Little Boy & Fat Man

At first glance, the two bombs appeared to be nothing special. One looked like a blunt-nosed torpedo; the other had the shape of a bulky, overweight blimp. So why, until last week, had the State Department suppressed all pictures of them for 15 secretive years?

The answer becomes understandable when the two fin-tailed monsters are identified. They were the first operational A-bombs ever built. "Little Boy," the slimmer of the two, was a duplicate of the 10-ft.-long, 9,000-lb. bomb that decimated Hiroshima. The 10,000-lb., spheroid "Fat Man," with its 5-ft. girth, crushed Nagasaki. Between them, the two bombs, each packing the punch of 20,000 tons of TNT, accounted for more than 200,000 casualties and dumped the world unceremoniously into the responsibilities of the nuclear age.

Whatever tragedy the sight of Little Boy and Fat Man recalled, it was less personal than the recurrent horror that still afflicts former Army Air Corps Major Claude Eatherly, pilot of the reconnaissance plane that fingered Hiroshima for A-bomb attack. It was Eatherly. looking down from his 6-29, who found Hiroshima free of cloud cover and selected it as a target. Guilt feelings for his part in that historic flight left Eatherly suffering from "neurosis with psychotic manifestations," and he was discharged from the service. He has not yet recovered.

Ever since he became a civilian, Eatherly has been in and out of hospitals and in and out of trouble. Back home in Texas, he was picked up a couple of times for forgery. Then he was arrested for theft and sent to a VA hospital in Waco for treatment. When he got out, he tried robbing post offices and breaking into a drive-in grocery. Always, his war record got him off and he was sent back to the hospital for further treatment. But this fall the ex-pilot walked out of the Waco hospital once more, and he has not been heard from since. Last week the search for him extended throughout the Southwest. As for Claude Eatherly, he probably does not care whether he stays lost or is found. He has not cared about much of anything since the times of Little Boy and Fat Man.

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