Far more people, many of them dying in far more horrible ways, perished in the mass, allied firebombings of Hamburg and the refugee center that was Dresden. In terms of the mind-numbing enormity of the slaughter of that war, the casualty count from both cities seems almost an insignificant statistic. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing about 36,000 more Japanese. The death toll from Hiroshima eventually reached 78,150. ''I quickly reply,'' he has said, '' `Not in the least.` '' But the Japanese, regarding their emperor as a god and warfare as a divine calling, still had more than 2 million ground troops under arms and 5,000 aircraft with trained kamikaze pilots.įor the rest of his life, Tibbets has continued to be asked if he has any regrets over what was done by his bomb. The Germans, defeated in the field, had bowed to the inevitable. The United States was desperately trying to end a global war that had threatened all of civilization. Years later, historian Samuel Eliot Morison described the act of these men-and the generals and government officials who commanded them-as something perfectly explicable and rational. ''Even though we were several miles away, it gave the appearance of something that was about to engulf us.''īeneath them, the city of Hiroshima had vanished in a vast, black smudge. ''It was a frightening sight,'' Tibbets wrote. ''Fellows,'' he said, clicking on his intercom, ''you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.''Īs he spoke, crew members stared at a monstrous purple cloud that already had boiled three miles into the sky above them. Tibbets, a much-decorated veteran pilot who went on to become a brigadier general, felt that so significant an occasion deserved a few words.
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When they had lumbered a few miles beyond the impact site and were beginning a turn to look at what they had done, they became aware of what had happened.
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In his book, ''Enola Gay,'' dedicated to his mother, for whom the airplane was named, pilot Tibbets noted that several members of the crew thought they`d weathered a near-hit from an exploding anti-aircraft shell. What happened when he depressed that little switch stunned all aboard. on a hazy summer morning in August 1945, he was to do his work. The other men were his confederates, their every effort dedicated to bringing him to the point in the sky over Hiroshima, Japan, where at 9:15 a.m. Peering through the Plexiglas nose of the Enola Gay, one can see the highly utilitarian place where Ferebee sat as the bombardier on the mission, and the grim little boxlike device that was his weapon.