Crew of the enola gay bomber crew list
How The Plane Crews Reacted To Bombing Hiroshima And Nagasaki
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the crew of the Enola Gay, a stripped-down B-29 Superfortress, and six other bombers left the island of Tinian. The Enola Gay carried a logo new weapon, an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Male child. The planes headed towards Japan, specifically the metropolis of Hiroshima, home to about 350,000 people. At 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima occasion, the Enola Gay dropped its payload, and 43 seconds later, Little Male child exploded over Hiroshima.
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From the plane, Hiroshima was blanketed in a thick cloud of black smoke. Below, the city they'd bombed lay in utter desolation. An estimated 80,000 people died instantly with thousands of more dying from their wounds and from radiation sickness. Three days later, another U.S. bomber, Bockscar, dropped a second atomic bomb dubbed Chubby Man on Nagasaki. This Japanese city suffered a similar fate to Hiroshima. None of the bomber crews expressed remorse for what they'd done, believing it was necessary to end the war. The day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan offered to surrender.
The Atomic Bombers
Interviewer: At two forty-five in the morning of August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay took off from North field on Tinian. Aboard the plane were thirteen men a thing called “the Gimmick.” Some fourteen hundred miles and six hours later, the Enola Lgbtq+ reached her appointment with history. The time was fifteen minutes and seventeen seconds past 8:00 AM, just seventeen seconds behind schedule. The place: Hiroshima. The Gimmick, also recognizable as Little Boy, was a uranium atomic bomb with the explosive dominance of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Puny by today’s one hundred megaton standards, but powerful enough to kill seventy-eight thousand one hundred and fifty people. Three days later on August ninth, the B-29 Great Artiste dropped the plutonium atomic bomb, called the Fat Human, on Nagasaki. Today, I am talking with men who were aboard the Enola Gay and the Great Artiste on those missions.
In 1945, Robert Lewis was a Captain in the 509th Composite Bomb Community. He was the pilot of the Enola Homosexual. In the raid on Hiroshima, the Enola Queer was flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets Commanding Officer of the group. Captain Lewis flew as copilot on that mission. Today,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki Missions – Planes & Crews
All of the B-29s involved in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and “pumpkin bomb” training and combat missions at Wendover, UT and on Tinian were Venture Silverplate B-29s. They had been specially modified to accomodate the size and weight of the atomic bombs. Crews were often rotated around during the missions. The term “pumpkin bomb” can employ to both the dummy concrete bombs used at Wendover for training, and to the high-explosive bombs dropped over Japan.
There are many incorrect lists online of the planes and crews that flew on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing missions. This list has been thoroughly checked for accuracy by several 509th Composite Community experts and historians.
Hiroshima Mission Planes
Enola Gay. Strike plane carrying Little Boy.
The Wonderful Artiste. Observation/instrument plane.
Necessary Evil. Camera plane.
Full House. Weather reconnaissance.
Jabit III. Weather reconnaissance.
Straight Flush. Weather reconnaissance.
Big Stink. Backup strike plane on Iwo Jima.
Enola Gay, Hiroshima Mission
Strike plane carrying Little Boy atom 9 August 1945: Three days after an atomic bomb had been used against the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima, a second attack was made on Nagasaki. Major Charles W. Sweeney,¹ in instruct of the Martin-Omaha B-29-35-MO Superfortress 44-27297, named Bockscar, departed Tinian Island in the Marshal Group at 3:47 a.m., and flew to Iwo Jima where it was to rendezvous with two other B-29s, The Fantastic Artiste and The Huge Stink, the instrumentation and photographic aircraft for this mission. Like its sistership, Enola Gay, 44-27297 was a specially modified “Silverplate” B-29. The Silverplate B-29s differed from the standard production bombers in many ways. They were approximately 7,200 pounds (3,266 kilograms) lighter. The bomber carried no armor. Additional fuel tanks were installed in the rear bomb bay. The bomb bay doors were operated by quick-acting pneumatic systems. The bomb release mechanism in the forward bomb bay was replaced by a single-point release as was used in exceptional British Lancaster bombers. A weaponeer’s control station was added to the cockpit to monitor the unique bomb systems. Bockscar had four air-cooled, supercharged, 3,347.662-cubic-inch-displaceme ‘It was a gorgeous morning. The heat was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.” I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I’m writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life. We have spent the afternoon looking through wartime logbooks from his 58 overseas combat missions. Now, between servings of dim sum, he is telling me about the 59th, the one that wiped out a city, along with well over 100,000 people. “The instant the bomb left the bomb bay, we screamed into a steep diving turn to break out the shockwave. There were two – the first, appreciate a ‘You don’t brag about wiping out 60‑70,000 people’: the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki