give them to the chaplain - just in case they didn't come back.īierman, the Jewish son of a clothing retailer from Passaic, knew something was up, although he couldn't -or wouldn't - say what. Soon, it would be no secret what the United States had been up to since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. 6, 1945: a six-hour, 1,500-mile flight from Tinian, a friendly island in the mostly hostile Pacific, to Hiroshima, where we would drop 'the big one' on Japan. Years of top-secret planning, laboratory heroics and daredevil test flights over desert in unproven B-29 bomber planes had come down to this in the early-morning hours of Aug. Bierman and the 67 other Americans who would soon be taking off on a mission to Hiroshima that only a few of them fully understood. The plan was set, and now there was no turning back.
