"He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb)"
- John Hersey
At around 8 am in the morning on August 6, 1945 the crew of a lone B-29 bomber was approaching the city of Hiroshima. It was partly cloudy that morning but you could clearly see the city below . For most of the men it was a routine mission. Some were napping, others read books. Any significant Japanese resistance had long since passed. Only two men in the cockpit knew what they were carrying.
Paul Tibbets, the pilot, had named the bomber after his mother, Enola Gay. In it’s enormous bomb bay was a single bomb that weighed 10,000 lbs. No one knew exactly what to expect from the device. They were trailed by another B-29 to record the event.
The Enola Gay had been stripped of any excess weight including it’s protective gun turrets. The plan was to turn and run as soon as the payload was released.
At 8:15 am he released the bomb over the city. Almost immediately the plane lurched upward free of the weight it was carrying. Tibbets banked hard into a 180 degree turn, losing 2,000 feet in the process. The B-29 is huge and no nimble fighter. The men, now fully alert, held on as the structure of the aircraft screamed under the stress.
A moment later “Little Boy” exploded over Hiroshima.
The crew saw a brilliant flash of light. Then, the shockwave hit rattling the aircraft so hard that the crew feared the plane would come apart. The trailing plane filmed the enormous mushroom cloud that rose over 20,000 feet in the sky.
In the atomic fire below 70,000 people died instantly. Thousands of the victims were Korean slave laborers. Less than 10% were military. Radiation sickness that followed would claim thousands of more lives
We left this morning for Africa and have had a very long layover in Washington DC. A new branch of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum was near by so we decided to go for a visit while waiting for our overnight flight.
It was a wonderful exhibit with historical aircraft from the last 80 years inside. The Space Shuttle Discovery was there. It was the longest serving shuttle in the fleet. They had a Concorde passenger jet and wonderful old airliners.
However what caught my eye was there in the middle of the hanger was a B-29. As I approached it I was startled to find it was the actual Enola Gay. It was like a ghost ship in the middle of the hanger with the blood of over 100,000 people on its wings. It was sobering to look at and to consider what happened with that single aircraft.
After the war the Enola Gay flew very little. It was sent to a airfield in Texas and fell into disrepair until the Smithsonian worked to restore it to this exhibit.
I understand the arguments of why we dropped the bombs. I am not here to offer judgement but just to bear witness of this extraordinary exhibit.
Consider this fact as you think about the Enola Gay. Little Boy was an incredibly inefficient weapon . Less that 20% of the fissionable material in Little Boy actually ignited. It is hard to imagine what would have happened to Hiroshima if the bomb actually worked and all of the payload exploded. It is a sobering thought.
Time to board the plane.
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