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Title: How 12 'Enola Gay' Crew Members Remember Dropping the Atomic Bomb

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/11/0518...

Last week saw the 80th anniversary of a turning point in World War II: the
day America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. "Twelve men were on that
flight..." remembers the online magazine Mental Floss, adding "Almost all had
something to say after the war." The group was segregated from the rest of
the military and trained in secret. Even those in the group only knew as much
as they needed to know in order to perform their duties. The group deployed
to Tinian in 1945 with 15 B-29 bombers, flight crews, ground crews, and other
personnel, a total of about 1770 men. The mission to drop the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, Japan (special mission 13) involved seven planes, but the one we
remember was the Enola Gay. Air Force captain Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk did
not know the destructive force of the nuclear bomb before Hiroshima. He was
24 years old at that time, a veteran of 58 missions in North Africa. Paul
Tibbets told him this mission would shorten or end the war, but Van Kirk had
heard that line before. Hiroshima made him a believer. Van Kirk felt the
bombing of Hiroshima was worth the price in that it ended the war before the
invasion of Japan, which promised to be devastating to both sides. " I
honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run.
There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese." In
2005, Van Kirk came as close as he ever got to regret. "I pray no man will
have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of
life..." Many of the other crewmembers also felt the bomb ultimately saved
lives. The Washington Post has also published a new oral history of the
flight after it took off from Tinian Island. The oral history was assembled
for a new book published this week titled The Devil Reached Toward the Sky:
An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.. Col. Paul
W. Tibbets, lead pilot of the Enola Gay: We were only eight minutes off the
ground when Capt. William S. "Deak" Parsons and Lt. Morris R. Jeppson lowered
themselves into the bomb bay to insert a slug of uranium and the conventional
explosive charge into the core of the strange-looking weapon. I wondered why
we were calling it ''Little Boy." Little Boy was 28 inches in diameter and 12
feet long. Its weight was a little more than 9,000 pounds. With its coat of
dull gunmetal paint, it was an ugly monster... Lt. Morris R. Jeppson, crew
member of the Enola Gay: Parsons was second-in-command of the military in the
Manhattan Project. The Little Boy weapon was Parsons's design. He was greatly
concerned that B-29s loaded with conventional bombs were crashing at the ends
of runways on Tinian during takeoff and that such an event could cause the U-
235 projectile in the gun of Little Boy to fly down the barrel and into the U-
235 target. This could have caused a low-level nuclear explosion on Tinian...
Jeppson: On his own, Parsons decided that he would go on the Hiroshima
mission and that he would load the gun after the Enola Gay was well away from
Tinian. Tibbets: That way, if we crashed, we would lose only the airplane and
crew, himself included... Jeppson held the flashlight while Parsons struggled
with the mechanism of the bomb, inserting the explosive charge that would
send one block of uranium flying into the other to set off the instant chain
reaction that would create the atomic explosion. The navigator on one of the
other six planes on the mission remember that watching the mushroom cloud,
"There was almost complete silence on the flight deck. It was evident the
city of Hiroshima was destroyed." And the Enola Gay's copilot later
remembered thinking: "My God, what have we done?"

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