While it did not drop the bomb on Nagasaki, the Enola Gay did take flight to get data on the weather in the lead-up to the second strike on Japan. After the war, the airplane took flight a few more times. In the aftermath of World War II, the Army Air Forces flew the Enola Gay during an atomic test program in the Pacific; it was then delivered to be stored in an airfield in Arizona before being flown to Illinois and transferred to the Smithsonian in July But even under the custody of the museum, the Enola Gay remained at an air force base in Texas.
It took its last flight in , arriving on Dec. As the Smithsonian recounts, it stayed there until August of , until preservationists grew worried that the decay of the historic artifact would reach a point of no return if it stayed outside much longer. Smithsonian staffers took the plane apart into smaller pieces and moved it inside. But when the nearly page proposal for the exhibit was seen by Air Force veterans, the anniversary started a new round of controversy over the plane, as TIME explained in The display, say the vets, is tilted against the U.
John T. Correll, editor in chief of Air Force Magazine , noted that in the first draft there were 49 photos of Japanese casualties, against only three photos of American casualties. By his count there were four pages of text on Japanese atrocities, while there were 79 pages devoted to Japanese casualties and the civilian suffering, from not only the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also conventional B bombing.
Politicians are getting in on the action. Any one of three Kansas museums. Adams, who is leaving his job after 10 relatively controversy-free years, sent back a three-page answer stiffly turning down her request for the Enola Gay. Meanwhile curators Tom Crouch and Michael Neufeld, who are responsible for the content of the display, deny accusations of political correctness. They want to stop the story when the bomb leaves the bomb bay.
Among the sights: charred bodies in the rubble, the ruins of a Shinto shrine, a heat-fused rosary, items belonging to dead schoolchildren. The veterans, for their part, say they are well aware of the grim nature of the subject. They are not asking for a whitewash. Forty-three seconds later, the bomb detonated at its predetermined height of 1, feet with the force of 15, tons of TNT.
A huge mushroom cloud appeared over what had been the heart of Hiroshima. The Enola Gay was then buffeted violently when struck by two shock waves—one direct and the other reflected from the ground. Caron took photos from the tail of the plane and described what he saw over the intercom for the rest of the crew. He later recounted the experience in his book Fire of a Thousand Suns :.
A few crewmen claimed they heard him say them. The devastation of Hiroshima was apocalyptic. The city was almost completely leveled while a conservative estimate places the death toll at , people. Of course, this was not a fleet of Bs.
This was two planes—the Enola Gay and the backup plane. The Japanese understandably assumed they were just weather planes. We flew them over Japan all the time in advance of bombing missions. So nobody went into the shelters. In his book, Rhodes wrote about what happened on the ground just after Little Boy detonated.
Mosquitoes and flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and were gone. The fireball flashed an enormous photograph of the city at the instant of its immolation fixed on the mineral, vegetable and animal surfaces of the city itself.
A spiral ladder left its shadow in unburned paint on the surface of a steel storage tank. Leaves shielded reverse silhouettes on charred telephone poles. A human being left the memorial of his outline in unspalled granite on the steps of a bank. It is believed that another , Japanese citizens died when Fat Man erupted over Nagasaki on August 9. At the time, most Allied military and political leaders believed they had no other option. Japanese aggression in the region had fueled the start of the war.
In a surprise attack, Japanese naval air forces had bombed the U. And throughout the war, the Japanese military had proven to be tenaciously belligerent—willing to die before surrendering and committing horrendous atrocities against Allied POWs. The war in the Pacific was now grinding on endlessly with mounting casualties each day and no end in sight.
The American public was growing weary of the toll it was taking. President Harry S. That battle had been extremely costly with nearly , Americans and Japanese military and civilian lives lost. The Allies expected even worse casualties during the invasion of Japan. The U. Chiefs of Staff predicted 1 million U. As many as 10 million Japanese might have perished in the attempt to conquer the island.
After the war, General Dwight D. Eisenhower , who would succeed him as president, and others said they believed Japan was close to surrendering, especially after the Soviet Union attacked Japanese-held Manchuria.
The key sticking point was retaining Emperor Hirohito as a ceremonial leader, which the Allies eventually agreed to when they accepted surrender terms. It is unrealistic to expect him to make any other decision than dropping the bomb. That choice has long inflamed passionate discord. He witnessed the controversy as it happened and how it led to the resignation of the director of the National Air and Space Museum.
The original exhibition was scrapped and replaced. Ryan: General, there are references in your recently published book about the bomb that was dropped over Nagasaki, and the fact that perhaps that whole mission was botched. Is that true? Tibbets: Well, the Nagasaki mission did not go nearly as smooth as Hiroshima.
I like to brag on the fact that ours went just about as good as you can do it. General LeMay made the comment that it was a textbook performance—well planned out.
It went the way I wanted it to go. Now, my concern about the Nagasaki mission is that people on board that airplane forgot what their mission was. It all revolved around the fact that to start with, the airplane had 1, gallons, two pound tanks, that could not release the fuel because the pump had gone bad.
