Twenty years ago, during its restoration, Enola Gay found itself at the center of a firestorm between World War II veterans and a younger generation of historians who questioned the use of "The Bomb." "On August 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan," its plaque simply notes, with no mention of the death or destruction it sowed. It's hard to miss in the vastness of the Udvar-Hazy Center, sharing hanger space with dozens of others planes including an Air France Concorde, the original Boeing 707 prototype and the Space Shuttle Discovery. Were it not for the atomic bomb, many Americans contend, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of American soldiers would have died in a US-led invasion of the Japanese mainland.Īt the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's vast public collection of historic aircraft near Dulles airport outside Washington, every display gets a succinct 150-word description, including Enola Gay. Using the atomic bomb, developed amid utmost secrecy, was hugely popular with war-weary Americans at the time - and 70 years on, a majority today still think it was the right thing to do.įifty-six percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center in February said using the atomic bomb on Japanese cities was justified, compared to 79 percent of Japanese respondents who said it was not.
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What did the pilot of enola gay say plus#
It would be another 27 days - plus a second nuclear mushroom over Nagasaki - before Japan surrendered, ending a war that began with its 1937 invasion of China and stretched across the Asia-Pacific region. Click here to listen."They certainly don't care to have us drop any more bombs of atomic energy like this." Nearly as fascinating is the story of the Enola Gay’s restoration, which you can hear in our long-form podcast. Sentimentality? Nostalgia? Or a dedicated commander who well understood his airplane’s place in history and wanted to make sure the world would see it as he thought it should be seen? Either way, I’d have given a barrel of pennies for those thoughts. There’s an understated pad on the pilot’s seat, in place of the hard pan that would have been softened (barely) by a parachute worn by each member of the flight crew.The pad was placed there to accommodate Tibbets, who traveled to the Smithsonian a number of times and sat quietly in his old seat. When I was preparing this podcast on the restoration of the Enola Gay, National Air and Space restoration specialist Ann McCombs told me that if you were in the cockpit of the Enola Gay today, at the Udvar-Hazy Center where the airplane is displayed, it would appear entirely as it did in 1945 save for one detail.
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In Tibbets, history found the right man.From the interviews I’d seen, I always took Tibbets to be a no-nonsense guy and probably not given to sentimentality. Given how complex getting the bomb on target was and how many things could have conspired to make it fail, the fact that Tibbets made sure that it didn’t stands as one of the towering examples of military leadership in a war that produced many others. It was his duty and he did what was expected of him. Inevitably, he was asked if he ever lost any sleep over the horrific results of the Hiroshima attack. He was 29 years old and responsible for what would become the most important weapon system of the war.I never met Tibbets-he died in 2007-but I saw him interviewed many times. The following year, Tibbets was selected to form what would eventually be the 509th Composite Group. It was so beset with developmental problems that by 1943, when Tibbets showed up in Wichita to help sort out the airplane’s shortcomings, there was some doubt that the airplane would be combat ready in time to have an impact on the war. Tibbets, whose arc through history put him at the point of two of the war’s biggest projects-the bomb and the bomber that would deliver it.Although it’s not commonly known, the B-29 was actually said to be a larger undertaking than the Manhattan Project, at least in terms of total dollars spent. And that leads inevitably to the B-29 Superfortress and Paul W.
I have always been fascinated by World War II and especially by the history of the Manhattan Project.