He really did shoot photos of A-bomb
PITTSBORO, N.C. — The dropping of the first atomic bomb was assigned to just three U.S. planes: the Enola Gay, which carried the 9,700-pound ordnance the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, and two other B-29s that followed to record the effects.
Allied aircraft were barred from the area of southern Japan, but there was another B-29 in the sky over Hiroshima at the moment "Little Boy" was let loose.
Asheboro, N.C., flyboy John McGlohon and his 10 Army Air Force crewmen didn't get the order to stay away, something researcher Ken Samuelson corroborates with a copy of the distribution list for the order, which McGlohon's group was not on.
When the bomb blew up, McGlohon's aircraft was approaching the city on a routine photography reconnaissance mission, with McGlohon running the cameras. The photos he took minutes after the explosion were the only ones made looking straight down on Hiroshima and the mushroom cloud.
After 65 years, McGlohon and his two surviving crewmen now have proof.
Ken Samuelson spent the past two years researching McGlohon's claim. "He was there. The plane was there. There is no question," says Samuelson, who pursued confirmation in archives and memories all over the country from his home in Fearrington Village, N.C. "This is a story that is not really known, that has never been publicized."
Samuelson also has a copy of the flight's mission report, indicating the route the plane traveled that day and noting the rising cloud the crew had seen.
At the moment the bomb exploded, McGlohon and his crew were approaching Hiroshima at about 27,000 feet and flying at least 275 mph. They would have passed over the city before the mushroom cloud had time to reach their altitude, Samuelson says.
McGlohon entered the war like millions of others, young adventurers who saw military service as a way out of wherever they were. In June 1941, he was sent to Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Ala., where he asked to join the newly formed 3rd Photo Reconnaissance Squadron, which gathered aerial photographs for use in making detailed military maps.
In the spring of 1945, his group was with the 3rd Photo squadron at Harmon Field on the island of Guam. The 3rd was attached then to the 20th Air Force, but in mid-July it was transferred to the 8th Air Force, which was bringing its might to help bombard Japan.
McGlohon's plane, piloted by Jack Economos, left in the early hours of Aug. 6 for a long flying day, to photograph potential targets near Hiroshima, Kure and farther north.
As they neared Hiroshima around 8:15 a.m., a gunner reported over the intercom seeing a B-29 flying in the opposite direction as if headed for an emergency landing at Iwo Jima.
Within seconds, McGlohon said, "There was a brilliant flash below our plane. The light was as if someone had fired a big flashbulb directly in your eyes.
"We assumed the bomber had salvoed his bomb load and managed to get a good hit on an ammunition dump or an oil tank, so the day wouldn't be a total loss," McGlohon said.
His crew completed its mission, returning to Guam late in the afternoon.
When he went to deliver his usual truckload of film to the lab, McGlohon says, he was met by two Marine guards at the door. Inside, technicians were already working on film shot by the photo team that was assigned to follow the Enola Gay.
When McGlohon was allowed to take his film into the lab, where he saw negatives being processed that included distant images of the cloud he had photographed from directly overhead.
"What is that?" he asked. A sergeant answered, "An atomic bomb."
"Well if it is," McGlohon told him, "we took portraits of it this morning."
Elmer Dixson who was the squadron's lab chief, has given his collection of wartime photos, of which McGlohon's is one, to the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum in Tyler, Texas.
<br>
