Claude Murphy
Interviewee: Claude Murphy
Interviewer: John McCabe
Date of Interview: 16 April 2002
Length of Interview: 150 minutes
In January 1944, Claude Murphy joined the U.S. Army; he was eighteen years old. He chose the army because that branch of the military allowed recruits three weeks before requiring them to report for active duty and those weeks allowed him to graduate from high school with the rest of his class. In this interview, Mr. Murphy describes what it was like to join the army at the time and the different examinations he had to go through. He joined the air corps and became a central fire controller. After attending gunner school and learning to operate more than one gun from a certain position by using simulators, he was shipped to California where he attended engineer school. He started flying missions near Japan, but he says that by this point in the war (late 1944), the Japanese air force was minimal. He recalls several exciting incidents in this interview. Mr. Murphy tells a story of how once his plane was attacked by fighters from behind and he, as tail gunner, shot two planes down, forcing the third to retreat. On the 9th of August, 1945, he was flying on a bombing mission to the island of Honshu. This was three days after the bombing of Hiroshima. Mr. Murphy tells of flying in the tail gunner position when he looked west and noticed what he describes as a “funny looking cloud” about forty or fifty miles away. He pointed it out to the pilot, who had also noticed it but did not know what it could be. It was not until the crew was back on base and heard about the dropping of a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki that they realized what they had seen on that mission. Mr. Murphy expresses the belief in this interview that those two bombs saved many American and Japanese lives. This is one of many intriguing stories in this riveting, excellent interview.