"We unleashed the first atomic bomb, and I hope there will never be another." Theodore van Kirk, the plane's navigator that day, told an interviewer in 2005. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life," Capt. "I pray no man will have to witness that sight again.
Some of the members later came to express regret and described being haunted by the destruction they caused. "If the newspapers would just cut out the s-: 'You've killed so many civilians.' That's their tough luck for being there." "You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people," he told Terkel. So, the reasoning goes, the attacks were necessary as an overwhelming show of force to end the war.Īs for the loss of civilian lives, Tibbets, who died in 2007, was unrepentant. The US military had calculated that an invasion of Japan could have cost millions of US and Japanese lives. Others contend that such devastation was necessary to force Japan's surrender and avoid a deadly military campaign through the Japanese mainland.īut how did the explosion weigh with the 12 men aboard the Enola Gay who dropped the bomb that day?įoto: An aerial view of the mushroom cloud of smoke as it billowed 20,000 feet in the air following the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.sourceTime Life Pictures/US Army Air Force/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images Some have argued that the bombings were an inhumane targeting of civilians and that there were other options available. Three days later a second, more powerful atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end.ĭebate has raged ever since over whether the US was right to launch the attacks. The crew recalled the jolt from the force of the explosion and said it was like coming under enemy fire. The Enola Gay was 10 miles away when the blast went off, but it still felt the shockwaves.
in the pilot's seat of the Enola Gay moments before taking off for the mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.sourceRichard Cannon/Us Air Force/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images Hiroshima had already been woken by several air-raid sirens that morning, which had proved to be false alarms.įoto: Col. Tibbets had been named the plane after his mother. Tibbets Jr., who led a crew of 12 men on a mission that would change the history of the world. It was carrying a 9,700-pound top-secret bomb named Little Boy.