Two shock waves from the explosion buffeted the plane. The Enola Gay turned and headed back toward the base. “Little Boy,” as the bomb had been nicknamed, dropped from 30,000 feet and detonated above the city as planned. Over Hiroshima, the bomb bay doors opened at 8:15 a.m. Nelson, an inveterate reader, pulled out a novel, “Watch Out for Willie Carter,” a boxing story. For most of the six-hour flight, there was little to do.
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The Enola Gay, named for the mother of colonel and pilot Paul Tibbets, took off at 2:45 a.m. “I knew it was an important mission because we were told this mission had the potential to end the war,” Nelson wrote. That was one tipoff to the gravity of the situation. they boarded the plane in the glare of floodlights, with hundreds of officials present. They ate breakfast in the mess hall and said prayers in the chapel. As Nelson himself related in a posthumously published autobiography, “At the time I still did not fully understand the scope of the mission, or the strength of the weapon we were carrying.” 5 shortly before midnight for a briefing in which they learned they would be dropping a bomb. The crew had no idea what they were practicing for. Nelson flew on three routine missions on the B-29, each time accompanied by two other planes. Plane and crew were sent to Tinian, one of the Mariana Islands. On June 14, he was among those who went to Omaha, Nebraska to pick up the silver-plated B-29 from the factory. “He thought: ‘I can’t be a pilot, but I can be on a plane.’” A sergeant looked at his papers and told him: “Oh, you’re meant for overseas.” “Dick was just elated,” Nancy said. In April 1945, he reported to the 509th Squadron in Wendover, Utah. Unbeknownst to him, he was being investigated by the Manhattan Project’s security team. Everyone else in his class received assignments and shipped out. Instead, he went to the Air Corps’ radio school in South Dakota and after graduation was sent to the B-29 base in Clovis, New Mexico to await orders. Army after high school, hoping to become a pilot like his older brother. Nevertheless, she heard her husband’s stories so many times in the years to come that in his speaking engagements, if he’d forget a detail, he would look at her and she would prompt him.īorn in Moscow, Idaho in 1925, Richard relocated with his family to Los Angeles at age 3 and enlisted in the U.S. Nancy Nelson was only 13 when World War II ended. We were all dumbfounded.We met Thursday, the 75th anniversary of the bombing. "We just looked at each other we didn't talk. "Things were very, very quiet," Gackenbach says. The plane circled twice around the mushroom cloud and then turned to head home.
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He got out of his seat, quickly picked up his camera and took two photographs out the navigator's side window. The first thing Gackenbach saw was a blinding light and then the start of a mushroom cloud. Then, the radio went dead: that was the signal from the Enola Gay that the bomb had been released. "We were not told anything about the cloud, just don't go through it."Īs they made their final approach to Hiroshima, they were flying 30,000 feet over the city. "We were told that once the explosion occurred, we should not look directly at it, that we should not go through the cloud," he says. Gackenbach was part of the 10-man crew that flew on the Necessary Evil. The atomic bomb explosion photographed from 30,000 feet over Hiroshima on Aug. They had different engines, fewer guns and a larger bomb bay. Their planes were reconfigured B-29 Superfortress bombers. The 509th Composite Group, lead by Tibbets, spent months training in Wendover, Utah, before being shipped off to an American air base on the Pacific island of Tinian.
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Tibbets said it would be dangerous but if they were successful, it could end the war. Paul Tibbets, who was recruiting officers for a special mission. After completing his training, he was approached by Col. Gackenbach enlisted in the Army Aviation Cadet Program in 1943. Today, the 95-year-old is the only surviving crew member of those three planes. Army Air Corps and a navigator on the mission. Russell Gackenbach was a second lieutenant in the U.S.
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There were three strike planes that flew over Hiroshima that day: the Enola Gay, which carried the bomb, and two observation planes, the Great Artiste and the Necessary Evil. It was the first time a nuclear weapon had been used in warfare. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Russell Gackenbach was the navigator aboard the Necessary Evil.