They did not have time to change it. But the fuel was only in there in the first place as ballast for the 10, pounds sitting up in the front. Tibbets: Initially, it started out as ballast. I had the same thing in my airplane but, when I released my weapon and started back, I pumped the fuel out of one of the tanks. I still kept some in the rear to maintain a better balance to the airplane. Ryan: All right. That mission was what an hour and 40 minutes late in dropping its—?
Tibbets: Yes. My instructions were, as I had done, to get the escort airplanes in formation with me or close to me.
I went to Iwo Jima and circled Mount Suribachi at about 9, feet. You better join me. They had another island off of the coast of Japan. It was as good a geographical reference as any. They went up there and made a circle, but only one airplane joined. They circled and they started talking.
They lost 45 minutes right there at that particular time, circling around, circling around, burning fuel, and weather deteriorating. They took off to go to Nagasaki from there. They got up to Nagasaki. The weather was bad.
They played around almost an hour up there hunting for a hole through which they could drop the bomb. They went to their alternate and they took a look there.
It was weathered in or weathered under then. They came back to Nagasaki. Now because they had 1, gallons of trapped fuel, the question was, what are we going to do? We have got 10, pounds of weight and that just burns more fuel. The bombardier, who I had placed on that crew months before, was a man that had been with me over in Europe. I knew that if anything went wrong, he had the best concept of how to rectify the situation.
They made a quick pass over Nagasaki. He saw a hole. He told the airplane commander turn around and come back. While they were spending this time on the two previous situations, waiting for an airplane to join and an airplane to look, I know that there was a difference of opinion between the naval commander, weaponeer [Frederick Ashworth], and the pilot flying the airplane.
General Groves had him as his representative to say technically the bomb will explode if dropped or it will not. Therefore, he had the right to tell the airplane commander abort the mission. I am the captain of the ship. There is only one captain aboard. The one that I had with me, Captain Parsons, the Navy man, who was from Los Alamos, did arm our weapon, but that was the difference in technology. Our weapon could be armed physically in the air by inserting the second half of the uranium into the weapon.
But the Nagasaki type bomb had to be assembled. It had to be made ready to go with safety plugs in the firing mechanism. Now [Frederick] Ashworth, the commander and the man designated as the weaponeer on that airplane, was responsible for pulling the plugs. The green plugs out and putting red plugs in which made the continuity. The red plug was continuity; the green plug no continuity. Ryan: So what would have happened had you armed that bomb, you were ready to go, and at the last moment, for some reason or another, you could not have released that.
Was there any way to stop that reaction? Tibbets: Yes, both of them could have been done. Because you see, they depended upon a barometric reading of the radar altimeter to explode.
They could go down to 5, feet. Both of them, yes, could turn around and come back. We could have done the same thing. We could have put the safety plugs in, taken one-half of the uranium out of the tail.
We would have had a high order detonation if anything had gone wrong. The other weapon, the Nagasaki weapon, they could have rendered it just as safe as it was when they took off.
Ryan: Oh, you mentioned Germany a moment ago and I understand Germany was a potential target during this time. How so? I mean for the atomic bomb. In other words, half of my unit could go to the European theater and bomb Germany, and half could do Japan because they wanted simultaneous bomb drops, if that took place. Tibbets: No, no, no, they never got to it. By that time, Germany was whipped, and everybody knew it.
There was no use thinking about it. Ryan: Many times people have tried to recreate the whole scenario of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, Walter Cronkite, several people did specials on the air.
They purported to show the actual bomb being dropped and everything else. Was there actual footage? Was this truly the footage of what happened over there?
Tibbets: There was a man in one of the airplanes flying accompanying me that had a hand-held 8 mm camera. That man did take some films. I have seen one release of that, which lasted just a few seconds. But the other films that have been made have used all kinds of B situations purporting to be the bomb dropped. They have shown explosions that actually occurred at Alamogordo, or taken place in the desert after that.
Ryan: There was a lot of erroneous reports, too. I think one of them said that you had fighter escorts that led you in. Tibbets: Well, that is quite erroneous. We did not have fighter escorts.
As a matter of fact, General LeMay had issued orders that no airplane would be anywhere near. I think they had a mile radius of those cities that we started out to attack. He did not want another airplane in the air. Just take the weather airplanes first. They were one hour ahead. They observed the weather, and then got out and started on their way by Tinian. So they were not over Japanese territory when we actually arrived in Japanese territory.
I had two airplanes accompanying me. It took two airplanes to drop the required instruments the scientists, the Los Alamos people, wanted dropped.
Two airplanes did that and accompanied me. Over the Japanese territory at that time there were three B airplanes. Ryan: But there was no real failsafe mechanism. In other words, if anything happened aboard your aircraft that had the bomb, if it went off prematurely or exploded in the plane, there was no backup. Tibbets: No, there was no backup at that time to bomb at that moment. I call it the number two position — the man that flew off of my right wing — was Charles Sweeney, Major Sweeney.
