Enola Gay

I will not pass judgment about the event which involved the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Enola Gay. Nothing would be easier than to judge in hindsight. I try to stick to the facts as much as possible. These facts actually started in 1937.

What is often ignored in the whole debate of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima are the years that lead up to that fateful day of 6 August 1945.

The Japanese Imperial Army started the industrial scale of mass murder before the Nazis did. The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (sometimes called Nankin) was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanking in the Second Sino-Japanese War, by the Imperial Japanese Army. Beginning on 13 December 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. The perpetrators committed additional war crimes, such as mass rape, looting, and arson. The massacre is considered one of the worst atrocities in pre-World War II history. In those six weeks, it is estimated that approximately 200,000 to 350,000 civilians were raped and murdered.

The average death rate of Allied nationalities of POWs in the Pacific War was 27%. The American mortality rate was 34%, the Australian 33%, and the British 32%. The Dutch mortality rate was below 20%. The number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000.

The exact number of civilians and POWs murdered by the Japanese Imperial regime is difficult to determine due to the sheer scale of it, but it well exceeds 10 million. The Japanese Imperial Army and Navy showed they were willing to sacrifice themselves. We have all seen footage of the Kamikaze attacks.

The Japanese government and its head of state Emperor Hirohito, determined the destiny of Japan on 7 December 1941, when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

Before 1943, work on the design and functioning of the atom bomb itself was largely theoretical, based on fundamental experiments carried out at several different locations. That year, a laboratory directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer was created on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 34 miles (55 km) north of Santa Fe.

Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on 16 July 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.

The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on the then-known as the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. It was renamed the White Sands Proving Ground on 9 July 1945.

In the early morning of 6 August 1945, three B-29 bombers departed from Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean. Six hours later, they changed the course of history. A single atomic bomb dropped from the Enola Gay exploded over Hiroshima, Japan. In an instant, over four square miles of the city and an estimated 90,000 inhabitants ceased to exist.

On 5 August 1945, during the preparation for the first atomic mission, Captain Paul Tibbets assumed command of the aircraft. He named it after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets (1893–1983), who herself had been named after the heroine of the novel Enola. When it came to selecting a name for the plane, Tibbets later recalled that:
“…my thoughts turned at this point to my courageous red-haired mother, whose quiet confidence had been a source of strength to me since boyhood, particularly during the soul-searching period when I decided to give up a medical career to become a military pilot. At a time when Dad had thought I had lost my marbles, she had taken my side and said, ‘I know you will be all right, son.’”

Before embarking, a flight surgeon handed Tibbets a dozen cyanide capsules to distribute to crew members in case the plane was shot down. He said, “The capsules would take three minutes to work.” Although crew members possessed limited information, they were not to be taken captive. Tibbets was ordered to shoot anyone who refused, under those circumstances, to swallow the capsule. Tibbets explained, “I had been given the order by the Commander-In-Chief, Pacific, shortly before take off. It was a hell of a thing to know you might have to kill your own crew.”

Tibbets understood that there was very little risk of getting shot down. Lt. Morris “Dick” Jeppson, the crew’s weapons specialist, said Tibbets referred to the flight as “a milk run.” “And it really was,” Jeppson confirmed, “there were no problems, there was no opposition from the Japanese—the plane was flying so high their fighter planes couldn’t get that high anyway. I wasn’t nervous. I tell people I was shot in the ass with confidence. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.”

Twenty-seven-year-old Brooklyn-born Irishman Robert Lewis expressed his optimism differently by putting a packet of condoms into his flight jacket, wanting to be ready for the postwar party. When Tibbets told his copilot about the suicide pills, Lewis showed him the condoms. Tibbets did not find this amusing.

Hiroshima was the primary target of the first nuclear bombing mission on 6 August, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternative targets. Enola Gay, piloted by Tibbets, took off from North Field, in the Northern Mariana Islands, about six hours flight time from Japan, accompanied by two other B-29s, The Great Artiste, carrying instrumentation, and a then-nameless aircraft later called Necessary Evil, commanded by Captain George Marquardt, to take photographs. The director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves Jr., wanted the event recorded for posterity, so the takeoff was illuminated by floodlights. When he wanted to taxi, Tibbets leaned out the window to direct the bystanders out of the way. On request, he gave a friendly wave to the cameras.

