The name of Kermit Beahan might sound comical to modern ears, or at least to those of us raised on the Muppets.
But his role in history was far from funny. Eighty years ago this week, he was the bombardier who dropped the device known as “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, killing 70,000 people then and later.
He was nicknamed “The Great Artiste” by colleagues in the US air-force, for his accuracy. They even had a plane so called in his honour which, with him in the crew, had also been part of the back-up at Hiroshima. It was said that he could “hit a pickle barrel … from 30,000 feet”.
His name may have been doubly Celtic. Kermit is a Manx version of MacDermot. As for Beahan, that looks like a variant of the surname more usually anglicised as Behan.
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But his wife, Teresa (aka Tess) Lavery was certainly Irish. And via both her husbands (Beahan was the second) - she became a footnote to history, literally or otherwise.
Belfast-born of a dynasty that included the well-known publicans and the painter Sir John, Tess Lavery first wed the future historian Shelby Foote (1916 – 2005). They met when he was stationed at Kilkeel, Co Down, in the later years of the war.
In 1944, he borrowed an official vehicle without clearance to visit her in Belfast. That earned him a court martial and dismissal from the army, before he had seen any action.
The pair married in New York soon afterwards, despite mutual misgivings. On the way to the church, according to his biographer C Stuart Chapman, Foote began whistling Cole Porter’s hit, Don’t Fence Me In. The couple’s obvious worries about each other led the priest to comment: “I have never seen two people getting married look so solemn”.
For the bride, this only made things worse: “On two separate occasions, the service had to be stopped because she cried so violently”.
It need hardly be added that the marriage didn’t last long. Anxious to get back to the war, Foote soon afterwards enlisted for the Marine Corps, who was desperate enough for recruits to ignore his previous misdemeanours.
In the event, he never saw combat with them either. But he was a man who didn’t want to be married, really. The condition “galled” him, he later admitted.
Lavery filed for divorce in early 1946. Her husband didn’t contest. And as Stewart Chapman notes: “If Foote lost a wife, he gained a vocation”.
Having reluctantly given up on war, he became a journalist and wrote a first novel, published in 1946, earning enough from it to make him a full-time writer.
A few years later again, he embarked on a 20-year project that became a three-volume, 3,000-page history of the American Civil War. Its narrative style drew praise and criticism and established him as one of the best-known historians of the 20th century, although he continued to see himself primarily as a novelist.
Lavery’s marriage to Beahan is less well documented but lasted until his death in 1989 and produced two children, Kermit Jnr and Patrick. Her new husband was lucky to have survived the war.
In 1942 alone, planes in which he was a crew member were shot down or forced to crash-land four times. But for good or bad, Beahan would be forever defined by his role in the two atomic bomb missions of August 1945.
He was part of a support team for the first. For the second, he was the man charged with dropping the bomb on the city of Kokura, the original intended target.
In a bleak irony, Kokura was saved by smoke and dust from an earlier, conventional US air-bombing, which prevented Beahan from recognising a target.
The crew settled instead for Nagasaki, although that too presented problems. It was at first clouded over and the crew were reluctant to rely on radar, which could be notoriously inaccurate. The plane’s fuel was running dangerously low, meanwhile. It looked for as if they might have to ditch the bomb at sea.
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Then Beahan spotted a sports stadium through a gap in the cloud cover. Moments later, according to Stephen Walker’s book Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima: “he yelled, ‘Bombs away’ – then corrected himself: ‘Bomb away’."
He and the others had no idea where exactly it had fallen until later. “In fact,” writes Walker, “in one of the most bizarre coincidences of the war, Fat Man had detonated almost directly over the factory that once made the torpedoes used in the attack on Pearl Harbor”.
It also killed 40,000 people, with many more to follow.
Beahan had mixed feelings in later years about his involvement in the missions. He was neither proud nor inclined to apologise, believing the bombs had saved lives in the long run.
Japan’s surrender followed within days, and a minor side effect was to end the hopes of Teresa Lavery’s first husband that he would ever see military action. According to Stuart Chapman: “Foote was devastated that World War II was over”.
