It would fly as part of a seven-plane task force-all B-29s-including three for weather recon, one carrying blast-measurement equipment, one for camera equipment and observation, one spare aircraft and the delivery plane itself, the Enola Gay. Tibbets had never dreamed that her legacy would carry such historical import, for the Enola Gay was about to become the most infamous military aircraft ever known. Tibbets, had named the airplane Enola Gay, after his mother. That very afternoon the pilot of this B-29, Paul W. On the afternoon of August 5, army personnel eased the weapon through open bomb-bay doors into the belly of a B-29 Superfortress, using a hydraulic lift. The airport had been built to serve one purpose above all others: Little Boy. Now it was home to the largest airfield on earth. A year earlier, most of this little island was covered in sugarcane.
The Tinian airbase was itself an industrial marvel, an emblem of American ingenuity. READ MORE: The Secret World War II MIssion to Kidnap Hitler's A-Bomb Scientists Little Boy employed a different gun mechanism than the one used in the Trinity atomic test, which had successfully gone off in New Mexico roughly two weeks earlier, so there was no certainty that this weapon would work. One of the men working at Tinian that day described it as looking like “an elongated trash can with fins.” When it came to the Manhattan Project, everything was experimental. It was roughly egg-shaped, with a steel shell and a tail poking out the back to guide its trajectory. A dozen men in short-sleeved tan uniforms gathered around it wearing expressions of concern, wheeling Little Boy on a platform as if it were a patient on a hospital gurney. On the afternoon of August 5, on the island of Tinian, army officials pushed the Little Boy bomb out of a warehouse at the airfield. It was a thriving city and a virgin target, with a population of 318,000, according to American intelligence.
LeMay’s command had not yet hit Hiroshima. Intelligence sources also found that Hiroshima had no POW camps, so the Americans could be relatively sure they would not be bombing their own men.
a major quartermaster depot” with warehouses full of military supplies. According to intelligence sources, Hiroshima was “an Army city. “Didn’t wish to have any more information than it was necessary for me to have.” He had orders as to the first bomb’s primary target: Hiroshima. “I didn’t know much about this whole thing and didn’t ask about it, because it was so hot,” LeMay recorded. A special messenger had flown to his headquarters on Guam to brief him. Only recently had LeMay learned of the bomb. on August 5, General LeMay, who had overseen the recent firebombing of Japan’s important industrial cities, gave the final go-ahead for the 509th wing to fly the secret mission the following day-August 6. At one point, the Augusta’s Advance Map Room cabled the White House inquiring about any news of “the Manhattan Project.” White House Map Room operatives responded that they could find no evidence of any such project.įrom his headquarters on Guam in the South Pacific, at 2 p.m. Given the secrecy of the mission, he received no updates. These attacking planes saw no opposition.Īs the Augusta pushed deeper into the Atlantic, Truman’s curiosity over the bomb grew excruciating. The flames engulfed miles of Japanese cities.
On August 2, the day Truman started his transatlantic journey home aboard the Augusta, Major General Curtis LeMay’s 21st Bomber Command struck the enemy with what The New York Times called “the greatest single aerial strike in world history.” Nearly 900 B-29s pounded targets with 6,632 tons of conventional and incendiary bombs. Army’s B-29 firebombing raids of cities such as Mito, Fukuyama and Otsu. In the Far East, Japan continued to burn, the result of the U.S.
He could only hope that it would serve its purpose: to end the war, to save lives. He had told himself in his diary, days earlier, that “military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” Surely he knew that this bomb, as technologically marvelous as it was, did not have the sentience to separate military individuals from civilians.