Gordon Burgess

U.S. Army Air Force
Pacific Theatre

“I didn’t see Hiroshima before it happened; I saw it afterward. There wasn’t much to see, it was just a mess.”

After finishing college Gordon Burgess enlisted in the Air Force. During the war, he served on Tinian, one of the Northern Marianas Islands, and piloted B-29 planes. He saw the Enola Gay before Hiroshima. After the bomb was dropped, he flew over Hiroshima and witnessed the damage it had caused.

Gordon A. Burgess looks out from the cockpit, wearing helmet, coat and equipment.

I was stationed on Tinian, which is about twelve hundred or thirteen hundred miles away from Japan. Some of the flights we took were pretty short, especially if you had good winds and a good navigator. We went up and hit Osaka — entered the waters of Osaka — in eleven hours and forty-five minutes. Some of the days, missions were sixteen hours. We would have to land in Hiroshima to get gas so we could get back to Tinian. We spent most of our time flying over the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I slept and sometimes the co-pilot slept. They were long boring flights I’ll tell you. It’s boring in a plane. But we were much more comfortable than the people in the 8th Air Force or in Europe. All we would wear was our coveralls and inside the plane there would be pressurization of everything — oxygen — it was comfortable. When you fly a commercial plane today you fly at thirty thousand feet but actually, pressurization takes place in them planes, just like it did in ours, at about eight to ten thousand. Otherwise you would go out in a hurry without that oxygen.

On Tinian, I saw the bomb that they were going to drop on Hiroshima. We didn’t know we were looking at the bomb though. We went by the loading area quite frequently as we took engineering ops for the B-29. They unloaded the bomb off the U.S.S. Indianapolis in our harbor, and flew it over by helicopter to the loading area. I saw the bomb both times—before it was used and after it was used. I didn’t see Hiroshima before it happened; I saw it afterward. There wasn’t much to see, it was just a mess. Terrible that the American people didn’t realize how devastating one of these atomic bombs can be. I met the guy that dropped it, Colonel Tibbets, over here in the Pima Air and Space Museum; that’s the only time—I never saw him in Tinian, but I saw him over here.

B-29’s in flight formation, headed for their targets, 1945.

The planes were on the cutting edge of things, pressurization for instance. We had remote control guns, which we never used. In battles, well, the Japanese fighters were pretty well taken care of. The Navy had taken care of them. What they call the turkey shoot around Saipan. I saw them once before they shot down most of the experienced Japanese pilots. We had some resistance but usually the B-29s were much faster than the Japanese. They couldn’t fly or attack us at all because we were so fast. As a matter of fact, they started bombing at thirty thousand feet or better and all they were hitting was rice patties. When we got over there, I got down to twenty five hundred feet to drop lines.

We had a different plane every time we went out to fly. One of the things was that they were very high. We went up to target about two hundred and seventy miles an hour. With some of their weather up around Japan, you were almost going as fast as the speed of sound, right over on the ground. The Japanese fighters couldn’t keep up. It was a very nice plane.

When we went on bombing runs, the bombs we used were firebombs. They were in clusters and they dropped over the stations. The first time that my crew went up, we went over Tokyo; they had four searchlights on us at one time. It was blinding, and we couldn’t see over Tokyo. We dropped our firebombs and clusters over there pretty close to the grounds of the Emperor.

Gordon and his navigation near the Quonset hut they lived in.

Once, when we got back from a bombing raid we found about seventy holes in the rear wing and they shot out one of the brakes on the right side. We got in a little bit, not much. We didn’t know they had shot us until we got on the ground. I guess it was a nightrider. All of sudden, right out of the black sky, without any warning, there were racers right at the wings; fortunately they didn’t shoot us at the front end. They just shot over to the right. The engines operated ok, so we went all the way back to Tinian and landed before we realized we were hit.

I suppose we were confident. Imagine your fighting in plane like this, you get feeling pretty good. The people that were chosen to direct and pilot these planes were supposed to be the elite people of the Air Force, particularly the 509th Group under Tibbets.

I was discharged in the fall of 1945 or ‘46 on one of the Denver fields; I’ve forgotten which one. When I got out of the University of North Dakota I had two majors: one was social science and one was in journalism. I never took up journalism after that. Another guy and I, a farmer, flew a little plane out in a farm. We bought a small plane and flew it around. That was a lot of fun. I took people up and went down to the Twin Cities from Shells, North Dakota. Flew up to Rugby, which is supposed to be the center of the North American continent.

1945, Gordon (left) with co-pilot Jerry Hansin at a training camp in Texas.

I didn’t like the military so much, but the flying was great and the camaraderie of the crew and all the other crews was great. The flight crew got along very well together. My co-pilot, radar operator, and myself remained close friends and visited with each other over the years since WWII. Now only the co-pilot and myself are living and we keep in contact. The radar operator passed away just over a year ago. Other crewmembers and I exchanged Christmas cards until they passed away in recent years. Whenever we got together it was immediately the close friendship and camaraderie again that we had in WWII. We had a mutual respect and liking for each other and we had shared intense experiences in flying the B29 together. All those guys were heroes of course, flying that far and dropping those bombs over enemy territory.

I volunteered out here at the Pima Air and Space Museum for about a year. Then I quit. There was one woman that was from North Carolina came over and I explained to her what we did. She wanted my picture, so she took it she said, “I’m sure glad that we had heroes like you.” You don’t get that expression very often.