After leaving Tinian, the three aircraft made their way separately to Iwo Jima, where they rendezvoused at 2,440 meters (8,010 ft) and set course for Japan. The aircraft reached the target in clear visibility at 9,855 meters (32,333 ft). Navy Captain William S. “Deak” Parsons of Project Alberta, who was in command of the mission, armed the bomb during the flight to minimize the risks during takeoff. His assistant, Second Lieutenant Morris R. Jeppson, removed the safety devices 30 minutes before reaching the target area.

The release at 8:15 a.m. (Hiroshima time) went as planned, and the Little Boy took 53 seconds to fall from the aircraft flying at 31,060 feet (9,470 m) to the predetermined detonation height of about 1,968 feet (600 m) above the city. Enola Gay travelled 11.5 mi (18.5 km) before the plane felt the shock waves from the blast. Although buffeted by the shock, neither Enola Gay nor The Great Artiste was damaged. In a 1989 interview, Paul Tibbets said:
“Well, as the bomb left the aeroplane, we took over manual control, made an extremely steep turn to try and put as much distance between ourselves and the explosion as possible. After we felt the explosion hit the aeroplane, that is the concussion waves, we knew that the bomb had exploded, and everything was a success. So we turned around to take a look at it. The site that greeted our eyes was quite beyond what we had expected, because we saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris below us with this tremendous mushroom on top. Beneath that was hidden the ruins of the city of Hiroshima.”

The detonation created a blast equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT (63 TJ). The U-235 weapon was considered very inefficient, with only 1.7% of its fissile material reacting. The radius of total destruction was about one mile (1.6 km), with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles (11 km2). Americans estimated that 4.7 square miles (12 km2) of the city were destroyed. Japanese officials determined that 69% of Hiroshima’s buildings were destroyed and another 6–7% damaged. Some 70,000–80,000 people, 30% of the city’s population, were killed by the blast and resultant firestorm, and another 70,000 were injured. Out of those killed, 20,000 were soldiers and 20,000 were Korean slave laborers.

In 2000, Paul Tibbets told NPR about the attack of 6 August 1945. Tibbets remembered his bombardier, spotting their target from 31,000 feet above Japan.

“As we approached the target, finally, Ferebee says I got the aiming point, which was Aioi Bridge if I remember the name of it correctly. We then all got ready for the bomb, the final bomb run. I gave him the countdown. I hooded the circuits, and then the next thing that happened, the bomb had left the aeroplane.

I saw the sky in front of me light up brilliantly with all kinds of colours. And at the same time, I felt the taste of lead in my mouth. And where – we had seen the city on our way in, I saw nothing but a bunch of boiling debris with fire and smoke and all that kind of stuff. It just—it was devastating to take a look at it.”

About the death toll, Paul Tibbets said:
“I said to myself, if you’re going to be a bombing pilot, you can’t worry about these things. This is not anything that you’ve thought of, but it’s something that you were told to do to fulfill your duty. The thing of it is there is no morality in warfare, that’s where you start. So there is no morality to anything that goes on in war. War itself is immoral, and I can’t buy that bit of statement. They would have gone on and on and they would have been many more people killed.”

Enola Gay returned safely to its base on Tinian to great fanfare, touching down at 2:58 pm, after 12 hours and 13 minutes. The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil followed at short intervals. Several hundred people, including journalists and photographers, had gathered to watch the planes return. Tibbets was the first to disembark and was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross on the spot.

Many have argued that the bombing of Hiroshima, and the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki, were atrocities and war crimes. In retrospect, and taken out of the wider context, that is a valid argument. However when you put it in the context of World War II, an enemy that was so evil and brutal that it was even willing to murder its own people. An enemy that didn’t appear to have any compassion and carried out numerous atrocities, murdering, maiming and raping millions. In that context, you may just come to a different conclusion.

Sources

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-enola-gay-pilot-no-regret-dropping-atom-bomb-2019-8?r=US&IR=T

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM#:~:text=From%20the%20invasion%20of%20China,including%20Western%20prisoners%20of%20war.

https://apjjf.org/-Peter-J.-Kuznick/2642/article.html

https://www.niod.nl/en/frequently-asked-questions/japanese-occupation-and-pacific-war-numbers

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/15858203

https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/japanese-mass-violence-and-its-victims-fifteen-years-war-1931-45.html

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Little Boy-Hiroshima

Little Boy was the name of the atomic bomb which was dropped from Enola Gay , over Hiroshima on August 6,1945. at 8.15 AM.The bomb exploded
about 1,500 feet above the city with a force of 15,000 tons of TNT.
The name of the plane was Enola Gay, named after the pilot’s mother.
The pilot, attached to the 509th, was Col. Paul Tibbets. The copilot
was Capt. Robert Lewis.
Little Boy destroyed 5 square miles of the city and caused about 140,000
deaths by the end of 1945.

The gun-type weapon possessed the power of 26,000,000 pounds of high explosives. Nuclear fission was achieved by the collision of two parts of active material (Uranium-235). A U-235 projectile fired down a gun barrel collided with a stationary element, causing a mass increase leading to nuclear fission. Little Boy was dropped untested. Previously, on July 26, the bomb, along with “Fat Man” was transported to Tinian Island by USS Indianapolis (CA-35) for final assembly. Four days later, Japanese submarine, I-58, sank Indianapolis, northeast of Leyte. the atomic attacks, the US Air Force dropped pamphlets in Japan. They advised the citizens of “prompt and utter destruction” and urged civilians to flee.

Prior to the atomic attacks, the US Air Force dropped pamphlets in Japan. They advised the citizens of  “prompt and utter destruction” and urged civilians to flee.

The result of the Manhattan Project, begun in June 1942, “Little Boy” was a gun-type weapon, which detonated by firing one mass of uranium down a cylinder into another mass to create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Weighing about 9,000 pounds, it produced an explosive force equal to 20,000 tons of TNT.

The crew of the Enola Gay consisted of 12 men. Prior to the war in the Pacifc and taking command of the Enola Gay, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr had flown the lead bomber ‘Butcher Shop'(aka Big Tin Bird) for the first American daylight heavy bomber mission on 17 August 1942, a shallow penetration raid against a marshaling yard in Rouen in Occupied France.

First Lieutenant Jacob Beser was the radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay, 3 days later, he was a crew member aboard Bockscar when the Fat Man bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He was the only crew member to be on both missions.

sources

https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/little-boy-and-fat-man

https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196219/little-boy-atomic-bomb/

Click to access fatman-littleboy-losalamosnatllab.pdf

Little Boy: The First Atomic Bomb

Hiroshima-The forgotten History.

Today marks the 74th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. So much has already been documented about this, so therefore I will focusing more on the lesser known facts about that fateful day and the aftermath

The crew of the Enola Gay consisted of 12 men. Prior to the war in the Pacifc and taking command of the Enola Gay, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr had flown the lead bomber ‘Butcher Shop'(aka Big Tin Bird) for the first American daylight heavy bomber mission on 17 August 1942, a shallow penetration raid against a marshaling yard in Rouen in Occupied France.

First Lieutenant Jacob Beser was the radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay, 3 days later, he was a crew member aboard Bockscar when the Fat Man bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He was the only crew member to be on both missions.

It was a common practice before the war for American Issei, or first-generation immigrants, to send their children on extended trips to Japan to study or visit relatives.There was, therefore, a sizable population of American-born Japanese living in their parents’ hometowns of Hiroshima. It is estimated that up to 11,000 Japanese-Americans died that day.

However  about 3,000 of them are known to have survived and returned to the U.S. after the war.Like other survivors they were called Hibakusha-person affected by a bomb’ or ‘person affected by the exposition to a bomb.

Before the atomic attacks, the US Air Force dropped pamphlets in Japan. They advised the citizens of  “prompt and utter destruction” and urged civilians to flee.

The Lonesome Lady was shot down on 28 July, 1945 while bombing the Japanese Battleship Haruna, in Kure Harbor. Only the pilot, Thomas Cartwright, and Tail Gunner, Bill Abel, returned home from that mission.

Three planes that were flying missions over Hiroshima were shot down in the days before the bombing, with the crew of Lonesome Lady all managing to bail out and survive the crash… before being quickly captured and imprisoned in a base in Hiroshima. the instructions given to captured airmen was to tell captors the truth, as the US assumed that Japanese already knew what was planned, and telling the truth would possibly limit torture. But despite Captain Tom Cartwright telling his captors the truth, he was not believed and he was shipped off to Tokyo for a more ‘rigorous’ interrogation. This actually saved his life, as when the bomb hit Hiroshima. But six of his  crew men died as a result of blast wounds and radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945.

 

 

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Sources

New York Times Magazine

Gizmodo

UCLA

Wikipedia

 

Enola Gay’s ‘Little Boy’

“Little Boy” was the codename for the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 during World War II by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., commander of the 509th Composite Group of the United States Army Air Forces.

It was the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare. The Hiroshima bombing was the second artificial nuclear explosion in history, after the Trinity test, and the first uranium-based detonation. It exploded with an energy of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT (63 TJ). The bomb caused significant destruction to the city of Hiroshima and its occupants.

Little Boy was developed by Lieutenant Commander Francis Birch’s group of Captain William S. Parsons’s Ordnance (O) Division at the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

Parsons flew on the Hiroshima mission as weaponeer. The Little Boy was a development of the unsuccessful Thin Man nuclear bomb. Like Thin Man, it was a gun-type fission weapon, but derived its explosive power from the nuclear fission of uranium-235. This was accomplished by shooting a hollow cylinder of enriched uranium (the “bullet”) onto a solid cylinder of the same material (the “target”) by means of a charge of nitrocellulose propellant powder. It contained 64 kg (141 lb) of enriched uranium, of which less than a kilogram underwent nuclear fission. Its components were fabricated at three different plants so that no one would have a copy of the complete design.

After the war ended, it was not expected that the inefficient Little Boy design would ever again be required, and many plans and diagrams were destroyed, but by mid-1946 the Hanford Site reactors were suffering badly from the Wigner effect, so six Little Boy assemblies were produced at Sandia Base. The Navy Bureau of Ordnance built another 25 Little Boy assemblies in 1947 for use by the Lockheed P2V Neptune nuclear strike aircraft (which could be launched from, but not land on, the Midway-class aircraft carriers). All the Little Boy units were withdrawn from service by the end of January 1951.

Hiroshima before and after.

 

At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. A number of military units were located nearby, the most important of which was the headquarters of Field Marshal Shunroku Hata’s Second General Army, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan, and was located in Hiroshima Castle. Hata’s command consisted of some 400,000 men, most of whom were on Kyushu where an Allied invasion was correctly anticipated.

Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military, but it also had large stockpiles of military supplies. The city was also a communications center, a key port for shipping and an assembly area for troops. It was a beehive of war industry, manufacturing parts for planes and boats, for bombs, rifles, and handguns; children were shown how to construct and hurl gasoline bombs and the wheelchair-bound and bedridden were assembling booby traps to be planted in the beaches of Kyushu. A new slogan appeared on the walls of Hiroshima: “FORGET SELF! ALL OUT FOR YOUR COUNTRY!”. It was also the second largest city in Japan after Kyoto that was still undamaged by air raids.

The center of the city contained several reinforced concrete buildings and lighter structures. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small timber-made workshops set among Japanese houses. A few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were constructed of timber with tile roofs, and many of the industrial buildings were also built around timber frames. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage.

The population of Hiroshima had reached a peak of over 381,000 earlier in the war but prior to the atomic bombing, the population had steadily decreased because of a systematic evacuation ordered by the Japanese government. At the time of the attack, the population was approximately 340,000–350,000.

On August 6, 1945, a mushroom cloud billows into the sky about one hour after an atomic bomb was dropped by American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, detonating above Hiroshima, Japan. Nearly 80,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 60,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950.

A Japanese woman and her child, casualties in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, lie on a blanket on the floor of a damaged bank building converted into a hospital and located near the center of the devastated town, on October 6, 1945.

Hiroshima

8.15 AM 6 August 1945 is the date that changed the lives for everyone in Hiroshima. This is the time when the first ever atom bomb’Little Boy’, was dropped.

The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure.

Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. After arriving at the U.S. base on the Pacific island of Tinian, the more than 9,000-pound uranium-235 bomb was loaded aboard a modified B-29 bomber christened Enola Gay (after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). The plane dropped the bomb–known as “Little Boy”–by parachute at 8:15 in the morning, and it exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city.American President Harry S. Truman called for Japan’s surrender 16 hours later, warning them to “expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth”.

By the time of the Trinity test(was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon) the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 -when President Harry Truman took office

-and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused.

Hiroshima’s devastation failed to elicit immediate Japanese surrender, however, and on August 9 Major Charles Sweeney flew another B-29 bomber, Bockscar, from Tinian.

Thick clouds over the primary target, the city of Kokura, drove Sweeney to a secondary target, Nagasaki, where the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 that morning. More powerful than the one used at Hiroshima, the bomb weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast. The topography of Nagasaki, which was nestled in narrow valleys between mountains, reduced the bomb’s effect, limiting the destruction to 2.6 square miles.

The survivors of the bombings are called hibakusha , a Japanese word that literally translates to “explosion-affected people”. As of March 31, 2015, 183,519 hibakusha were recognized by the Japanese government, most living in Japan.The government of Japan recognizes about 1% of these as having illnesses caused by radiation. The memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki contain lists of the names of the hibakusha who are known to have died since the bombings. Updated annually on the anniversaries of the bombings, as of August 2015 the memorials record the names of more than 460,000 hibakusha; 297,684 in Hiroshima.

Hibakusha and their children were (and still are) victims of severe discrimination in Japan due to public ignorance about the consequences of radiation sickness, with much of the public believing it to be hereditary or even contagious.

This is despite the fact that no statistically demonstrable increase of birth defects or congenital malformations was found among the later conceived children born to survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A study of the long-term psychological effects of the bombings on the survivors found that even 17–20 years after the bombings had occurred survivors showed a higher prevalence of anxiety and somatization symptoms.

The medical effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima upon humans can be put into the four categories below, with the effects of larger thermonuclear weapons producing blast and thermal effects so large that there would be a negligible number of survivors close enough to the center of the blast who would experience prompt/acute radiation effects, which were observed after the 16 kiloton yield Hiroshima bomb, due to its relatively low yield:

• Initial stage—the first 1–9 weeks, in which are the greatest number of deaths, with 90% due to thermal injury and/or blast effects and 10% due to super-lethal radiation exposure.
• Intermediate stage—from 10–12 weeks. The deaths in this period are from ionizing radiation in the median lethal range – LD50
• Late period—lasting from 13–20 weeks. This period has some improvement in survivors’ condition.
• Delayed period—from 20+ weeks. Characterized by numerous complications, mostly related to healing of thermal and mechanical injuries, and if the individual was exposed to a few hundred to a thousand Millisieverts of radiation, it is coupled with infertility, sub-fertility and blood disorders. Furthermore, ionizing radiation above a dose of around 50-100 Millisievert exposure has been shown to statistically begin increasing ones chance of dying of cancer sometime in their lifetime over the normal unexposed rate of ~25%, in the long term, a heightened rate of cancer, proportional to the dose received, would begin to be observed after ~5+ years, with lesser problems such as eye cataracts and other more minor effects in other organs and tissue also being observed over the long term.

The burns on this survivor took on her kimono pattern; the lighter areas of the cloth reflected the intense light from the bomb, causing little to no burns. The tighter fitting parts of clothing, such as the shoulders, are the most severe. Loose fitting sections show no burning.

 

During the war, Japan brought many Korean conscripts to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to work as slaves. According to recent estimates, about 20,000 Koreans were killed in Hiroshima and about 2,000 died in Nagasaki. It is estimated that one in seven of the Hiroshima victims was of Korean ancestry.For many years, Koreans had a difficult time fighting for recognition as atomic bomb victims and were denied health benefits. However, most issues have been addressed in recent years through lawsuits.

It was a common practice before the war for American Issei, or first-generation immigrants, to send their children on extended trips to Japan to study or visit relatives. More Japanese immigrated to the U.S. from Hiroshima than from any other prefecture, and Nagasaki also sent a high number of immigrants to Hawai’i and the mainland. There was, therefore, a sizable population of American-born Nisei and Kibei living in their parents’ hometown of Hiroshima  at the time of the atomic bombings. The actual number of Japanese Americans affected by the bombings is unknown — although estimates put approximately 11,000 in Hiroshima city alone — but some 3,000 of them are known to have survived and returned to the U.S. after the war.

As of 2014, there are about 1,000 recorded Japanese American hibakusha living in the United States. They receive monetary support from the Japanese government and biannual medical checkups with Hiroshima and Nagasaki doctors familiar with the particular concerns of atomic bomb survivors. The U.S. government provides no support to Japanese American hibakusha.

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