The Legacies of Heroes

By R.Z. Sheppard

In bombers named for girls, we burned/The cities we had learned about in school" is how the poet Randall Jarrell remembered World War II. Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 that incinerated Hiroshima, is more prosaic: "There was no city, there was nothing but the fringes of where the city used to be."

Months earlier John Bradley had been one of the six men immortalized in Joe Rosenthal's one-in-a-million photograph of the flag raising atop Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi. After the war, Tibbets went home to Columbus, Ohio, to eventually run a corporate-jet service and shun publicity. Bradley returned home to Antigo, Wis., to become a funeral director and community pillar. He never told war stories.

Two taciturn warriors, one who killed from a great height, the other a blood-caked corpsman who routinely risked his life to treat the wounded and comfort the dying, are remembered in two remarkable books. They are remarkable not only for their scorching accounts of war but also because they were written by sons desperate to know fathers who never talked about the most intense experiences of their lives.

In Duty (Morrow; 295 pages; $25), the Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene goes back to Columbus to see his dying father, a highly decorated World War II infantry officer. In an effort to understand his dad and the men of his generation, Greene persuades his hometown's most renowned veteran, Tibbets, to finally break his silence.

The octogenarian is as matter-of-fact as a fried egg as he tells how he led the secret 1,800-man team that was responsible for delivering the first atom bomb to its target. Tibbets' tone can seem unnervingly detached from the immensity of his deed. "The seat slapped me on the ass" is how he recalls the moment when the five-ton bomb left the plane.

Any qualms about Hiroshima should fade after reading James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers (Bantam; 376 pages; $24.95). With the help of Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Ron Powers, Bradley rediscovers the carnage of Iwo Jima through the stories of the flag raisers. His father is the one in the center of the photo, the only man whose face can be seen.

More than 20,000 well-fortified Japanese each had orders to kill at least 10 Americans before they perished themselves. As it had demonstrated in China and the Philippines, the imperial army of Japan did not follow even the basic rules of war. Captured Marines were tortured to death. Others were lured into traps by the white flag of surrender.

Iwo Jima's numbers are appalling. Practically all the defenders were annihilated or committed suicide. The Marines suffered some 20,000 casualties, including nearly 6,800 dead. That is one-third of all the leathernecks killed in the entire war. Were it not for the atom bomb, tens of thousands of Americans and their Allies would have died during the planned invasion of Japan. If that seems too remote, think of it this way: Bradley, Greene and perhaps even you, reader, might not have been born.

--By R.Z. Sheppard