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Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. It had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive, he wrote in his book. Tibbets looked back to see an immense mushroom cloud. Robert Caron described the view from his seat in the tail gunners turret as a peep into hell. The shock waves severely shook the retreating plane, but did not damage it. My God, what have we done? Lewis wrote in his logbook. Tibbets, who carried poison pills for the crew in case the B-29 went down, put the plane into a sharp, diving turn to speed away from the imminent explosion.Īt 8:16 a.m., 1,890 feet above the center of Hiroshima, the bomb detonated with a core temperature estimated at 50 million degrees. Seventeen seconds after 8:15 a.m., from an altitude of 26,000 feet, the bombardier, Maj.
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Two other B-29s accompanied the Enola Gay to monitor the event. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, lumbering under the load of the 9,700-pound bomb, struggled up off a runway on the island of Tinian for the 1,700-mile flight north to Hiroshima. Lewis to accept the secondary role of co-pilot in what had been Lewis B-29, Tibbets ordered his mothers name, Enola Gay, painted on the side of the fuselage. Outmaneuvering some top officers who sought to take over the bombing mission, Tibbets rallied support from Washington to retain his command of the 509th and announced that he would be piloting the plane that dropped the first bomb.įorcing an unhappy Capt. The Japanese ignored the demand, which made no mention of nuclear weapons. Less than a month after Truman approved the invasion plans, the first atomic bomb was tested successfully at Alamogordo, N.M.īelieving that the Japanese should have one last chance to avoid the bomb, Truman issued an ultimatum: surrender unconditionally or face prompt and utter destruction. Douglas MacArthur said it could take 10 years to wipe out the last pockets of resistance, with total American losses reaching 1 million men. 1, followed five months later by an attack by 1.2 million troops on the island of Honshu. The initial assault, by 815,000 troops, would begin on the island of Kyushu on Nov. Truman approved military plans for the invasion of Japan. My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war, he wrote in his book, Flight of the Enola Gay (1989). Tibbets was summoned to a secret military conclave in Colorado, where he was told that he had been selected over dozens of other candidates to head a unit called the 509th Composite Group. In early 1943, Tibbets was recalled to the United States toīegin testing a new super bomber, the B-29. Two months later, he led the bombing runs supporting the American landings in North Africa. bombing raids over German-held targets in Western Europe. Tibbets liked the military life, and despite subsequent premedical studies at the universities of Cincinnati and Florida, he enlisted as a cadet at the Army Air Corps Academy at Fort Thomas, Ky., in 1937.īy late summer 1942, nine months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust America into World War II, Tibbets was flying some of the first U.S.
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Tibbets father, a believer in discipline, shipped his son off to Western Military Academy in Alton, Ill., the following year. The 12-year-old Tibbets rode as a passenger, tossing handfuls of Baby Ruth bars to the crowd below.įrom that day on, I knew I had to fly, Tibbets said. His father, a candy distributor, hired a popular barnstormer, Doug Davis, to fly over Hialeah racetrack as a promotional stunt. 23, 1915, he moved to Florida with his parents while still a child. Proud, prickly and a perfectionist, Tibbets never doubted that he was the man for the job.īorn in Quincy, Ill., on Feb. And he drove his men hard, weeding out those who fell short or talked too much about what they were doing. Tibbets picked an isolated air base straddling the Nevada-Utah border where the men of the 509th trained for their mission. Many of the crewmen were personal friends who had flown missions with him over Nazi-occupied Western Europe and North Africa. He selected the combat veterans who manned the bombers. Tibbets chose the planes that flew those missions - specially reconfigured B-29s, then the largest operational aircraft on Earth, stripped of armament and armor plating to lighten them for their extended journeys. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another plane from the 509th leveled much of Nagasaki with another nuclear bomb, prompting the Japanese surrender. Hap Arnold as the best damned pilot in the (Army) Air Force, Tibbets was hand-picked to command the mysterious 509th Composite Group, the first military unit ever formed to wage nuclear war.