My squadron flew pre-strike and post-strike photo reconnaissance missions — pre-strikes so the bombers would know where the targets were, and then follow-ups to record the results of their bombing. When we flew post-strikes, sometimes we went in right after the bombers. Our squadron would be over every target at least twice; often, several times more than that. Then the incendiary bombing camaign started the ninth of March with a raid which burned out thirteen-and-a-half square miles of Tokyo in one night. Several missions after that, we burned out roughly the same amount again, so by the end of the war about twenty-seven square miles of Tokyo had gone up in flames. After Tokyo came Nagoya, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe. Those were the main population centers. We and the bombers were flying every day. Many times, it would be a maximum strength thing; other times, against certain targets, it might be just a wing or a group from Tinian or Saipan.

The first week of August, 1945, I was asked to submit the names of two crews to fly a special mission out of Tinian. I wasn’t told what the mission was, but I knew it must be important, because this was such an unusual request: I wasn’t allowed to change any of the names of the crew members, even a few days before the mission when somebody got sick. I suspected they were going to photograph the results of a bigger bomb, maybe a twenty-thousand pound bomb; but those crews wound up as trailer crews, flying over the target about fifteen minutes after the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Another airplane flew closer to the Enola Gay, monitoring what went on with the bomb — just individuals with hand-held cameras.

Our squadron’s airplane took the picture of the atomic cloud that wound up on the cover of Life magazine a couple of weeks later. It also took pictures of the damage to Hiroshima. We had the only decent photo lab in the Marianas at the time, so I flew an F-2 up to Tinian that evening, picked up the film, brought it back down to our lab in Guam, and stayed with it. I got back around eleven o’clock, saw the pictures of the damage, and took them over to General LeMay’s headquarters around two in the morning.

Damage that equalled what had been done by a couple of hundred airplanes over Tokyo in March had been done with one weapon at Hiroshima. It had wiped out the city. On the second atomic mission, the primary target was Yawata, an industrial city at the very northern tip of Kyushu, on the Shimonoseki Straits. But the weather was bad — Yawata was socked in — so they hit their secondary target, Nagasaki. They missed the aiming point by a good mile, but they sure did a lot of damage even with that kind of a miss. The bomb, which was an air burst like the one at Hiroshima, reduced a steel mill to a bunch of twisted girders, which shows you the power of that particular weapon.

About three days later, I flew up to take pictures and try to get some decent post-strike coverage of Nagasaki. First, I went up to a high altitude and got more pictures of Hiroshima; then I let down to about fifteen hundred feet to get the photographs that I still have of Nagasaki. You had to be very alert, because we didn’t know whether the Japanese had quit or not, but I had a sense that this was going to be the end of the war. They had nothing left. After seeing the devastation wrought by atomic bombs, my first thought was, “Well, man’s either going to have to learn to live with man, or we won’t have a world to be living in.” My second thought was, “Now I’m going to get to go home”

Clarence Becker continued his military career in the Air Force Reserve Program and was recalled to active duty in 1951. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1967 as a colonel and came to Reno in 1968 to open the west coast office of National Data Corporation.

Biographical notes on the life of Clarence Becker may be found on this web site by clicking here: