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“It wasn’t really talked about much,” he later recalled, “but even so, we did feel that what we were doing would end the war and solve all our problems at that time.”Īt 2:45 AM the next morning Colonel Paul Tibbetts took off in Enola Gay to carry the bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, to its destination. He and his crew knew the extra importance of the mission. He flew “a rather uneventful run” and delivered a report of clear conditions. At the controls was Baraboo native First Lieutenant Garvin Kowalke, who had named the plane after his hometown. The B-29 City of Baraboo drew the weather reconnaissance mission for August 5. Image of the Crew from the City of Baraboo from the Sauk County Historical Society To not attract attention, the planes flew singly and swung out over Korea and the East China Sea to avoid giving away their special interest in those cities. With weather such a critical factor, the Twentieth Air Force, based in the Mariana Islands 1,500 miles f ro m Japan, began a program of B-29 flights over the target areas to assess conditions.
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Hiroshima was also headquarters for the Second General Army, responsible for defending Japan’s western half. All had been chosen because of their military and industrial significance. Twelve days before, on July 25, the War Department instructed General Carl Spaatz, commander of Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, to use the two atomic bombs on Japan “as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945.” The target cities were four: Hiroshima, Kokura (modern Kitakyushu), Niigata, and Nagasaki. For the first time, nuclear weapons had been used in war.
#WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MEN WHO FLEW THE ENOLA GAY HOW TO#
It’s too bad they couldn’t have forgot how to make them after that bombing, but on the other hand, maybe the bombs are the things that have kept peace this long.On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first victim of an atomic attack. I know he saved more Americans lives than he cost the Japanese, and he probably saved Japanese lives when it comes right down to it, because they would have lost a lot more lives in the fighting than they lost in that bombing. They claimed that if we went into Japan, we would have lost millions. I’m sure we would have lost an awful lot of men.
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"I think we all agreed with him that he made the right decision of bombing Hiroshima. It took two bombs to make the Japanese realize what was going to happen to them." - Mildred Pogue Gardner, Lincoln University of Nebraska student. "We knew that the cost of lives was going to be just unreal, that was the justification for it and that was the justification that we had to take too. You’d think it would cure everybody of ever starting a war again, but it hasn’t." - Rose Marie Murphy Christensen, Columbus Grade school student.
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It was a terrible, terrible thing, and it’s too bad, but there were a lot of people who got killed in that war. They started it and they had their chance, and even after we dropped the first one, they didn’t give up, so we had todrop the second one. Visit the Smithsonian website on the Enola Gay. The debate over how the war was won has continued. Udvar-Hazy Center outside Dulles Airport in northern Virginia. Now, the entire restored plane is displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. But there was so much disagreement over the plane’s mission that the exhibit was closed. The Enola Gay was restored and parts of the plane were put on exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum between 19. It made its final flight on December 2, 1953, when it was flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. flew the plane to Park Ridge, Illinois, a storage site for the Smithsonian Institution. After her mission, the Enola Gay was returned to the United States in 1946 and stored in Arizona for several years.