Throughout our childhood in Maine and the South Shore of Boston, my Uncle Russell Gray told a story about almost parachuting out of a US Air Force plane on August 6. The tale ended with the jumpers seeing the mushroom cloud rising over the city. It wasn't true, but all stories are true, if interesting.
In actuality Uncle Russ had enlisted upon graduating from U Maine that spring and had been processed through the Fort Williams in South Portland. He completed his infantry training in Georgia, then was transported across country by train to San Francisco and shipped west to Japan. Today I asked about those particulars and Russ said that the troop transport had docked in Nagasaki late October 1945, more than two months after the second bombing, but immediately he and his fellow soldiers headed north to Honshu, where he spent the next year. At 98 his memory is a crystal radio signal from another century.
Two years ago Jack Haven recorded his VDO in Marblehead at Fort Edgecomb.
Another telling of the same story.
From a true New Englander.
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