Hiroshima
The Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, left the island of Tinian 1,500 miles south of Japan on August 6, 1945. Its mission was to bomb Hiroshima. Hiroshima was selected because it had not been bombed in prior air attacks, so the U.S. could assess the destructive power of the atomic bomb. In Enola Gay hung the “Little Boy” atomic bomb, made of an Uranium isotope, that would detonate after it was armed and dropped. The atomic bomb tumbled out of the bomb bay doors at 8:15 a.m. The people of Hiroshima had half a minute to live.
“The mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside. . . . It looked like lava or molasses covering a whole city." -George Caron, tailgunner of the Enola Gay Co-pilot Robert Lewis saw the evaporation of a city: “Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city.” |
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Interview with Colonel Paul Tibbits, pilot of the Enola Gay
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