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John J. Brady,  who as a 22-year­ old Army Air Corps fighter pilot witnessed the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the day that ef­fectively ended a war and changed the world, Mr. Brady flew with the 384th Fighter Group on a mission to protect B-29s bombing the Japa­nese mainland.

Almost half a century later – the first time he talked about his experience – Mr. Brady recalled that he thought he was on just another mission.

He flew 80 missions during World War II, gathering notches in his belt and medals for his chest – the Air Medal, seven battle stars – in P-40 and P-51 planes.

“We didn’t expect any action,” he said in a 1993 Daily News interview. “… It was so clear, we could see for 60 miles.” Nothing he had seen in combat before, though, could have pre­pared him for what he saw that day as he flew his P-51, which he had named Flower of Philly, as an escort to the B-29 Enola Gay.

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A Scene from Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun.” 


A scene from Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun.” depicting a fly-over of the American prisoner of war camp, where American prisoners were used as human shields to protect the fighter planes, by the 341st fighter squadron which John Brady was a part of.

“All of a sudden, I saw this big dust thing in the sky” through special goggles he had been issued just before takeoff, he said. “It looked like a gray cloud and appeared to be coming up from the ground. It looked like nothing I had ever seen before. I asked myself, ‘What the hell was that?’ We hadn’t been told why we were there. We didn’t even know what an atomic bomb was.”

Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, the United States ex­ploded another atom bomb, over Na­gasaki; on Aug. 14, Japan surren­dered. Estimates vary, but the death toll from the Hiroshima bombing was horrendous: 100,000 were killed and another 100,000 died later of radiation poisoning and other side-effects.

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After he came home, Mr. Brady, who had grown up in Philadel­phia’s Swampoodle and Tioga sec­tions and graduated from the old Northeast High School, settled in Olney and decades later moved to the Northeast.

He finished his education at Temple University, earning a bachelor’s degree in business in 1949. Eventually, he started a career in public relations, working for Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania and AT&T for a total of 37 years before retiring in 1986.

He never spoke of the war. No one in his family, not even his wife, Connie, knew of what he had witnessed. In the AT&T news release announcing !tis retirement, some of his World War II experi­ences are mentioned. But its only reference to the closing days of the war were of his flying “the last combat missions against the Japanese homeland” and of his be­ing “one of the first Americans to set foot on Japanese soil at the end of World War II.”

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“When I was younger, he would never talk about the war, said his son James. And when the time did come for Mr. Brady to begin talking about his war experiences, “the stories he told were just mind-boggling. They were experiences I just couldn’t even imagine.”

Those experiences included watch­ing his best friend wave farewell as his fighter plane, crip­pled by antiaircraft fire, crashed into the Pacific Ocean. That and other horrors prompted Mr. Brady to decorate the cockpit of his Flower of Philly with religious medals and artifacts.

“He knew that if he got shot down, he would be entombed in his plane,” his son said. Mr. Brady did not begin talking about Hiroshima until 1993, after he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He said in the Daily News interview that he felt ”bad about all the Japanese that were killed, but I wouldn’t be here today if we hadn’t done what we did.”

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His son believes that Mr. Brady meant it when he said dropping the atomic bomb was a horror, but a necessary horror. But he also knows, from an incident that took place when he was a grade-schooler as well as from his father’s long silence, that the bombing had a huge impact on Mr. Brady.

His son said his father was paging through a school report he had done on Hiroshima. When Mr. Brady reached the page where his son had pasted a picture of the mushroom cloud over the Japanese city, “his whole face changed.” Mr. Brady paused. “This picture doesn’t do it justice,” he told his son tersely, then continued to go over the homework.

By any measure, Mr. Braqy’s life in Philadelphia after World War II was ordinary – and successful. He and his wife were married for 51 years. He put three children though college. James is a chiropractor with offices in Bucks County and Philadelphia. Mr. Brady’s oldest son, John, is a math teacher at Fa­ther Judge High School. His daugh­ter, Teresa, is a lawyer with offices in Bucks County and Philadelphia.

Professionally, Mr. Brady was listed in the 1986-87 edition of “Who’s Who in the East” in recogni­tion of his accomplishments in pub­lic relations.