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He released the brakes, advanced the throttles, and rolled down the long runway, gathering speed. The aircraft was heavily loaded with fuel and the 9,000-pound bomb, and was 15,000 pounds over the usual takeoff weight. Tibbets had already decided to make use of every inch of the runway. 6, 1945, Enola Gay taxied out from its Tinian parking spot with its unique cargo. Besides the Enola Gay, six aircraft were to participate – three were weather planes, launched beginning at 1:17 a.m, a back-up aircraft in case Enola Gay encountered mechanical problems and needed to land at Iwo Jima, and two additional B-29s carrying special instrumentation. The pre-dawn launch from Tinian involved a number of other 509th group B-29 bombers. Tibbets’ crew included four who had flown with him in Europe: bombardier Maj. Not really little at all but actually 12 feet long, weighing 9,000 pounds with a 28-inch diameter belly, the Little Boy was hoisted by hydraulic lift and slipped through the bomb bay with two inches to spare. They moved the big bomber into position straddling a bomb-loading pit. 5, 1945, ground crews began loading the “Little Boy” weapon aboard Enola Gay. Dorr, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2012. The tentative cover design for the book Mission to Tokyo, by Defense Media Network author Robert F.
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The plane Lewis had thought his own would eventually wear the words Enola Gay, named for Tibbets’ mother. Most members of the 509th still did not know why they were on Tinian, why they had special aircraft, or why they were sitting out big missions being flown by hundreds of B-29s. Someone wrote a poem deriding Tibbets’ outfit:īut take it from one who is sure of the score, Members of other units found 509th troops reluctant to converse, clannish, and tight-lipped. He had to have some sense that nothing less than the fate of the world rested in the hands of his 1,760 men and 15 specially configured Superfortresses. Tibbets understood little of the science behind the Manhattan Project but he knew bombing and bombers. In charge of the 509th was Paul Tibbets, born in Illinois but a product of an Iowa upbringing, serious, earnest, deadpan. No one else at B-29 bases in the Marianas had enjoyed the luxury of arriving aboard their own transport planes. It was supposed to be a combat group, like the others on Guam, Saipan and Tinian, yet it had only two flying squadrons – one with B-29 Superfortress bombers, the other with C-54 Skymaster transports. The 509th’s distinctive tailcode of an arrow inside a circle was changed to that of the 6th Bomb Group’s “circle R” by Tibbets after Tokyo Rose noted the tailcodes of the newly-arrived aircraft in two separate radio broadcasts. Later that year it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and spent many years parked at air bases exposed to the weather and souvenir hunters, before being disassembled and transported to the Smithsonian's storage facility at Suitland, Maryland, in 1961.Boeing B-29 Enola Gay on Tinian in the Marianas Islands. It was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll. After the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in Nagasaki being bombed instead. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura.
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The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused unprecedented destruction. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line.