“I personally think there shouldn't be any atomic bombs in the world - I'd like to see them all abolished,” Van Kirk said. At exactly 8:15 AM the Enola Gay drops a uranium based Atomic Bomb that explodes with an blinding air-burst, some 1,600 feet above ground zero, wiping out the city and 100,000 of its inhabitants in less then a minute. The plane’s navigator and last surviving member of the crew, Theodore Van Kirk, died last week at the age of 93.īefore his death, Van Kirk told the Associated Press that while the mission went perfectly, and that he believed the bombing which killed some 140,000 people actually saved lives in the long run, he felt slightly conflicted. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility, part of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
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Tibbets, a 30-year-old colonel at the time of the bombing, named the bomber after his mother. The Enola Gay is a B-29 Superfortress, which pilot Paul Tibbets named after his mother, and which had been stripped of everything but the necessities, so as to be thousands of pounds lighter than. I took these pics of the famous plane in 1993 at the Paul E. Inside the window-covered nose of the plane, you can see where pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee sat during Special Mission No. (National Archives) They thought Hiroshima had been spared. The plane was further modified to carry the atomic bomb - dubbed “Little Boy” - which was dropped from the front bomb bay onto the heart of Hiroshima during the mission. The weapon is hoisted into the bomb bay of the B-29 dubbed Enola Gay in August 1945 on Tinian Island in the Northern Mariana Islands. (Associated Press)At the time of its mission, the Enola Gay was among the most sophisticated, propeller-driven bombers in the sky during the Second World War, according to the Smithsonian. The seventh and most important aircraft was one named the Enola Gay, in honor of the mother of.
![a look inside the enola gay bomb bay a look inside the enola gay bomb bay](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ds0Sk9JWsAMara1.jpg)
Paul Tibbets named the modified Boeing B-29 bomber used in Special Mission No.