Larry A Beser

Enterprise Architecture

Technology Strategy

​Collaboration & Innovation

One passion my father wanted us to take to heart was this; that if we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it. I was reorganizing my storage after getting a new desk system a while back and came across some old video that is suddenly very relevant. I think it's a rare glimpse into the story behind the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and my father’s role in that.

My father, Jacob Beser, was the only one to be on both planes that dropped the atomic bombs over Japan and ended World War II. On the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the ABC morning show Good Morning America took him to Hiroshima for a segment of their show. It was his first time back to Japan. He had never been on the ground where the bomb went off. The clip is only about 6 minutes long. It features my father and a woman who survived the attack. I think the message is a powerful one that rings ever louder in current times.

I came across the second video as part of a recent effort to digitize old photos and such. It's a half hour interview by the Dundalk Community College cable TV channel back in the 1970's I believe. I have other interviews of my mother and dad's older sister done by the Jewish Historical Society on dad's role in the war. Those are forthcoming.

Back in 1995 as the 50th anniversary of the bombings approached there was a lot of revisionist chatter that caught my attention. A website, Exploratorium, was hosting some of it and I put my thoughts on it at the time. Here's what I wrote.

7/19/95

My name is Larry Beser. My father, Jacob, was the only man to be aboard both planes that dropped the bomb; the Bock's Car and the Enola Gay. As the Electronic Countermeasures Officer, it was his job to insure the bombs went off when and where they were supposed to. As the 50th anniversary approaches this August, I've seen the explosion of revisionist historians trying to spew their versions of why it would have been better to invade the Japanese home islands, killing many more on both sides with guns than what we did with two single bombs. Why would killing a man with a rifle be moral and with a bomb immoral? Some revisionists insist the Japanese were on the verge of surrender, or that the defenses on the home islands weren't 'that bad'. It's almost funny, pathetic really, how some people deny history to preserve their private morality and further their private agendas.

First, there's the basic immorality of war. By definition, war is immoral and a spawning ground for inhuman acts of man upon man. The Tokyo fire bombing killed more people than were killed at Nagasaki, just as horribly and just as dead. It was, in fact, those Tokyo raids which caused Nagasaki to be the target that day because the smoke from the firebombing obscured the primary target.

What is history? History is the collection of facts; observations of those who were actually there. Modern revisionists, interpreting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with 90's morality and perspective do not serve society as historians only as moralists who fail in the placement of fact and action in the perspective of the times in which they occurred. They may serve themselves, but they fail societal expectations of the objective historian. What matter the secrets uncovered years after the fact; what a president's advisor may have known or whatever, if at the time decisions were made those secrets were not known by the decision makers?

My father passed away several years ago, and spent his post-war life speaking to school and community groups about his experiences; trying to get the messages across that war itself is immoral as are all things done in pursuit of victory, that we as a people have seen the horror of atomic warfare and cannot afford to let it recur, but in the perspective of the times the dropping of the atomic bomb was the only decision we could have made.

Hundreds of thousands of Japanese were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that's a damn shame. They were, however, the enemy and they started it. The use of the atomic bombs, despite revisionist objections, shortened the war and saved American lives. In the perspective of the times, that's really all that matters.