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

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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