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It was about that time that Tibbets turned the airplane around, so that everybody could get a look at it. On August 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later the Enola Gay conducted weather reconnaissance. Flames in different spots would be springing up. Tibbets flew the Enola Gay back to Tinian, where he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
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"And fires, I could see fires spring up through this undercast, or whatever you would call it, that was covering the city. It looked like bubbling molasses, let's say, spreading out and running up into the foothills, just covering the whole city." I could see the city, and it was being covered with this low, bubbling mass. "As we got further away, I could see the city then, not just the mushroom, coming up. I think that's how I described it on the intercom," Caron said years later in an interview. Well, it was white on the outside and it was sort of a purplish black towards the interior, and it had a fiery red core, and it just kept boiling up. I described the mushroom cloud as it grows. Tibbets immediately steered into a 160-degree. The Enola Gay was a B-29 bomber commanded by Colonel. When the bomb was released, the Enola Gays nose lurched up, the plane freed of a four-and-a-half-ton weight. Paul Tibbets, who named the B-29 the "Enola Gay" after his mother, told Caron to describe what he saw to the crew over the intercom. The responsibility of using the world's first atomic bomb in war fell to the crew of the Enola Gay. The Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress Bomber, was responsible for dropping the atomic bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima, Japan. Instead of 12 men on the Enola Gay, people would think there were only nine.An aerial view of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Jeppson was worried that without some addition, the importance of his role, along with that of Navy Capt. Jeppson was concerned because he learned his name, along with two others, would be absent from a list of crew members long-ago stenciled on the side of the infamous B-29 bomber by the military. The new Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was about to open with the Enola Gay on display. It was 2003 when Jeppson felt compelled to come forward. Another atomic attack on Nagasaki followed three days later. Today he lives in Las Vegas with his wife, Molly, retired after a career spent at the helm of a handful of high-tech companies and working as consultant for the Department of Energy. On August 6, 1945, the crew of a modified Boeing B-29 Superfortress named Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare, called Little Boy, on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The USAF transferred Enola Gay to several locations and didn’t really take much care to preserve it. Jeppson turned to graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, after leaving the military. In 1949 the Air Force turned over Enola Gay to the Smithsonian Museum but the museum entrusted it to the Air Force to storage. Now 90, Tibbets lives in a modest brick home in a well-kept neighborhood in Columbus and travels occasionally for air shows and veterans’ ceremonies.
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Most of the lives saved were Japanese,” the 84-year-old said from his suburban Atlanta retirement home near the base of Stone Mountain, where a large relief memorial carved out of the bare rock depicts Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. “I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. ATLANTA The last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, hastening the end of World War II and forcing the world into the atomic age, has died in Georgia. The 9,000-pound bomb fell down toward the city as the Enola Gay banked away, the crew hoping to escape with their lives.ĭespite decades of controversy over whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb - which left some 140,000 dead in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki three days later - Van Kirk remains convinced it was necessary because it shortened the war and relieved the Allies of having to mount a land invasion that might have cost far more lives on both sides. Under cover of night, he guided the bomber nearly exactly as planned - the plane was just 15 seconds behind schedule. It was a perfect mission, Van Kirk recalls. Van Kirk, then 24, was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped “Little Boy” - the world’s first atomic bomb - over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.