"My God, what have we done?” Captain Bob Lewis, the copilot, shouted as he saw the plumed wreckage boiling and leaping up at them above its 80,000 dead. Threw the big plane around at an angle of 150 degrees and plunged it down to gain speed while the two observation aircraft behind him did the same.Īs they’d known would happen no matter how quickly they turned and ran, two massive shocks hit them from the blast of their bomb below but the three planes righted themselves and lurched on home. The difference was that now his life, and others, hung on the result. Tibbets repeated a manœuvre he had practised as long and carefully as a baseball player practising a bunt just inside the third-base line. When the bomb bay opened Ferebee shouted: “It’s clear!” and turned the controls back to Tibbets. Little Boy was the first atomic bomb ever dropped in anger and when it exploded fortythree seconds after its release all the history and all the prospects of the human race underwent a change beyond all reckoning and beyond all guessing. The bomb known as Little Boy, sometimes called Thin Man, would be on the way to Hiroshima. It was a small bridge, and when two dots came together in the sight Ferebee knew the rest would happen automatically. Was locking for in the cross-hairs of his Norden bomb-sight. Ten miles and two minutes from their destination the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, silently turned over the controls to his bombardier, Major Tom Ferebee.Īlmost at once, because he had a good radar man behind him and even though they were six miles high. The seventh and most important aircraft was one named the Enola Gay, in honor of the mother of its pilot. A fifth carried cameras and a sixth bore other instruments to weigh and measure what was about to happen on the ground below. A fourth, standing by for emergencies, dropped off at the intervening island of Iwo Jima. Three of the planes went thirty minutes ahead, to scout the weather. ON AN AUGUST MORNING IN 1945, very early on a day that turned out to be a warm and sunny one, seven United States Air Force B-29’s left the Pacific island of Tinian and began a six-hour journey northwest to Japan. This became a challenge … and you’d be surprised at the pride these boys took in being able to qualify.The men who destroyed Hiroshima describe their later lives and tell how they feel now about DUTY, GUILT, THE NEXT BOMB I wouldn’t settle for anything less than a quarter of a mile of accuracy, and I wouldn’t stand for anything less than 20 seconds off on time. Tibbets, 509th Composite Group commander, and orchestrator of the operational aspect of the original nuclear enterprise, the Manhattan Project, in an interview in 1966. “What I tried to do, initially, was to train individuals – then weld the individuals into a good, cohesive team to fly this B-29 better that anybody else was flying … that particular day,” said Lt. 17, 1944, was created for the sole purpose of delivering the world’s first nuclear weapon.īecause of the secret nature of their mission, the group trained at Wendover, Utah, and Tinian Island, in the Pacific, ever-perfecting the performance of the crew and their B-29 Superfortress bombers. The 509th Composite Group, born in secrecy Dec. The Enola Gay lurched as the the 10,000 pounds Mk I bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” dropped out of the bomb bay