He was the squadron commander of that organization that had the Bs. I wanted Sweeney to drop the second weapon. I had him fly on my wing so that he and I could talk back and forth in I would say shaded, coded terms: cryptic and whatnot.
We had a little thing arranged between us that I could inform him of every move that I was making. Ryan: If you would, describe that specific moment when the bomb left the airplane and your people were looking down. They saw it being delivered on the target below. Tibbets: When the bomb left the airplane, of course we were 10, pounds lighter right to start with. That gave me the opportunity to, in terms of the vernacular, roll the airplane over on its side and pull it around in an unusually steep curve for an airplane of that size and at that altitude.
We were at 33, feet. But I had practiced this time and time again, and understood how to do it. We did just exactly that very thing. He was the only one that could look directly at it. How hard is that shock wave going to hit us? It had been predicted to be somewhere between two and three G-forces. It hit. We had an accelerometer in the airplane to measure it. The measurement turned out to be right at 2. Airplanes are built to take that. I kept thinking, is it going to explode before it should?
That was the one thing I was concerned with as far as safety is concerned. When I was well into that turn, I figured okay, the fusing mechanism is working the way it is supposed to work. Ryan: Tell me, when you did look back after you had banked the plane, what did you see? Tibbets: I just continued a normal turn to again face the city.
I flew south of the city, Hiroshima, so that the people in my airplane, the people in the two airplanes that accompanied us to drop instruments to record the blast, would be able to take these cameras and make pictures. We knew that it would be three or four days before a photographic reconnaissance airplane could be sent up there to do it. Weather was one thing and then there was a certain worry about contamination.
Ryan: I am assuming you were wearing some sort of glasses, too, or something to shield that. Well, one would have to imagine how bright that is, but it was definitely bright because we saw it inside that airplane. The whole sky lit up when it exploded. Ryan: I doubt that you actually saw what happened on the ground though. I mean itself.
Tibbets: No, we did not. We did not see that because by the time we turned around to look at it, there was nothing but a black boiling mess hanging over the city. It was actually obscuring everything but something on the outskirts. Tibbets: That is a misquotation.
Both of you destroyed innocent lives. How do you react to that? Tibbets: Look, civilians have been killed in every war. Now, it depends upon how they are killed.
Let us take two instances right quick. Number one, Germany for instance is an industrial country that had basically isolated industry similar to what we have got in the United States. Yes, when you bomb the factory, bombs went astray and innocent people got killed. Go to Japan. Japan had a little community that in one house they built some part of a machine and in another they built something else and finally they get down to the point.
So what I am saying is that a whole city could contribute to that. This is where many, many people were killed during the war with firebombs and with the atomic weapons. Even a shopkeeper in Germany who was feeding, say, the factory workers that were working to make munitions. It was still there. Some of these suspected people were less than that. On the other hand, we do know from firsthand information that they even made booby traps out of children over there, and this could kill our GIs.
I do not know. It is a terrible decision to have to make. Ryan: Have you ever had any regrets or any psychological problems as a result of this, or suffered any guilt feelings? Do you feel that what you did was right? Tibbets: Yes, after the fact there was quite a bit. This was basically a result of Russian propaganda, who took the position that nobody but a crazy man would do that for any country.
With that situation, I am supposed to have lost sleep over what I did, have a certain amount of morose, and so forth. The man that flew the airplane over Hiroshima to observe the weather [Claude Eatherly] became, should we say, unbalanced after the end of the war. But he had had a problem of mental incapacities, disabilities, leading up to the wartime. Declared competent.
He was a good pilot. He flew a good crew for me. But when he got pushed out of the Air Force unceremoniously, because of drinking habits and gambling, he, I guess, wanted to seek publicity. What he did was to hold up post offices in Texas with a water pistol, hoping to get caught. Now, this played into the hands of the propaganda machine because here was a man that had been to Hiroshima.
He was mentally unbalanced. Tibbets: He was the only one, but as I said unfortunately, he got too much publicity and the propaganda machine was fed by some of his utterings, appearances, and his personal behavior.
Remember, I had come from a peacetime Air Corps, where safety was the rule if you were going to fire a gun or you were going to drop a practice bomb or do something. Well, you had to ascertain by every means available that the range was clear, that nobody could possibly get hurt by the act that you were about to perform.
The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, I watched those things go down because we could do it in Bs. I watched them go down. Then I watched those black puffs of smoke and fires in some instances. Those are not soldiers. Well, then I had a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school.
I lived with a doctor. He would tell me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so forth and so on, because they could not practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities. I thought, you know, I am just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground.
I am supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. Now, I have been lucky because if I had to make up my mind and want to reject something, I can reject it and I do that. So that was one of the things that I was faced with when, as you say, I was on my way to the target. But before that time, Tom, I was clearly convinced in my own mind, and I had people telling me how much property and lives that bomb would take when it exploded because it was nondiscriminatory.
It took everything. Tibbets: I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business.
0コメント