Who flew the enola gay over hiroshima
We concluded that it would be over - that not even the most obstinate, uncaring leaders could refuse to surrender after this. We were pleased that the bomb had exploded as planned and later we got to talking about what it meant for the war. At the base you could see nothing but thick black dust and debris - it looked like a pot of hot oil down there. We turned to look back at Hiroshima and already there was a huge white cloud reaching up more than 42,000 feet. The tail-gunner later said he saw it coming towards us - a bit like the haze you see over a car park on a hot day, but moving forwards at great speed. Within a minute of the blast a white cloud had reached 42,000ft Someone called out 'flak' but of course it was the shockwave from the bomb. There was a great jolt on the aircraft and we were thrown off the floor. We'd been told that if we were eight miles away when the thing went off, we'd probably be ok - so we wanted to put as much distance as possible between us and the blast.Īll of us - except the pilot - were wearing dark goggles, but we still saw a flash - a bit like a camera bulb going off in the plane. The next thing I felt was 9,400lbs of bomb leaving the aircraft - there was a huge surge and we immediately banked into a right hand turn and lost about 2,000 feet. Once we verified the target, I went in the back and just sat down. I'd flown 58 missions over Europe and Africa - and I said to one of the boys that if we'd sat in the sky for so long over there we'd have been blown out of the air. It was perfectly clear and I was just doing all the things I'd always done as a navigator - plotting our course, getting fixes to make sure we were on course and reading the drifts so we knew the wind speed.Īs we flew over an inland sea I could make out the city of Hiroshima from miles away - my first thought was 'That's the target, now let's bomb the damn thing'.īut it was quiet in the sky.
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We flew in low over Iwo Jima while the bomb crew checked and armed Little Boy (the uranium bomb) and once we cleared the island we began climbing to our bombing altitude of just over 30,000 feet. Tibbets was the first to disembark, and was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross on the spot.There was a lot of picture-taking and interviewing going on - by the military - and it was a relief to get in the Enola Gay about an hour before we took off. When Enola Gay returned safely to its base on Tinian it was greeted with great fanfare. The bomb was detonated 2,000 feet, or 600 metres, above Hiroshima, flattening five square miles of the city in seconds. The Little Boy took 43 seconds to fall from the aircraft.
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#Who flew the enola gay over hiroshima how to
Tibbets was trained in how to turn the plane as fast as possible to get as far away from the blast as possible. As a result, few people bothered to head to air raid shelters.Īt 7:50am the bomb crew were nearing Hiroshima. However, the city’s residents had witnessed many other B-29 crews fly over city, dropping ‘pumpkins’ - harmless orange test bombs the same shape as an atomic bomb. The US weather reconnaissance bomber, Straight Flush, was spotted over the city and air-raid sirens sounded across Hiroshima. The weather also played a part - on the morning of 6 August the city was waking up to clear skies. Hiroshima was targeted because of its importance as a military base, centre for manufacturing and the fact it did not have an allied POW camps. Enola Gay carried “Little Boy” - a bomb that weighed five tonnes and had the explosive force of 20,000 tonnes of TNT.Īfter a six hour flight, Enola Gay reached Japan’s coastline. The bomber was accompanied by two other B-29s: The Great Artiste, carrying instrumentation and a then-nameless aircraft later called Necessary Evil, which was commanded by Captain George Marquardt and used to take photographs. The following day, Tibbetts piloted Enola Gay from North Field, in the Mariana Islands, to Japan.
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The name was painted on the aircraft on 5 August after Tibbetts assumed command of the bomber. Tibbets named the aircraft after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbetts, who had always supported her son’s decision to give up a medical career to become a military pilot. Tibbets, Jr - a brigadier general in the United States Air Force - while still on the production line. The “Little Boy” bomb caused unprecedented destruction, killing an estimated 30 per cent of the city’s population.Įnola Gay was personally selected for the mission by Colonel Paul W. Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, was used to drop the world’s first atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima.