![enola gay dropped which bomb enola gay dropped which bomb](https://airandspace.si.edu/sites/default/files/styles/body_large/public/media-assets/USAF-56310AC.jpg)
![enola gay dropped which bomb enola gay dropped which bomb](https://previews.agefotostock.com/previewimage/medibigoff/c68abec1b7c15441fab732fc8f4c0ff2/poh-arp17a29_355.jpg)
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. More powerful than the one used at Hiroshima, the bomb weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast. 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. General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, had warned the Enola Gays commander, Colonel Paul Tibbets, to expect 'a little publicity', but Tibbets and his crew are surprised by the scene of the. Bathed in floodlights, the B-29 Enola Gay awaits the start of its historic mission to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan. 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. August 6, 1945, 2:00 a.m., Tinian Island, the Central Pacific. 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. 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). Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with spearheading the construction of the vast facilities necessary for the top-secret program, codenamed “The Manhattan Project” (for the engineering corps’ Manhattan district).ġ6 Images 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' Are Dropped government began funding its own atomic weapons development program, which came under the joint responsibility of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department after the U.S. The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named for Enola Gay. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.” The Manhattan ProjectĮven before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists-many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe-became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany. First hand account from pilot of the bomber Enola Gay and dropping the Atom Bomb. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.